School's Pastoral Structure and Pupil Achievement - Essay Example

At the outset, pastoral care, as decisive to academic achievement as its successful implementation may be, is patently an elusive subject to configure and bring together. Clarifying the concept may shed light on a better implementation of pastoral initiatives and pin down its imperatives. Pastoral Care is a characteristically British paradigm that in other Western cultures is restricted to a decidedly religious context. Yet, in the holistic sense of educating the whole person pastoral care ideally should fit seamlessly into the very raison d'être of the academic setting. Education from its etymological perspective is the process of drawing out the all-around aptitude in each student, and concomitantly bringing out the best in practitioners as each integrated experience develops more proficiency in the process. Pastoral Care, rather than the aggregate of actions or exercises that employ its practitioners over time, in essence is the underlying impetus for the care in its implementation. Effective Pastoral Care facilitates optimal education by cultivating open communication between students and practitioners as well as carers and parents. Through discrete consultation and positive attention to the student's personal learning style, pastoral care serves to augment the greatest prospects for quality realisation of each pupil's best. When a pastoral curriculum succeeds in promoting good relations and feedback in the academic process among all participants, it is an operative element of successful education of the whole person. However, significant research currently indicates that academic structures operating under the auspices of pastoral care can quite easily relapse into an academic exercise less focused on aspects of student welfare than issues of social management and organizational expediency, carving a considerable gap between lip-service and actuality (Best, Lang, Lodge, and Watkins 289). Distortions of pastoral care transpire when perfunctory notions of education seize control of the comprehensive discipline. The upshot is a dichotomy between pastoral care and the academic curriculum where the educational ambience, frustrated by an obsession with control, intensifies an instinctive power struggle on the part of young people who on the whole are naturally prone to test the limits of independence. A study of student attitudes toward pastoral care shows that on average pupils mistrust its nuances basically as a further assertion of school authority over their lives (Power 75). When government mandates hold teachers accountable for pupil performance the temptation is to assert more control in the classroom. The National Literacy Strategy intervention may authoritatively approve interactive whole-class teaching but by all indications such policies drive practitioners to more autocratic styles of instruction with little occasion for student discovery and development of intellectual insights. Legislative impositions, deliberated from the inside, tend to repeat time-worn educational models from sheer precedent (Watkins 3). A survey of pastoral curricula across schools in a single London borough distinguished four diverse types: tutorial-centred, tutorial aimed at individual and communal learning, the pastoral curriculum integrated into the responsibilities of the faculties, and, finally, a pastoral curriculum strongly established as the academic culture (Best 19). In his article "Pastoral Care and the Millennium," Ron Best regrets that the 1988 Education Act ironically discourages any real progress on a pastoral outlook for the National Curriculum that might have been designed to advance the very expertise and competence that furthers individual initiative in the context of social accountability (Collins and McNiff 27). In terms of evaluating academic merit, intangible values whose worth is easily ascertained, are cast into doubt and abandoned with neglect. Instead government mandates seek to assert increased social control through socialising the mission of education. The National Forum for Values in Education and the Community has departed unequivocally from the model for value clarification envisaged by the National Association for Pastoral Care (Collins and McNiff 26). To reclaim pastoral care from the tyranny of deleterious modern policy it is important to listen to the experienced insights of competent educators who envision a return to a healthier focus on an all-inclusive academic endeavour. Recently a broad appraisal of teachers' attitudes in Britain found that the dynamic that most clearly inspires the majority of practitioners to go into education is a predilection for connecting with young people, and it remains the foremost incentive influencing educators to remain in the profession (Collins and McNiff 72). In evident contrast, the factors which most disheartened teachers were overwork, project overload, and the façade of being required to teach to compulsory performance-based initiatives. The aspirations most educators entertain for the 21st century emphasise instruction and culture, a modified curriculum that speaks resourcefully to student-centred interests, and the autonomy to implement self-directed and creative academic initiatives that truly speak to the formation of avid learners (Watkins 7). Trends in UK schools that undervalue the realistic implementation of pastoral care tend to neglect one of the foremost aspects in educational support and student success. In spite of theoretical recognition of the import of pastoral care and personal-social education in schools, those facets of education which are not out-and-out immediate instruction can often be left in jeopardy when weighed against monetary constraints or disciplinary quandaries (Best 8). For practitioners serious about keeping an essential focus on authentic education the omission represents a disadvantageous mind-set. Meaningful education calls for teachers who require and elicit top quality in effort and conduct, while responding competently to various learning requirements. Practitioners who give priority to the student are receptive to objective student needs and work judiciously to engage young pupils in the real-life lessons of interaction with the entire academic community (Best, Lang, Lodge, and Watkins 304). Pastoral care and personal-social education are effectual to the degree that they challenge, cultivate, and engage learning strengths, as well as address any learning difficulties of young pupils. Pastoral care in the academic setting