The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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From pessimism to hope: global learning and sustainability

When the Cambridge Primary Review conducted its Community Soundings in 2007, it encountered a widespread sense of the world as a threatening place for children. The Review’s Final Report (p 189) explains:

We were frequently told … that the wider world is changing, rapidly and in ways which it is not always easy to comprehend, though on balance they give cause for alarm, especially in respect of climate change and environmental sustainability.

However, it then adds:

Pessimism turned to hope when witnesses felt they had the power to act. Thus, the children who were most confident that climate change need not overwhelm them were those whose schools had replaced unfocussed fear by factual information and practical strategies for energy reduction and sustainability.

I have spent a quarter of a century thinking about how primary schools can help children engage with such information, and adopt such strategies. It remains work in progress. I hope that the following will help teachers as they create their own professional repertoire.

Let us begin with pessimism.

Frightening visions of the world often impinge on children’s consciousness. Aged six in Cardiff, my  teacher told a horrified class about the nearby Aberfan disaster. Could this happen to us? My childhood nightmares revolved around nuclear war and the scene in the Sound of Music where the family crouches in terror, hiding from a Nazi search party. The nature of the challenges has mutated, but there remains much for children to be anxious about.

Spending a morning with year four children in a Worcestershire first school, I observed their efforts to make sense of some enormous numbers on the Worldometers website. As they watched the figures for births, deaths, carbon emissions and arms sales ratchet up in real time, like a demented gaming machine, the children began to decipher what they were seeing. They compared figures and applied what these meant to the real world around them. Within fifteen minutes, the children were cross-referring statistics on global literacy to what they had seen on Newsround about Malala Yousafzai.

The absolute figures for access to water and sanitation showed slow but steady progress. One child related this tellingly to population data: ‘About once every second someone else gets clean water and sanitation. But look at how many people there are: it’s not very nice.’ A nine-year-old child who can not only understand factual information, but interrogate it critically, and thereby create new knowledge, is already on a journey from pessimism to hope. That child will certainly not be easily duped by statistics, although he or she may also be in need of some wider perspectives and some practical solutions.

If we censor the world for children, in all its scariness and wonder, we can end up failing to protect them. In our quite proper desire to keep children safe, this can sometimes seem counter-intuitive. Time and again, however, surveys show that even very young children are already aware from family and the media of what is going on in the world. They will also often be very confused about it. If we delay our responses until children reach an imagined stage of developmental ‘readiness’, we merely allow fear and confusion free rein.

Many schools provide safe spaces where children can talk about what is going on in the world. This might be a daily ‘in the news’ slot, or through circle time, communities of enquiry, or within dedicated humanities, PSHE or RE time. Story can offer a powerful way in, offering as it does the protection that children are dealing with the world of fiction and the imagination.

I saw some powerful work recently from a year five class in West London, based on Pandora’s Box. The class created its own box, into which children placed what they most hated in the world. Importantly, clear ground rules had been established in advance, including the option to keep feelings private. Several families came from conflict zones, and many children related fears about violence and war. Others talked about unfair adult treatment, frightening things that they had witnessed, or deep-seated negative feelings about themselves. This activity was possible because these children had a high degree of trust in their peers and teachers, including a belief that their fears would be heard and responded to. Their own Pandora’s Box set out quite an agenda for the school, embracing curriculum (e.g. the literature, history and geography of war, conflict and refugees), wellbeing and safeguarding. Some of this had implications for the whole school and the local community. However, without the school having bravely provided a safe space for the children to reveal their ‘furies’, they might easily have remained silent and unattended in the children’s hearts and minds.

Pessimism requires a considered response. There is also cause for hope, but we may not hear so much about it. I think our highly-numerate year four child would be encouraged by these figures from the United Nations Development Programme:

  • Since 1990, the number of people living in extreme poverty has declined by more than half.
  • The proportion of undernourished people in the developing regions has fallen by almost half.
  • The primary school enrolment rate in the developing regions has reached 91 percent, and many more girls are now in school compared to 15 years ago.
  • Remarkable gains have also been made in the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.
  • The under-five mortality rate has declined by more than half, and maternal mortality is down 45 percent worldwide.
  • The target of halving the proportion of people who lack access to improved sources of water was also met

(Of course, our canny child would not be alone in asking how these figures had been arrived at, what they omit, and about the use of a term like ‘the developing regions’).

In September this year, leaders from 193 countries agreed 17 Sustainable Development Goals, setting out objectives for sustainable human and environmental development for the next fifteen years. Crucially, SDG4 for ‘Quality Education’ also sets the following target:

By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development.

The Cambridge Primary Review and CPRT have been ahead of the game, embracing sustainability and global citizenship as both a priority for the Trust and two explicit aims for all schools. The commitment has been implicit from the very beginning in CPR’s strapline – ‘Children, their world, their education’ – which was also was used for its final report and a 2014 seminar in which CPRT was involved, and there have been three recent CPRT blogs on this issue. The 2014 seminar also drew on pilot work carried out by the cross-European project DEEEP, considering the tricky question of how we measure progress against this UN target.

Frankly, all this may be a bit hard to digest. For me, the test is therefore what best serves the needs of particular children and their education. My instinct is to start with a question: what is happening and why does it matter? We can then move on to what different people are saying about it. It will be important to ensure that children have access to a good range of varied perspectives: this is one place where the specialists can help. From there, children can move on to the ways forward that might be available (there should usually be more than one, even at key stage 1). There may then be appropriate action that children can take: themselves, through others, often both.

From a pedagogical point of view, one of the great things about big global issues is that they may appear abstract, but they are actually very concrete. This means that children are engaging with real questions in real time, and this can lend a clear purpose to their enquiries, their talk, their writing. Moreover, because we are dealing with the real world, we are necessarily engaging with its glorious messiness. The world is perennially changing, what people say about it is contested, and our knowledge of it is constantly being updated. Such global knowledge is enormously rich: there is no answer-book for the big questions that face us in the real world.

This also means that we are to some extent necessarily co-learners. Indeed, it has been argued that human and sustainable development is itself a learning process, in which case we are all de facto participants on a shared learning journey. This can be challenging, but it can also be liberating for both teacher and pupils.

To put this into sharper focus, let us imagine that a year six class is learning about the forthcoming climate change summit in Paris. Yet again, world leaders are going to determine what is to be done about our collective futures. By borrowing an enquiry process that Tide~ has used in the past, we could ask:

  1. What is climate change? There is some solid science here, including the opportunity to take weather measurements, look at leaf-fall and bud-burst. Children could examine what so-called ‘climate sceptics’ have to say, and where the balance of evidence presently resides.
  2. Why does it matter? This allows children to move into geography, and the differential impacts of climate events on, say, the UK, the Sahel and small island states. They could use a ‘mystery’ to explore complex chains of cause and effect across the globe. They could follow online news reports about what people are saying in different places in the lead-up to the Paris summit.
  3. What can we do about it? This includes geography and science. Children could look at technical solutions in design technology, personal action and morality in PSHE and RE, the decision-making processes at Paris. They might write persuasive texts to send to local delegates to Paris. For a whole school response, a scheme such as Eco Schools would come into its own.
  4. What have we learned and how? This is a chance for children to share their learning with others, and with a purpose in so doing. For example, they could create an assembly, a film, a blog or news bulletin for their peers and the community, thereby meeting an ‘extended writing’ brief for National Curriculum 2014. In reviewing the ways they have learned about this issue, they may well devise further questions for the future. This is about empowering children not only as learners, but also as confident citizens.

