The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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Joyless, inaccurate, inequitable?

I recently enjoyed the opportunities provided by some longer than average train journeys and the al fresco possibilities of a sunny garden to catch up on my reading. Indeed, I diligently increased my familiarity with a wide range of books; asked questions to improve my understanding of text; summarised the main ideas drawn from more than one paragraph, and worked out the meaning of new words from context.  In short, I demonstrated the skills in reading required of upper KS2 readers.

Which has left me with rather a bee in my bonnet about last week’s KS2 SATs reading paper and its usefulness as an assessment of these skills.

My first buzzing bee in response to the paper: the quality and range of the texts provided to assess our children’s abilities as confident readers. Rather than a range of engaging writing, offering opportunities to demonstrate skills as joyful interrogators of literature and authorial craft, the test offered three rather leaden texts: two fictional and one non-fiction.  We had Maria and Oliver running off from a garden party at the big house to explore an island, which might hold the clue to the secret of a long-standing upper-class family feud. We had Maxine riding her pet giraffe, Jemmy, in South Africa, having an unfortunate encounter with some warthogs (some ferocious, others bewildered) but fortunately learning a lesson about the consequences of not listening to adults. We finished with the non-fiction text about the demise of the Dodo, a text so oddly structured that it appeared to have, rather like another curious creature, been thrown together by committee. The sun-soaked stillness of our inner-city school hall, last Monday morning, was ruffled by the occasional gentle gusting sighs of 76 children trying hard to engage with such dull texts and do so with purposeful determination ‘because I love books and I love reading and I want to do well, but it wasn’t like proper reading.’

Which brings me on to my second buzzing bee: it was most definitely not, to quote (year 6 standard pupil Shueli), anything like ‘proper reading’ nor, I would suggest, a meaningful way to assess whether our children themselves are ‘proper’ readers, using the DfE’s own interim assessment criteria.

The first four questions of the test focussed solely on vocabulary and words in context. For example, Question 1: ‘Find and copy one word meaning relatives from long ago’. If, like many of our children, you did not know the word ‘ancestor’, the answer for this question was almost impossible to work out from context.  A first mark lost and a tiny dent in the self-esteem of pupils who were hoping for a test of their ability to filter and finesse a text for nuance and meaning rather find ‘words I should have in my head, but didn’t’ (Sayma B). More gusty sighing.

Question 2 continued to dig deeper into the realm of internal word-lists: ‘the struggle had been between two rival families… which word most closely matches the meaning of the word rival? Tick one: equal, neighbouring, important, competing.  If you were not familiar with the word ‘rival’ then the choice of either ‘important’ or ‘neighbouring’ are plausible choices in context. I give you some higher order reading reasoning:  the children were at a party in a big house, clearly from ‘posh’ families – hence ‘important’ was a perfectly sensible choice; rival football teams play in the same league, so are in some way ‘neighbours’.  Both demonstrate a key year 6 reading skill: ‘working out the meaning of new words from context’, a skill our children use routinely but, in this case, cost them a mark and one more cross gained on the examiner’s recording sheet.

Bringing me onto bee no. 3: the test appeared to be designed for ease of marking. Only 2/33 questions on the test required extended ‘3 mark’ answers – allowing extended inferential or evaluative thinking – a mere 6 percent of the paper. The rest were questions requiring – much easier to mark – word or fact retrieval answers.  Our children’s reading SATs scores will reflect this unbalanced diet of question types; resulting in assessments neither accurate nor equitable. Not accurate, because teachers, using the national curriculum and 2015-16  interim assessment framework, assess year 6 readers using a much wider set of criteria – including, for example reading aloud with intonation, confidence and fluency, as well as contributions to discussions around book-talk, none of which can be assessed  by a simple test. And not equitable, because research indicates that the children most likely to under-perform in language/vocabulary biased reading tests are those from the most deprived backgrounds.

The reason for this is that children from lower income, or more socially deprived backgrounds, often come to school with a more limited vocabulary because they begin life being exposed to fewer words than children from more affluent backgrounds.  The gap this discrepancy presents is not insurmountable; the CPRT/IEE dialogic teaching project is one clear example of how putting talk at the heart of our children’s learning can help close such gaps.  However, a national testing system that skews the reading results by which children and schools are judged – and categorised – in favour of such a vocabulary-heavy bias, is simply not fair. Or purposeful.

I urge you, experienced reader, to stand for a moment in the shoes of Sheuli and Sayma B. I give you a sentence to consider, one which incorporates a word that I learnt from my own recent reading.  ‘A gust of wind rippled through the exam hall, it made me pandiculate and look hopefully at the clock. Q1: In this sentence which word most closely matches the meaning of the word pandiculate? Tick one: ponder, panic, stretch, laugh out loud.

All might seem plausible choices. The experience of the reading SATs last week may have caused our children indeed to ponder, to panic or to laugh out loud in test conditions.  It might even have made them pandiculate in earnest, for the correct answer is, of course, c) to stretch – and typically to yawn when awakening from a dull or sleepy interlude. But surely you knew that? It must be fair to assume that we all share the same internal word list. And if this is not the case (shame on you) could you not demonstrate your ability to work out the meaning of a word from the context?  No?  It cannot be that my test is flawed; it must be you who are a poor reader.  My internal bee is susurrating indeed about the value of a national test that reinforces gaps, rather than one which assesses how well we are closing them.

Sarah Rutty is Head Teacher of Bankside Primary School in Leeds, part-time Adviser for Leeds City Council Children’s Services, a member of CPRT’s Schools Alliance, and Co-ordinator of CPRT’s Leeds/West Yorkshire network. Read her previous blogs here. 

 If you work in or near Leeds and wish to become involved in its CPRT network, contact administrator@cprtrust.org.uk.

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Learning global

Before you’ve finished your breakfast this morning, you’ll have relied on half the world. (Martin Luther-King)

The Cambridge Primary Review Trust prioritises a rounded primary education that does not shirk the ‘everyday complexity’ of the contemporary world. In February 2016, it published the report Primary Education for Global Learning and Sustainability, which called for further work on ‘the development of a pedagogy of global and environmental social justice.’

The following are some thoughts about what ‘learning global’ looks like. It draws on insights from a project at Tide~ global learning which involves teachers from the UK, Spain, Kenya and The Gambia.

What are we trying to do?

CPRT’s February 2016 report points out that ‘learning about global and sustainability themes raises wider points regarding the purpose of education.’

Our aims will dictate the approaches that we take. Most serious commentators on the purpose of education go beyond test results to consider both individual and societal purposes. CPRT aims for ‘Self, others and the wider world’ are particularly (but not exclusively) relevant here. The following two aims deserve a careful reading:

Promoting interdependence and sustainability. To develop children’s understanding of humanity’s dependence for well-being and survival on equitable relationships between individuals, groups, communities and nations, and on a sustainable relationship with the natural world, and help children to move from understanding to positive action in order that they can make a difference and know that they have the power to do so.

Empowering local, national and global citizenship. To help children to become active citizens by encouraging their full participation in decision-making within the classroom and school, especially where their own learning is concerned, and to advance their understanding of human rights, democratic engagement, diversity, conflict resolution and social justice. To develop a sense that human interdependence and the fragility of the world order require a concept of citizenship which is global is well as local and national.

It is also worth noting that a set of outward-looking aims are also now enshrined within the globally-agreed UN Sustainable Development Goals as SDG 4.7.

What are our theories of knowledge and learning?

The next step on our pedagogical journey is to consider knowledge itself. How do we know the world?

Let’s take the issue of climate change as an example. Knowledge about it is contentious. Scientific predictions and solutions vary. We are dealing with change itself, so new knowledge is coming into being all the time. Our response therefore needs to be flexible, rather than fixed.

With an issue like this (or conflict, the refugee crisis etc) Mr Gradgrind’s ‘facts’ are only going to get us so far. If we think that human suffering, injustice and environmental devastation actually matter, we need something more.