dictates keeping a strong balance between cultivating an impetus to learn and adapting to a flexible array of individual learning modes (Flutter and Rudduck 15). In evaluating the assessment and import of pastoral care and the personal-social education it prioritises, the issue surfaces of how to characterise it and pinpoint its objectives. The results of pastoral care are on-going, dictated by diverse unrelated factors, and quite complex to assess. It is certainly difficult to quantify a clear-cut assessment of personal and social development in the student majority (Best, Lang, Lodge, and Watkins 304). Most curriculum testing, designed to assess the learning of a collection of facts, less clearly measures the broader critical know-how and insight that bespeak authentic student education. To appraise the retention of information is an unsatisfactory gauge of academic culture or school excellence. Schools can even realize an upturn in positive test results at the larger cost of real comprehensive learning (Watkins 2). Truly competent educators know that to teach rote information without instilling the process for its assimilation and integration is pointless. Students with a practical grasp of their knowledge will be able to make use of that know-how out of personal initiative; perfunctory learners will fail to do so. The curriculum should genuinely empower each student to own the essence of the material, rather than spend time practising pointlessly for pre-programmed test results (Power 107). Ron Best identifies three aspects of pastoral care that comprise the pastoral curriculum relative to the centre of concentration for each component. Pastoral care can be considered reactive, proactive, or developmental. In reactive pastoral care practitioners are on call to respond to students who suffer from troubles of a personal, social, emotional or behavioural nature. The form tutor must attempt to be on reasonably familiar terms with the student enough for the child to feel comfortable with approaching the tutor for general emotional direction and support. The competent tutor as an active listener is available to the pupil for counselling and guidance, unless severe problems warrant referral to an outside specialist (Collins and McNiff 18). Proactive pastoral care centres in on prevention in anticipation of common difficulties. The proactive concentration focuses on building up realistic awareness and staying power to train students in judicious choices for a practical response to normal social, emotional and educational challenges. Proactive care forestalls decisive occurrences likely to transpire over an academic career and delineates specific programmes to prepare pupils to deal with relatively predictable adolescent crises (Collins and McNiff 19). The final concept of developmental pastoral care addresses much more than an academic curriculum. Its focus is the personal and social growth of the student, through an actual pastoral curriculum of reflections, proficiencies and perspectives developed by practitioners genuinely committed to the human growth of students in the fullest measure. Neither reacting to difficulties on an individual basis nor providing special skills in expectation of critical incidents does sufficient justice to the overall dimension of pastoral care (Collins and McNiff 20). Academic attainment runs concurrent with social de­velopment, and it is imperative for educators to foster both. Professionals debate whether the more preferable option is an authoritarian style in contradistinction to a more supportive solicitude meant to engage students in the learning process. Such antitheses can be misleading, since both facets play an basic role in operative education (Best 28). A balanced perspective on pastoral care facilitates receptive communication between students, educators, carers and peers and encourages individual responsiveness to all available resources. The thriving student becomes conversant, self-sufficient, inventive, and open-minded (Flutter and Rudduck 124). Elements for strengthening the pastoral care components of education include team effort and peer mentoring that support student success. Substantial rationale for the efficacy of reciprocal learning in a group setting is supported by thorough research (Taylor and Fransman 17). Investigation has offered wide corroboration that interactive academic exploration in a group furthers more concrete education than competing private learning initiatives (Fry, Ketteridge, and Marshall 93). Results show that individual social assimilation and academic achievement can be completely reversed by involvement that brings in peers as well as teachers in making a student feel appreciated and respected. Tutoring known as cross-age support given by high-achievers to semi-challenged slower peers has been found to be more cost-efficient and academically expedient than the reduction of class size, addition of tutoring time, or over-reliance on computer-aided lessons (Jones and Charlton 92). A broad pastoral care configuration would involve the infusion of the curriculum with pastoral components designed to facilitate the personal, social, moral, spiritual and cultural balance of students through implementation of personal-social education, individual attention and cross-curricular communication. The ambience of a well thought-out and enabling environment builds up rapport within the academic community and confidence in the students (Collins 152). Sometimes called the hidden curriculum, caring structures and constructive relations between all members promotes an enduring culture of reciprocal concern (Power 81). Expert pastoral care invests careful consideration in the process of improving, inspiring, designing, sustaining, appraising, and otherwise directing the underlying character of the academic endeavour. Research by Porteous and Kelleher, 1987, ascertained that students in purportedly authoritarian schools built up more problems with authority. The administration tended to heighten discord and adolescent resistance by over-solicitous guardianship. By contrast, policies of insufficient attention to students in some schools apparently generated greater problems in the area of workable peer groups. Not surprisingly, in schools with even-handed policies, committed to empowering student success, students were more predisposed to get along well with each other (qtd. in Best 306). Settings where form tutors perform largely administrative tasks, such as registration and correspondence, are likely to suffer from more disorderly