There is a great deal of material for those wanting to go deeper into the pedagogy and ethics of global learning and sustainability. Elaine Miskell has produced a succinct document on some common pitfalls, and how they can be overcome. Teachers at Tide~ have produced a discussion paper on teaching about climate change as a focus for staff meetings. Thinkers like Vanessa Andreotti have written compellingly about how to challenge development stereotypes.

Eventually, the choice of what to do comes down to the individual teacher, the circumstances and opportunities that exist in her or his school, classroom and community, with specific children in mind. When I think about the many children I meet, like that year four child in Worcestershire, the fears that they share, the tricky questions that they ask, and the potential solutions they undertake, my own anxieties about the world start to feel more hopeful. If children can become agents of their own learning, authors of their own future and makers of sustainable change, those ‘darker visions’ of the world look a little bit brighter.

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. The example from Worcestershire  previously appeared in the article ‘The World in Numbers’ in Primary Geography 33.

The ‘darker visions’ in Ben’s final paragraph is a reference to the scene-setting in the Cambridge Primary Review final report and a reminder of why the Review and the Trust are committed to equity, global understanding and sustainability. The report said (p 15): ‘This is the era of globalisation, and perhaps of unprecedented opportunity. But there are darker visions. The gap between the world’s rich and poor continues to grow. There is political and religious polarisation. Many people are daily denied their basic human rights and suffer violence and oppression. As if that were not enough, escalating climate change may well make this the make-or-break century for humanity as a whole. Such scenarios raise obvious and urgent questions for public education.’

by Robin Alexander

Face the music

Opera North has reported dramatic improvements in key stage 2 test results in two primary schools, one in Leeds, the other in Hull, and both in areas deemed severely deprived. ‘Dramatic’ in this instance is certainly merited: in one of the schools the proportion of children gaining level 4 in reading increased from 78 per cent in 2014 to 98 per cent in 2015, with corresponding increases in writing (75 to 86 per cent) and mathematics (73 to 93 per cent).

But what, you may ask, has this to do with opera?  Well, since 2013 the schools in question – Windmill Primary in Leeds and Bude Park Primary in Hull – have been working with Opera North as part of the Arts Council and DfE-supported In Harmony programme. This aims ‘to inspire and transform the lives of children in deprived communities, using the power and disciplines of community-based orchestral music-making.’  Opera North’s In Harmony project, now being extended, is one of six, with others in Gateshead, Lambeth, Liverpool, Nottingham and Telford. In the Leeds project, every child spends up to three hours each week on musical activity and some also attend Opera North’s after-school sessions. Most children learn to play an instrument and all of them sing. For the Hull children, singing is if anything even more important. Children in both schools give public performances, joining forces with Opera North’s professional musicians. For the Leeds children these may take place in the high Victorian surroundings of Leeds Town Hall.

Methodological caution requires us to warn that the test gains in question reflect an apparent association between musical engagement and standards of literacy and numeracy rather than the proven causal relationship that would be tested by a randomised control trial (and such a trial is certainly needed).  But the gains are sufficiently striking, and the circumstantial evidence sufficiently rich, to persuade us that the relationship is more likely to be causal than not, especially when we witness how palpably this activity inspires and sustains the enthusiasm and effort of the children involved. Engagement here is the key: without it there can be no learning.

It’s a message with which for many years arts organisations and activists have been familiar, and which they have put into impressive practice.  To many members of Britain’s principal orchestras, choirs, art galleries, theatres and dance companies, working with children and schools is now as integral to their day-to-day activity as the shows they mount, while alongside publicly-funded schemes like In Harmony, the Prince’s Foundation for Children and the Arts pursues on an even larger scale the objective of immersing disadvantaged children in the arts by taking them to major arts venues and enabling them to work with leading arts practitioners.  Meanwhile, outside such schemes many schools develop their own productive partnerships with artists and performers on a local basis.

Internationally, the chance move of a major German orchestra’s headquarters and rehearsal space into a Bremen inner-city secondary school created first unease, then a dawning sense of opportunity and finally an extraordinary fusion of students and musicians, with daily interactions between the two groups, students mingling with orchestra members at lunch and sitting with them rehearsals, and a wealth of structured musical projects.

But perhaps the most celebrated example of this movement is Venezuela’s El Sistema, which since 1975 has promoted ‘intensive ensemble participation from the earliest stages, group learning, peer teaching and a commitment to keeping the joy of musical learning and music making ever-present’ through participation in orchestral ensembles, choral singing, folk music and jazz. El Sistema’s best-known ambassador in the UK – via its spectacular performances at the BBC Proms – is the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, and it is El Sistema that provides the model for In Harmony, as it does, obviously, for Sistema Scotland with its ‘Big Noise’ centres in Raploch (Stirling), Govanhill (Glasgow) and Torry (Aberdeen).

By and large, the claims made for such initiatives are as likely to be social and personal as musical, though Geoffrey Baker  has warned against overstating their achievements and even turning them into a cult. Thus Sistema Scotland’s Big Noise is described as ‘an orchestra programme that aims to use music making to foster confidence, teamwork, pride and aspiration in the children taking part’.  There are similar outcomes from Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen’s move into the Tenever housing estate, with dramatic improvements reported in pupil behaviour and the school’s reputation transformed from one to be avoided to one to which parents from affluent parts of the city now queue to send their children.

Similarly, the initial NFER evaluation report on In Harmony cites ‘positive effects on children’s self-esteem, resilience, enjoyment of school, attitudes towards learning, concentration and perseverance’ with, as a bonus, ‘some perceived impact on parents and families including raised aspirations for their children, increased enjoyment of music and confidence in visiting cultural venues, and increased engagement with school.’  Children and the Arts sees early engagement with the arts through its Quest and Start programmes as a way of ‘raising aspirations, increasing confidence, improving communication skills andunlocking creativity.’ Such engagement is offered not only in ‘high-need areas where there is often socio-economic disadvantage or low arts access’ but also, through the Start Hospices programme, to children with life-limiting and life-threatening illnesses and conditions.

The SAT score gains from Opera North’s In Harmony projects in Leeds and Hull add a further justificatory strand; one, indeed, that might just make policymakers in their 3Rs bunker sit up and take notice.  For while viewing the arts as a kind of enhanced PSHE – a travesty, of course – may be just enough to keep these subjects in the curriculum, demonstrating that they impact on test scores in literacy and numeracy may make their place rather more secure.

This, you will say, is unworthily cynical and reductive. But cynicism in the face of policymakers’ crude educational instrumentality is, I believe, justified by the curriculum utterances and decisions of successive ministers over the past three decades, while the reductiveness is theirs, not mine. Thus Nicky Morgan excludes the arts from the EBacc, but in her response to the furore this provokes she reveals the limit of her understanding by confining her justification for the arts to developing pupils’ sense of ‘Britishness’, lamely adding that she ‘would expect any good school to complement [the EBacc subjects] with a range of opportunities in the arts’.  ‘A range of opportunities’ – no doubt extra-curricular and optional – is hardly the same as wholehearted commitment to convinced, committed and compulsory arts education taught with the same eye to high standards that governments reserve for the so-called core subjects.  Underlining the poverty of her perspective, Morgan tells pupils that STEM subjects open career options while arts subjects close them.

