The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

by Robin Alexander

Over but not out

We mentioned at our highly successful national conference last November that the future of Cambridge Primary Review Trust (CPRT) has been under discussion.

During the past ten years CPRT and its predecessor the Cambridge Primary Review have established an unrivalled foundation of educational evidence, vision and principle for those to whom such things matter (which, dispiritingly, excludes many of our political leaders), and the 2016 conference reminded us of what can be achieved if we are prepared to transcend institutional and professional boundaries and act together.

CPRT was always expected to be time-limited rather than a permanent fixture, a way of giving the spirit and messages of the Review a final push before releasing them to find their own place in the landscape of primary education.  The national map is patchy, but there’s no doubt that in many quarters that place is secure, so the Review’s tenth anniversary was a time not just to celebrate, as we did last November, but also to take stock.

The stock-taking is now complete. Rather than run the risk of fading away through over-familiarity, and mindful of our increasing reliance on voluntary effort, we have decided that the time to stop is now, and that we’ll go out on a high.

Better still, we have been able to secure a deal which will maintain the Trust’s voice, presence and resources for the foreseeable future, albeit in another guise.

Here’s how it will work. CPRT will shortly cease to operate as a company. Its remaining financial assets will be transferred to a holding account to cover outstanding bills and keep its website alive and fully accessible for the next two years.  Meanwhile, the new Chartered College of Teaching (CCoT) has agreed to take over curation of the combined online resource bank of Cambridge Primary Review and Cambridge Primary Review Trust – over 100 publications plus a host of official submissions and other material – and ensure that as a mainstay of CCoT’s ‘knowledge platform’ it continues as an exemplary source of ideas, information and evidence relating to the development and education of young children, and a standard-bearer for what matters as well as what works.

Further, those teachers who have been engaged with CPRT – whether as recipients of our e-mailings or as members of CPRT regional networks and Schools Alliance – will be able to join CCoT at the College’s founding rate. At the same time we are hoping that at least some of our regional networks and alliance schools will take up the opportunity to transform themselves into CCoT regional communities.

Though the timing looks perfect, it isn’t as serendipitous as it may seem. Robin Alexander (CPR Director and CPRT Chair) and Alison Peacock (CCoT’s first Chief Executive) not only worked together during 2010-12 to disseminate CPR’s messages but were also party to the initial discussions in 2013-14 about what is now CCoT, while during 2016 Robin was a member of CCoT’s Research and Evidence Advisory Group. Common to both CPRT and CCoT is the re-empowerment of teachers after two decades of enforced dependency and compliance. The desired shift is encapsulated in that familiar quote from the CPR final report (p 496) that ‘children will not learn to think for themselves if their teachers are merely expected to do as they are told’ and its less familiar exegesis (also p 496):

We need to move to a position where research-grounded teaching repertoires and principles are introduced through initial training and refined and extended through experience and CPD, and teachers acquire as much command of the evidence and principles which underpin the repertoires as they do of the skills needed in their use. The test of this alternative view of professionalism is that teachers should be able to give a coherent justification for their practices citing (i) evidence, (ii) pedagogical principle and (iii) educational aim, rather than offering the unsafe defence of compliance with what others expect. Anything less is educationally unsound.

At the time there were those who found CPR’s definition of professionalism somewhat daunting, though it made perfect sense to professions such as medicine, law and engineering with which teaching claimed parity. In any event, the belief that true professional empowerment and school improvement are conditional on evidence and teachers’ willingness to seek, create and apply it became an increasingly mainstream aspiration. It was incorporated into government rhetoric (though with one recent Secretary of State expressing open contempt for expertise I daren’t rate official endorsement higher than that) and the mission statements of CCoT.  So with CPR/CPRT approaching its tenth anniversary and the professional context of primary teaching looking rather different now than in 2006, joining forces in this way seemed wholly appropriate. We are particularly pleased that it is with the CPR/CPRT evidence bank that the knowledge platform of the Chartered College of Teaching will be launched.

This blog will be one of CPRT’s last. Our next one, we hope, will formally confirm the new arrangements and no doubt offer some valedictory comments.

For now, stay with us and watch this space.

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SEAs4ALL – equity, voice, community and pedagogy

What is SEAs4ALL?

SEAs4ALL is an Erasmus+ project promoting ‘Successful Educational Actions for Inclusion and Social Cohesion’ (SEAs) in England, Cyprus, Italy and Catalonia. SEAs are innovative pedagogical strategies that have been shown to improve social cohesion, inclusion and attainment, and to reduce early school leaving. Based on Flecha’s principles of dialogic learning, SEAs are in use in over 600 schools in Europe and Latin America and have proved successful in a wide variety of contexts, with all age groups and in challenging social and economic circumstances.

We suggest that SEAs, and the opportunity to participate in ‘egalitarian dialogue’ in the classroom, could pre-empt the disillusion and mistrust allegedly underlying the widespread, anti-establishment votes of recent months. We suggest also that such disillusion may be a consequence of the unintended exclusion many children experience in the classroom, given decades of evidence of teacher-dominated classroom interaction in which only a small proportion of those present actually speak. Teaching that requires learners to be passive, to speak in chorus or to answer actual questions in short, memory –based utterances can build resentment that lingers into adulthood, potentially damaging lives and communities.

SEAs4ALL offers solutions through dialogic approaches that value everyone’s contributions and encourage community participation. SEAs4ALL responds to four CPRT priorities – equity, voice, community and pedagogy – and has obvious parallels with the joint CPRT/University of York project on  dialogic teaching and social disadvantage. Our arguments are not new, but one strength of dialogic learning, is its affordances for what Louis Moll calls ‘funds of knowledge’ from family and community to penetrate the exclusive epistemic climate created by the bank of knowledge known as the national curriculum.

The SEAs4ALL project

SEAs4ALL is an extension of the  EC-funded INCLUD-ED: Strategies for inclusion and social cohesion from education research, directed by Professor Ramón Flecha at the Community of Research on Excellence for All (CREA, University of Barcelona), between 2006 – 2011. INCLUD-ED worked in 14 European countries to find and trial educational actions that succeeded in improving social and academic factors, with emphasis on the inclusion of vulnerable groups such as migrants, cultural minorities, women, youth and people with disabilities.  The research demonstrated that SEAs work with children and adults, in mono- or multi-ethnic, urban or rural, rich or poor settings – unlike context–specific ‘best practices’.

Two SEAs, ‘Dialogic Literary Gatherings’ (DLG) and ‘Interactive groups’ (IG), were adopted by six primary schools in Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Peterborough in the ChiPE project  (2013-15) led by Dra. Rocío García Carrión. The positive outcomes resulted in three schools extending their SEAs to more classes in 2016. In SEAs4ALL, two lead schools, The Spinney Primary School, Cambridge, and West Earlham Junior School, Norwich, are using SEAs, supported by Cambridgeshire Race, Equality and Diversity Service (CREDS).

What does SEAs4ALL involve?

