The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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North and South

This blog takes us to two beautiful corners of the UK, one to the north and one in the far south. We begin with the south, on England’s largest and second most populous island, the Isle of Wight. As the controversy surrounding former Ofsted Chair David Hoare’s recent comments about the Island vividly demonstrates, raising matters like educational disadvantage can be dangerous ground. Whilst Mr Hoare was right to draw attention to the serious problems in coastal England which have continuously slipped under the radar when it comes to funding and interventions, solutions are not to be found in public speeches shaming or blaming those unfortunate enough to be at the sharp end of disadvantage. Labelling children and families as products of inbreeding and their homes as ghettoes was not only scurrilous but neatly diverted attention away from an educational system that seems to have failed them. Whilst Ofsted data suggests the Island’s schools are steadily improving, only 64% of its primary children attend schools categorised as good or outstanding, placing the local authority fourth from the lowest rung on the national ‘league table’.

Yet for many who visit Tennyson’s ‘Enchanted Isle’, Mr Hoare’s description may well have come as a shock. Holidaymakers go there to enjoy the Island’s natural beauty and architectural heritage, testimony to its fashionable heyday when Queen Victoria commissioned Osborne House. Official statistics, however, paint a rather different, sombre view of the Island, with high unemployment and poverty, low aspirations and educational underachievement afflicting many Islanders’ lives. The Island’s fall from prosperity is sadly mirrored in many other coastal areas around the UK. Cheap air travel tempted tourists to resorts overseas decades ago and recession in other maritime industries has left many seaside resorts struggling to survive. Finding ways to address such complex, pervasive problems is not easy and quick-fix solutions have proved to be illusive but clearly education must lie at the heart of community regeneration efforts if they are to succeed in the long term.

Turning our attention northwards, an interesting success story can be found in the Scottish Lowlands, 45 miles south of Glasgow, and it may offer inspiration to other areas battling against the economic tide. CPRT was recently invited to attend an Education Day at Dumfries House in Ayrshire, where we heard about a heritage-led regeneration project instigated by His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales. This innovative project is reinvigorating its local community through a cohesive strategy involving the conservation and reuse of Dumfries House, an 18th century mansion and its estate, to provide employment and educational opportunities, and to rekindle local pride and aspirations. Heritage-led regeneration initiatives like this one can serve as catalysts for economic and social improvement: although the link between heritage-led regeneration and education may not seem immediately apparent, educators know that what happens in schools and classrooms is inseparably interwoven with the culture and conditions of the communities they serve.  Aware of this crucial link, the Dumfries House project is focusing its attention on education and is working closely with schools from across the region and beyond to effect positive change.

Linked to the objectives of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, the Dumfries House Education programme has six centres providing opportunities for children and adults to engage with a wide range of hands-on learning experiences and training for employability. The Pierburg Building and Kaufmann Gardens have been designed for children to experience the delights of planting, harvesting and eating their own vegetables, a learning opportunity that keys into the Curriculum for Excellence sustainability requirements. For many of the primary school children who come here this will be the first time they have dug the soil, picked sugar-snap peas fresh from the plant or tasted soup made with vegetables they have grown themselves. The Morphy Richards Engineering Centre has an imaginatively-designed Harmony playpark and well-equipped teaching area where children explore topics relating to science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Activities are designed to challenge children, ‘…to imagine, design, build and test solutions to real world problems’.

However, it is perhaps the House and its estate which are likely to inspire children’s curiosity and imagination most. Just as the 5th Earl of Dumfries intended, the beautiful 18th century house and its landscaped grounds leave an indelible impression. The House breathes life into history, introducing children to a fascinating collection of artefacts and furnishings (including The Grand Orrery which is spellbinding to visitors of any age!); the landscaped gardens and the arboretum encourage children to explore and discover the extraordinary diversity of the natural world. Without the regeneration project all this would have been lost and future Ayrshire generations would have been denied these precious opportunities to wander and wonder, and to engage with their community’s heritage.