What worries me no less than the policy stance – from which, after all, few recent Secretaries of State have deviated – is the extent to which, in our eagerness to convince these uncomprehending ministers that the arts and arts education are not just desirable but essential, we may deploy only those justifications we think they will understand, whether these are generically social, behavioural and attitudinal (confidence, self-esteem) or in the realm of transferable skills (creativity, literacy, numeracy), or from neuroscience research (attention span, phonological awareness, memory). The otherwise excellent 2011 US report on the arts in schools from the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities falls into the same trap of focussing mainly on social and transferable skills, though it does at least synthesise a substantial body of research evidence on these matters which this country’s beleaguered advocates of arts education will find useful.

Let me not be misunderstood: the cognitive, personal and social gains achieved by El Sistema, Children and the Arts, In Harmony and similar ventures are as impressive as they are supremely important for children and society, especially in cultures and contexts where children suffer severe disadvantage.  And if it can be shown that such experiences enhance these children’s mastery of literacy and numeracy, where in the words of CPRT’s Kate Pickett, they encounter a much steeper ‘social gradient’ than their more affluent peers, then this is doubly impressive.

But the danger of presenting the case for arts education solely in these terms, necessary in the current policy climate though it may seem to be, is that it reduces arts education to the status of servant to other subjects, a means to someone else’s end (‘Why study music?’ ‘To improve your maths’) rather than an end in itself; and it justifies the arts on the grounds of narrowly-defined utility rather than intrinsic value. It also blurs the vital differences that exist between the various arts in their form, language, practice, mode of expression and impact.  The visual arts, music, drama, dance and literature have elements in common but they are also in obvious and fundamental ways utterly distinct from each other. They engage different senses, require different skills and evoke different responses – synaptic as well as intellectual and emotional. All are essential. All should be celebrated.

This loss of distinctiveness is perhaps unwittingly implied by the evaluation of the only Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) project in this area. EEF evaluates ‘what works’ interventions designed to enhance the literacy and numeracy attainment of disadvantaged pupils (including CPRT’s own dialogic teaching project) and its ‘Act, Sing, Play’ project has tested the relative impact of music and drama on the literacy and numeracy attainment of Year 2 pupils. It found no significant difference between the two subjects. So, in the matter of using the arts as a way to raise standards in the 3Rs, do we infer that any art will do?

So, yes, the power of the arts, directly experienced and expertly taught, is such that they advance children’s development, understanding and skill beyond as well as within the realms of the auditory, visual, verbal, kinaesthetic and physical. And yes, it should be clearly understood that while the arts can cultivate affective and social sensibilities, when properly taught they are in no way ‘soft’ or intellectually undemanding, and to set them in opposition to so-called ‘hard’ STEM subjects, as Nicola Morgan did, is as crass as claiming that creativity has no place in science or engineering. But until schools have the inclination and confidence to champion art for art’s sake, and to make the case for each art in its own terms, and to cite a wider spectrum of evidence than social development alone, then arts education will continue to be relegated to curriculum’s periphery.

For this is a historic struggle against a mindset that is deeply embedded and whose policy manifestations include a national curriculum that ignores all that we have to come know about the developmental and educative power of the arts, and indeed about its economic as well as cultural value, and perpetuates the same ‘basics with trimmings’ curriculum formula that has persisted since the 1870s and earlier.

That’s why the Cambridge Primary Review argued that the excessively sharp differentiation of ‘core’ and ‘foundation’ subjects should cease and all curriculum domains should be approached with equal seriousness and be taught with equal conviction and expertise, even though, of course, some will be allocated more teaching time than others. This alternative approach breaks with the definition of ‘core’ as a handful of ring-fenced subjects and allows us instead to identify core learnings across a broader curriculum, thereby greatly enriching children’s educational experience, maximising the prospects for transfer of learning from one subject to another, and raising standards.

Seriousness, conviction, expertise: here we confront the challenge of teaching quality. Schemes like Sistema, In Harmony and those sponsored by Children and the Arts succeed because children encounter trained and talented musicians, artists, actors and dancers at the top of their game.  These people provide inspirational role models and there is no limit to what children can learn from them. In contrast, music inexpertly taught – and at the fag-end of the day or week, to boot – not only turns children off but also confirms the common perception that music in schools is undemanding, joyless and irrelevant. Yet that, alas, is what too many children experience. For notwithstanding the previous government’s investment in ‘music hubs’, Ofsted remains pessimistic as to both the quality of music teaching and – no less serious – the ability of some school leaders to judge it and take appropriate remedial action, finding them too ready to entertain low expectations of children’s musical capacities.

But then this is another historic nettle that successive governments have failed to grasp. In its final report  the Cambridge Primary Review recommended (page 506) a DfE-led enquiry into the primary sector’s capacity and resources to teach all subjects, not just ‘the basics’, to the highest standard, on the grounds that our children are entitled to nothing less and because of what inspection evidence consistently shows about the unevenness of schools’ curriculum expertise. DfE accepted CPR’s recommendation and during 2010-12 undertook its curriculum capacity enquiry, in the process confirming CPR’s evidence, arguments and possible solutions. However, for reasons only DfE can explain, the resulting report was never made public (though as the enquiry’s adviser I have seen it).

In every sense it’s time to face the music.

As well as being Chair of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, Robin Alexander is a Trustee of the Prince’s Foundation for Children and the Arts.

 www.robinalexander.org.uk

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The Prevent duty: investigation or education?

While scrolling through Twitter the other morning I stumbled across a picture posted by a tweeter who will remain anonymous. It showed a notice on the front entrance of a north London primary school which read:

I do not, to the best of my knowledge, associate with anyone who would be a danger to the safeguarding of children, nor do I associate with people holding extremist or radical views. Thank you.

A quick Google search showed that this is not the first school to have implemented a ‘radicalisation policy’ or ‘extremism policy’ in the wake of the government’s Prevent duty of June 2015. Nicky Morgan said that ‘extremism has no place in our schools’. However, do these policies, as both Christine Blower (NUT) and Russell Hobby (NAHT) fear, create an educational space in which teachers are expected to become spies, or experts in surveillance or counter terrorism? The role of the teacher, they maintain, should be first and foremost to safeguard and educate the children and young people in their care.

DfE’s Prevent duty asserts that pupils’ ‘resilience to radicalisation [can be built] by promoting fundamental British values and enabling them to challenge extremist views.’ Resilience is not the problem here; it is the nature of the education that is needed to build resilience. The Prevent duty suggests that through PHSE all students should have time to explore ‘sensitive or controversial issues…equipping them with the knowledge and skills to understand and manage difficult situations…’

Although the building of skills is fundamental, as are the need for ‘resilience, determination, self-esteem, and confidence’ and the ability to engage in healthy debate and weigh evidence, such skills are not possible without the prerequisite knowledge with which to debate. For how can we expect young people to be able to challenge extremist views if they are not provided with the understanding of religious traditions which will enable them to recognise when a view is extreme or not? One can, and should, instil ‘British’ values of mutual respect, but at the same time pupils should be made aware that these values are not uniquely British and that they also run through many of the world’s religions, including Islam. The word Islam means submission (to Allah) yet, to Muslims, it also has another meaning as it is derived from the Arabic root word salam meaning peace: Assalamu ‘alaikum, the preferred greeting between Muslims, means ‘peace be with you.’