Both DLG and IG exemplify Ramón Flecha’s principles of dialogic learning. The first principle is of Egalitarian Dialogue which ‘…takes different contributions into consideration according to the validity of their reasoning, instead of according to the positions of power held by those who make the contributions’. Giving children the same right to speak as the teacher – who chairs the DLG to ensure order and fair turns – removes the ubiquitous ‘follow-up’ or ‘feedback’ move from IRF, thus allowing the dialogue to develop.  Secondly, the principle of ‘cultural intelligence’ accepts that every person has intelligence to share, whether abstract, practical, homegrown, certificated or book-based.

In DLGs, each child takes home an age-appropriate edition of a classic text (such as The Odyssey, Great Expectations, Don Quixote), reads an agreed section that everyone can read with help if necessary. While reading, participants choose an idea from the text and note the reason for their choice. In the ‘Gathering’, the teacher, children, TAs and parents (if participating), sit in a large circle. The teacher (usually) chairs the session.  Participants offer to share their choice, and when invited, read their chosen excerpt (phrase, sentence or paragraph) and explain their choice. Other participants comment on the choice and reason, agreeing/disagreeing (surprisingly politely), presenting new arguments and extending the original idea with their own ‘funds of knowledge’.  Difficult topics such as honesty, love, death, friendships, racism are common, and last 5 – 10 minutes. The children express moral and ethical arguments, in long utterances – 40 words or more. Some children change their thinking during the dialogue.  Critically, the children choose the topics, control the content of discussion, and have their ideas respected. Our observations show consistently that children do over 80 percent of the talking, with over 75 percent contributing.  Most surprising is that the teachers say little and listen.

IGs can be used in any curriculum area, and frequently in mathematics and language learning. The class is divided into four or five mixed ability groups. The teacher prepares a 15-20 minute task for each group on the relevant theme. An adult volunteer (e.g. parent, grandparent, community member, support staff, trainee teacher) sits with each group to introduce the task and then ensure that the children help and explain the work to each other. The volunteer does not teach, but facilitates the children’s supporting each other. After about 15 minutes the children move on to the next task with another volunteer, such that they have done all the tasks by the end of the session. The teacher observes, monitors, ensures smooth circulation, and might ask the class to analyse their learning before each change.  Children’s evaluative comments reveal their view that, often, other children explain the task better than the teacher.

IG and DLG allow Flecha’s ‘dialogic learning’ to flourish. Both demonstrate ‘egalitarian dialogue’ and capitalise on each child’s ‘cultural intelligence’. Both are completely inclusive. They transform children’s and teachers’ opinions about each other and about knowledge. They improve literacy, numeracy and oracy skills. They offer solutions to the problems posed in two Cambridge Primary Review research surveys

In relation to CPRT’s priorities, these SEAs:

  • help to close educational and social gaps (equity),
  • give children the floor (voice)
  • involve parents and community at home and in the classroom (community)
  • develop teachers’ listening abilities and foster high quality talk (pedagogy)

For more information about SEAS4ALL

Linda Hargreaves is Reader Emerita in classroom learning and pedagogy, University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education.

Rachel Snape is Headteacher of The Spinney Primary School, Cambridge, a national leader of education, head of the KITE Teaching School Alliance, Cambridgeshire, and a member of the CPRT Schools Alliance.

To learn more about SEAs4ALL contact coordinator Maria Vieites Casado mariavc@seas4all.co.uk

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Compliant, collegial or Clint? What type of school leaders do we need?

In its chapter on professional leadership and workforce reform, the Cambridge Primary Review final report described a working environment in which ‘head teachers, once the undisputed and independent leaders of their schools, now operate in a culture of compliance and one that, borrowing the language of business, exhorts them by turns to be “visionary”, “invitational”, “democratic”, “strategic”, “instructional” or “transformational”’. Reflecting on the conceptual shift in primary school leadership over the last 50 years, the report highlighted the move from an absolutist, paternalistic (or even grand-paternalistic, with the head teacher leading a ‘three-generation family’) model of headship to the more collegial professional relations of recent times (Children, their World, their Education, pp 437-9).

The six years since the final report was published have seen both a continuation of these trends and the introduction of new dimensions into the school leadership landscape. The pressure on head teachers to be all things to all people has certainly not gone away – and to the list above we can now add, courtesy of Sir Michael Wilshaw, the suggestion that head teachers should be ‘bruisers’, ‘battleaxes’ and, as if that weren’t enough, ‘more like Clint Eastwood’.

The concept of compliance, though, is an interesting one. The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) is unequivocal in its belief that, if we are to create a truly self-improving school system, we must move away from a model based on compliance with central direction to one in which schools work together to build capacity and drive continuing improvement.

In many ways, we have made important strides over the last six years away from a compliance-based model of school leadership. The hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute direction of the school day through the primary national strategies is no more. National Curriculum levels have gone, with schools now able to assess attainment and track progress between key stages as they see fit. Ofsted is at pains to point out that its inspectors do not expect teachers to plan or mark in a particular way, or school leaders to evaluate their schools using a specific format. And schools that convert to academy status can choose to reject central prescription in more radical ways, such as moving away from the National Curriculum or adopting different term times.

Increased autonomy (along with its joined-at-the-hip bedfellow, accountability) is, we are constantly reminded, the holy grail of current education policy. Nick Gibb, minister of state for school standards, rarely misses an opportunity to extol the benefits of autonomy. He spoke at a conference earlier this year of the emergence of a system of education in England in which ‘autonomous schools are able to break free from the intellectual and bureaucratic constraints of the past, allowing school leaders to beat a new path of previously unimaginable success’. The government has, apparently, taken ‘clear and purposeful action to free heads from … meddling’, liberating them to ‘focus on what is best for raising pupil outcomes’.

The lived experience of teachers and school leaders, of course, doesn’t always match high-flown political rhetoric. Levels and the primary strategy ‘lunchboxes’ may have gone, but in their place are detailed ‘interim’ assessment frameworks, and statutory national assessments in three out of the six years of primary education.

The dangled carrot of autonomy through embracing academy status may also be something of a mirage. The National Curriculum may not be compulsory for the 20 per cent of primary schools that are now academies, but it’s a brave head teacher who strays too far from the ‘expected standards’ against which both children and schools are held to account. And some head teachers are finding they are actually more closely managed in a multi-academy trust than they ever were by their shrinking local authority. There are many good reasons to consider joining a MAT, but increased autonomy is not one of them. (See Warwick Mansell’s CPRT report, Academies: autonomy, accountability, quality and evidence, for more in-depth analysis of the dimensions and realities of academy autonomy.)

Compliance is clearly not what we should be aiming for. As one of the most often quoted phrases from the Cambridge Primary Review puts it, how can we expect children to think for themselves if their teachers simply do what they are told? And, by extension, how can we expect teachers to think for themselves if school leaders simply do what they are told?