Since climate change is already a pressing reality for millions of human beings, meaningful knowledge about it is not just a moral imperative but a growing necessity. It is not accidental that countries like Bangladesh have made it a compulsory element in their National Curriculum.

It is that wider narrative that makes all the messy information meaningful. However, a nine year old child may need specific stories to access that big picture: the polar bear stranded on an ice floe; the teenager generating renewable energy from a hamster wheel; the Maldives’ president holding an underwater press conference to draw attention to his islands’ plight; a demonstration or a summit that brings people together around a call for change. Some of those stories will want to counter potential pessimism with tales of hopeful action.

If we are to make sense of big, messy issues, then we are most likely to do so as active makers of meaning. We can start to make sense of the stories and information we encounter through investigation, comparison, experimentation, experience, dialogue, drama, debate, critical reflection, synthesis and application. To borrow from Jerome Bruner, we will mostly be using ‘narrative’ ways of understanding the world.

Learning may ultimately happen in each individual brain, but the business of effective global learning is a social activity. As CPRT’s final aim and seventh priority remind us, dialogue is paramount. Our ideas – and the values that inform them – are in play with those of other people. We make meaning together.

Rather than imagining a helpful and omniscient answer-book for big global issues, I like Edward Said’s idea of thinking ‘contrapuntally.’ He takes his metaphor from an orchestra, and how its individual instruments play distinctive lines that together make a greater whole.

In the example of climate change, these instrumental lines can be played by different subjects (Science, Geography, Citizenship etc), by accounts from contrasting parts of the world (big carbon emitters like the USA, vulnerable countries like The Gambia, rapidly-industrialising countries like India), or by the stories of people with different roles and viewpoints (the climate scientist, the fuel company employee, the Alaskan villager needing to move her home). When we put them together, we make a bigger whole, and in so doing we avoid the trap of ‘the single story.’

How do we connect action to learning?

If we are talking about global learning, challenging pessimism and fostering hope, then we are not only talking about understanding but about positive action.

I think that it is best to imagine action and learning in a dialectical relationship, where one constantly leads on to the other. Positive action, as part of a learning process, is not only informed by new knowledge, but leads on to further knowledge.

Seen this way, positive action can serve as a way into deeper learning. For example, a Year 4 class adopts a simple energy-saving measure, switching lights off in empty classrooms. This only makes sense if pupils locate what they are doing within the bigger picture of climate change and energy use. (‘We are doing this because …’)

Pupils can then subject their idea to scrutiny. Is this the best course of action, given the big picture? How much energy does it save? Where does the electricity come from? (e.g. if it is all generated from renewable sources, is it having any effect on climate change?)  Are there safety or security benefits to sometimes leaving lights on? If so, is there a way around this (e.g. installing movement sensors)? And so forth …

In this instance, positive action leads to legitimate learning, and thus to further action. All-knowing adults are not grooming children into predetermined forms of ‘behaviour change’ (where switching off the lights is always an unquestionable good), but empowering them to arrive at their own ideas about what is responsible and effective. Children are acting as agents both of their own learning and of social and environmental change.

Moreover, 2016’s solutions are unlikely to be those of 2056, so children’s growing ability to criticise, analyse and imagine plausible courses of action is not only educationally richer, but more likely to be useful and sustainable. Professor Bill Scott describes this as ‘learning as sustainability.’

Global learning lenses – a useful scaffold?

The following offers some useful pedagogical scaffolding. It comes courtesy of Tide~’s Spanish project partners at FERE-CECA in Madrid, and takes the form of four ‘global learning lenses.’ These can help us look into any global issue, for example the international food trade.

The Magnifying Glass opens up the issues, including becoming aware of hidden questions about values and the way we use language. We might start by looking at food labels, identifying where things have come from, and finding the places on the map.  Using a questioning framework like the Development Compass Rose we can investigate images of growers and producers in some of these places. We could give them thought or speech bubbles, freeze frame the images, and discuss why they are thinking or saying those things.

The 3D Glasses offer diverse perspectives. These could be subject or place perspectives, the viewpoints of different people in the production cycle. Who earns what from growing a banana?  We could debate-in-role as a banana grower, an importer and a supermarket manager. Are the processes just? Older pupils could look at an international news website and consider what people in different countries are saying about the latest trade talks.

The Microscope looks deeper and more critically into the issues. What would happen if we were to fill a lunchbox using different criteria, such as trading fairly, being environmentally friendly, healthy eating, living on a budget, tastiness?  What would go into only one box? Into all? Which would we opt for and why?  Older children might look at the way a big supermarket chain or a leading brand works. Who is involved and what are the processes?

The Telescope envisions solutions and engages us in ‘utopian thinking’. We might write or draw an imaginary classroom, school or community of the near future where all its food is provided fairly and with the environment in mind. From this, we might decide to set up a food growing project at the school, or to support a particular producer, and present our work to peers and parents. Outputs of this kind not only concentrate and focus learning, but lend it real purpose.

Like any pedagogical journey, we need to consider our aims, the kind of approaches that best suit the content (and the children) and to have some useful tools at our disposal. I look forward to hearing how readers’ global learning journeys go.

Ben Ballin works for the educational charity Tide~ global learning. He is also a consultant to the Geographical Association and Big Brum Theatre in Education.

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Do sponsored primaries perform better than maintained schools?

The education white paper proposes the conversion of all schools in England to academies by 2022. If this takes place, the vast majority of schools affected will be primaries. Of the 15,343 mainstream schools that are not currently academies, 13,822 (90 per cent) are primary schools.

This is a massive change in the structure of the primary sector, with very little evidence of any benefits. The Education Select Committee report Academies and free schools stated in January 2015 that ‘there is at present no convincing evidence of the impact of academy status on attainment in primary schools’.

The Department for Education has carried out very little research on the subject, as Secretary of State Nicky Morgan confirmed in a letter to NUT Deputy General Secretary Kevin Courtney in April 2016:

We have not undertaken a ‘similar schools’ analysis for primary schools as, to date, there have been a relatively small number of schools with results for more than one academic year.

This prompts the question of why all primary schools should be forced to become academies when even the government admits that it lacks evidence to support its claim that the policy will produce school improvement. In fact there is growing evidence that it may do the opposite.

The one claim for primary school standards in the white paper is that:

2015 results show that primary sponsored academies open for two years have improved their results, on average, by 10 percentage points since opening, more than double the rate of improvement in local authority maintained schools over the same period.

This is an odd statement. It is not saying that all sponsored primaries perform better than the average. It is not even saying that sponsored primaries that have been open for two years or more perform better. It is only claiming that the specific subset of sponsored primaries that have been open for two years, and no more than two years, performed well.

The statement also compares two very different sets of schools. The results of sponsored academies tend to start from a lower base and so they have more room to grow. Many primary schools already have SAT results at 80 per cent or 90 per cent and so are unlikely to grow at the same pace.

The key question is whether a sponsored academy will improve more or less than a non-academy that starts from the same point in terms of results. Despite the Secretary of State’s claim, there is now a significant amount of data to enable us to explore that question, with 416 sponsored primaries having at least two years of SAT results.

In December 2015, DfE released data showing SAT results, for 2015 and previous years, for every primary school in the country. This analysis is based on dividing sponsored academies into quintiles, or five equal groups, based on their prior year 2014 results. The growth from 2014 to 2015 has then been compared to local authority maintained schools with results in the same ranges.

The chart below is based on the new Level 4b benchmark but the results are the same if the old Level 4 benchmark is used, or if Level 5 is used. The first thing that is clear is that schools with a lower starting point in their 2014 results do indeed grow at a faster pace. Those with fewer than 41 per cent achieving a 4b in reading, writing and maths in 2014 saw their results grow on average over 15 per cent in one year. In contrast those with results between 59 per cent and 67 per cent grew at less than 5 per cent and those with results of 68 per cent or more actually saw their results, on average, fall.