We all know how biased the media within this country can be, so teachers perhaps need to be aware of the ‘education’ about Islam that some non-Muslim children receive at home. In their insightful book Pointing the Finger: Islam and Muslims in the British Media, Julian Petley, Robin Richardson and other key scholars analyse the ways in which sections of the media could be seen to foster Islamophobia. Robin Richardson’s remark resonates not only with a valuable social and religious education, but also with the aims of CPRT:

Human beings never exist outside cultural and social locations … No one is totally unaccommodated – or, it follows, unaccommodating. On the contrary, everyone is embedded in a cultural tradition and in a period of history, and in a system of unequal power relations. Everyone, therefore, is engaged in unending tasks and struggles to accommodate and adjust to others. How talk and text in the media help modern societies to understand and to live with difference of perception and value-system is crucial… But, removing differences of perception and values from the world is psychologically not beneficial, morally not desirable and politically not possible. Demonisation is not an option. (Pointing the Finger, p. 20)

By building and maintaining active connections with local faith communities the school not only fosters a relationship but also creates an engaging and more rounded curriculum. It also helps young people to become resilient, confident citizens of a global community.

Baroness Sayeeda Warsi in her 2012 Ebor Lecture The Role of Faith in Society (MP3 available here) discussed the importance of faith when choosing a school for her own daughter; opting not for an Islamic school, or a secular school, ‘but rather an Anglican convent school.’ Baroness Warsi called not for religion to be paramount to society, but just to not be denied a ‘seat at the table of public life.’ She remarked:

So we are not afraid to acknowledge when a debate derives from a religious basis, and we are as confident in taking on board – and taking on – the solutions offered up by a religion as we are in rejecting them.

In the Cambridge Primary Review’s very first report Community Soundings it was noted that although the children interviewed by the Review team voiced a degree of pessimism about the future, including ‘…unease about terrorism’, in those cases where the school ‘… had started engaging children with global and local realities as aspects of their education they were noticeably more upbeat.’ This reminds us that education empowers; and that by engaging children more holistically with faiths and values the skills that Prevent aims to foster may be more easily accomplished.

Moreover, by exploring the similarities as well as differences between the world’s major religions we can not only encourage respect and reciprocity (CPRT aim 5), empower local, national and global citizenship (CPRT aim 7) and celebrate culture and community (CPRT aim 8), but also foster skills (CPRT aim 10) through debate and active engagement, and enact dialogue (CPRT aim 12).

Matt Coward is Administrator of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust
www.yorksj.academia.edu/MCoward

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Load and bless with fruit the vines

It’s been a busy couple of weeks here in pleasantly autumnal Leeds. We are enjoying the familiar tropes of seasonal change: the trips to the local park, avoiding the litter and dog-mess please Year 4, to collect the ‘lovely, lively, golden leaves laughing like a sun’ (thank you Blue 1 for this flourish of figurative language); the celebration of the bounty of our local shops for harvest festival (nothing perishable, as the vermin infestation in church has finally outwitted the best laid plans of the men – and women – of the clergy team, so, this year, the homeless can eat only canned food), and the first explosive outbursts of randomly thrown fireworks, a daily herald of the onslaught of Bonfire Night itself.

And, alongside the expected events that shape the ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ here in the inner city, there are some more singular ones to enjoy: the glory of our Year 6 school residential trip; a meeting of headteacher colleagues to discuss how research-based school practice might give our families and children a voice in developing the landscape of learning and opportunity across our highly diverse city; the publication of the latest Cambridge Primary Review Trust research report by Kate Pickett and Laura Vanderbloemen, Mind the Gap – Tackling Social and Educational Inequality. All these have provided occasion to reflect on the importance of creating rich learning experiences, so that all our children achieve their best potential and thrive in their school settings. To indulge in one more Keatsian metaphor (and this the end of them, I promise): to ensure that we ‘load and bless with fruit the vines’ – in this case the rich harvest of our primary-aged children.

It is, as they say, a no-brainer, that we would want the best for all our children and that we would aim for 100 per cent of them to be a blooming top crop. Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, in her speech to the Conservative Party conference earlier this month, clearly shares these principles:

The commitment to meritocracy means nothing if we don’t give every child the chance to succeed … For us social justice and One Nation are not just buzzwords. They explain all we’ve done and all we’re going to do to extend opportunity to every single child.

Hear, hear, I say: a noble ambition and clearly stated; bravo Ms Morgan. But, as I read further through the speech, I begin to feel a little nagging unease, that somehow Nicky and I are not quite on the same page about how we might achieve this. Ms Morgan believes that

(the) belief in equality of opportunity has been our guiding principle for five years …Look at what we have achieved. We’ve raised the bar on standards in schools with a rigour revolution:… a tough new national curriculum that fosters a love for literature, a grasp of arithmetic and an appreciation of our history. 120,000 more six year olds on track to become confident readers thanks to our focus on phonics and record numbers of 11 year olds mastering the 3Rs.

There’s talk of ‘grit and spark’ and ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’ and there is a clarion cry for a new breed of teachers to shape the destiny of the next generation. Ms Morgan even name checks her own encouraging teacher ‘without whom I wouldn’t be standing here today – thank you Mrs Thynne’.

It is heart-warming stuff indeed and I feel even more churlish about my growing sense of misgiving. I want to agree, but I can’t. And not out of some misplaced political ideology, but because of the reality of another inner-city autumn; the return of the year 6 residential trip; the content of the headteacher meeting about creating an equal landscape for children’s voice and choice in Leeds, and the most recent CPRT report. Essentially, I can’t agree, because, as a teacher, I know that good learning and education are not merely about being relentless and focussed; they are about trying to create adaptive and creative outcomes so that each child can flourish in their learning, in spite of some of the daily challenges with which they have to contend beyond the school gate. Sadly, unlike Ms Morgan, I do not believe that what characterises the best schools ‘is that when you walk through the door the first thing that they talk about is where their students are going, not where they have come from’. Experience – and research – tell me that seeing children in their social context is critical if we are to attempt to close the gaps which will otherwise prejudice their future success. We need to realise the enormity of this task if we want our children to achieve their best potential in the warmth and love of a community of learning, in spite of the messiness of their own home backgrounds.

The CPRT report mentioned above – Mind the Gap  – makes this point clearly. Among its conclusions it finds that:

  • The most important influence on educational attainment, on how well a child develops in the early years, performs in school, in later education and in adulthood, is family background.
  • Average levels of educational attainment and children’s engagement in education are better in more equal societies. [The report shows that the UK is among the most unequal of the OECD countries – p 7, fig 3]
  • Targeted spending such as the Pupil Premium can certainly make a difference … yet targeted spending is not sufficient on its own to close the attainment gap and reduce educational inequalities.
  • Reducing educational inequality will ultimately depend on reducing social and economic inequality.