But neither, perhaps, is autonomy all it’s cracked up to be. There is an increasing body of evidence that genuine improvement, whether at an individual school or a system level, happens when schools work together to plan learning, solve problems and create the right solutions to local needs.

In our increasingly fragmented system, the answer to tackling the culture of compliance is not a proliferation of ‘hero heads’, but school leaders coming together to shape not only their own schools, but the education system as a whole. Lone warriors need not apply.

Julie McCulloch is Primary and Governance Specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL). She is also a member of the Board of CPRT.

Embodying the ‘collegial’ leader are the two winners of the CPRT ASCL award for evidence-informed leadership, presented at CPRT’s national conference. Find out more about Graham Chisnell and Iain Erskine here.

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Reading for pleasure: just window dressing?

Since reading for pleasure was mandated in the national curriculum, its profile has risen exponentially. This is assuredly good news, and many schools are seeking ways to demonstrate their commitment to this agenda. But as the pressure to raise reading scores persists, there is surely a danger that schools will only find the time to pay lip service to reading for pleasure, constructing it as little more than an act of institutional window dressing in our highly performative culture.

The requirement that children should be ‘taught to find pleasure in reading’ appears to have prompted many schools to refurbish/reclaim their libraries and buy new books. Some have even purchased double decker buses, tents, tree houses and caravans to deck out as school libraries, as well as garden sheds, boats, baths and sofas to enrich classroom reading areas. These physical spaces overtly indicate to parents, governors, Ofsted inspectors and the children that the school values reading, but is this institutional demonstration enough?

In other ways too, with the best of intentions, schools can be sucked into performing reading for pleasure. Institution-wide competitions exist aplenty, including for example: extravagant dressing-up competitions on World Book Day, and competitions to read books for the school. There are also class awards (for example Reader of the Week), and inter-class competitions such as the number of books reviewed each month. In one school I know the children’s home-reading records are turned into class percentages each week and the winning class, announced in assembly, is rewarded with extra break time. Such competitions act as extrinsic motivators – encouraging children to read for recognition, for reward, for their parents, their teachers and/or the school, but not perhaps for themselves. Yet we know that reading for pleasure is more closely associated with intrinsic motivation and some research suggests extrinsic motivation has a detrimental effect on children’s comprehension.

Physically attractive reading environments can be enticing to children and are part of the reading for pleasure pedagogy described by the UKLA Teachers as Readers study, alongside reading aloud, own reading time, and informal book talk. However their ability to influence the dispositions and engagement of young readers cannot be guaranteed. Much will depend on the quality and diversity of the texts available, the degree of choice and agency offered, and the time set aside for informal talk and interaction. Many classrooms, responding to children’s 21st century reading preferences and practices, now have comics, magazines, newspapers and digital books readily available. Some schools also annually order the children’s literature shortlisted for the UKLA Children’s Book Awards or the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Awards to ensure new books are encountered by staff and children. Such texts can unquestionably make a difference, as can the nature of the physical space, but if the reading environment is not inherently social, reciprocal and interactive, then the cost and labour involved in showcasing the school’s commitment to reading surely has to be questioned.

How reading spaces are used, who owns them, who made them and who has access to them, (when and how frequently), are all questions worth asking and monitoring over time. The kinds of opportunities these spaces afford for conversations and book recommendations are also worth documenting. It is all too easy to assume reading environments represent an institutional ‘good’ and are being fully used, but the intense pressure of the standards agenda tends to reduce the time teachers feel they can set aside for children’s volitional reading practices.

In recent research undertaken in areas of social and economic disadvantage, in schools renowned locally for their work on reading for pleasure, the OU team found that the class reading areas and the sometimes fabulous school libraries were, in all but one of the four schools, simply used as text repositories. While children did borrow books from their class reading areas, predominantly they were used for ‘time out’ and as additional work spaces. No text related talk was heard in them. No browsing or relaxed reading was observed within them. Furthermore, the displays in these areas tended to represent reading as a technical skill; showcasing comprehension strategies and reading domains, and displaying proficiency ladders denoting the children’s ‘abilities’ as readers.

In other classrooms and schools, reading displays may be interactive, profiling particular texts, authors, genres, questions, artefacts and children’s work, all of which can serve to trigger text talk.  Displays that feature personal, home and community aspects of reading (e.g. through photos of ‘who reads at home, where and what we read at home’) can also enrich reading areas and libraries. These carry significant messages about actual readers, not reading, and position children, teachers, teaching assistants and parents as members of the community of readers.

To be effective, reading environments need to be much more than physically appealing. Critically they need to be socially inviting, foregrounding the role of dialogue, and offering a myriad of opportunities to talk about texts, to hear books read aloud, to develop class ‘texts in common’ and to read alone and with others. As the Cambridge Primary Review final report highlighted six years ago, ‘talking must be part of reading and writing rather than an optional extra’ (p. 269). Indeed reading, like learning, is a social and collaborative act of participation, as well as an individual one, a point which Goswami also underscores in the CPRT research review into Children’s Cognitive Development and Learning.

In order to avoid reading for pleasure becoming little more than a colourful visual laid across the landscape of schools, we must ensure the social environment receives more attention, but not through more high profile competitions. Talking about texts, their possible meanings and interpretations, and informal conversations about reading and oneself as a reader deserve to be placed at the very heart of the reading curriculum. Such talk brings the landscape to life and helps to build communities of engaged readers.

For other CPRT blogs by Teresa Cremin click here and/or download CPRT’s book Primary Colours.

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The power of the arts in primary schools

The arts are essential in life. They can shape and define who we are and how we understand ourselves and our possible selves.  It is a travesty that in some quarters the arts in schools are increasingly regarded as unnecessary.  We see dance, drama, music and visual arts as fundamental to cultural engagement and personal development.  Artistic experience fuels imagination and in turn imagination fuels creativity. Within CPR’s curriculum framework, the arts are linked to creativity as one of eight essential curriculum domains – although CPR emphasises that creativity is not regarded as exclusive to the arts.

The instrumental argument for the inclusion of the arts in education is that they foster transferable skills and boost overall academic achievement, leading to better future work opportunities, enhanced well-being and self-esteem.  In contrast, the essentialist view, underlined in an earlier blog from Robin Alexander, is that the arts are valuable for their own sake and should not just be seen merely as tools for other kinds of learning. Elliot Eisner’s ten lessons the arts teach resonate beautifully with CPR’s aims.  They propose that the arts provide space for personal judgement; help problem-posing and thinking outside the box; promote diversity, respect and intercultural understanding; show that making mistakes can be liberating and open up new opportunities; encourage looking at details and thinking in depth; allow the creation of a personal reality; provide therapeutic benefits and support emotional literacy and make us feel alive.

Children don’t experience learning as separate parcels of knowledge to be opened. They flow from one form, with different ways of exploring and expressing, to another.  They use what Loris Malaguzzi calls ‘100 languages’.  In relation to CPRT’s values and vision, we suggest that positive connections between the arts, as well as non-arts subjects, can maximise creative learning.  Although we may more commonly talk about learning in and through different art forms, the work of Lars Lindström usefully draws attention to also learning about and with the art form.  These distinctions emphasise a wonderful world of possibilities for both teaching and learning.

