I am going to begin this piece with a bold statement: The overall purpose of schooling is pastoral. I know that this is likely to be regarded as a controversial statement, or one that is simply wrong. Some readers will wish to problematise the obvious false dichotomy that I seem to have presented between the academic and the pastoral. Others will wish to mount a defence of the academic as the ultimate goal of schooling - to 'make kids cleverer' (see, for example, Didau, 2019). Others still will seek to establish that economic goals actually drive schooling. The first point - that there is a false dichotomy at the heart of my claim - was one of the responses I gained in July 2020 when I posted a poll on Twitter that asked respondents to choose between 'academic' and 'pastoral' in relation to the 'overriding purpose of schooling'. It was, of course, a somewhat tongue-in-cheek poll that nonetheless flagged up a couple of points I'd like to make. Firstly, whilst the binary presented
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