As a headteacher, I can – and relentlessly do – set the aspirational tone for a ‘Bankside Best’ attitude to all that we do and learn at school. We expect the ‘best for and the best from’ every member of our learning community, thank you very much – ask anyone in the school, or indeed who has ever spent more than 10 minutes in conversation with me (one puzzled visitor, after my nth reference to ‘Bankside Best’ enquired if it was a brand of bitter I was about to offer him). As a leadership team, we can insist, as Ms Morgan urges, that we root out poor education ‘wherever it lurks’ and we do. We are proud of our learning community where children make exceptional progress because of this, from very low starting points to attainment in line with – and in many cases above – national average at KS2. A school where we actively create conditions for meta-cognitive understanding so that, once again, from the very beginning of school children understand the importance of being resilient learners (we are ‘have a go hippos’ even in nursery) and value how they learn, as well as what they learn. Holy Moly, we are wonderful here in LS8.

However, what we cannot do, even with the support of our excellent governing body, local authority and other multi-agency partners, is change the demographic we serve. We can spend Pupil Premium on taking our Year 6 children on school residentials (and indeed all our children on trips and outings as a matter of school routine) to enrich their learning experiences and widen their sense of self and ambition. We cannot, however, prevent the personal distress and upset that one of those children experienced on their return, to discover that her older brother’s remand arrangements had changed and that he might be returning to the area imminently. The turmoil and upset this created for this child and her family far outweighed the benefits of a trip away. And, with all deference to Ms Morgan’s faith in the social importance of 11 year olds mastering the 3Rs, appreciating history and grasping arithmetic to ensure a country that is ‘fair… wise… and great’, the older boy in question had flourished at school fuelled by our belief (shared with Ms Morgan) that ‘children only get one shot at education and we owe to them to give them the best one’. From well below age-related starting points he left Bankside with very good KS2 results, appreciating and grasping concepts and knowledge like a good ‘un. This may have been why he was able to shine so brightly within the local crime scene.

My point is this: high academic results alone, in contradiction to current educational ideology, cannot possibly close all the necessary gaps that will ensure the ‘security of our country’, as Ms Morgan’s comments suggested, whilst social inequality is so prevalent.

I will finish with a few thoughts about our headteachers’ meeting, looking at some of the very issues that underpin this blog. ‘Gaps’ to be closed in educational and social outcomes do not begin at the age of 3 or 4, when a child first arrives in school; they begin from the very start of life itself. The first 1001 days of a child’s life, from conception to the age of 2, are the most powerful determiners of a child’s long term success, both socially and in terms of educational outcomes. Our group was reading Building Great Britons, the report, published earlier this year, of the cross-party First 1001 Days All Parliamentary Group, where the first (of nine) recommendations is that

Achieving the very best experience for children in their first 1001 days should be a mainstream undertaking by all political parties … Recognising its influence on the nature of our future society, the priority given to the first 1001 days should be elevated to the same level as Defence of the Realm.

Stirring stuff – and all of it resonates more powerfully with me, as a leader of learning in a very deprived area of the country, than the call to create a ‘supercharged approach’ by Nicky Morgan – which appears to be another means to create a world of stand-alone academies and free schools, rather than address the key social causes of poor academic achievement.

We are very proud of the work that we do so passionately to close the gaps in learning at our school; we recognise that we need to do this as soon as possible. Over the last two years we have developed an extended early years team – to start working with our potential students from the very beginning of their life – in our mission to create learners from ‘Birth to Bankside’ (B2B – we love a good brand here). To this end we work, as the 1001 report recommends, in strong partnership with our local authority partners: public health, NHS, and colleagues in early years and children services. The need for a strong and committed public sector has never been more critical to achieve this (read the 1001 report and see for yourself). It worries me that if we focus solely on raising standards in stand-alone schools we will not be ‘the spark to light a fire’ to paraphrase Ms Morgan’s final thoughts at conference. Rather, without looking at the bigger, more complex and divisive social picture, we could be the fuse that ignites further inequality.

Since I have started typing this blog over 20 fireworks have screamed and blasted their way through the quietness of a post-school evening. I know for certain that these are thrown not by teenagers who have all been failed by education (many of them attended this school and ‘did well’) but by young people who do not have the advantages of coming from a home where, according to the CPRT report, they have a greater chance of life-long success. Homes where ‘parents have higher incomes and higher levels of education and … they have a place to study, where there are reference books and newspapers.’ Are we going to let the future of these children go up in ideological smoke, at the expense of really closing the gap, as we focus on outcomes and not on root causes? I sincerely hope not.

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 blog 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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Squirrel on acid

A confession. I made a mistake teaching long division to my class this week. It had something to do with zeroes and, while I realised my error straight away, putting it right wasn’t so easy. Children, who I assume only half listen to 30 per cent of what I say, were conscientiously putting in my superfluous zeroes.

Perhaps I should be sacked. After all, the ability to do long division at primary school was important enough to the Tories to be written into their manifesto. Being ‘let go’ would, in many ways, be a blessed relief. Aside from a desire to live just a tiny portion of my own life, I am torn, like 53 per cent of teachers,  between my belief in the value of the job and the frustrations involved in actually doing it.

Let me explain. Under my calm teacher exterior seethes the interior turmoil of a squirrel on acid. The crazed rodent is tasked with ensuring that every child makes steady progress across the board of an ever harder curriculum – and that there is evidence to prove it. Each day passes in a whirlwind of lesson planning, preparation and panic. Resources must be found or created to cater for four ability levels. They must be photocopied, sorted, stapled and guillotined to fit into books nicely. Assessment methods – self, peer or squirrel – must be decided and organised. Each lesson’s ‘learning objective’ needs to be printed onto individual sticky labels. This is degree-level photocopying and has taken me months to perfect – but I was driven to it by the fact that some children spend an astonishingly high percentage of their learning time just writing out what they are supposed to be learning.

Usually I mislay one vital ingredient somewhere along the line, entailing squirrel-like scrabbling on my desk and frantic repeat photocopying. The children warm their hands on freshly printed worksheets while I try not to worry about the planet. In between all this, there are ‘working wall’ displays to sort out, interventions to discuss, assemblies to give, hurt feelings and cut knees to tend. Then, of course, there is the marking … marking … marking. Teachers go on alarming about marking so I will spare you – anyway it largely happens at night.

It rarely runs like clockwork, but usually we get by. Sometimes, however, things go awry. The day of the long division error is a case in point. After lunch, I had intended to teach science – a lesson on light and pinhole cameras. Sadly, the three test cameras I made the night before failed to turn a mug of coffee, let alone the world, upside down. Never mind, I mused as I shovelled some lunch into my mouth, perhaps we can move straight onto reflection and refraction, Quickly, I grab torches and mirrors from the new £100 science light kit and peer hopefully into a pale pool of light. No joy. The beams are too diffuse to refract or reflect anything save my despair.

With 15 minutes left of the lunch break, I decide to teach a history lesson planned for the following week. It requires watching a short video clip on the Stone Age settlement of Skara Brae in the Orkneys. What a shame, then, that the local authority regards online videos as the devil’s work and blocks 90 per cent of them including, of course, Skara Brae. Ten minutes to go, I leap into the car and head for home. No, I’m not running away – not yet. I’m in search of my Simon Schama History of Britain DVD.