However what is also clear is that, in each of the five comparisons, it was the maintained schools that grew at a faster pace. On average maintained schools increased their Level 4b SAT benchmark by 6.4 per cent more than similar sponsored academies. In a one form entry primary that is equivalent to two extra pupils achieving the benchmark.

The difference is very clear. Regression analysis shows that the data demonstrating that maintained schools perform better than similar sponsored academies is very robust, being statistically significant at the 99 per cent level.

This analysis is freely available for checking at http://bit.ly/KS2Regression.

The white paper has already come in for substantial criticism. As well as Labour and trade union opposition many Conservative MPs and local authorities have objected. Currently 84 per cent of primary schools are rated good or outstanding by Ofsted. It is not clear why the government feels the need to change a structure that seems to be working well.

Indeed the evidence indicates that the mass conversion of primary schools, as well as being extremely disruptive, could lead to a slower improvement in results. In 2014 Ofsted noted the difference between secondary and primary schools after the main period of academy conversion in the secondary sector:

Children in primary schools have a better chance than ever of attending an effective school. Eighty-two per cent of primary schools are now good or outstanding, which means that 190,000 more pupils are attending good or outstanding primary schools than last year. However, the picture is not as positive for secondary schools: only 71 per cent are good or outstanding, a figure that is no better than last year. Some 170,000 pupils are now in inadequate secondary schools compared with 100,000 two years ago. (Ofsted annual report 2014, 8)

Ofsted’s evidence on the disparity in standards between primary and secondary schools also featured in the CPRT blog on 15 April. On that basis, using secondary school results to support the drive to turn all primary schools into academies is hardly convincing.

The available evidence provides no justification for a policy of forced conversion of primary schools to academies. Indeed it suggests that it could lead to the same slowdown in improvement, with more students in schools rated ‘inadequate’, that has occurred in the secondary sector.

Henry Stewart is Co-founder of the Local Schools Network

henry@happy.co.uk

Readers may also wish to read Warwick Mansell’s recent blog on the government’s academies drive. His full-length CPRT report reviewing the evidence for the government’s structural changes will be published within the next few weeks.

by Robin Alexander

After primary, the ‘wasted years’?

How should we respond to recent Ofsted reports comparing secondary schools unfavourably with primary?

Last December HMCI Michael Wilshaw told us that secondary schools are less likely than primary to be rated good or outstanding, and that England is ‘a divided nation after age 11’ because the primary/secondary disparity is most acute in the midlands and the north.

This disturbing judgement followed hard on the heels of another. Subtitled ‘The wasted years?’ an earlier Ofsted report claimed that many secondary schools were concentrating on maximising student achievement in Key Stage 4 at the expense of the quality of teaching and learning in Key Stage 3.  Moreover, said Ofsted:

Too many secondary schools did not work effectively with partner primary schools to understand pupils’ prior learning and ensure that they built on this in KS3. Some secondary leaders simply accepted that pupils would repeat what they had already done in primary school … particularly in Year 7. This was a particular issue in mathematics and, to a lesser extent, in English.

Divided after age 11? The wasted years? (Echoes of the divisive consequences of the 1944 Education Act are uncanny though surely unintended). In light of such devastating assessments, and mindful of the minister who notoriously decreed that the chief aim of primary education is to make children ‘secondary ready’, primary teachers might well retort, ‘We are making them secondary ready. But are secondary schools ready to receive them?’

Of course, none of this is new. For decades, researchers have documented patchy arrangements for primary/secondary transfer and the phenomenon of the Year 7/8 attainment ‘dip’. Martin Hughes  confirmed empirically the professional folklore about children’s primary school learning being ignored or dismissed by some Y7 teachers, while Maurice Galton found a significant drop in pupils’ post-transfer interest in maths and science and traced it to Y7 teaching in which there was too much writing and too little discussion and practical activity.

In mitigation it must be stressed that secondary school leaders have been as eager as their primary colleagues to address concerns about inadequate transfer arrangements by improving communication and information exchange and making children’s transition as comfortable as possible. Yet while the Ofsted ‘wasted years’ report acknowledges the success of schools’ efforts to secure such pastoral continuity from primary to secondary, it finds academic continuity a more intractable problem, and it confirms Maurice Galton’s finding that the failings are pedagogical no less than structural. Startlingly so, for there can be few requirements for effective teaching more obvious than discovering and building on what the child has already learned. How can those castigated by Ofsted not understand this most elementary of principles?

But is it that simple? In exploring diagnoses and cures we should remember, obvious though it may be, that the worlds of primary and secondary are very different, not just in respect of school size and organisation but also culturally and developmentally. Large primary schools are growing larger but they remain mostly smaller than secondary. While the primary curriculum, unless it capitulates completely to the pressures of testing and inspection, remains reasonably broad and uniform from reception to the end of Year 6, the secondary curriculum is an altogether more complex enterprise, starting broadly before it narrows and fragments into multiple options as pupils progress from KS3 to KS4. And though some primary schools are deploying teachers’ specialist expertise more flexibly than they did, say, twenty years ago, in most primary schools generalist teaching remains the default.

These defining features of primary schools shape a distinctive professional culture. Working with young children all day, every day and across what is supposed to be a ‘broad and balanced’ curriculum encourages a holistic outlook. Primary teachers still talk about the ‘whole child’ and ‘whole curriculum’ as they have done since the 1930s, and long before the invention of PSHE they saw it as their responsibility to give as much attention to children’s personal and social development as to their academic progress.

So to the challenges of pastoral continuity and academic progression at the primary/secondary boundary we might add the experience of moving between distinct educational and professional cultures. There’s no mention of this in Ofsted’s ‘wasted years’ report.

Human development is a factor too. The primary years – what Alan Blyth called ‘the midlands of childhood’ – are a period of rapid physical, cognitive, social and linguistic development but this follows a fairly steady trajectory. About teenage growth spurts, hormonal surges, sleep patterns, eating habits, identity crises, mood swings, emotional turbulence, peer power, ambivalence towards adult authority and all the rest we need do no more than remind ourselves how very different pre-adolescent and adolescent children can be, including, as we now know from neuroscience, in the structure of their brains. Ofsted says nothing about this either. Yet I recall the late Ted Wragg  – an instinctive and gifted teacher of children of any age – turning to me during a somewhat rarified QCA discussion about the Year 7/8 dip to mutter, ‘Have they forgotten what adolescence is like?’

The argument that that an understanding of children’s development is essential to an   understanding of the Y7/8 dip is clinched by the NFER finding that it occurs in many other countries besides England. That being so, the unique pattern of English secondary schooling can hardly be expected to shoulder all the blame. Equally, the NFER finding should prompt us to reconsider the relationship between human development, the structure of schooling and the timing of the school day – a relationship which, as the few surviving middle schools will remind us, was central to the rationale for their formation.

These cultural, developmental and comparative considerations in no way excuse such inadequacies of Y6/7 communication, attainment tracking, staffing and teaching as are recorded and illustrated in Ofsted’s ‘wasted years’ report. However, they do confirm that the task of ensuring steady academic progress from the upper years of Key Stage 2 into and through Key Stage 3 is more complex than Ofsted may have grasped; that couching the issue in terms of blame rather than explanation may be what ministers demand but it is hardly helpful; and that pinning the entirety of that blame on secondary schools is neither fair nor productive.

We might enter further notes of reservation. ‘Across England’ says HMCI Wilshaw, ’85 per cent of primary schools are good or outstanding compared with 74 per cent of secondary schools.’ This finding came from inspection data collected before the introduction of Ofsted’s Common Inspection Framework  in September 2015. The new framework, says Ofsted, ‘ensures more comparability through inspection when children and learners move from one setting to another. It supports greater consistency across the inspection of different remits.’ This is in effect an admission that under the previous framework – the one that yielded the ‘nation divided’ and ‘wasted years’ findings – using Ofsted data to compare different setting types was an uncertain science. If that structure applied to settings catering for similar age ranges (the concern of the new framework) it must have applied no less, and probably more, to inspection-based comparisons between primary and secondary.

