Doughnut education? From rigour to resilience
by James Townsend
Executive Director
The Reach Foundation
James Vincent starts his brilliant history of measurement, ‘Beyond Measure’, with an analysis of William Blake’s 1795 painting of Isaac Newton.
Newton by William Blake
The painting shows Newton absorbed entirely in his work, with his whole body directed towards his compass and calculations. He is impressively focused. Yet, as Vincent writes, Blake
“was not celebrating the work of the great scientist but satirising his blindness…. He is hunched, not heroic; obsessed with his measurements and so missing entirely what his compass cannot contain.”
In education, we have reached a point where our “compass”—our measures of success—can no longer contain the reality of children’s lives and what matters in enabling them to thrive.
Blake would no doubt have argued it never could. Neither exam results nor Ofsted capture the true value of a trusting relationship between a teacher and her class, the collective sense of achievement felt by a group of children completing a Duke of Edinburgh expedition, or the joy of a child’s imagination sparked by hearing a new piece of music.
But even those of us who believe in a rigorous academic education for all children and think this should form a core part of how we measure success, the impact of other factors is increasingly difficult to ignore.
The wider world keeps nudging our compass. As Loic Menzies has pointed out, our results are extremely ‘lopsided’.
Children in England score significantly above the OECD average in reading, science and mathematics and the number of children achieving expected standards in reading, writing and maths continues to increase (although not quite back at pre-COVID levels).
At the same time, however, we have an attendance crisis, an epidemic of poor mental health amongst young people and a stubborn disadvantage gap. We know that UK teenagers are at the bottom of the international league tables when it comes to the indices of empathy, stress resistance, emotional control and cooperation.
This impacts all elements of children’s lives.
A number of school and trust leaders we work with at The Reach Foundation have spoken about reaching a ‘plateau’ in school improvement and in their children’s outcomes. The levers they pulled prior to the global health pandemic and the cost of living crisis are no longer effective.
There are a significant number of children and families who are isolated, do not feel school is for them, and lack hope for a positive future.
Years of fast-paced curriculum reform and increasing pressure on academic outcomes, paired with a significant increase in child poverty and a reduction in wider support for children has resulted in a sort of pyrrhic victory for schools: greater rigour and improved outcomes for (some) children but significant fragility in the system.
Vincent writes,
“To measure is to choose; to focus your attention on a single attribute and exclude all others. The word precision comes from the Latin praecisio, meaning to ‘cut off’”.
What have we ‘cut-off’ in our pursuit of better and better academic outcomes?
COVID-19 dramatically revealed to many school leaders the extent to which our mindsets have been shaped by the Govian paradigm in which we work. “Measurement has not only made the world we live in, it has made us too.” There is now a desire for a different approach; a new paradigm.
How can we continue to improve academic outcomes in a way that also pays attention to children’s and teachers’ ability to thrive while rebuilding trust with families?
How can we create a system in which schools and trusts fulfil their potential as regenerative institutions?
An education doughnut?
In his 1973 classic ‘Small is Beautiful: A study of Economics as if People Mattered’, EF Schumacher describes a realisation about the nature of economic growth in the decades after the Second World War.
“...the changes of the last 25 years, both in the quality and quantity of man’s industrial processes, have produced an entirely new situation—a situation not from our failures but from what we thought were our greatest successes. And this has come so suddenly that we hardly noticed the fact that we were very rapidly using up a certain kind of irreplaceable capital asset, namely the tolerance margins which benign nature always provides.”
In education, the assets we’ve been using up in the last 25 years—our educational ‘tolerance margins’—were teachers’ goodwill, trust from families and schools’ connection to their local communities. Our ‘greatest successes’—improved academic outcomes—masked a gradual depletion of other factors that are equally important in enabling children, families and communities to thrive in the long-term.
We need to move to a new model.
Kate Raworth’s hugely influential ‘Doughnut Economics’ describes a route to a new economic paradigm. The Doughnut is, in her words, “a radically new compass for guiding humanity.” It is necessary because, just like in education, the economic paradigm in which we live and the way we measure ‘success’ (GDP growth almost at all costs) fails to capture the full picture of what people need to thrive.
Gross Domestic Product was devised in the mid-1930s by US economist Simon Kuznets. For the first time, the calculation enabled the government to see all income generated by residents of the USA in one figure. It also enables comparisons with the previous year’s GDP, with other countries, and league tables of growth. Its influence has been monumental. We remain obsessed with growth. Our new government’s number one ‘mission’ is “Kickstarting economic growth.”