However, promoted by the DfE, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) Teaching and Learning Toolkit  tells us that arts participation has low impact on ‘academic learning’.  This worries us on two counts: firstly, the type of research approaches used to gather this evidence can never fully capture the subtle qualities of learning in the arts; secondly, it is grossly inaccurate to imply that the arts are non-academic.  Also, we are deeply troubled when it is seen as perfectly acceptable to relegate the arts to extra-curricular activity, seemingly the view taken in the DfE White Paper Educational Excellence Everywhere. In any event, evidence from a much larger body of research  than the single project cited by EEF shows that arts education does indeed have a positive and significant ‘academic’ impact.

Our work with the South West Research Schools connects closely to four of CPRT’s priorities: community, curriculum, voice and pedagogy.  These schools are fully committed to providing rich and stimulating learning experiences and recognise that the arts have much to offer in contributing to this aspiration.

In the Power of the Arts event recently held at Bath’s Royal Literary and Scientific Institute, six of CPRT’s South West Research Schools shared their research findings to date, which led to wider discussions about teaching and learning in the arts and, more generally, a creative school ethos.  Significant messages arising from the discussions underlined the importance of both teachers and children learning as researchers, and the potential of working with the ‘habits of mind’ of artists and creative professionals to develop creative learning skills.

David Allinson, Head Teacher of St Vigor and St John Primary School, Chilcompton, Somerset talked about:

… believing in children’s ideas, with research as a habit of mind – catching learning. We became fascinated in how children’s drawings help them to put ideas together and grow – in how can ideas be revealed, connected and grow through drawing. Some important things came out from what we saw.  The children’s language was more developed, their imagination had grown into a fantastical language, children were catching ideas from each other. The ideas changed because we gave children time, we gave them space to do it in, and gave them attention from a teacher who was very interested in what they were doing, showed attention by writing things down, taking photos. As teachers we need to step back and ask questions about the things that fascinate us. We saw the story unravelling – we were then interested in how we could give children the time space and attention they needed.

Professor Nick Sorensen, Associate Dean, Institute for Education, Bath Spa University closed the day:

Thank you to the primary head teachers who have generously shared their innovative approaches to learning, teaching and professional development, showing how artists and teachers work together to increase children’s self-esteem, self-confidence and independence with the vision to expand the imaginative potential of children and supporting them to become independent learners.

Post Brexit, here is much healing that has to be done and what you’re doing is really important work.  Artists and teachers are united by the fact that they are social beings; their actions have an impact on what happens in society and they reflect what is going on in society. The work that you, and others, are doing takes on a much broader significance and importance given that the context we are working in has changed radically.

What I am interested in is practice, in what great artists and teachers do.  Practice doesn’t exist in isolation but comes out of a culture.  We need to engage in a process of analysis not just to document that what we do which is of value, but to collectively legitimise those practices that may appear to be marginal in order to resolve the tensions between policy expectations and practical realities, between a restricted and restrictive National Curriculum and the stuff that children immediately recognise as ‘real learning’. We need to be able to provide evidence for those practices that foster understanding, cooperation, cross-cultural perspectives and cross-disciplinary learning.

5x5x5=creativity aspires to research and support creativity in children’s learning to increase their aspirations and life skills.  Partnerships between schools and cultural organisations are essential at this time, as we need to draw on our collective imagination to make a real difference to children’s lives.  With determination and a growing sense of community and shared endeavour, we can together ensure that children’s experiences of primary school are enlivened and enriched by the arts.

We agree with artist Bob and Roberta Smith, that ‘art makes children powerful’ and would add that it can also make teachers, as learning and research partners, powerful too.

Emese Hall (University of Exeter) and Penny Hay (Bath Spa University) jointly co-ordinate CPRT’s South West regional network, which includes the South West Research Schools Network and its current focus on the arts and creativity in primary schools. Contact them here for more information.

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Much ado about drama

The words ‘new’ and ‘national’ in relation to the primary national curriculum are misnomers. Much is similar to my primary school education in the 1950s, when there was a relentless focus on passing the 11+. Academies, free and independent schools don’t have to follow the ‘national’ curriculum anyway, so it is not national. With a rapidly increasing number of schools jumping (before being pushed) into academy status, soon most schools won’t have to follow it. Their curriculum ‘freedom’ could enable academy chains and individual schools to create something better than the retro, imbalanced national curriculum. A balanced arts curriculum would be an improvement but currently the increasingly high stakes national assessments in maths and English are what are actually shaping what is being taught for most of each day. What children learn, and the ways they learn it, influence the development of their brains, minds and attitudes. Education with insufficient arts is a form of deprivation.

I talk with teachers from many schools. I have been told, ‘We used to do drama but there just isn’t time now,’ and ‘We have been told that if we don’t have to teach something, then we mustn’t waste time on it.’ The curriculum is being shaped by fear of poor test results, with young children being overdosed on spelling, punctuation, grammar, phonics and maths. Art and design and music are at least in the national curriculum, so these subjects get some attention but drama is increasingly pushed to the wings.

Drama has always been a national curriculum casualty in England, locked safely and inappropriately inside English. Even when it was slightly more prominent in the last English national curriculum, the national strategies and Ofsted ignored it. Drama is now reduced to the odd bullet-point in the programme of study for English and defined mainly by its usefulness to reading comprehension and writing.

Drama has an extensive toolbox of interactive strategies and techniques that can be used to scaffold different types of thought and talk in any curriculum area. Many teachers know just two or three drama strategies and use them repeatedly, (e.g. hot-seating, freeze-frame, conscience alley). This is often a legacy from national strategies training. However, more recently trained teachers may not know any drama strategies at all and may not have had any drama training.

Drama is a main artform, not just a toolbox. The Cambridge Primary Review report positioned ‘Arts and Creativity’ (including drama), at the top of its list of eight curriculum domains. Jim Rose’s ill-fated curriculum also placed drama appropriately, within ‘Understanding the Arts’, where it had equal subject status alongside art, music and dance.

England used to lead the way internationally for drama in schools but no longer. Australia has its first national curriculum and dance, drama, media arts, music and visual arts have equal curriculum subject status within it. Ontario has had a statutory arts curriculum in its primary schools for almost a decade. Indeed, the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau was once a drama teacher.

Ironically, Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary coincides with drama in schools being diminished. England’s national curriculum has no programme of study or even appendix for drama, yet former Education Secretary Michael Gove agreed that all schools should receive a free copy of the Royal Shakespeare Company Toolkit for primary teachers. The press heralded his support for annual ‘Shakespeare Week’, but schools need a drama curriculum that has been fully consulted on, not just a free handbook about teaching Shakespeare and a ‘bolt-on’ Shakespeare Week.