conduct among students than those in which form tutors are actively engaged in discipline, counselling and directional activities, observing academic excellence and other pastoral duties. (Watkins 8) Academic programmes which enable pupils to evaluate actual real-life settings, create goals and assume accountability for their choices prompts improved incentives for study and better-quality educational accomplishment (Sumner and Warburton 117). The creation of realistic self-esteem assumes a pivotal point in pastoral care. It is not easy for even skilled practitioners to spot poor self-worth in students solely on the basis of individual familiarity with them established through every day contact. As self-image is effectively an individual awareness, it is valid to question to what degree any teacher can form an accurate judgement about a specific student. Research has indicated some disparity between practitioners' guesstimates of students' self-esteem and the pupils' own assessments of themselves (Miller and Moran 25). Certainly educators committed to improving self-esteem as a significant aspect of their course work, found that their heartfelt efforts were more often than not generally ineffective (Best 12). Pastoral care is designed to develop and support the pupil from both an individual and social perspective. The contrast between academic and pastoral concerns is the difference between the communication of information as set forth in the areas of interest delimited by the curriculum and the broader perspective of introducing the young person into an assortment of insights, proficiencies and behaviours which address the contingencies of a world beyond and distinct from the student (Best 4). Supplemental teacher-attention, apart from aspiring to build self-confidence, may be worthwhile in its own right, since, the more teachers recognize either positive or negative aspects of children's attitudes, the more accommodating they are able to be and the more competent to hearten self-worth along with the concomitant self-reliance that fosters enterprise and responsible performance. Involving parents in the effort is critical to success (Best 12). For parents, students' personal well-being and social self-confidence in the academic setting is at least as paramount as their educational objectives for the child. Parental selection of the school is strongly inclined to down-to-earth pastoral considerations, viewpoints which pay less attention to the actual make-up of what students will be given in educational content or techniques (Taylor and Fransman 128). Most parents who choose schools for their children do so from pastoral standpoints, showing less concern for quantifiable standards than with an ambience congenial to the pupil's personal progress (Collins and McNiff 152). The best pastoral care attends to the propensities apparent in the interests of the student. Really listening depends closely on the proficiency, sensitivity and motivation of teachers to act in response to a distraught student on a one-to-one basis. The form tutor has a personal inventory on each pupil and can recognize many characteristics of each one's most distinctive ways of assimilating the material in the light of each student's strong points and limitations (Raymond 177). By appraising the student's individual learning style through the form tutor's familiarity with the academic setting, effective techniques can be developed for all practitioners to introduce positive improvements into the overall learning experience (Flutter and Rudduck 124). Tutoring should provide for optimal student success, and there is substantial evidence that pastoral direction from the form tutor gives significant impetus to pupils' commitment in a broad spectrum of academic and communal activities that serve to build up the young people's sense of self-confidence (Taylor and Fransman 12). Pastoral care is ultimately designed to foster the competencies that make a difference in the over-all growth of the pupils. Group learning is ideal for developing different views on the multifaceted basics of community life and learning the advantages of team effort. It is an ambience in which decisive abilities can be cultivated – respect for others, support for peers, and group dynamics (Collins and McNiff 133). Pastoral care facilitates the interrelationship of individuals in an academic community. The estimation which pastoral teams acquire of student know-how and cultural levels can be of invaluable assistance to other practitioners to the degree that it is professionally passed on through quality coordination from year to year (Best, Lang, Lodge, and Watkins 83). Students sift all communication through personal frames of reference and unique aspects of their familial and cultural identity. As individual pupils receive, sort out, and understand academic material through their own personal sphere of reference, other students in the group add another dimension to assimilate. The possibility that some students may find it difficult to connect with others' perspectives gives the form teacher an opportunity to integrate the educational experience. Students discover that real communication entails listening as well as sharing, and respectful group interaction provides a more direct learning tool for active listening than classroom lecture (Long 8). Centring on holistic education undoubtedly enhances performance. UK secondary schools in which students have done extremely well in the recent years, even above the national average, have experimented with varied strategic techniques. However, the highest performing schools have reached beyond cursory tactics into a broader academic thrust which builds up facility to truly educate students through an all-encompassing spotlight on the comprehensive ambience of pastoral care for the individual pupils and practitioners a well. Research from ninety-six Secondary Schools found that the overriding characteristics in positive student achievement are pupil involvement and assimilation. Pastoral care practitioners in these academic settings accentuated respect, support, commitment and integration in contrast to the existing rhetoric of administrators needing to use determination, resolute action, and convinced supervision (Watkins 6). The view of the academic setting as a community of committed, responsible individuals, rather than an industry, shows an essential correlation between high-quality pupil performance and practitioner initiative. When teachers are dismissed as though they were employees in a factory not their