Even more fundamentally, Ofsted reports only what it inspects, and the frameworks, whether old or new, ignore or trivialise aspects of both primary and secondary education that many schools – and certainly CPRT – regard as desirable or even essential. To take one example, the new Ofsted framework uses the phrase ‘across the curriculum’ on several occasions, but like its predecessor ‘broad and balanced’ this is little more than tokenistic, for English and mathematics are the only aspects of the curriculum that are named or about which specific inspection judgements are required. For those who believe that the quality and standards of education reside in more than literacy and numeracy ‘outcomes’, vital though these are, Ofsted’s 11 percentage point claim of primary schools’ superiority over secondary may be deemed questionable. What, I always want to know, is going on in addition to what Ofsted inspects, and does it matter? In all but the most slavishly Ofsted-driven schools, a great deal, and yes it does.

Notwithstanding all this, converging evidence from inspection and research certainly confirms that in the matter of primary-secondary transfer and progression we have a historic problem that has not yet been fully addressed. As well as learning from those schools – secondary as well as primary – that manage these matters effectively, and there are many of them, what can be done?

Well, academies may be contentious but the rapid growth of federations, multi-academy trusts and all-through schools opens up opportunities for the cross-phase exchange, in pursuit of a more seamless experience of schooling for every child, not just of information and ideas but also personnel. In this matter, it is significant that ASCL, formally the secondary school leaders’ union, is now also open to primary leaders and has appointed a primary specialist. CPRT is working with the first holder of this post, Julie McCulloch, to explore and develop the primary-secondary relationship.

Finally, whether we accept Ofsted’s alarming judgement about a ‘wasted’ Key Stage 3, we must I think acknowledge that the education of children aged 11 to 14 has not received the national attention it deserves. Perhaps it too has tended to be viewed as no more than a prelude or anteroom to what follows, in this case the trials and triumphs of Key Stage 4. I find it significant that during the past decade there have been two major independent enquiries into post-early years education – the Cambridge Primary Review (4-11) and the Nuffield 14-19 Review – but that no such attention has been devoted to education between the ages of 11 and 14. True, Labour had a KS3 strategy, but this  was a pedagogical prescription rather than an educational enquiry, its focus was as narrow as that of the primary strategies it emulated and it ignored or pre-empted the questions about structures, purposes, curriculum, assessment and indeed pedagogy that the Cambridge and Nuffield reviews rightly sought to address.

So: what, fundamentally, should Key Stage 3 be about, and what do children aged 11-14 most need from that phase of their education? Following CPR and Nuffield we need an independent 11-14 review; or even – so as to include continuity, progression and pupil maturation from Key Stages 2 to 3 as discussed here – a review of education 10-14, from Blyth’s ‘midlands of childhood’ into adolescence.

In any event, there is no room whatever for complacency in the primary world about Ofsted’s criticisms of KS3 provision. We should care as much about what happens to our children after primary education as during it.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

The full text of Robin Alexander’s keynote at the March 2016 Annual Conference of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) may be viewed/downloaded here.

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We need to talk about structures

It has been a seductive slogan, for several reasons. But ‘standards, not structures,’ the oft-invoked rallying cry of those who want to cast themselves as fair-minded pragmatists in the now-very-inflamed academies debate, has been an error, I think. For, as has been becoming clearer in recent days, last week’s white paper spelling out the policy of forcing schools towards academy status has at last pushed serious questions about the detail of the academies policy to the fore, and we do need to talk about structures.

The phrase ‘standards, not structures’ – first made popular during Tony Blair’s first term in office – is an attempt to take what is seen as ideology out of the debate as to how state-funded schools should be run. Instead of viewing one type of organisational arrangement – local authority versus academy – as superior and then defending it to the end, the argument goes that we should be agnostic on that. Instead, we should worry only about the quality of education provided to pupils; acknowledge the obvious truth that good practice, or not, exists on either side of this ideological debate; and then move on. In terms of what kind of organisational structure we have in English education, basically we should join the majority of the public and not care: what happens in the classroom is all that matters.

As I say, this argument, set out in those terms, is very powerful. My perception is that ‘standards, not structures’ is used principally, and to a certain extent very effectively, as a weapon against ministers who have been seen to favour academies as an end in themselves. It is very difficult to argue that this is not their position, when a white paper has been published which says all schools are to be turned into academies, but when there is no clear research evidence in favour of the policy. (My last blog discussed this, and it will be set out in detail in my forthcoming research review for the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, especially in relation to primary schools.)

‘Standards, not structures’, was deployed again in Sunday’s Observer newspaper by David Blunkett, who introduced the original academies policy back in 2000. Here, in a well-argued analysis of many of the central problems of this extraordinary white paper, Blunkett said it was part of an ‘ideological agenda that put the structure of our school system before classroom standards’.

He’s right, of course. A government which really cared above all about the quality of what went on in schools, took seriously all the evidence it had and genuinely put children rather than politics first, as the white paper claims to do, would not be proceeding in this manner. Before pushing thousands of schools through a costly and energy-diverting change such as this, it would want to know for sure that improvement would follow. If you want a further insight into the fragility of the evidence base, by the way, just consider Nicky Morgan’s first response when asked about it on last Thursday’s BBC Question Time. The main piece of evidence she could muster on academy quality was a set of statistics embracing changing Ofsted grades for all schools, academies or not.

So the implementation of this policy is, of course, ideological. But that does not mean that arguments about it should stop at a consideration of supposedly ideology-neutral statistics. In fact, we do need to consider arguments away from pure ‘standards’ questions, too.

A personal view is that the obsession over, say, whether school test and exam results are better on the academy or non-academy side, or whether either is improving Ofsted results faster, though important, has obscured real debate about the detail of the really quite fundamental structural changes schools go through in moving to academy status.

And I find myself increasingly thinking about structures – is this the best way of setting up our schools system, irrespective of often small movements in data? – when fielding calls from whistleblowers as I do when writing news stories about the academies system. I would highlight a few structural issues now.

Structure of control

The academies policy, of course, originated under Labour as the suggested answer to usually long-standing problems in inner-city secondary schools. Where institutions had struggled for many years, if not decades, the thinking was that something bold and new had to be tried. The answer was to give great influence to an outside sponsor who, initially usually in response to a promise to donate £2 million, would be given effective control over the school, with only the Secretary of State, overseeing matters from Whitehall, as a democratic backstop.

This was controversial, as it took schools away from local democratic influence and gave great power to sometimes controversial individuals who might have been seen by the ministers backing the scheme to be dynamic. However, if there were worries about an over-concentration of power, they might have been viewed by ministers as a price worth paying in the hope of finally bringing about improvement.

Fast forward to 2016, though, and this, effectively, is the model being proposed for every state-funded school in England by 2022. Academy trusts can be set up with a very small number of ‘members’ – sometimes, only three – at the apex of their governance structures. They can appoint and dismiss the other governors.

It is true that academy trusts can be set up in a much more democratic manner. Yet some of the larger current multi-academy trusts clearly are run as described above, with a small number of individuals having great power. This is made possible because the essential overarching philosophy of the way they are set up has not changed from the original scheme under Labour.

This is not just an abstract debate, either, in my experience. In recent years, as a journalist contacted by people raising concerns, I’ve heard about: a prominent couple running an academy chain, who have particular views as to what should be in the curriculum, imposing that curriculum on schools despite opposition from professionally-trained teachers; an American firm which is influential in running a school ensuring that ‘its’ curriculum is taught in that school; and high remuneration packages finding their way to two individuals who are both among only three or four controlling ‘members’ of the academy chain paying their salaries. This looks to me to suggest an over-concentration of power with regard to taxpayer-funded bodies, serving many pupils.

A key structural question might, then, be: is the original architecture of academy governance, set up for the very particular circumstances of a small number of secondary schools which had struggled, now right for all English  primary and secondary schools?