For not a single question about drama was included in the national curriculum consultation. No DfE official was given responsibility for drama.  Subject expert groups were set up, but none for drama, and the subject expert group for English invited a National Theatre representative to join but no representative from the professional drama teachers’ associations. Creative and cultural industry representatives were given prominence in the developing educational landscape, and DfE consulted the relatively new Cultural Learning Alliance (CLA) rather than arts teachers’ professional organisations such as National Drama.

Through Creative Partnerships (2002-2011) and also through Arts Council England initiatives such as Artsmark and Arts Awards, a large national database of artists and arts organisations has been compiled.  It continues to grow and is not openly available to schools. The education work of artists and arts organisations is being channelled by ACE through their Regional Bridge organisations (jointly funded by the DfE). This infrastructure and database will be useful if and when the ‘Cultural Citizens’ initiative gets underway (proposed in ‘The Culture White Paper’ – March 2016). In this publication, the Education Secretary Nicky Morgan says that she wants ‘every single young person to have the opportunity to discover how the arts can enrich their lives.  Access to cultural education is a matter of social justice.’

Schools certainly should provide opportunities for children to work with artists and visit galleries, museums and theatres as part of their planned curriculum but these experiences and opportunities are no substitute for regular curriculum arts teaching in schools by qualified teachers with arts training.  Meanwhile, in some academies there are teachers without qualified teacher status (QTS). At least this development benefits artists as contributors to the teaching workforce.

Ofsted expectations, too, reflect the changing landscape within which arts education could too easily become confused with and subsumed by ‘cultural education’. The 2015 school inspection handbook says (my italics):

Ofsted inspectors take account of pupils’ cultural development, including their willingness to participate in artistic, musical, sporting and other cultural opportunities. Inspectors expect schools to provide a broad and balanced curriculum and extra-curricular opportunities that extend pupils’ knowledge, understanding and skills in a range of artistic, creative and sporting activities.

The arts must not be become an out-of-school-hours activity. Children need arts as part of a broad and balanced curriculum in school time and that should include art, music, dance and drama.

Patrice Baldwin is a drama for learning specialist, past Chair of National Drama and past President of the International Theatre, Drama and Education Association. www.patricebaldwin.com

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Rigor spagis

Amid the gloom of unsavoury Sats and enforced academisation, comes one delicious moment of joy. Schools minister Nick Gibb doesn’t know his subordinating conjunctions from his prepositions. He can’t answer one of the questions he has set children. Despite this woeful (in his eyes) ignorance – though, tellingly, when his mistake is pointed out he says ‘This isn’t about me’ – he has managed to become and to remain a government minister. Need one say any more about the pointlessness of the Spag test?

At least by this time next week it will all be over. The country’s 10 and 11-year-olds will be free to enjoy their final few weeks at primary school, liberated from the government’s oh so very rigorous key stage 2 tests. Like them, I am tired of fractions, tired of conjunctions, tired, in fact, of being told of the need for ‘rigour’. The Education Secretary and the Chief Inspector need to wake up to the fact that rigour is a nasty little word, suggestive of starch and thin lips. Its lack of humour and humanity makes parents and teachers recoil. Check out its origins in one of those dictionaries you recommend children use.

Hopefully the weight of protest here, echoing many in America, will force some meaningful concessions from the ‘rigour revolutionaries’ in time for next year’s tests. Either that, or everyone with a genuine interest in helping young children learn will stand up and say No.  In the words of CPRT Priority 8, Assessment must ‘enhance learning as well as test it’, ‘support rather than distort the curriculum’ and ‘pursue standards and quality in all areas of learning, not just the core subjects’. The opposite is happening at the moment in the name of rigour. It’s not rigour – but it is deadly.

Of course, the memory of subordinating conjunctions and five-digit subtraction by decomposition will fade for the current Year 6s – and for Nick Gibb – unless they turn out to have failed the tests. Mrs Morgan will decide just how rigorous she wants to be in the summer. Politics will determine where she draws the line between happy and sad children. Politics will decide the proportion she brands as failures at age 11, forced to do the tests again at secondary school.

But still the children have these few carefree weeks where primary school can go back to doing what primary school does best – encouraging enquiry into and enjoyment of the world around us. Well, no. Teachers still have to assess writing. And if my classroom is anything to go by, writing has been sidelined over the past few weeks in the effort to cram a few more scraps of worthless knowledge into young brains yearning to rule the country.

So how do we teachers judge good writing? Sadly, that’s an irrelevant question. Don’t bother drawing up a mental list of, for example, exciting plot, imaginative setting, inventive language, mastery of different genres. No, teachers must assess using Mrs Morgan’s leaden criteria, criteria that would never cross the mind of a Man Booker prize judge. Marlon James, last year’s Booker winner and a teacher of creative writing, was praised for a story that ‘traverses strange landscapes and shady characters, as motivations are examined – and questions asked’. No one commented on James’s ability to ‘use a range of cohesive devices, including adverbials, within and across sentences and paragraphs’.

The dead hand of rigour decrees that we judge children’s ability to employ ‘passive and modal verbs mostly appropriately’. We have to check that they use ‘adverbs, preposition phrases and expanded noun phrases effectively to add detail, qualification and precision’. (Never mind thrilling, moving or frightening, I do love a story to be detailed, precise and qualified.) We forget to read what the children have actually written in the hunt for ‘inverted commas, commas for clarity, and punctuation for parenthesis [used] mostly correctly, and some correct use of semi-colons, dashes, colons and hyphens’. Finally, it goes without saying that young children must ‘spell most words correctly’.

There are eight criteria in the Government’s interim framework for writing at the ‘expected standard’ – expected by whom, one is tempted to ask. Only one of the eight relates to the point of putting pen to paper in the first place. Aside from ‘the pupil can create atmosphere, and integrate dialogue to convey character and advance the action’, the writing criteria spring entirely from the Government’s obsession with grammar, punctuation and spelling. I fear it is only too easy to meet the ‘expected standard’ with writing that is as lifeless, uninspiring and rigorous as the criteria themselves.

If writing is not to entertain and inform, then why bother? In the old days of levels, teachers had to tussle with Assessment of Pupil Performance Grids – a similar attempt to standardise the marking of a creative activity. But at least the APP grids acknowledged that good writing should make an impact. Texts should be ‘imaginative, interesting and thoughtful’. Sentence clauses and vocabulary should be varied not to tick a grammar checklist box but to have an ‘effect’ on the reader.

So now we have to knuckle down and make sure children’s writing satisfies the small-minded rigour revolutionaries. Can we slip in a semi-colon and a couple of brackets without spoiling the flow of a youthful reworking of an Arthurian legend? How many times can we persuade our young authors to write out their stories in order to ensure ‘most’ words are spelt correctly. And what to do about those blank looks when we suggest that they repeat a phrase from one paragraph to the next to ensure they have achieved ‘cohesion’?

