When Do We Have Enough Knowledge To Make A Reliable Decision?

We are both suspicious of witnesses who seemed confidently certain about what was right – in some cases about almost everything – and attracted to those who admitted to some provisional uncertainty about whether their knowledge is accurate, adequate, and should be applied in ethical decision-making.

Knowledge – at least the knowledge we use for decision-making – is never just an accumulation of facts. In this case knowledge contains many skills, wisdom, values, beliefs and ideas, as well as the information and facts. ‘Knowledge’ is hardly a sufficient label.

We see those who want to continue to see education as a never-ending battle between progressives and traditionalists seeming to fall into the trap of creating a false dichotomy. In the wider definition of knowledge that we have just outlined we are supporters of what some call a ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum. It is vital for our children to develop their capacity for understanding their own prejudices when it comes to deliberation and making judgements and decisions.

They will need to know the difference between intuitive and analytic reasoning and the part each plays in the process. Knowing what to do in the circumstances is a very different sort of knowledge from being knowledgeable in your discipline. It is the key to wisdom.

We also reflected how much easier, and therefore more dangerous it is to make decisions at the macro-level because it allows the decision maker to consider wider- impact consequences. Those making decisions at the micro-level – doctors and consultants in health, parents and carers in the family, heads, teachers, and teaching assistants in schools – are more keenly aware of the impact of their decisions on the individual.

Therefore, we considered the two levels of decision making in the schooling system, asking ourselves the question of how each in practice is ‘enough knowledge’.

Ministers arguably make the most far-reaching decisions about our schooling system and most of the 20 we interviewed, explained their attempts to follow the evidence. They were ‘helped’ by senior civil servants, their own personally chosen 2 or 3 Special Advisers and Number 10’s policy unit in differing degrees, according to circumstance.

Nick Gibb, who was the only Minister to refuse our invitation to give evidence for our book, was we hope an outlier. Apocryphal no doubt but Gibb had a reputation as someone who would cover his ears and say ‘ I am not listening’ when hearing things in meetings at odds with his own views.

As he revealed in an article for the Daily Telegraph, he was confident he was doing the right thing when rebutting some UCL/IOE research raising questions about synthetic phonics as the sole means of teaching reading.

For him the evidence of a teacher (who had emigrated to Australia but had written in support of his views) trumped all other evidence: it was safer, this English expat told him, that politicians not experts should decide what should be taught and how it should be taught. It makes one glad he was not a health minister,

So far as major policy decision making is concerned, Nancy Cartwright and Jeremy Hardie’s ‘Evidence Based Policy Making; a practical guide’ justifies its title and would be an invaluable ‘vade me cum’ to Schools Ministers, CEOs of MATs and headteachers who haven’t come across it already. It illustrates the many pitfalls of relying on Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) inevitably limited by horizontal factors such as differences in contexts and vertical hazards of implementation, such as having the wrong people doing a vital part of the plan or overlooking the usual factors in carrying out complex change.

But some of the most the most important decisions are taken each day in the classroom by teachers who make decisions about which enriching experiences will most likely inspire children and help them to acquire ever more knowledge, in its widest sense. So, they will be thinking of what each pupil needs to do to extend their previous personal best – we call it ipsative assessment – in terms of facts, skills, ideas, values and beliefs and most importantly judgement.

And they will be doing that conscious of the individual differences among their pupils – that Macy is on the autistic spectrum and Jonny has just gone into care and suffers from panic attacks and that kneeling next to Haroon isn’t welcome, but that Paramjit wants you at her level.

No wonder teachers get exhausted where other people get tired. They are making decisions all the time which either lock or unlock the minds, open or close the hearts and engage or disengage the hands of their pupils.

Headteachers make myriad decisions too – whether to say yes to Mrs Smith’s request to try some new idea in English – default position probably ‘yes’. Or -whether to exclude Sophie who is neurodiverse and prone to unmanageable panic attacks and bouts of anxiety, who has been the victim of an assault and is worrying about being a witness in court in court shortly.

She has outbursts in lessons and in the latest of many she erupted and violently pushed a teacher whom she says ‘had got in my f+++g face’. It has led to demands that Sophie should be permanently excluded. She is in Year 11 and has a mother who is suspected of being the victim of domestic violence.

What would be a headteacher’s response, faced with similar decisions on a regular basis? The conflicting demands are very onerous. The interests of the child, the demands of the teacher and the unions, the best interests of the other pupils. Headteachers, it is often argued, are responsible for macro-decisions affecting the curriculum and organisation of the school, not just the future of one child!

Nancy Cartwright and Jeremy Hardie can help here too-on this occasion with Eileen Munro and Eleonora Montuschi who have just published ‘Improving Child Safety; Deliberation. Judgement and Empirical Research’. It is an essential guide for all school staff, as well as those beyond the school, who are properly concerned with making good decisions about how to guard and help the many children and their families who are struggling for well-being.

It shows that knowledge is a complex matter with which we all struggle.

In the classroom the teacher soon knows whether they have made the wrong decision. Feedback in the disposition, behaviour and commitment of the pupils and adjustments can be made quickly. As Haim Ginot memorably said of being the teacher ‘I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous’.

So mistakes are made even with the optimum combination of information, skill, intuition and wisdom but they are quickly evident. At the departmental and especially the school level it lies in making the judgement call which could have much more far-reaching effects.

The head might have an entirely different, and wider contextual knowledge of the child under stress than the teacher or unions calling for suspension. It is the adequate knowledge of the context that make decisions more likely to be appropriate. The further you get away from the immediate context the more important it is gathering the contextual evidence. The closer you are to the issue, the more important it is to get the wider context.

It is why decisions at a national level appear so often to be out of touch with the reality of schools and helps us to understand why advocates of democratic participation emphasise the concept of ‘subsidiarity’ – that is starting from the assumption that, in all matters, the more decisions can be made at the lowest possible level, the more accurate will be the knowledge of the context and the appropriateness of the call.

Tim Brighouse and Mick Waters