Autonomy for individual schools

This is probably a key one for school governing bodies considering how to react. The white paper effectively spells the end of the settlement between local authorities and individual institutions, ironically  set up by the Conservatives in 1988, whereby autonomy was given to headteachers and governing bodies, but with the local authority influencing in the background.

Now, the favoured multi-academy trusts can run a whole chain of schools in a top-down manner if they choose. Schools contemplating joining one would be well advised to try to pin down MATs on precisely what freedoms they might be allowed if they join them.

Complaints when things go wrong

It’s a fast-solidifying view of mine that worrying about ‘standards, not structures’, is fine so long as all is well in an institution. It is when things start to go wrong that there are problems. For, over the past four years I’ve been contacted by many people concerned about various goings-on within academies. These include staff bullying, inappropriate spending, the ‘gaming’ of Ofsted inspections, pupils going missing from the system and institutionalised exam cheating.

A refrain of many of these whistleblowers has been concern as to who academies are accountable to. In theory, central government, through the Education Funding Agency and Department for Education, investigates. But we have often found that these remote Whitehall agencies, who, after all, now have thousands of institutions to oversee, are not interested. Nor, by the way, generally is the new intermediate tier of academy oversight, the Regional Schools Commissioner.  To be sure, local authorities, a natural first port of call for a whistleblower in the past, are far from perfect. Yet the ability of an individual to complain, for example, to their local councillor about a particular issue with a local authority school, will be lost in a move to an all-academy system. The general concept of an appeal to a truly local body outside of the instititution itself has fallen by the wayside. The white paper promises that local authorities will focus on protecting, for example, the needs of ‘vulnerable’ children. But without real power, how are they to do this?

These are just a few structural issues. I could mention more, such as questions about the merits of teacher pay and conditions deregulation – is it really best for the taxpayer to have a kind of ‘race to the top’ going on in terms of academy chief executive pay, with salaries in the range of £200-£400,000 now not unheard-of? – the now-well-discussed removal of parents from academy governance structures or the fact that much education law can now be formulated privately, away from the Parliamentary gaze, in the form of academy funding agreements with the Secretary of State.

The bigger issue is that all of these structural changes, which may centre on the de-democratisation and deregulation of state schooling, are important. They should not be seen as subservient to questions about often small changes in test and exam results, for example, or Ofsted outcomes. The country needs to ask itself whether these structural reforms are really in the best interest of pupils. In making this whole issue much more contentious, by proclaiming that all schools are to be forced into the status, ministers  may actually have done this debate a favour. At least now these questions might get more attention.

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 next term. This blog, a sequel to the one posted on 4 March, was prompted by the publication on 17 March of the White Paper ‘Educational Excellence Everywhere’.

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Baseline assessment – we’re not buying

Last autumn hundreds of thousands of four-year-old children, as diverse as any group pulled from the population, were each assigned a single number score which purported to predict their future progress in learning. They had been baselined.

They arrived in reception classes from school nurseries, from private or voluntary nurseries, from childminders, and from homes where they had no previous experience of early years provision.  They came from families awash with books, talk and outings, from families struggling with the economic and emotional pressures of life, and from troubled backgrounds and foster care.  Some were hale and hearty while others had a range of health conditions or special needs.  Some were fluent in English and some spoke other languages with little or no English.  And some were nearly a year older than the youngest, 25 percent of their life at that age. Yet with no quarter given for such differences, they were labelled with a simple number score within six weeks of arriving at school.

In the face of widespread and vehement opposition (including from CPRT’s directors) DfE had decided on baseline assessment not to support children’s learning, but as a primary school accountability measure for judging schools when these children reach Year 6. Unsurprisingly, recent press reports indicate that lack of comparability between the three approved schemes may mean the baseline policy will be scrapped – possibly in favour of a simple ‘readiness check’.  Frying pans and fires come to mind.

The fact is, there is no simple measure that can accurately predict the trajectory of a group of such young children. This is not to deny a central role for assessment.  Teachers assess children on arrival in a formative process of understanding who they are, what they know and understand, how they feel and what makes them tick, in the service of teaching them more effectively.

As CPRT has frequently pointed out in its evidence to government assessment reviews and consultations, the confusion of assessment with accountability results in a simplistic number score which ignores the range and complexity of individual learning and development, over-emphasises the core areas of literacy and maths required by the DfE, and places a significant additional burden on teachers in those important early weeks of forming relationships and establishing the life of a class.

Recent research by the Institute of Education into the implementation of baseline assessment confirms that teachers found the process added to their workloads, yet only 7.7 percent thought it was an ‘accurate and fair way to assess children’ and 6.7 percent agreed it was ‘a good way to assess how primary schools perform’.

What is the harm?  Aside from the waste of millions of pounds of public money going to the private baseline providers, there is concern about the impact of the resulting expectations on children who receive a low score within their first weeks in school, and who may start out at age four wearing an ‘invisible dunce’s cap’. CPRT drew attention to this risk in its response to the accountability consultation, saying ‘Notions of fixed ability would be exacerbated by a baseline assessment in reception that claimed to reliably predict future attainment.’ For children whose life circumstances place them at risk of low achievement in school, being placed in groups for the ‘slower’ children and subjected to an intense diet of literacy and numeracy designed to help them ‘catch up’ will deny them the rich experiences that should be at the heart of their early years in school to provide them with the foundation they need.

Better Without Baseline echoes CPR’s statement on assessment in its 2010 list of policy priorities for the Coalition government. CPR urged ministers to:

Stop treating testing and assessment as synonymous … The issue is not whether children should be assessed or schools should be accountable – they should – but how and in relation to what.

Unfortunately policy makers are seduced by the illusion of scientific measurement of progress, using children’s scores to judge the quality of schools.  Yet there are more valid ways to approach accountability.  Arguing for a more comprehensive framework, Wynne Harlen said in her excellent research report for CPRT:

What is clearly needed is a better match between the standards we aim for and the ones we actually measure (measuring what we value, not valuing what we measure). And it is important to recognise that value judgements are unavoidable in setting standards based on ‘what ought to be’ rather than ‘what is’.

Baseline assessment is not a statutory requirement, and this year some 2000 schools decided not to opt in; that remains a principled option for the future.  We can hope that government will think again, and remove the pressure on schools to buy one of the current schemes.   What is needed is not a quick substitute of another inappropriate scheme such as a ‘readiness check’, but a full and detailed review of assessment and accountability from the early years onward, where education professionals come together to discuss and define what matters.  The aim should be to design a system of measurement that is respected, useful and truly supports accountability not only for public investment but most importantly to the learners we serve.

Nancy Stewart is Deputy Chair of TACTYC, the Association for Professional Development in Early Years.

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Valuing values?

Do we have time to value values? Should values be taught? If so how? Which values are best? Who says? Should children be left to develop their own values? Why or why not?

Such questions were asked after DfE published ‘Promoting Fundamental British Values in Social, Moral, Spiritual and Cultural Education’ in November 2014.  This document requires teachers to promote British values and help children distinguish ‘right’ from ‘wrong’ while acknowledging that ‘different people may hold different views about what is “right” and “wrong”.’

Government has defined British values as ‘democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and individual respect, and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs’. Thus while acknowledging that values may differ, schools are being asked to promote British values.

There seems to be some confusion about whether it is possible to isolate distinctively British values. When asked if there are values associated with being British several student teachers, teachers and headteachers answered in the affirmative. Findings from a small scale research project undertaken by academics in four British universities can be viewed in a presentation to local NQTs about fundamental British values (FBV) in the Cumbria and Lancashire CPRT regional network page. Several participants cited politeness, support for the Royal family, reminiscing about ‘our great country’ as a dominant empire, stiff upper lip.  I would query whether such tokenistic and colonialist values should be promoted with our young people.

At the same time, a sizeable number of student teachers, teachers and headteachers in our sample said it was impossible to agree on a set of values because Britain is so diverse. To them, British values are a social construct varying from person to person. One student teacher said that values change to incorporate the changing landscape, mix of people and political agenda at a particular time.