Mrs Morgan claims the ‘tough’ new curriculum will foster a love of literature. This is a mad, topsy-turvy world that includes too many ‘strange landscapes and shady characters’. It is good, at last, that ‘motivations are examined – and questions asked’. Keep up the good work, everyone. We can stop the rigour revolutionaries.

Stephanie Northen is a primary teacher and journalist and one of our regular bloggers. She contributed to the Cambridge Primary Review final report and is a member of the Board of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust.

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The end of primary education as we know it?

The government seems seriously to be considering requiring all schools – and yes, that includes all primary schools – to become academies. A white paper setting out such a change may come later this month while, as Robin Alexander pointed out last month, the government has been arguing that ‘all schools should become academies or free schools’ for more than a year.

This would be the biggest change to institutional oversight in the primary sector since the 1988 Education Reform Act, at least. It would enable the Conservative party at long last to achieve what it set out to do less successfully 25 years ago through grant maintained schools: the bypassing of local authorities.

But is it going to herald change for the better, or is it a risky break with what has been a reasonably successful post-war primary education framework in favour of something much less democratic, potentially much more commercialised, arguably much more at risk of capture by vested interests, and certainly much less stable?

A research report I have written for the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, to be published this spring, considers the academies policy in detail. Here is what I found:

Evidence that academy status has improved primary schools since the first primary academies came into existence in 2010 is patchy-going-on-non-existent.

This is perhaps the most obvious finding. The headline is that there is little firm evidence that academy status in itself has improved primary schools. This doubt about evidence perhaps unsurprisingly includes that provided by the Department for Education, which last year was taken to task by the UK Statistics Authority for presenting official test data on sponsored academies without context and was asked by the cross-party Commons Education Select Committee to stop ‘exaggerating’ academy success.

The committee itself said that, as of January 2015:

We have sought but not found convincing evidence of the impact of academy status on attainment in primary schools.

Meanwhile, eight of the nine larger academy chains which have been inspected by Ofsted have come in for criticism.

It is true that the academies policy has been credited by the Commons Education Select Committee with injecting extra dynamism into state education. But the evidence for this seems very indirect.

There is little evidence that academies have used the autonomy which the government says is the centrepiece of the policy on the things that the government usually talks about in relation to it.

Although ministers have tended to argue that academies have greater freedoms over the curriculum, teachers’ pay and conditions and the length of the school day and term, independent studies have tended to find that such theoretical liberties are often not taken up.

For example, although academies can depart from national curriculum arrangements, the existence of an assessment regime which focuses on the national curriculum and against which schools’ futures are decided severely limits their scope for manoeuvre.  Indeed, professionals surveying the current highly prescriptive stipulations of primary English assessments might greet suggestions of professional teaching freedom anywhere within the state-funded sector with a hollow laugh.

The academies policy, with the freedom it gives to multi-academy trusts to control what goes on within a chain of schools, provides no guarantee of meaningful autonomy of any kind for individual schools run by an overarching trust.

At the level of the individual school operating as one of several within a multi-academy trust (MAT), the very concept of school-centred autonomy may not exist as currently understood. Decision-making can be controlled by the MAT board, with the governors of each school having little or no power. If this as a trend continues and many or all schools enter into multi-academy trusts run in such a centralised way – and several leaders of large MATS have confirmed this is what happens in their organisations in the past year– it will be highly significant. Effectively it will bring to an end nearly 30 years of local management of schools, which, ironically, the Conservatives introduced in 1988.

To put it another way, we will have replaced a system whereby heads and governing bodies were given some freedom to manage their own affairs, but subject to oversight and influence by a locally democratic body, with one where a central body which is not subject to local democracy can run a group of schools in a top-down manner.

The academies policy does give meaningful autonomy to academy trusts, at the level of the trust, rather than to single schools within a MAT, in relation to some aspects of what they do. But the question then becomes whether such freedoms are appropriate. Such freedoms come in several categories.

Admissions. For example, the movement of many institutions from ‘community school’ status, run under the auspices of local authorities, to semi-independent academies makes each such academy trust its own admissions authority, rather than having admissions controlled by its local authority.

Yet why would a non-selective school need to control its own admissions? It seems difficult to identify any benefits, from the perspective of a system which sought to treat all local children fairly. However, the potential downsides have been powerfully voiced by, for example, the independent Pearson/RSA Academies Commission. It found that

Academies’ autonomy over admissions has attracted controversy and fuelled concerns that the growth of academies may entrench rather than mitigate social inequalities.

Governance. The academies scheme genuinely gives trusts great freedom in terms of how they set themselves up. At the top of academies’ governance structure sit ‘members’. Members have the ability to appoint and dismiss the other powerful figures within the trust’s governance structure, the trustees. Yet there can be as few as three members controlling multi-academy trusts, which in turn can run large numbers of schools. In some cases, these members seem to know each other well, sometimes as husband and wife. In others, a major figure involved in the day-to-day running of the MAT – say, the chief executive – is also a member sitting at the top of its governance structure.

This seems at odds with established good corporate governance practice and appears to create the clear risk that only a small number of people can be in effective control of large sums of public money and of important public institutions.

Finance. The large sums of taxpayers’ money now finding their way to some senior academy executives – and thus away from the classroom – combined with the payment of public funds to companies in which those governing academy trusts sometimes have an interest, raise additional concerns. Specifically, they highlight the clearly debatable freedoms which have been given to academy trusts over financial affairs.

As DfE’s Academies Financial Handbook puts it, the academies system hands trusts ‘wide discretion’ over the spending of public money, with auditors and the government then checking afterwards that this has been done correctly. In the non-academy sector, the local authority retains ultimate responsibility for spending. Readers will no doubt have views on which procedure is better, but financial goings-on in the academies sector at the very least give rise to concerns.

The system for deciding who runs academies is lacking in transparency and democracy

Decisions such as which organisation gets to take over a school under the new Regional Schools Commissioner (RSC) system are not taken in public; no detailed decision-making documents are available to taxpayers, parents, pupils or staff; there is no detail even on the rules by which such decisions are made, if they exist. Virtually no education stakeholders have any role in the decision-making process. The system is effectively controlled from Whitehall, as RSCs report ultimately to ministers. Though taking decisions with big implications for local communities, they are not subject to any local accountability.

The academies system has also introduced a controversial new feature on education’s landscape: the school takeover. This is when an outside academy trust can be brought in to take over the running of an institution, sometimes whether or not the school community – the parents, staff and pupils – want it.

Conclusion

Moving all schools to primary academy status would seem to herald a major increase in bureaucracy – and a field day for lawyers and auditors – as for thousands of institutions the legal structures on which schools are based are changed. This stands to take resources and the energy of school leaderships away from the core business of what goes on in classrooms.

It also stands to move England towards a system where the claimed greater autonomy of academies over, for example, the curriculum – on which the teaching profession has real expertise –  often seems more rhetorical than real. But it would hand great power to academy trusts over areas such as admissions, where gameplaying in search of a ‘better’ intake seems a clear risk, and finance, where the misuse of public funds is an obvious worry.

