Bureaucracy old and new

I've spent much of today with colleagues discussing projects funded by the UK Film Council's awkwardly-titled offshoot, "Film: 21st Century Literacy" (let's give it a postcode-style acronym: F21CL). It's not my place to reveal what these projects are about, or to anticipate how F21CL will report on them. But it was a welcome reminder of the many kinds of quietly creative ingenuity and sheer dogged perseverance that go on driving film education at grass roots level. Everybody doing this kind of work knows perfectly well that education is a conservative field, that change is slow, hard to accomplish and difficult to sustain, but they keep at it.

So a much less welcome feature of the meeting was the reminder it also provided: that the funding and policy regimes under which such efforts are made do not have the freedom to adopt the time-frames and evaluative frameworks that such processes of change deserve. Political meddling in education and culture have almost normalised the idea of the "quick fix" and the "big idea". Achievement is measured numerically, not qualitatively, even when the numbers don't make sense. When I was at the BFI I never succeeded in getting my managers to understand that merely adding the numbers of children attending 90-minute cinema screenings together with the numbers of teachers enrolling on year-long MA courses was not providing data that could explain to taxpayers how and why their money was being spent. Instead (because I'm not averse to number-crunching: I just like the numbers to mean something) I wanted to introduce the idea of "learner hours". So 60 children attending 10 screenings each 90 minutes long would amount to 900 learner hours, and 20 teachers undertaking a 60-hour course would amount to 1200 hours. I hope I've got the sums right: anyway, the principle was to try and represent the "reach" of our activities more fairly. But this was always too difficult for our managers and funders to comprehend, so I went on being castigated for wasting public money on training 20 teachers when we could be showing a film to 60 kids. Such is the life of the cultural bureaucrat.

But I digress: I'm happy to say that the kinds of reporting that these projects will be asked to do is a lot more sensible. Nevertheless it is still driven by pressures from outside the world of education: pressures that want to use words like "delivery" and "impact" instead of "teaching" and "learning"; pressures that demand "headline results" before any proper reflection and analysis has been completed. After the end of the meeting one of our F21CL colleagues was describing his experience of trying to learn Arabic in 12 weeks. Like all of us when we talk about our own learning, he didn't mention "delivery" or "impact". He said how hard it was but also how fascinating, and how by the end he really couldn't speak or write very much Arabic: to do that you'd need a lot longer than 12 weeks. How can we get our new political leaders to stop and think about their own learning experiences, rather than about their schooling, before they start making demands for a new set of "results"?