The government’s initiatives on ‘British’ values is often claimed to be a way of avoiding terrorist attacks and preventing radicalisation. However such initiatives may prove counter-productive because some young people, particularly Muslims, feel marginalised by an emphasis on so-called British values over which they have little ownership. So primary teachers may be fearful of navigating a way through the complexities and contradictions of a directive which asks them to promote values that could be described as tokenistic, trivial and, for some groups, downright exclusive.

Thus many primary headteachers and ITE institutions have chosen – and one can see why – to just tick the box and adhere to the guidance paying lip service, to the promotion of British values (whatever they might be) and getting on with the main business of the day which is scoring high on the league tables to maintain their reputation, intake, OFSTED scores and jobs. In fact there is often a reluctance to engage with any politicisation of the curriculum, it is just too risky. So all this may leave us feeling pretty bleak about the future – but I would argue, because I am an optimist, that valuing values is necessary and fundamental to our practice.

For example in the latest CPRT research report Primary Education for Global Understanding and Sustainability, Bourne, Hunt, Blum and Lawson claim that learning about global social and environmental justice in school is more effective and meaningful if located within the wider critical  understanding of values.  Similarly, the aims presented in the Cambridge Primary Review final report are underpinned by values which represent moral standpoints on relations between individuals, groups and societies.

Valuing values may be necessary but do we have time to take a step back and reflect on those values? Many teachers in today’s schools say they are too busy preparing lessons, facilitating and assessing children’s learning to consider the values which underpin their teaching. In recent reading group sessions with CPRT Schools Alliance members in my region where we discuss CPRT research reports or briefings, teachers often bemoan the lack of time to reflect. Student teachers, although also busy, do have more opportunity in their courses to reflect on pedagogy and values underpinning their teaching and the children’s learning, because in assignments they are specifically asked to do so.  Similarly teachers who engage in CPD or Master’s work have chosen to carve out time to critically analyse their practice and engage in research to improve their children’s learning.

Master’s courses provide space to step back and think, about values and pedagogy. The Master’s course at the University of Cumbria provides a range of opportunities from ‘dip your toe in the water’ modules introducing models of reflection, to more substantial practitioner research modules.  We need to reflect – we need to take back ownership of our profession, feel empowered and confident that we can engage in open discussions about values within our initial teacher education courses, within our staffrooms and with our children. We should all, not just a minority, be brave and not shy away from being political, adapting our practice in the light of well-respected research.

Too often teachers only change their practice to copy, with little criticality, the latest fad, or meet the needs of a governmental directive simply because they are told to do so. We should challenge each other, and be strong enough to be challenged in turn about our values and practice, and be brave enough to take a risk for what we believe in. Do our values include resilience, perseverance and bounce-back ability when we encounter failure? (See Barry Hymer’s pocket book about Growth Mindset). Failure can be valued rather than avoided.

Therefore, rather than pretending they don’t matter because we don’t have time for them, we could reflect on our values, consider what we really value. We can draw on our deeply held convictions to provide us with the courage and energy to supersede an obsession with hitting the imposed requirements of getting all our student teachers to be OFSTED grade 1, or being an OFSTED outstanding teacher  and get on with the main task of the day, namely, to draw on the aims of education as set out by the Cambridge Primary Review,  attending to the wellbeing, engagement, empowerment and autonomy of our children. And actually – I am ever the optimist and hold a glass half full perspective – such values could help us produce grade 1 students and be outstanding teachers, but more importantly we will serve the needs of our children, their education and  our world – a ‘win win’ situation.

Sally Elton-Chalcraft, of the University of Cumbria, is CPRT’s regional co-ordinator for Cumbria and North Lancashire. Contact her for further information or if you would like to help to develop activities in that region. 

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Boycott the Sats

Schools are scrambling to prepare children for the new Sats tests to be taken in May. Teachers who have never before ‘taught to the test’ are gloomily conceding that the Government has left them no other option. Children are being drilled in the mechanics of adverbial clauses and long division, forced to spell vital words such as ‘pronunciation’ and ‘hindrance’, and helped to write stories showing their mastery of the passive voice and modal verbs. Headteachers shake their heads sorrowfully. Advisers grimace and say ‘nothing to do with us’. None of this should be happening – and finally there is just a possibility that the madness will stop.

First, came the suggestion of a boycott of baseline testing. Now, at last, there is a call to cancel the KS2 Sats. I watch the signatures grow daily (hourly) hoping they represent the moment when the classroom worms such as myself finally turned and said no.

The only word on the spelling list that Year 6s should learn is ‘sacrifice’ as this will enable them to write to the Education Secretary pointing out that their learning is being sacrificed to a mean-spirited and regressive assessment system.

The new tests and assessments have been designed, not to discover and celebrate what children can do, but to catch them out. Here are just a few examples. It is essential, says the Government, that KS1 children are taught maths using concrete and visual aids such as Numicon and number squares.  So which callous wretch decreed that the same children must be deprived of these props when taking their Sats? In my school, children wept because they could see the number squares but were not allowed to use them.

I’d also like to meet the sour-faced creators of the sample grammar test who asked Year 6 children to add suffixes to nouns to create adjectives (clearly a life skill) and then decided that getting five out of six right merited no marks. Likewise I’d love to shake hands with the generous soul who recently decreed nul points for any child misplacing a comma when separating numbers in the thousands in their KS2 maths Sats. Similarly, there’s no mercy for the left-handed child who struggles to join up his handwriting or for the fast-thinking kid who writes brilliantly but forgets her full stops.

Assessment should, as CPRT recommends, ‘enhance learning as well as test it’ and ‘support rather than distort the curriculum.’

Assessment in the CPRT spirit ensures that the children in my class are set a range of appropriate challenges every day. As a consequence, they are all generally making cheerful progress, though some more rapidly than others and some have greater strengths in one area of learning than another. Yes, I’m sorry to say, they are inconsistent: they have been known to go backwards and they even make mistakes. In other words, they are human beings.

The new tests have not been designed with humans in mind, let alone small humans. Rather they have been created by cyborgs for baby cyborgs. If you don’t believe me, watch the bizarre 2016 KS2 assessment webinar from the Standards and Testing Agency.

The STA cyborgs explain why it was necessary to ditch the ‘best fit’ model of levels where teachers, heaven forbid, used their professional judgement to decide if a child had ticked enough boxes to be awarded a level 3c. According to the cyborgs, parents were confused by their 3c kid being able to do, or not do, things that their mate’s 3c kid could or couldn’t do. Clearly in cyborg land, parents had nothing better to do than check that all children assessed at the same level had exactly the same set of skills and knowledge. This is just so ridiculous as to be laughable were it not for what is currently happening in the nation’s classrooms.

In terms of teacher assessment, best fit has been replaced by perfect fit. Now we have to tick all the boxes in order to judge children to be working at the ‘expected standard’. If just one box cannot be ticked, children are classified as ‘working towards’. However, it doesn’t end there. If a child doesn’t tick all those boxes, they will cascade back down the (not) levels potentially all the way to Year 1. Take writing as an example. One of the best young writers I have taught would not qualify even as ‘working towards’ because she didn’t join up her handwriting. Likewise imaginative but dyslexic 10-year-olds will slip down and down because they can’t spell words supposedly appropriate for eight-year-olds such as ‘occasionally’, ‘reign’ or ‘possession’. And, according to the STA cyborgian webinar, there is ‘no flexibility’ on this.

Yet not only is it inflexible, mean spirited and regressive, it is also just not fair. The current Year 6 has only had two years at most to prepare for this newly punitive world of harder work and pitiless mark schemes. And make that only three months in terms of writing where standards have been wrenched up from a level 4b to a 5c. Parents do not know what harsh judgements await their children this summer. If they did, chances are they would support a boycott. As Warwick Mansell, writing in a CPRT blog back in 2014, wisely commented:

The single ‘working at national standard’ – or not – verdict, where it is to be offered, also seems to invite a simple ‘pass/fail’ judgement. This, it is hard to avoid thinking, will set up the view among many children that they are failures at an early age.