It would move the management oversight of schools from governing bodies and local authorities  rooted in their local communities to potentially very small groups of individuals, sometimes friends of each other, supervised essentially from Whitehall. It would allow the writing-out of most parents and taxpayers from meaningful influence and information in relation to major decisions on the future of state-funded schools, including a potential takeover by an outside organisation.

Faced with all of these considerations, one more is worth bearing in mind. As shown by the extensive evidence presented in the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review, considering as it did the system before primary academies:

Primary schools appear to be under intense pressure but are in good heart. They are highly valued by children and parents and in general are doing a good job … [They] may be the one point of stability and positive values in a world where everything else is changing and uncertain. (p 488)

That being so, and taking into account the less attractive aspects of what is being proposed, one question begs itself in relation to this possible change.

It consists of five words: why would you do it?

Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist and author of ‘Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing’ (Methuen, 2007). His CPRT research report on recent systemic reforms in the primary sector will be published in the spring.

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Crisis in childhood: the loss of play

A widely recognised and dramatic cultural change over the last two generations, in the UK and many other modern, urbanised and technologically advanced countries, is the change in children’s life experiences. The generation of ‘baby-boomers’ born just after World War II experienced a childhood in which they played out in the street or in the local fields and parks, in groups of children often of very mixed ages. This relative freedom and experience of free play and unstructured time has now very largely disappeared. As I have noted in The Importance of Play, it is currently estimated that around half of all children world-wide now live in urban settings, and experience very reduced opportunities for free play, and particularly free play outdoors, and in natural environments. And as documented in the Cambridge Primary Review final report (pp 53-62), parental concerns about traffic, ‘stranger danger’, germs, disease and so on, have resulted in children’s home lives being structured and supervised to an extent which would have been regarded as bizarre only a couple of generations ago.

This is not simply a romanticising of the past, but is a cause for serious concern. The anthropologist Peter Gray has demonstrated that the loss of free play opportunities for children over the last 50 years has been accompanied by alarming increases in children’s mental health problems.

There is also good evidence that rich play opportunities in the home support children’s transition into school. A recent study by the developmental psychologist Jane Barker in the United States, for example, showed that the more unstructured time children had while out of school, including both indoor and outdoor unsupervised free play and family excursions to settings such as the seaside and museums, the better their ‘executive functioning’ – a crucial set of cognitive skills that support children’s abilities to concentrate, to maintain their attention on task, and that are consequently highly predictive of academic achievement.

In the UK, a study led by Claire Hughes found that the strongest predictor of language and cognitive development among children at the point of starting school was an item completed by their teachers indicating that the child ‘talks about fun activities at home’.

However, we know that the stresses of urban living, particularly for those living in poverty, often significantly reduce the amount of fun and playfulness in the home context, and it is clear that this loss of play experiences in children’s early years reduces their preparedness for school.

One obvious means by which the negative effects of reduced play opportunities in the domestic context could be ameliorated would be the provision of rich play experiences in pre-school and in early schooling. This was a key recommendation of the Cambridge Primary Review, which noted that children in the UK start formal schooling at an unusually young age and reported that evidence from international comparisons and from research, backed up by the opinions of those teachers and parents who argued (p 168) that ‘children are ill-served by starting school at four and embarking on formal, subject-based learning almost immediately.’

Consequently, though subject to concerns about baseline testing, CPR welcomed the Labour government’s Early Years Foundation Stage and recommended (p 491) that it should be extended to age 6, and that the feasibility of raising the school starting age to that age should be examined. However, anticipating the misreading of this recommendation which duly occurred, CPR stressed that the central issue was not the school starting age as such but ‘the character and quality of what our youngest children encounter, whether in pre-school or school settings.’

Tragically, however, in direct contradiction to all the evidence, the trend in UK education policy has been in completely the opposite direction. In the name of ‘raising standards’ and ‘increased rigour’, today’s young children in nursery and primary schools in the UK, the USA and some other developed and developing countries, are being subjected to a long-discredited curriculum which emphasises learning facts at the expense of developing the skills and dispositions that support children in becoming powerful, confident and enthusiastic learners. Many commentators have rightly expressed concern that, at the start of the 21st century, when, more than ever, we need to be educating our children to be creative problem-solvers, innovators and confident, adaptable learners, this is a totally counter-productive situation. Among the many other concerns about this current direction of travel of education policy for our youngest children is the loss of teaching approaches and learning opportunities grounded in activities which are playful. In the UK, opportunities for young children to learn through playful activities are now almost or completely absent from Year 1 onwards in many primary schools, and under increasing threat in Reception classes and even pre-school settings. The current accountability regime, and the relentless, high-stakes, formal testing of even our very youngest children (baseline assessment at age 4, phonics test at age 6, and the threat of the re-introduction of KS1 SATs at age 7) have seen to that.

While there is much that we still do not understand about how play supports learning and mental health, the evidence of its benefits for a number of areas of development is unequivocal.    As I have reviewed elsewhere  this evidence comes from a wide range of anthropological, neuroscientific, psychological and educational studies. From anthropological studies of children’s play in extant hunter-gatherer societies, and evolutionary psychology studies of play in the young of other mammalian species, it is clear that play is an adaptation which evolved in early human social groups that enabled humans to become powerful learners and problem-solvers. Neuroscientific studies have shown that playful activity leads to synaptic growth, particularly in the frontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for all the uniquely human higher mental functions. Studies in developmental psychology have shown that a playful approach to language learning, as opposed to formal instruction, offers the most powerful support for the early development of phonological and literacy skills. Play has also been shown to support intellectual and emotional ‘self-regulation’, a key predictor of educational achievement and a range of other positive life outcomes.

Within educational research, a number of longitudinal studies have provided evidence of long-term outcomes. In a 2002 US study, for example, Rebecca Marcon demonstrated that, by the end of their sixth year in school, children whose pre-school model had been academically-directed achieved significantly lower marks in comparison to children who had attended child-initiated, play-based pre-school programmes.

The irony is that, certainly in the UK, much of the motivation for moving towards a more instructional model of teaching at ever-earlier phases of schooling appears to derive from a desperation to match the scores achieved in PISA tests by 15 year olds in countries such as China, Singapore & Korea, where the limitations of this approach are now widely recognised, and where moves are being made to move to more creative and often play-based pedagogies. The development of material-based outdoor play facilities in the Anji district of China is a good example of this kind of development.

As a consequence of current UK education policies, our children are amongst the least happy in the world, with worrying increases in mental health problems, and well-informed, inspirational teachers are leaving the profession in droves. The very likely impact of these trends for the quality of children’s education is only too evident.

At the same time, however, there are encouraging signs. The crisis in play opportunities, in the home context and in early schooling, is now widely recognised and many national and international bodies are working at the level of policy to develop responses to it. Even in the UK, the All Party Parliamentary Group on a Fit and Healthy Childhood, originally established through concern over the shocking rise in childhood obesity, has recognised the crucial role that play has in supporting all aspects of children’s development, and has issued a specific report on the importance of play for children’s healthy development physically, mentally, emotionally and in relation to school achievement.

