Who Won the British National Contest for Teaching Grit?

Robin Alexander of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust reports on the results of the British national competition to find and reward the schools that are best at teaching “grit.”

He writes:

The Department for Education–DfE – England’s equivalent to the US Department of Education, but with considerably greater powers – has duly announced the 27 prizewinners in its Character Education competition.

Though the names of the schools are not likely to mean much to US readers, complaints about the award methodology may strike a chord. Schools nominated themselves and then justified their claims to a 23,000 dollar prize for building character, grit and resilience through brief answers to six questions. One of these questions asked for evidence of the impact of their character forming strategies on their students, but critics of the scheme claim that such evidence counted for less than the eloquence of schools’ answers, that these were not independently checked for accuracy, and that the provision of genuinely verifiable evidence was optional.

We have not been told how many of England’s schools entered this bizarre competition (DfE’s remit doesn’t extend to the whole of the UK, to the increasing relief of many in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), but we can safely assume that the overwhelming majority did not. Most, quite simply, will have been too busy to do so. Some will have been unwilling to have their names so publicly linked to what was essentially a pre-election political stunt. Others will have been justly offended by the suggestion that schools didn’t attend to the development of their students’ personal and interpersonal attributes until the UK government told them to, or that without a 23,000 dollar incentive they wouldn’t bother. Others again, as my blog of 30 January suggested, will have objected to being told to replace their carefully conceived and sensitively nurtured efforts in this direction by a recipe from which ethics, communality, plurality, social responsibility and global citizenship are so conspicuously excluded.

Which is not to say that the 27 winners did not deserve to be recognised for the work they do. But no less deserving of recognition are the thousands of schools whose teachers value and nurture ‘character’ but manifest it by not competing with others to advertise the fact.

The DFE announced the winners last February.

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