Inside the Secret Garden attempts to provide a general account of state education. Like Chris Woodhead’s Class War, and Melanie Phillips’ All Must Have Prizes, its central and perhaps familiar idea is that schools are failing because their political guardians have subscribed to a romantic worldview that runs counter to the essentially conservative nature of education.

Burkard’s lively critique opens with a deeply frustrating, if also thought-provoking, description of the ‘progressive mythology’ by which schools are governed. The central myth is the notion that intellectual development is a natural process and that pupils learn best when they pursue their own interests. This idea, he rightly suggests, is deeply flawed, because it assumes that students will spontaneously acquire skills and understanding of the same value as that which has been developed and passed down though culture over thousands of years.

Historically, Burkard points out, so-called ‘progressive’ educational ideas have been closely associated with the emergence of specialised training, creating teachers who are said to be uniquely able to judge when pupils are ready to learn. This spurious expertise, he argues, has in turn given the state a reason to control and regulate teaching practice, which has further reinforced progressive ideas.

Recently, Burkard adds, state control over the content of education has been buttressed and extended by the misguided notion that schooling is the ‘key to economic virility’. This narrowly instrumental view, he concludes, has combined with an egalitarian hostility towards individuality, with the result that traditional liberal forms of education have become marginalised.

Burkard’s opening is frustrating because it contains many ideas that are worthy of serious consideration. For example, he argues that progressives do not in fact practice what they preach. ‘Education’, he suggests, ‘is always about imposing authority.’ Traditionalists do so openly and honestly, by directly attempting to transmit culture. Progressives, he points out, also attempt to mould the child, but do so through indirect and covert means. 

Sadly, Burkard’s promising ideas are poorly developed. He suggests that Rousseau’s Emile is a pivotal progressive text, but provides no references to the original to demonstrate that this is true. Similarly, he refers erroneously to a conceptual phrase – the ‘zone of proximate development’ – which he attributes to the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky. A quick glance at any translation would have made it clear that the phrase was the ‘zone of proximal development’.

These might seem like nit-picking criticisms, but they indicate that Burkard is either overstretched or cavalier in his approach. This is compounded by the way in which he tends to lump together all those with whom he disagrees. Reading his introduction it would appear that there is a united relativist-instrumentalist-progressive conspiracy against liberal educators.

Anyone who has tried to uphold a liberal viewpoint may feel this to be so, but it’s important to remember that the various perspectives he mentions do not sit together easily. A postmodernist is as likely to attack a progressive as a liberal. Equally, progressives, such as Patrick Ainley, of the University of Greenwich, expend a great deal of their intellectual energy taking up the narrow instrumentalism of government – see Education Make You Fick, Innit?.

In other words, there is no coherent cultural elite, as one might have traditionally understood this term. Any coherence those that run education might appear to have is based on an entirely negative rejection of the past, rather than a worked through approach to the future. And this is what gives education policy such a spasmodic, directionless, and often flatly contradictory character.
All of this matters because the second section of Inside the Secret Garden is a genuinely informative read. It offers a patient, and in my view compelling, explanation of why synthetic phonics has proved such an effective method of teaching pupils how to read. This is a topic of which the author, who is the director of a charitable organisation that provides reading support, has a great deal of personal expertise. And on this narrower issue he writes convincingly.           

Burkard’s starting point is to draw a clear distinction between reading and understanding. Reading, he argues, is a mechanical skill and the ‘divisibility of decoding and understanding can easily be demonstrated by the simple observation that any skilled reader could read a technical paper … without understanding the meaning of the text’. Understanding, by contrast, is based on knowledge. What follows from this ‘restricted definition of reading’ is that ‘the only objective of reading instruction is to teach efficient decoding skills’ (p67). Instruction using synthetic phonics intensively and exclusively, Burkard argues, does precisely this.

Sadly, amongst the teaching profession and government, other approaches have for many years been popular, and Burkard does a good job of illustrating their limitations. Two examples he refers to include reading strategies that encourage pupils to guess words from wider contextual cues and those that promote whole word recognition, rather than the sounding out practised with phonics. Guessing approaches are ineffective, Burkard argues, because they distract readers from the task of decoding words, and the most significant words are anyhow the least predictable. Equally, the notion that pupils should attempt to memorise entire words offers no mechanism by which the learner can accomplish this task, given that our system of symbolic word transcription includes to no obvious graphical expression of meaning. 

Having addressed these ‘reading myths’ and others including the notions of phonological awareness, reading readiness, and dyslexia, Burkard concludes the middle section of Inside the Secret Garden with a consideration of the ‘lessons’ of West Dunbartonshire, a Local Education Authority in which reading failure has almost been eliminated by the use of synthetic phonics. Burkard suggests that local initiative was the key to effective change, rather the top down bureaucratic reform. He might be right, but perhaps a more important lesson is that the government’s subsequent whole-scale adoption of synthetic phonics, and ditching of the more diverse ‘searchlights’ approach it previously advocated, demonstrates the weakness with which New Labour holds to its convictions. 

The penultimate section of Burkard’s work repeats the errors of the first: too many issues, and insufficient detail, despite some interesting insights. In sixty pages he attempts to cover issues that require books in their own right, such as new approaches to maths, meritocracy and education, thinking skills, as well as ICT and ADHD. Inevitably, the results frustrate. The potential of ICT in education is, for example, dealt with in four swift pages. Burkard makes the reasonable point that computers ‘are just tools’. This observation is backed up by just two press cuttings, however, one from the Spectator and another from the Daily Telegraph. This is hardly likely to convert the ardent Guardian-reading technophile.     

Burkard concludes by considering the mechanisms by which education might be improved. Whilst he has some faith in the possibilities of privatisation, Burkard believes that the political climate is not right for reforms of this type. Instead he proposes a rolling back of state intervention, a ‘bonfire of controls’, in order to give teachers the space in which to experiment, as ‘when they see other teachers doing things that work, they are more than likely to try and imitate their success’ (p214).

Reducing bureaucratic controls over the working lives of teachers would of course be a welcome change in and of itself. But Burkard seriously underestimate the scale of the problem he confronts. Giving teachers more space to experiment with what works in the classroom will do nothing to address the fundamental confusion that exists over the aims of education. Explaining what schools are for, and why they should not be concerned with issues such as gang violence, obesity, citizenship, in fact requires serious intellectual leadership.