Trundling down the Northern Line (London Underground) between meetings the other day, a large banner caught my eye. It was advertising a school for those with ‘Learning Differences’. Now, I’ve come across a few variations over the years – ‘Learning Difficulties’, ‘Learning Disabilities’ and the like…but ‘Learning Differences’?? I have ‘Learning Differences’ from my wife – I can watch a film and then have largely forgotten it after six months, whereas she will be able to remember intricate plot details quite clearly several years later even if she was reading a book at the same time as ‘watching’ said film – but I hardly think that’s what this school had in mind.
Of course, it’s not unusual for the education powers-that-be (btw that’s a typically clear coinage by William Tyndale, the 16th century Bible translator and Gloucestershire local hero) to change terminology apparently for the sake of it. It’s been a long time now since we were all encouraged to stop talking about pupils being ‘suspended’ or ‘expelled’ and were instead informed that miscreants had been ‘temporarily excluded’ or ‘permanently excluded’: after all, why use one word when two will do?
Did I just say ‘pupils’? Obviously, I should have written ‘students’. We’re all ‘students’ now, whether crying in the playground because it’s our first day in Reception and we’d rather be with mummy, or powering our way towards a Nobel Prize, or indeed putting a couple of hours a week into our lifelong learning course.
Some of the blame for this lack of clarity can doubtless be attached to the fact that, even in an era of Academies and Free Schools, we have a public-sector education system still largely driven by the state. Parenthetically, I’ve always found it rather wonderful that, given linguistic tabula rasa back in the 1980s, our national education bureaucrats managed to devise a system in which the first year of compulsory education became ‘Reception’ and the second was named Year 1. Nevertheless, as someone who frequently interviews teachers in order to write marketing material for schools, I think it’s fair to say that some teachers can lean towards obscurantism. It’s always tempting for a profession, club or cult to take refuge in its own jargon; education-speak can make those in the know feel somehow more secure. The message is: ‘We can speak a special language, so we’re the experts and you (parents, the public, whoever) are not.’ Let me hasten to add that this is by no means universal. It’s probably more common among younger teachers: the, ahem, more mature teachers perhaps no longer feel the need to try to impress in this way.
Could I make a plea for clarity? If those in schools are tempted to introduce jargon into their conversations with parents, perhaps they could first take a step back and ask themselves ‘Is this terminology necessary, or would it be better said in plain English?’ Teachers are usually the first to complain about state interference in their jobs, but not, it would seem, when it comes to the language they use. Maybe it’s time to rebel and make a (learning) difference.