Phew. Made it. We sit engrossed as Schama takes us back to prehistoric Scotland. Reluctantly, as he moves to the conclusion of his thoughts on Skara Brae, my finger moves towards the off button. ‘Please, just one more minute!’ beg the children. Given that they are genuinely interested in the thoughts of a serious historian, I happily give in. Sadly, the serious historian chooses that moment to discuss some Viking graffiti. Gravitas thrown to the wind, he translates the Norseman’s runes. ‘Horny bitch,’ he announces.

‘Oh Miss!’ the children chorus in delighted shock. ‘Oh Miss, should we be watching this?’”

Comedy aside, such days persuade me not of my own disorganisation and incompetence, but of the validity of the case for more specialist teaching in primary schools. It is a case well made by Children, their World, their Education, the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review. 

The real breakthrough will come when schools accept that the argument made by the Williams report for using specialists to enhance the teaching of mathematics could be made for all curriculum domains …
Until there is acceptance that domain expertise is so crucial to educational quality that it directly challenges the historical basis of primary teachers’ professional identity as generalists, this Review’s definition of curriculum entitlement as the highest possible standards of teaching in all domains, regardless of how much or little time each is allocated, will remain a pipe dream. (p 434)

Most teachers, in fact most humans, would struggle to become expert enough to teach English, maths and science – never mind French, computing, history, geography, art, music, RE, PE… This is especially so given that good teaching requires so much more than knowledge. It requires a cupboard full of engaging lessons backed up with tested resources coupled with an awareness of what children need to know and how they best learn it. It would be truly delightful to be able to develop such an expertise in a few subjects or domains. They wouldn’t be the same subjects as my colleagues’ so between us we could cover the curriculum. The children would thrive – most actually enjoy seeing the occasional different face in front of the whiteboard – and so would we.

Perhaps then the crazed squirrel could take the occasional nap.

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

by Robin Alexander

Jerome Bruner at 100

APA interviewer: ‘You’ll be turning 100 this year …’
Jerome Bruner: ‘Yes! Isn’t that nifty?’

Today is the 100th birthday of Jerome Bruner, one of contemporary education’s greatest. Admirers around the world are celebrating this more than nifty event and wishing him well. CPRT gladly joins them. Happy birthday, Jerry!

There was a time when trainee teachers explored education’s founding ideas and knew something about those who generated them. Latterly, educational ideas of any kind have been lampooned by one English Education Secretary as ‘barmy theory’, while their purveyors have been called ‘enemies of promise’ by another – and oh how the tabloids stamped and cheered. Nowadays, trainee teachers must concentrate on ‘requirements’; that is to say, policy diktats whose authority resides not in evidence or argument, let alone wisdom, but simply in the fact of their being imposed and policed from above.

So let us take time to celebrate one for whom ideas, evidence and argument really matter, who is indeed wise, and who over the past seventy years has drawn us into conversation and held us there – for such is the power of his wonderfully lucid and engaging prose. Bruner’s conversation, like Bakhtin’s an unending one, is about human development, cognition, learning, schooling, culture, law, narrative and much else; in sum, to coin the question underpinning his revolutionary 1960s curriculum Man, a Course of Study, about what it is to be human.

Consider the cognitive revolution, scaffolding, constructivism, the spiral curriculum, paradigmatic and narrative modes of cognitive functioning, folk pedagogy and … the list goes on. Insights such as these inform so much of our current thinking about the conditions for productive learning and teaching that we may take them for granted, and many in our profession may not even know their source.

Chris Watkins is one of several who have written splendid birthday blogs and tributes, and I can do no better than refer you to him and to them via the links below. But first, here are some familiar Bruner quotes to greet as friends old or new.

Education research should never have been conceived as principally dedicated to evaluating the efficacy or impact of ‘present practices.’ … The master question from which the mission of education research is derived is: What should be taught to whom and with what pedagogical object in mind?

We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.

A quiet revolution has taken place in developmental psychology … It is not only that we have begun to think again of the child as a social being – one who plays and talks with others, learns through interactions with parents and teachers – but because we have come once more to appreciate that through such social life the child acquires a framework for interpreting experience, and learns how to negotiate meaning … Making sense is a social process.

The reality that we impute to the worlds we inhabit is a constructed one … Reality is made, not found.

Language is for using, and the uses of language are so varied, so rich, and each use so preemptive a way of life, that to study it is to study the world and, indeed, all possible worlds.

We can trace three themes in relation to discourse … discourse as scaffolding … discourse as the negotiation of meaning … discourse as the transfer of cultural representations.

Education is not just about conventional school matters like curriculum or standards or testing. What we resolve to do in school only makes sense when considered in the broader context of what the society intends to accomplish through its educational investment in the young. How one conceives of education … is a function of how one conceives of culture and its aims, professed and otherwise.

Intellectual activity is anywhere and everywhere, whether at the frontier of knowledge or in a third-grade classroom.

To play is not just child’s play. Play … is a way of using mind, or better yet, an attitude towards the use of mind. It is a test frame, a hot house for trying out ways of combining thought and language and fantasy.

The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion – these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.

The main objective of teaching is to… open up a wider range of possibilities… to go beyond the information given.

I want … to leapfrog over the issue of school subjects and curricula in order to deal with a more general matter: the mode of thinking that helps children … create a version of the world in which … they can envisage a place for themselves … I believe that story making, narrative, is what is needed for that … The importance of narrative for the cohesion of a culture is as great as it is in structuring an individual life … What we all do for each other is to keep telling our stories. That is how we live with the ordinary and its setbacks.

School reform without concomitant economic reform is simply not sufficient.

www.robinalexander.org.uk 

Read Chris Watkins’s IoE blog celebrating Jerome Bruner’s 100th.

Read Jerome Bruner’s centenary interview for the American Psychological Association (the APA referred to at the head of this blog).

Read the tribute from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

Watch a televised interview with Jerome Bruner for the Association of Psychological Science.

Buy Jerome Bruner’s two-volume selection from his writing from 1957 to 2006, In Search of Pedagogy.

 

 

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Requiring reading for pleasure

Having worked with a few schools recently on reading for pleasure, I’m beginning to wonder whether its inclusion in the national curriculum is a mixed blessing.  As one teacher explained it, ‘We’ve got to do it now haven’t we? Make them read for pleasure – make them love literature’.  Another observed she’d re-established SQUIRT (Sustained, Quiet, Uninterrupted, Individualised Reading Time) in her classroom and renamed it SQUIRP (Sustained, Quiet, Uninterrupted, Individualised Reading for Pleasure). But we cannot require children to read with or for pleasure, nor can we oblige them to engage positively in words and worlds. We can, however, invite and entice children to find enjoyment in reading, share our own pleasures (and dissatisfactions) as readers, and work to build communities of engaged readers.

In any case reading time doesn’t necessarily need to be a silent or solitary activity. What of sharing a Simpsons Comic with a friend, pouring over the visuals in the National Geographic Kids or debating a rugby review in First News? What of reading poetry in the online Poetry Archive and wanting to voice it aloud and drum the beat? Reading, like learning, is socially mediated, as Usha Goswami reminded us in the recent CPRT report on Children’s Cognitive Development and Learning, it is a social and collaborative act of participation, as well as an individual one. In order to nurture children’s enjoyment teachers need to build communities of engaged readers who can and do choose to read, and create rich and inventive reading environments – both physically and socially – like those at Fulbridge Academy (CPRT Alliance School) for instance.