The Dumfries House Education programme reminds us that inspiring curiosity and imagination is one of the aims for primary education proposed in the Cambridge Primary Review final report, Children, Their World, Their Education. In England, the current primary curriculum has placed greater emphasis on narrowly-defined ‘core skills’, reducing opportunities for giving attention to broader aspects of knowledge, and to developing capacities for creativity, imagination and understanding. Schools should be places that allow space and time for wandering and wondering. There must be sufficient time allowed for children to imagine and to ask questions because solutions to problems and new knowledge are created through divergent thought, curious questions and imaginatively-inspired action. More urgently than ever, we need these qualities to enable us to find solutions to the dilemmas we face, whether in our own, local communities or on a global plane.

The heritage-led regeneration work at Dumfries House is just one, small example of an imaginative starting point but it offers a positive model for areas facing similar challenges and one which accepts the unique qualities of a place and its people as valuable assets. Working in tandem with Scotland’s curriculum based on clearly-articulated aims ‘to develop successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors’, Dumfries House and its Education programme are becoming part of a coherent approach seeking to establish a brighter, more sustainable future for the region.

Returning to the south, the problems identified in the Isle of Wight and other disadvantaged areas need a similarly holistic approach and their problems highlight the importance of tackling the CPRT’s priorities, particularly those regarding:

We’ve seen that it’s possible to start addressing these priorities if joined-up thinking, determination and imagination are used to kickstart change, and if we use the positive attributes of a locality and its people as starting points. It’s also worth reminding ourselves that the CPR’s curriculum model calls for around 30 per cent of teaching time to be devoted to locally proposed, non-statutory programmes of study (‘the Community Curriculum’) to respond to local interests. The CPR Final Report argued that a Community Curriculum could be:

…planned locally by community curriculum partnerships (CCPs) convened by each local authority, or where this is desirable and appropriate by local authorities acting together; each panel includes school representatives, community representatives and experts in the contributory disciplines, and its work must involve consultation with children (CPR Final Report, p. 276).

The Report goes on to say:

…by building on children’s knowledge and experience, by engaging children educationally with the local culture and environment in a variety of ways, and by involving children in discussion of the local component through school councils and the world of the CCPs, the community curriculum would both give real meaning to children’s voices and begin the process of community enrichment and regeneration where it matters (CPR Final Report, p. 275).

Wherever their home is within the UK – north, south, east or west – children have a right to succeed and fulfil their potential. We urgently need to increase our efforts to ensure that these rights are achieved for every child.

Details of the year-round educational programme can be found on the Dumfries House Education website. The programme offers an extensive range of educational opportunities for schools and organisations, including residential courses.

Julia Flutter is a Co-Director of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust.

by Robin Alexander

What’s the point?

In case you missed it…

The House of Commons Education Committee has launched an inquiry into the purpose and quality of education in England.  The deadline for receipt of evidence is 25 January 2016 and submissions may be made via the Committee’s  website  or its online forum. We hope that readers of this blog will respond.

Or do we? When the mother of parliaments asks ‘What’s the point of education?’ we might retort, descending to even greater depths of cynicism than usual, ‘What’s the point of telling you? What’s the point of contributing to yet another consultation when on past form nobody takes any notice?’ and indeed, ‘You ask about educational purposes now? After hundreds of so-called reforms? Are you telling us that these reforms have all been, in the strict sense of the word, pointless?’

But then the voice of moderation gently interposes: ‘It’s true that governments have a lamentable tendency to invite consultations and then ignore the results, for good measure lambasting less than obsequious respondents as “enemies of promise”, “the blob”, “Marxists hell-bent on destroying our schools” and worse. But the House of Commons Education Committee is not the government. Its cross-party gathering of backbenchers tries to hold government to account. It launches enquiries in good faith, inviting evidence, listening to witnesses, and by and large represents fairly their views in reports to which the government is obliged to respond. So while government may continue on its reckless rollercoaster of ill-conceived initiatives that capture headlines, massage ministerial vanity and create scholastic mayhem while never asking the really fundamental questions about educational purpose, our backbenchers deserve credit for attempting to redress the balance.’

So I’ve talked myself, and CPRT, into adding this inquiry to the countless others to which we’ve contributed in the hope of making a difference, and we’ll make our submission in the new year. Please add your voices to ours, for the Committee’s three questions are no less important for being at least a century overdue. They are:

  • What should be the purpose of education in England?
  • What measures should be used to evaluate the quality of education against this purpose?
  • How well does the current education system perform against these measures?