And not only the children. Teachers are under tremendous pressure to ensure their pupils reach the new standards in reading, maths, grammar and writing – irrespective of individual strengths or weaknesses. Yet we are supposed to achieve this without allowing these standards ‘to guide individual programmes of study, classroom practice or methodology’ as the STA disingenuously insists. Sometimes I wonder if I’m stupid or perhaps was asleep when a new era of Orwellian doublethink dawned. How on earth do children learn to ‘use passive and modal verbs mostly appropriately’ if I don’t explicitly teach them? How do they learn to add, subtract or multiply fractions without that being a programme of study? Perhaps in some Utopian classroom there is a lesson plan – presumably in something tasteful like quilting – that miraculously transfers this knowledge to children in such a form that they can pass their Sats and meet the ‘expected standard’.

But until someone lends me that plan, I’d rather we all just said no.

Stephanie Northen is a primary 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.

by Robin Alexander

An ideological step too far

Secretary of State Nicky Morgan is reportedly looking to recruit the next head of Ofsted from the United States.

Even if she were to locate, with due objectivity and rigour (words much used by ministers but seldom exemplified in their actions), a variety of American educators with the requisite expertise and professional standing, her quest would be perplexing. For it would signal that no home-grown British talent can match that imported from an education system which reflects a national culture very different from ours, is mired in controversy, and, though it has individual teachers, schools and school districts of matchless quality, performs as a system below the UK on international measures of pupil achievement.

But that is not all. A check on the touted names makes it clear that the search is less about talent than ideology.  The reputation of every US candidate in which the Secretary of State is said to be interested rests on their messianic zeal for the universalisation of charter schools (the US model for England’s academies), against public schools (the equivalent of our LA-maintained schools), and against the teaching unions.  This, then, is the mission that the government wants the new Chief Inspector to serve.

Too bad that the majority of England’s primary schools are not, or not yet, academies. Too bad that Ofsted, according to its website, is supposed to be ‘independent and impartial’; and that Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills is required to report to Parliament, not to the political party in power; and that he/she must do so without fear or favour, judging the performance of all schools, whether maintained or academies, not by their legal status or political allegiance but by the standards they achieve and the way they are run.  Too bad that on the question of the relative efficacy of academies and maintained schools the jury is still out, though Ofsted reports that while some truly outstanding schools are academies, many are not. And too bad that the teaching unions are legally-constituted organisations that every teacher has a right to join and that, by the way, they have an excellent track record in assembling reliable evidence on what works and what does not.

When we consider the paragons across the pond who are reportedly being considered or wooed in Morgan’s search for Michael Wilshaw’s successor, mere ideology descends into dangerous folly. One of them runs a charter school chain in which the brutal treatment of young children in the name of standards has been captured on a video that has gone viral. Another leads a business, recently sold by the Murdoch empire (yes, he’s there too), that having failed to generate profits in digital education is now trying to make money from core curriculum and testing. A third is the union-bashing founder of a charter school chain that has received millions of dollars from right-wing foundations and individuals but whose dubious classroom practices have been exposed not just as morally unacceptable but, in terms of standards, educationally ineffective. A fourth, yet again a charter chain leader, has published a proselytising set text for the chain’s teachers tagged ‘the Bible of pedagogy for no-excuses charter schools’ that, according to critics, makes teaching uniform, shallow, simplistic and test-obsessed. Finally, the most prominent member of the group has been feted by American and British politicians alike for ostensibly turning round one of America’s biggest urban school systems by closing schools in the teeth of parental protest, imposing a narrow curriculum and high stakes tests, and making teacher tenure dependent on student scores; yet after eight years, fewer than a quarter of the system’s students have reached the ‘expected standard’ in literacy and numeracy.

As head of Ofsted, every one of these would be a disaster. As for the US charter school movement for which such heroic individuals serve as models and cheerleaders, we would do well to pay less attention to ministerial hype and more to the evidence. In England we are familiar with occasional tales of financial irregularity and faltering accountability, and of DfE using Ofsted inspections to bludgeon academy-light communities into submission. But this is as nothing compared with the widely-documented American experience of lies, fraud, corruption, rigged student enrolment, random teacher hiring and firing and student misery in some US school districts and charters, all of which is generating growing parental and community opposition.  Witness the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and this week’s nationwide ‘walk-in’ in defence of  public education.  Yet the culture that American parents, teachers, children and communities are combining to resist is the one the UK government wishes, through Ofsted, to impose. Ministers believe in homework: have they done their own?

However, as prudent fallback Nicky Morgan is said to have identified five British candidates. While these don’t hail from the wilder shores of US charter evangelism, their affiliations confirm the mission ‘to make local authorities running schools a thing of the past’ (Prime Minister Cameron last December), and, to avoid any lingering ambiguity, ‘The government believes that all schools should become academies or free schools’ (from the DfE website).

In pursuit of this agenda, the reported British candidates have immaculate academy and/or Teach First credentials (Teach First is the British teacher training cousin of the evangelistic Teach for America, like charter schools an essential part of the package of corporate reform). Most take home eye-watering salaries. All are within the inner ministerial circle of school leaders whose politically compliant views are rewarded with access, patronage, gongs, and seats on this or that DfE ‘expert group’ whose job is to dress up as independent advice what the government wishes to hear.

Home-spun this second list may be, but it is hardly likely to meet the Ofsted criterion of ‘independent and impartial.’

It should not be like this, and it does not need to be. Like the United States, England has many more outstanding schools, talented teachers and inspirational educational leaders than those few who are repeatedly praised in party conference speeches and with which ministers assiduously pack their ‘expert groups’.  The talent worthy of celebration and reward is not located exclusively in academies or Teach First any more than in individual schools it resides solely in the office of the head (for these days rank and file teachers barely merit a mention even though without their unsung dedication and skill all schools would be in special measures).

The problem with the much longer list of potential candidates for the top Ofsted post is that those who ought to be on it – and they come from maintained schools, academies and other walks of life – don’t necessarily toe the ministerial line. They are not, in Thatcher’s still resonant words, ‘one of us’. Such independent-minded and genuinely talented people may conclude from inspection or research evidence that flagship policy x, on which minister y’s reputation depends, isn’t all it is cracked up to be. They put children before their own advancement. They dare to speak truth to power.

Yet isn’t this exactly what an ‘independent and impartial’ Ofsted is required to do, and what, give or take the odd hiatus, most HM Chief Inspectors have done – so far? And isn’t it exactly what a genuine democracy needs in order that well-founded policies gain a hearing, ill-founded policies are abandoned before they do lasting damage, and the education system is ‘reformed’ in the ameliorative sense rather than merely reorganised as part of the latest ministerial vanity project?

But no, for by politicising public education to the extent heralded by the 1988 Education ‘Reform’ Act and entrenched ever more deeply by each successive government since then, ministers are signalling that power matters more than improvement, compliance more than honesty, dogma more than reasoned argument; and that in the battle between ideology and evidence – a battle in which the Cambridge Primary Review and CPRT have been strenuously engaged for the past ten years, often to their cost – ideology trumps every time. The government’s attempt to ‘fix’ the agenda of England’s independent inspectorate by appointing one of its own persuasion as chief inspector is not just an ideological step too far. It is an indefensible abuse of political power.

Talking of Trump, is he on Nicky Morgan’s bucket list too?  Go on, Secretary of State – in for a penny, in for a trillion dollars.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

If you would like to learn more about educational ‘reform’ in the United States, try the blogs of Diane Ravitch  and Gene Glass, and recent books by Ravitch and Berliner and Glass. For a catalogue of US charter school irregularity see Charter School Scandals.  For Jeff Bryant’s reflections on this week’s ‘walk-ins’ in support of US public schooling, click here.

