Why Polarisation Doesn’t Help Pupils (and What We Can Do Instead)
I read a TES daily update recently about the legacy of Nick Gibb and the ‘traditional vs progressive’ wars.
“Oh no. Not this again,” I thought.
Not because teaching methods don’t matter (they absolutely do, and in a big way) but because how we talk about them can turn a profession full of thoughtful, tired, brilliant humans into two cartoon armies, camped in opposite trenches, lobbing baseless accusations at each other. Or, if you don’t like the war analogy, two puppies fighting over a favourite rope toy.
The TES piece makes a sharp point: the fierceness of the trad/prog debate made it look bigger than it was. A minority argued loudly, and it sounded like the whole sector was in a permanent staffroom showdown. Nick Gibb, the article argues, used that.
He didn’t just sit in policy-land talking to think tanks and universities. He brought the debate into classrooms and positioned one side as:
· evidence-based
· standards-focused
· equitable
· the “real teacher” stance
…and the other side as, well, the opposite.
That’s a powerful move and a risky one, because the moment you turn a complex professional conversation into a moral issue, you don’t just win an argument you reshape what people feel able to say without being judged.
The spectre at the feast
Fast forward, and the article suggests Bridget Phillipson is now dealing with the after-effects.
She’s tried to stay neutral (which, frankly, sounds like what most teachers want), but every curriculum or assessment-related move gets translated through the old Gibb-era framing.
The TES example that made me laugh (in that “if I don’t laugh, I’ll cry” way) was advisers treating certain words like they’re setting off the fire alarm.
“Skills” as a trigger word.
Imagine the scene. A room full of adults, trying to improve education, nervously whispering: “Don’t say ‘skills’… it’ll trigger the trads.” If we weren’t living it, it would be like a Monty Python-esque sketch.
Why polarisation is such a bad thing for schools
Here’s my view, in plain terms: polarisation is a terrible operating system for education.
In real classrooms, teachers do not teach as “trad” or “prog”. They teach as:
“I’ve got 31 pupils, two of them dysregulated, one of them grieving, and it’s wet playtime and blowing a gale outside. What do my children need right now?”
Most good teaching is not about ideology. It’s about judgement.
Polarisation does three unhelpful things:
- It turns professional disagreement into identity. Once you’re labelled, you stop listening, because listening feels like betrayal.
- It shrinks the conversation. We end up arguing about the signal, instead of the substance. Not “Will this help the pupils?” but “What does this mean politically?”
- It makes policy worse. Policy becomes defensive. That means it’s written to avoid being misread, rather than written to be understood.
Those who lose out are the ones who aren’t in the debate at all: pupils.
The silent majority problem (and why it matters)
The TES piece calls out something else that’s important: the silent majority of the sector needs to engage more with policymaking.
I get why we don’t. Teachers are busy. Leaders are firefighting. Everyone is doing the work of three people while also being expected to have a calm opinion about national assessment reform. However, if the only voices policymakers hear are the loudest ones, then the loudest ones become the “sector view” by default. Then we all complain that policy doesn’t reflect reality.
It’s a cycle.
What I’d love to see instead
If we want to stop the trad/prog wars being the only lens, a few things need to happen.
1) Politicians: say what you believe, clearly
The TES argument is that Labour needs to be braver and more direct about what it believes about education, unfiltered, and challenge the old framing head-on. Not because we need more ideology, but because we need less guessing. When policy is vague, people fill in the blanks with fear.
2) The sector: judge initiatives by what they are
Not everything is a coded signal. Sometimes a curriculum tweak is just a curriculum tweak.
Sometimes an assessment reform is an attempt (clumsy or otherwise) to fix a real problem.
We should absolutely critique policy, but critique the thing itself, not the imaginary villain monologue we’ve written for the person who proposed it.
3) Teachers and leaders: reclaim “both/and”
We need to get comfortable saying:
- “I like explicit instruction and I value exploratory talk.”
- “I want high standards and I want joy.”
- “I care about knowledge and I care about application.”
Pupils need both and most teachers already do both; they just don’t always feel allowed to say it.
The TES piece ends with a line that stuck with me: what may have been true of Gibb is not necessarily true of all.
That’s a good reminder. In education, we’re often tempted to treat every policy move like it’s part of a grand ideological chess game, but schools aren’t chessboards.
They’re messy, human places where children learn who they are.
So yes, let’s debate pedagogy. Let’s debate curriculum. Let’s debate assessment. But if the only way we can talk about teaching is by picking a side, we’re not improving education.
We’re just adding noise to an already very loud day.
If you’ve got a view on how we move beyond the trad/prog framing, especially from real classroom experience, I’d genuinely love to hear it.