own, students turn out cookie-cutter results. On the other hand, where educators benefit from a consciousness of having the self-determination to take the initiative and make a difference, student scores soar (Flutter and Rudduck 129). Transcending the factory image mandates centring on the perspective of learners, enabling them to focus on all-inclusive meaning from the generally fragmented experience of secondary school. The key to achievement is helping students appreciate the character and rationale of their education, even involving pupils in planning and evaluating aspects of the curriculum, so students are provided a clear incentive to make progress (Flutter and Rudduck 131). Sally Powers argues that some pastoral pedagogies of self-realisation as the path to personal autonomy can be limiting in an over-emphasis on learning through the subjectivity of the student because the underlying point of view of human liberalism tends to be a rejection of the overriding objective reality of the historical, political, and material contexts outside the limited grasp of students' provincial perceptions and attitudes. That type of emphasis on student uniqueness makes it difficult to see how pastoral care can provide critical and alternative educational experiences (Powers 88). For Powers the dichotomy between the pastoral and academic curricula perpetuates the ascendancy of the academic domain as the keystone of educational identity, with a injudicious propensity for the integration of both, whereas the internal dynamics of the pedagogic disciplines should be considered in their own right and located in the wider social context of social communities inevitably interwoven with social interests (Power 139). A review of research confirms that little or no material on the subject of the academic success of pupils living under welfare assistance has been published in Britain and no more than a fleeting reference in the typical child welfare texts. Nothing appears to have changed. Reportedly there is a scarcity of hard data on any educational investment in these students, but what there is available serves to show unmistakably the degree of disadvantage they face that is intensified by the profound chasm between pastoral care and education in our academic institutions (Best 15). Though implementation of the National Curriculum in some ways certainly constricts pastoral care provision and may tend to jeopardize various middle-management posts, it also offers definite opportunities for partnerships. While the emphasis on foundation subjects underscores the dominance of a subject-oriented curricula, guidance from the National Curriculum Council urges the need for cross-curricular dimensions of integration such as equal opportunity, preparation for life, personal and social education, as well as cross-curricular skills such as communication and problem-solving (Power 137). Though these national mandates may be ignored in subsequent legislative directives and neglected in diverse local areas of implementation, the directive promises to provide a source of healthy tension within the academic curriculum, allowing core and foundation material to be developed through the cross-curricular themes. Even though such developments may occur infrequently due to the fundamental shift in curriculum design, the cross-curricular mandates provide official acknowledgment of the limits of educating exclusively through academic subjects (Power 137). The National Curriculum Council’s Curriculum Guidance did specify cross-curricular elements slated to be integrated through the course of development of the National Curriculum that envisioned the assimilation of academic subjects into cross-curricular themes in secondary schools in England and Wales. In a random sample of a quarter of the secondary schools in England and Wales the original appraisal was supplemented by more thorough interviews in a direct follow up of ten of the schools (Raymond 252). The investigation was concerned with the Curriculum Guidance stipulation that themes be inculcated across the confines of the academic subjects that typically characterise an intrinsic feature of the secondary curricula. The conclusion was that themes that had no noteworthy incidence in academics prior to the launching of the National Curriculum had continued generally to be short on resources or standing, and the preponderance of the schools took few reasonable measures to try to appraise or introduce cross-curricular connections apart from pre-established activities formerly operative in relation to individual subjects. The absence of a clear criteria for review of material related to the themes was recognized as the basic obstacle (Raymond 253). A separate action-research project directed to convincing staff of the worth of a cross-curriculum methodology, in contrast to the concerted focus of personal-social education in a single 35-minute class, determined that better teacher and peer relationships, enhanced student incentive, more accountability, and a more mature academic ambience were among the advantages generated by the successful initiative (Best 20). From one perspective the National Curriculum could be understood as integrating pastoral care into the actual fabric of the teaching profession, requiring that educators themselves be comprehensively trained in pastoral care techniques. In recent years the educational system appears to have grown significantly in a responsiveness to the susceptibility of young people in the academic process. The call for a student-based focus seeks to address all aspects of a multifaceted learning environment and honour a pastoral mandate to provide a network of community support to strengthen the student's sense of personal responsibility for academic success. In response to the deep-seated challenges, well-prepared practitioners working from that same sense of personal independence and accountability should possess the competency to construct the best all-embracing ambience for eliciting the promise within students to set their sights on their fullest possibilities. Works Cited Arnold, Roslyn. Empathic Intelligence: Teaching, Learning, Relating. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press Ltd. 2005. Bell, Les. Appraising Teachers in Schools: A Practical Guide. Routledge Education Books London Taylor & Francis, 2002. Bell, Gordon H., Stakes, Richard, and Taylor, Geoff. Ed. Action Research, Special Needs and School Development. London: David Fulton Publishers. 1994. Best, Ron. 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