In the glaring absence of attention to digital texts in the national curriculum, there is a real danger that the profession will equate reading for pleasure with reading fiction, thus reifying this albeit highly potent form. If the profession becomes book-bound, this is likely to hold back the development of children’s wider reading repertoires and may reduce the potential for pleasurable engagement in reading. As the EU Expert Panel on Literacy states:

There should not be a hierarchical ranking of reading material. Books, comic books, newspapers, magazines and online reading materials are equally valid and important entry points to reading for children and adults alike. …Books and other printed texts are important. But in recognition of the digital opportunities, people should be encouraged to read what they enjoy reading, in whatever format is most pleasurable and convenient for them.

Is the profession failing to recognise and build upon the every day reading practices and preferences of the young? Driven by their personal interests and popular culture children read a wide range of texts, in print and on-line, at home and in school, but they may not recognise this as reading. School reading books, assigned to readers in various ways through colour-coding and/or graded and levelled schemes, represent only a small part of their reading diet. Perhaps through undertaking 24-Hour Reads (where children and teachers record everything they read over 24 hours and make posters/ scrap books/diary entries to demonstrate this), practitioners may begin to credit this diversity and widen the range of material that is welcomed in their classrooms. This idea was one of many developed by the creative practitioners in UKLA’s Teachers as Readers project. Through their involvement in such activities, the teachers began to reconceptualise reading in the 21st century and question what counts as reading in school. In this study 43 teachers from five local authorities engaged in considerable reflection on their own as well as children’s reading practices and preferences, and some developed as ‘Reading Teachers: teachers who read and readers who teach’. These teachers made more of a difference to children’s attitudes and enjoyment in reading.

In nurturing young readers and learners, volition and agency are crucial. Adult readers exercise their rights daily: the right to choose what to read and when, where and why, the right not to write a review after finishing each book and the right not to be quizzed on the content/characters/theme or plot. Many will also exercise the right not to finish a book, but do we offer such rights to younger readers? Daniel Pennac’s Rights of a Reader (wonderfully illustrated by Quentin Blake), are worth exploring with children in this regard since intrinsic motivation is key – reading for its own sake rather than reading for rewards such as recognition, grades and competition. As schools across the country pick up the mantle of inviting and enticing children to read for pleasure, teachers may need to loosen the reading reins and hand more control over to them. Are only those deemed ‘free readers’ able to make choices? What are the consequences of having your ‘school reading book’ imposed upon you? Reading for pleasure has to be child-owned and directed, oriented towards reading for oneself, not for teachers or parents, the school or the system.

Much depends however on our long terms aims. Do we want to develop readers for life (the maximum entitlement) or are we satisfied with the ‘expected standard’ (the minimum)? And why has children’s pleasure become a statutory requirement now? It has never before been authorised in England. In the prescriptive remit of the original National Literacy Strategy back in 1998, whilst there were more than 55 verbs to describe reading: ‘enjoy’ was not one of them. The reason for the current attention on this issue lies of course, at least in part, in PISA and PIRLS results and established international evidence that reading for pleasure – independent choice led reading – is a strong predictor of reading attainment. These large-scale surveys also assert that the relationship between reading achievement and positive attitudes to reading is bi-directional: the will influences the skill and vice versa. Hardly surprising at one level, but it seems to have been enough, alongside concerted campaigning by literacy organisations, (and perhaps some awareness of research evidence), to influence government.

I am uncomfortable however with harnessing children’s reading for pleasure, even implicitly to the standards agenda.  If standards fail to rise and children’s engagement in reading (as measured in PISA and PIRLS) refuses to shift, will the profession be offered technocratic ‘guidance’ in this regard; lists of required practices which will apparently deliver the golden goose, but may also serve to limit children’s lived experience of reading. The imposed emphasis on policy-endorsed phonic schemes in the early years and the accompanying Year 1 Phonics Check suggests the profession needs to mindful of the challenging imperative to ‘teach’ reading for pleasure. Creating an effective balance between teaching reading, and fostering readers’ pleasurable engagement through building communities of readers characterised by reciprocity and interaction, is genuinely challenging. The assessment of the former tends to sideline the latter.  Again our aims need to guide us. Indeed in re-reading the Cambridge Primary Review Trust’s 12 aims for primary education, I was struck by how many resonate with the reading for pleasure agenda. Aims one and two focus on ‘wellbeing’ and ‘engagement’ as both preconditions and outcomes of successful education,  aim four profiles children’s ‘autonomy and sense of self’ and aims five and ten, which focus on ‘respect and reciprocity’ and fostering ‘skill development’ respectively,are also feasible through developing communities of engaged readers. But it is the 11th aim ‘exciting the imagination’ that underscores why reading for pleasure must be seen as a worthwhile activity in its own terms.

To excite children’s imagination in order that they can advance beyond present understanding, extend the boundaries of their lives, contemplate worlds possible as well as actual, understand cause and consequence, develop the capacity for empathy, and reflect on and regulate their behaviour; to explore and test language, ideas and arguments in every activity and form of thought … We assert the need to emphasise the intrinsic value of exciting children’s imagination. To experience the delights – and pains – of imagining, and of entering into the imaginative worlds of others, is to become a more rounded and capable person.

Reading literature, in particular, can distinctively excite and develop the imagination and whilst children’s textual choices and interests are important, reading (and hearing, inhabiting and discussing) literature must retain a central role. It can support children’s personal, social, moral and cultural education, and can, as CPRT asserts, strengthen, challenge or alter the ways in which they see the world and engage with it. So as schools respond to the requirement to develop reading for pleasure, they would be well served by revisiting these aims in order to avoid implementing practice that leans towards ‘demanding’ or ‘requiring’  demonstrations of apparently positive attitudes or compliant dispositions on the part of young readers.

Reading for pleasure and reader engagement cannot be mandated.

www.open.ac.uk/people/tmc242

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

 

by Robin Alexander

True Grit – the sequel

Last January I noted Secretary of State Nicky Morgan’s ambition, surfing the wave of educational fashion, to make Britain ‘a global leader in teaching character … ensuring that young people not only grow academically, but also build character, resilience and grit.’ To that end, DfE invited bids for projects showing how her version of ‘character’ might be built, and on 16 March there was a grand ceremony at which the 2015 Character Awards of £15,000 each were presented to the 27 winners, with an additional £20,000 prize for the lucky best of the best.

In my blog of 30 January I traced the American roots of the current trade in grit – serious thinking about what it takes to cope with today’s world all but swamped by corporatism, psychobabble and John Wayne – and its curious melding with ‘play up, play up and play the game’, that very British but decidedly passé transmogrification of life’s experiences and vicissitudes into a public school playing field peopled by muscular males. I also reported Jeffrey Snyder’s objection to ‘grit and resilience’ as currently formulated on the grounds that it is ‘untethered from morals, values and ethics’, and John White’s concern, rather underlined by the DfE awards themselves, that instead it is ‘tied to an ideology of winners and losers.’