The trouble with GDP though, is that it does not tell us anything about the nature or quality of growth.
Political economist Geoff Mann describes this memorably:
“All ‘output’ contributes to GDP, no matter if it is in education or healthcare, fracked gas or weapons. It doesn’t matter, either, if an increase in GDP is distributed between two rich people or a million poor people: if you get hit by a bus and it costs thousands to save you (or fail to), both you and the bus driver have made a positive contribution to GDP.”
It also excludes, as Raworth says,
“the enormous value of goods and services produced by and for households, and by society in the course of daily life.”
Crucially, it does not capture the impact of GDP growth on the planet.
In chasing GDP, we forget to ask deeper questions about its purpose and that of our system overall. Raworth’s response is to suggest we shift from a linear economic model, where success is basically understood as growth in GDP, to the Doughnut, which has a radically different starting point, “What enables human beings to thrive within the means of our life-giving planet?”
Raworth describes the Doughnut as follows:
“Below the Doughnut’s social foundation lie shortfalls in human well-being, faced by those who lack life’s essentials such as food, education and housing.
“Beyond the ecological ceiling lies an overshoot of pressure on Earth’s life-giving systems, such as through climate change, ocean acidification and chemical pollution.
“But between these two sets of boundaries lies a sweet spot—shaped unmistakably like a doughnut—that is both an ecologically safe and socially just space for humanity.”
What might ‘an education doughnut’ look like?
Following Raworth, my starting point description of the educational doughnut would be:
“Below the Doughnut’s educational foundation lie shortfalls in the factors that enable children to enjoy lives of choice and opportunity: being safe and well-supported; being healthy (physically and mentally); achieving well academically; having strong relationships and social networks.
“Beyond the ‘system ceiling’ lies an overshoot of pressure on schools and the system that undermines their potential to thrive in the long-term—such as teacher retention or the number of exclusions.
“In between is a sweet spot that enables schools to sustain positive outcomes for children and teachers in their community in the long-term.”
The above, as I hope is obvious (!), is absolutely a ‘first draft’ and I’d love ideas and feedback on the concept.
The measures (both those below the educational foundation and those above the system ceiling) need more careful thought to get right.
I will explore the potential implications of such a model and how it might be used in more detail in future posts. But there are three things to state upfront.
Firstly, as Russell Hobby argues in his excellent 2021 blog, ‘Which schools should we emulate?’, this is not about excuses or a lack of ambition:
“Success still matters. This isn’t about stasis or mediocrity.… It’s about finding the real success by properly accounting for the full price paid.”
The doughnut approach is about avoiding ‘outcomes triumphalism’, looking at how success is achieved and ensuring it is supportive of long-term thriving for individuals and the system. The Education Policy Institute's Effective School Groups Data Tool is very helpful in providing some of the wider data needed to ensure this happens.
Secondly, and relatedly, this is not an argument that ‘schools should do everything’.
Rather, it is an argument that schools should consider all elements of what children need to thrive and seek to work with parents, other schools and other partners to weave such a supportive web.
We should, as Hillary Cottam argues in ‘Welfare State 5.0’, seek to build capabilities. This means actively not defaulting to service provision. Instead, schools could “emphasise what they can support and enable.” Schools can think of themselves as what Cottam calls ‘5.0 Institutions’. These institutions,
“are open and porous, exhibiting a strong relational ethos and a facility with conversational/ deliberative methods. Within these institutions, there is a blurring of the boundaries between those who are helped and those who need help. They are as local as possible; we cannot participate and meaningfully contribute to what we cannot see or touch.”
This is the approach being taken with much success by our Cradle-to-Career Partners.
Finally, all the elements of the education doughnut are, of course, interconnected.
The beauty of it is that it pushes us to think hard about how we best act to create a healthy balance that is positively reinforcing. Just as reforesting hillsides can enrich biodiversity and retain more water, therefore securing the supply for the local community, increasing the number of children accessing early years education might both enable parents to take on more paid work and also increase the likelihood of children being ready to learn at primary school.
The nature of where we put our emphasis at any one point in time will be informed by local contextual factors as well as questions of impact on our ability to thrive as a whole. The key though, is that we do ask the questions.
As systems-thinker Donella Meadows put it, we must always ask:
“growth of what, and why, and for whom, and who pays the cost, and how long can it last, and what’s the cost to the planet, and how much is enough?”
Hopefully, the education doughnut may help us keep our broader purpose in mind.