There is also, currently, an exciting resurgence in serious scientific research attempting to understand the essential components of play, what happens in the brain when we play, how playfulness develops, and what experiences support it, how it relates to other important aspects of development, and in what ways playful activities and pedagogies might be developed in schools. Several recent edited volumes attest to the number of young researchers world-wide who are beginning to take an interest in play as an important topic for enquiry.

At Cambridge, the LEGO Foundation have sponsored the Play, Learning and Narrative Skills (PLaNS) project demonstrating the potential of a playful approach to supporting primary school children’s development as writers. We have also now just launched, supported by a further generous donation from the same source, the Play in Education, Development and Learning (PEDAL) research centre, which will be led by an endowed Professorship, and has been set up to conduct rigorous scientific research to address the many important questions relating to the role of play and playfulness in human development.

Play is sometimes dismissed as essentially trivial, as something young children do but which serves no purpose and which they grow out of. The evidence we have, however, from an increasingly rich and rigorous research literature, is that play is a fundamental human characteristic which supports our unique qualities as creative problem solvers, as innovators and as a highly adaptive species. Arguably, our culture, our science and our technological achievements all arise, at least in part, from our playfulness. We put our children’s future at risk, and their ability to deal with the many difficulties that the human species will confront through the 21st century and beyond, if we do not recognise the importance of play and begin to develop policies, both in relation to our domestic arrangements, and our schooling systems, that support and nurture their natural and adaptive playfulness.

David Whitebread is based at Cambridge University Faculty of Education, where he is acting director of the new PEDAL centre.

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Divide and Rule

A mark of a successful primary school career is, according to the Conservatives, the ability to do long division. As our privately-educated Education Secretary Nicky Morgan explained, long division is at the heart of giving ‘every child the chance to master the basics and succeed in life,’ something that is a ‘fundamental duty’ of government.

This is interesting for many reasons. Here’s one. Finland, long-time star of the education world, has clearly decided it wants its children to fail. Shockingly, it is deleting long division from its national curriculum and replacing it with coding.  The change is part of a drive, says Liisa Pohjolainen, head of education in Helsinki, to provide ‘a different kind of education’. Long division is being cast into the long grass because ‘young people now use quite advanced computers. In the past the banks had lots of clerks totting up figures but now that has totally changed’.

British technologist Conrad Wolfram makes the same point more bluntly. Long division, he says, is being used ‘as a badge of honour of what the government calls rigour when in fact it’s a prime example of mindless manual processing’. Marcus de Sautoy, professor for the public understanding of science, agrees: ‘Most people think that maths is about long division to lots of decimal places. Really, though, a mathematician is someone who looks at structure and pattern – and in a sense that’s how everyone reads the world: we’re all mathematicians at heart.’

All these comments echo the the Cambridge Primary Review final report which argued that ‘primary mathematics escapes the critical scrutiny to which other domains are subject’, and urged teachers and curriculum planners to ‘address with some rigour the question of what aspects of mathematics are truly essential and foundational in the primary phase’ (p271).  Long division is neither. It’s not what maths is about. It’s what Tory politicians believe their voters believe maths is about.  Hyping up the importance of long division in primary schools is yet another example of playing politics with education – as is labelling schools ‘coasting’ in order to create more academies. Statements of the bleeding obvious, maybe, but bleeding obvious statements clearly aren’t being made often or forcefully enough. If they were, changes that are bad for children and ultimately for all of us would not keep happening.

But back to the question of long division and the ethical issues it raises. Do I teach it knowing that I should not? Answer: a woeful yes. My profession is not trusted to decide what maths is best for young children. In that case, how do I teach it? My one year of training did not actually cover long division – or coding for that matter. My Finnish colleagues can, of course, teach both simultaneously while standing on their woolly-hatted heads. I calculate, using my mathematical skills, that this is because that they had five times more training than I did.

So, guiltily, I am relieved to discover that the way I was taught in (secondary) school is back in vogue.  However, as we know, being able to do something is a far cry from being able to teach it. The CPR final report’s chapter on pedagogy (pp 279-310) makes excellent reading on this topic – as well as underlining the need for ‘teaching to be removed from political control’. But I am under political control so I dutifully draw my bus stop and pop the numbers in. For example, 7,236 divided by 36. I start the mantra: ‘First you divide 36 into 7. Won’t go. So next try 36 into 72.’ Half the class stare at me blankly. ‘They don’t know what you mean, by “into”,’ the TA whispers helpfully.

Oh, ok. ‘Let’s try how many 36s are there in 72?’ Still blank. Hmm. ‘If I had 72 sweets to share between 36 children, how many sweets would they have each?’ Hands wave excitedly. I get excited too. ‘Write your answers on your whiteboards, please, and hold them up.’ Oops. The mathematically able children are fine, but the rest hold up a random display of answers: 3, 4 and, bizarrely, 7.6.

I catch my TA’s eye. We are thinking the same thing. Back to basics once more for those who are struggling. But I am also aware that Asian maths teaching methods, most definitely approved of by the current administration, expect all children to progress at roughly the same pace. Lessons are repetitive, short and thorough. So do I force my able mathematicians to do what they can already do, over and over again, or do I differentiate by stretching them with more interesting challenges? If only Nicky Morgan would tell me. Interestingly, if you ask Google to search ‘differentiation and Nicky Morgan’ the top hit is a reference to a 2 per cent pay rise for the ‘best’ teachers. Guess that’s not me!

Similar questions cloud times tables teaching – another ‘basic’ that holds the key to a successful life, according to Mrs (don’t ask me 7×8) Morgan. Half my class know them inside out and back to front. Another quarter know them if they are given time to think. And another quarter is as doubtful as Mrs Morgan herself. Sometimes I yearn for the hot-house pressure of Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea where parents drill their children in their times tables and demand homework. Children in my class tell me in all seriousness that they have been too busy to do one piece of homework in a week. Perhaps they are right. Hopefully they have been too busy being children to bother learning that the internal angles of every triangle in the universe add up to 180, or that 7×8 is and always will be 56, or that 7,236 divided by 36 equals 201.

Conservative politicians also complain that too many children don’t understand fractions. I have a feeling that there might be a reason for this. It goes like this. 1⁄10 of population of the UK controls 1⁄2 of the wealth. Globally 1⁄100 controls 1⁄2 of world’s wealth. Try this one, 1⁄3 of children in the UK live in poverty. Yes, I agree with the government. Fractions are important when it comes to succeeding in life.

Stephanie Northen is a teacher and journalist. She contributed to the Cambridge Primary Review final report and is a member of the Board of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust.  Read other blogs by Stephanie in CPRT’s recent downloadable collection Primary Colours .

Contact

Cambridge Primary Review Trust - Email: administrator@cprtrust.org.uk