Having now seen the list of awards I must eat some though not all of my words, for among the winners are some undoubtedly impressive and indeed moving initiatives, including several schools striving to raise disadvantaged children’s self-esteem, and these are reassuringly remote from the headline-grabbing crudity of the Nicky Morgan paradigm.

Yet even before the results were announced there were rumblings about the competition procedure, which required interested schools to nominate themselves and then justify their claims to a prize by briefly answering six questions.  One of these asked for evidence of the impact of their character-forming strategies on their students, but critics of the scheme claimed that such evidence counted for less than the eloquence of schools’ answers, that these were not independently checked for accuracy, and that the provision of genuinely verifiable evidence was optional.

We have not been told how many of England’s schools entered this somewhat bizarre competition, but we can safely assume that the overwhelming majority did not.  Most, quite simply, will have been too busy to do so.  Some will have been unwilling to have their names linked to what looked suspiciously like a pre-election political stunt. Others will have been justly offended by the implication that schools don’t attend to their students’ personal and interpersonal development unless DfE instructs them to, and that even then they require a £15,000 incentive. Others again, as my January blog suggested, will have objected to being told to replace their carefully conceived and sensitively nurtured efforts in this direction by a recipe from which ethics, communality, plurality, social responsibility and global understanding were apparently to be excluded.  And, for that matter, the CPR aims of respect, reciprocity, interdependence, sustainability, culture and community?

The ingredients, in fact, of citizenship. But then, Ms Morgan’s government has made citizenship optional at Key Stages 1 and 2.

Which is not to say, as I’ve stressed above, that the winners did not deserve to be recognised for the work they do. But equally deserving of recognition, surely, are the thousands of schools whose teachers value and nurture  ‘character’ with no less commitment and success, but perhaps more consistently manifest that character by not competing with others to advertise the fact.

All of which raises a troubling question about the government’s cynical view of professional motivation. Not only are there many more awards for teaching now than there were, say, thirty years ago – in itself no bad thing in a country that has tended to take this most essential of professions for granted – but the award industry has become increasingly and dangerously politicised, with what Warwick Mansell has calculated as a disproportionate showering of gongs on academy heads at the tendency’s apex.

Fortunately, most teachers are motivated by something more profound and less self-serving than the hope or expectation of such baubles. Indeed, in the matter of leading our children by example, we might argue that it’s the unsung thousands of teachers who disdain ministerial threats and bribes who most truly manifest grit and resilience.

Nicky Morgan modestly lauded her character-building wheeze as ‘a landmark step for our education system.’ If we add together all the landmark steps announced by recent education ministers we’ll have a veritable staircase. Does it, I wonder, lead up or down?

www.robinalexander.org.uk

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

 

by Robin Alexander

Mind the Gap

It’s official: money can buy you happiness. Well, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), that is.

But hold on: two years ago the evidence purported to show the opposite, confirming the pessimistic adage, while a quick internet scroll back a decade or two shows ostensibly secure data on this matter flipping backwards and forwards as often as it attracts media attention.

Do those who report these serially contradictory findings about the relationship between wealth and happiness pause to check today’s news against yesterday’s? Or ask whether interviewing a bored billionaire might be missing the point? Or consider instead the genuinely newsworthy but this time entirely consistent findings about poverty, and especially the damaging impact on health, education and wellbeing of childhood poverty?

In 2009, Kate Pickett co-authored the influential study The Spirit Level: why equality is better for everyone.  This showed that the issue is not wealth as such but the extent of the gap between rich and poor, and the way that this most basic of inequalities correlates with a host of others, not least in children’s educational opportunities, experiences and outcomes. This was an argument that politicians of all parties were keen to be seen to embrace, and to which initiatives like New Labour’s Narrowing the Gap and the coalition government’s Pupil Premium bear witness.

Today CPRT publishes Mind the Gap, a new report specially commissioned from the same Kate Pickett, who with Laura Vanderbloemen revisits the evidence that unequal educational outcomes are closely associated with social inequality – and its converse, that more equal societies have narrower attainment gaps and higher average attainment levels (they also perform better on measures of wellbeing and happiness, as it happens).  We urge you to download and read their report; and we hope that CPRT’s regional networks and alliance schools will give a lead in ensuring that it is disseminated and discussed. If you wish to cut straight to the conclusions there’s also a three-page briefing, though the evidence, tables and graphs in the main report deserve and repay attention.

So far, CPRT has published three research reviews in this series. There will eventually be twelve, and from now on the pace of publication increases, with all twelve reports due to be in print by March/April 2016.  Their aim is to update and extend the considerable body of published evidence surveyed for the Cambridge Primary Review in 2007-9 and then revised and combined into a major research compendium in 2010.

‘The gap’ has always been a prominent theme for CPR/CPRT. As CPR said then, and as the new CPRT report reminds us now:

Britain remains a very unequal society. Child poverty persists in this, one of the world’s richest nations. Social disadvantage blights the early lives of a larger proportion of children in Britain than in many other rich nations, and this social and material divide maps with depressing exactness onto the gap in educational attainment … While recent concerns should be heeded about the pressures to which today’s children are subject, and the undesirable values, influences and experiences to which some are exposed, the main focus of policy should continue to be on narrowing the gaps in income, housing, health, care, risk, opportunity and educational attainment suffered by a significant minority of children, rather than on prescribing the character of the lives of the majority. (Children, their World, their Education , p 488).

It was the apparent intractability of this challenge, and politicians’ seeming imperviousness to the illogicality or perhaps hypocrisy of trumpeting their efforts to close the gap in educational attainment while pursuing policies that widen the contingent gaps in income, health and wellbeing, that led CPRT to nominate as its top priority the pursuit of equity. Of course, equity and equality are not synonymous. But if the level of income into which far too many of our children happen to be born so severely conditions their educational prospects and future lives, and if – as Pickett and Vanderbloemen remind us – children do better if their parents have higher incomes and higher levels of education, then this is hardly fair or just and equity and equality become inseparable.

The new report doesn’t just document the gaps. It also assesses efforts by policymakers to close them.  One of these is the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), substantially part-funded by DfE to identify and evaluate promising school-based initiatives designed to narrow the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their peers. One such EEF initiative is CPRT’s own project Classroom talk, social disadvantage and educational attainment, whose programme of intensive support for dialogic teaching begins its trial phase next week in schools in Birmingham, Bradford and Leeds.

Policy initiatives such as these can and do make a difference, as do the impressive efforts of politically independent charities like the Sutton Trust and the Prince’s Foundation for Children and the Arts. But of course what has by far the greatest impact, for it does not depend on the vagaries of externally funded interventions and is sustained into the longer term, is the work of those thousands of teachers who simply by being there, and by combining skill with compassion and energy, are able day after day to refute the unbending determinism of the ‘cycle of disadvantage’.

So when Kate Pickett and Laura Vanderbloemen conclude that ‘reducing educational inequality will ultimately depend on reducing social and economic inequality’ they are neither yielding to that same determinism nor discounting the achievements of the many teachers who help their pupils to succeed against the odds. Rather, they are reminding us of the typically British folly of educational and economic policies which are unjoined-up to the point of being self-defeating, while encouraging politicians to meet the challenge of inequitable inequality holistically rather than piecemeal.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

Download the new CPRT report ‘Mind the Gap: tackling social and educational inequality.’

Download a short briefing about this report.

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

Contact

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