I was struck by an article in, of all places, today’s Daily Telegraph. Apparently Guy Claxton,
a visiting professor at King’s College, London, has labelled erasers in schools
‘instruments of the devil'. He says that they encourage children to feel
ashamed about mistakes.
He believes that instead of a culture in which children are
encouraged to feel shame about their errors, there is a need for a culture in
which children are not afraid to make mistakes. Children should be encouraged
to acknowledge and learn from their mistakes and should not be made to believe
that the best way to succeed is by getting the right answer quickly.
There is a need to ban erasers in child protection too. For
too long in Britain, and elsewhere, there has been a climate of shame and blame
surrounding error in child protection. Without an acknowledgement that mistakes
not only happen, but are an integral part of providing complex services in
challenging safety critical circumstances, learning from error is frustrated and
improvements in safety and quality inhibited.
What, I wonder, would Ofsted inspectors make of a local
authority child protection team that greeted them with the statement: “We make
lots of errors here.” I expect it would be hands up in horror and reaching for
the ‘inadequate’ stamp, but the truth of the matter is that such a team is
likely to be much safer than a team that believed its practice to be error
free. By and large you don’t learn a great deal from denying your weaknesses;
you learn from acknowledging them and making the necessary changes.