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Reading: re-asserting the potency of the personal

In countries where the language of schooling predominantly focuses on measurable and often oversimplified notions of attainment, children can come to be viewed and discussed in relation to their current standards of performance, rather than as unique individuals.  In such audit-driven cultures the vital personal and affective dimensions of teaching reading and of being a reader can easily become obscured, and the potential for richly reciprocal reader relationships between children and children and between children and teachers reduces.

Yet it is possible to build human connections between readers and texts and to make the life-to-text and text-to-life moves which are core to reading in the real world. A balance needs to be wrought between teaching the skills of decoding and comprehension and fostering reading for pleasure. Such reading is essentially volitional, intrinsically motivated, child-directed and choice-led. It has making meaning at its heart.

In order to build reciprocal communities of readers who can and do choose to read and who think and talk about what they are reading, I believe we need to re-assert the potency of the personal in reading. Personal emotional responses include care, concern, sympathy, sadness, excitement, exhilaration, fear, boredom, anger and indifference, to name but a few.  Our responses motivate us as readers to persevere and to read on, or to exercise our rights as readers and step away. Either way our responses often prompt us to talk to others about our reading, whether it’s a worrying news item, an amusing text message, a surprising Facebook entry, or an unnerving novel. Reading opens up conversations between readers about their views and values, lives and experiences, it enables us as humans to consider who we are, what we and others stand for and what we feel about personal, social and cultural issues.

Such conversations cannot be left to chance. They are a crucial element in a rigorously planned and responsively executed reading for pleasure pedagogy that creates communities of readers. Pedagogy is one of CPRT’s eight priorities. Indeed as CPRT asserts, teachers need to

Develop a pedagogy of repertoire, rigour, evidence and principle, rather than mere compliance, with a particular emphasis on fostering the high quality classroom talk which children’s development, learning and attainment require.

But how is the profession to develop such a pedagogy for volitional child-led reading? And how can this be planned for and integrated into the daily fabric of school life when, as a deputy head told me this week ‘It’s not assessed, so frankly we find it hard to give any time to it’. While the profession undoubtedly wants to avoid ‘measuring the pleasure’, volitional reading demands careful nurturing, ongoing invitations to engage, imagine and be inspired. A planned reading for pleasure pedagogy is needed, based on evidence and principle. The UKLA research project Teachers as Readers suggests that this encompasses four core elements:  enticing reading environments (physically and socially), a rich read aloud programme, the provision of quality time for independent choice-led reading, and space and time for informal talk about texts .

In the UKLA study, many of the teachers (from 27 English schools) started by conducting an audit to determine the opportunities currently on offer for children to read for pleasure and the space made available to talk about their choices with one another and with teachers.  Most found that adults were the ones controlling the reading on offer to children. In particular, talk about texts was confined to the official literacy curriculum, to guided and shared reading where children’s responses were commented upon and evaluated according to the daily learning objectives. There were few real spaces for non-assessed relaxed reading conversations (in pairs or small groups), and few opportunities to talk informally about children’s responses (to literature or non-fiction), to discuss personal preferences, home practices or what being a 21st century reader might involve.

I fear this is still the case in many schools where literature is seen as a resource for literacy, staff are not encouraged to widen their pedagogic reading for pleasure repertoires and lip service is paid to children’s intrinsic motivation as readers. Too often extrinsic motivation rules. This may be evidenced through ongoing and high profile tests and targets, school-wide competitions about reading at home, and awards for those children who read higher numbers of books.  In such schools limited talk and creative interaction around texts is likely to be heard, constraining personal responses to reading.

In the Teachers as Readers project, teachers’ talk about self-chosen children’s books was initially dominated by a professional focus: they concentrated on what literacy objectives the book was good for (e.g. teaching character, plot, setting and specific language and literary devices) and often talked about how long the book would sustain a literacy focus and the amount of work it could generate. This talk was largely at the expense of mentioning the content or meaning of the narrative, or of how individual books affected them personally or might affect children.

In complete contrast, when the teachers discussed their self-chosen adult books, meaning and affect were foregrounded; personal views and emotional responses were voiced about both fiction and non-fiction and emerging social, cultural or moral issues were spontaneously discussed.  The teachers shared myriad connections to their own lives and in the process got to know more about one another – their values, families and life histories for example. This disconnect between talking about children’s texts and their own adult reading material was significant. It was fed back to the teachers, who began to re-consider what counts as reading in their homes and schools. Gradually, as they began to  read much more children’s literature, they came to talk about it as worth reading for its own sake – to be experienced, enjoyed (or not) and debated. Recognising that affect and engagement were crucial in motivating their reading, the practitioners began to share their own responses to texts in class and gave increased attention to children’s personal and emotional responses. They also set considerably more time aside for reading aloud.

Reading aloud offers an invitation to children to engage, imagine, predict and participate in the classroom community of readers; though much will depend on the quality of the text, who chose it, and the teacher’s capacity to bring it vividly to life, as well as whether it is read as a precursor to related writing activities.  It is not an ‘extra’ to be included if time allows or the children’s behaviour is deemed satisfactory.

This crucial pedagogic practice has personal, social and cognitive benefits and offers an externalised model for silent, independent reading, enabling children to experience the patterns, language and tunes of texts which they could not yet read independently.Significantly, the shared experience of being read to draws the class together in a kind of bonding time and establishes ‘texts-in-common’ whichprompt interaction. Other ‘texts-in-common’ emerge when teachers and children and children and children recommend reading material to each other; such two-way recommendations also trigger conversations and connections. Whilst these chats may happen in the interstices of the school day, making time to touch base with others and voice your thoughts and feelings about a text helps build connections between readers. These opportunities for personal interaction, reader to reader, offer invaluable support and help create a reading culture.

Reading Teachers – teachers who read and readers who teach – can often draw on a wide repertoire of children’s literature and other texts and their knowledge of the young people as readers. They are better positioned to reach out to individual learners and share texts that will interest and intrigue them, this is a much underrated professional skill which can make a profound contribution to the development of individual readers. Their classrooms are often characterised by informal text talk and book gossip as readers swap, recommend, debate and discuss their reading. Additionally Reading Teachers may foster wider human connections and empathetic responses to the plight of others. As Neil Gaiman, the children’s writer, notes:

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

EmpathyLab, an exciting new social action start-up led by Miranda McKearney (ex CEO of the Reading Agency), is exploring ways to nurture children’s empathetic innerstanding through words and stories. As the team argue, children’s social and emotional skills are increasingly recognised as vitally important for their wellbeing; they represent the basis of sound relationships and a trusting classroom ethos and can be fostered through talk and interaction about texts, potentially leading to social action. Their team’s work with schools has myriad connections to CPRT’s aims for primary education. As Robin Alexander’s recent CPRT submission to the House of Commons Education Committee reminded us, these aims focus on the individual – their wellbeing, engagement and autonomy, and on the relationship between self, others and the wider world – in particular encouraging respect and reciprocity and foregrounding the role of dialogue in learning.

Reciprocity and interaction are key markers of reading communities. In these, teachers share something of themselves as readers and as humans and make the time to find out more about the children and their everyday reading lives. They might do this through undertaking Reading Rivers (where children and teachers create collages of their recent reading in all its diversity), and build upon the variety documented by widening the range of reading material welcomed in class.  When children are invited to bring something of their reading selves to school, are offered engaging spaces and dedicated time to read their self-chosen texts, and experience texts read aloud evocatively, then the boundaries between reading in school and beyond begin to blur and reading discussions become more shared. In such communities there is a high degree of informal interaction around reading and a sense of reciprocity – of giving and receiving as readers, and as individuals.

We need to re-assert the potency of the personal, the essential reciprocity of human relations and the significance of affect and interaction in reading and in learning.

If you are interested in these issues, do consider joining UKLA’s research symposium Reading for Pleasure: What next? at the OU Camden, London, on March 23rd 2016. Cutting-edge research will be shared from colleagues in Oslo, Sheffield, Nottingham and Manchester, and there will be opportunities to debate research, policy and practice with the CEOs of BookTrust, the Reading Agency, the Reader Organisation and the NLT.

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

Contact

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