There is no better source for tackling the first question – ‘What should be the purpose of education?’ – than chapter 12 in the Cambridge Primary Review final report.  Entitled ‘What is primary education for?’ it traces and compares the rhetorical and actual purposes of public primary education from the nineteenth century to the present day so as to warn us, before we get carried away, that the old utilitarian habits, mindsets and policy vocabularies die hard and in England efforts to promote a more generous vision of education make headway with difficulty if at all.  It’s not so long ago that a minister announced, crushing any optimism generated by the national curriculum review, that the purpose of primary education is to make children ‘secondary-ready’, no less and, especially, no more.

Undaunted, chapter 12 then synthesises answers to its question about educational purposes from the thousands of witnesses who gave written or oral evidence to the review before coming up with the now well-known statement of 12 aims that informs the work of CPRT and an increasing number of Britain’s schools. These aims balance individual development and fulfilment (well-being, engagement, empowerment, autonomy) with responsiveness to social, societal and global need (encouraging respect and reciprocity, promoting interdependence and sustainability, empowering local, national and global citizenship, celebrating culture and community). The first eight aims are manifested and nurtured through four pedagogical or process aims (exploring, knowing, understanding and making sense; fostering skill; exciting the imagination; enacting dialogue). Each aim is carefully defined and discussed, and the full set adds up to a vision that celebrates the power, vitality and infinite possibility of young children’s development and education: a long way indeed from that tired ministerial mantra, regularly trotted out in BBC interviews, about ‘learning to read, write and do their times tables’. Yes, that, but so much more as well, and how about practising what the national curriculum preaches and using the not overly technical term ‘multiplication’?

So CPR’s exhaustive consultation on the purposes of education does much of the Select Committee’s work, and we may well send them copies of the CPR final report to remind them.

When we consider the Select Committee’s second question – ‘What measures should be used to evaluate the quality of education against this purpose?’ – we collide once again with political habits, mindsets and vocabularies. For the evaluation procedures preferred by governments entertain only what is measurable (the Committee itself has unwittingly perpetuated that one) and in any event attend only to the narrowest segment of educational purposes and outcomes, deeming the rest not so much unmeasurable as not worth the effort.

Since even in relation to literacy the current assessment procedures are said by many to be barely fit for purpose, prospects for a pattern of assessment that does full justice to the larger educational purposes proposed by CPR’s witnesses, and to the rich curriculum that these purposes require, look pretty bleak. So if questions about educational purposes are to have any point at all, they must go hand in hand with reforms of curriculum and assessment considerably more radical than any recent government has either permitted or had the imagination to envisage.

The Select Committee’s third question – ‘How well does the current education system perform against these measures?’ – plunges us deeper into the quagmire, for it muddles ‘ought’ and ‘is’. That is to say, it appears to ask us to adjudicate on the achievement of current educational practice by reference to evaluation procedures which either exist but are unfit for purpose, or which have yet to be devised.

That’s as maybe. But will teachers contribute to the Select Committee’s inquiry or will it be left to others? I ask because during the past few weeks I’ve been visiting schools in connection with CPRT’s project on classroom talk and social disadvantage and for every teacher who is excited by the power of talk in learning and teaching and is eagerly striving to improve it, there is another who is so overwhelmed by government requirements and directives – the new national curriculum, new assessment arrangements, safeguarding, the spectre of Ofsted, endless form-filling and box-ticking – that they can barely entertain anything else.

Too poleaxed by policy to think about pedagogy? Too addled by assessment to think about aims? Has teaching come to this?

All in all, this well-intentioned Select Committee inquiry is a bit of a minefield.  But let that not deter it or us.  There may be a point. Happy New Year.

http://www.robinalexander.org.uk

  • Download the Cambridge Primary Review Trust statement of educational aims here .
  • Submit evidence to the House of Commons Education Committee inquiry here .
  • Join the inquiry’s online forum here .
  • One of CPRT’s eight priorities is  ‘Develop and apply a coherent vision for 21st century primary education; enact CPR’s aims in curriculum, pedagogy and the wider life of the school.’ Read about CPRT’s work in pursuit of this priority here.

This blog was originally published by CPRT on December 18, 2015.

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