by CPRT
Today we publish the third in our series of reports updating CPR research reviews. This latest report, by cognitive neuroscientist Usha Goswami, reviews evidence on children’s cognitive development and learning and its implication for primary schools.
View/download full report Children’s Cognitive Development and Learning.
View/download briefing on this report.
by Warwick Mansell
Has DfE, including its supposedly public-minded official statisticians, been misusing data in its drive to force on primary schools its favoured policy of academy status?
The question arises since I performed an analysis that seems to raise serious difficulties about a key statistic used by a minister to defend the academies scheme.
On February 2nd, education minister Nick Gibb was confronted on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme with the findings of a report by the cross-party House of Commons Education Select Committee. The committee, following an inquiry on academies and free schools, had concluded the previous week: ‘We have sought but not found convincing evidence of the impact of academy status on attainment in primary schools.’
The minister responded that sponsored academies – generally previously struggling schools which are taken over by a ‘sponsor’ entering into a contract with the Secretary of State to run the school – were improving faster than the national average.
He said: ‘We do know sponsored academies do improve standards of education in our schools. If you look at the primary sponsored academies, they’ve seen their reading, writing and maths results improve at double the rate seen across all schools.’ He added: ‘Primary [sponsored academies]…have seen their reading, writing and maths results improve at double the rate of local authority schools.’
This seemed to mark a change of position for the DfE, which less than a year ago concluded, in its publication Academies: research priorities and questions that ‘The research evidence [is] primarily based on secondary schools and with more and more primary schools becoming academies, further evidence is needed on what drives those schools to become academies and what makes them viable and sustainable.’
So was Mr Gibb’s statement accurate? Investigating, it became clear that the source was DfE’s Statistical First Release which accompanied the publication of primary league tables on December 12th, 2014. The document is headed with the reassuring logo ‘National Statistics’. It says: ‘Attainment in sponsored academies increased by 7 percentage points between 2013 and 2014, compared to 3 percentage points in converter academies and LA maintained schools.’
This statement seemed factual enough. But doubts began to surface in my mind after digging a tiny bit further into the data.
So, the 420 sponsored academies included in the statistic did indeed improve at faster than the national rate for other schools between 2013 and 2014, rising seven percentage points in the proportion of their pupils achieving level 4 in all of reading, writing and maths, from 61 to 68 per cent. By contrast, the 13,396 non-academy (local authority) schools rose three points, from 77 to 80 per cent, while, among 1,006 converter academies – generally previously successful schools choosing to take on the status – the rise was from 80 to 83 per cent.
The immediate question, though, was whether like was really being compared with like. With both types of school, other than sponsored academies, starting with higher average scores in 2013, sponsored academies would appear to have had more room for improvement.
Another way of looking at that is to say that, clearly, the closer a school gets to 100 per cent of its children achieving level 4s in all three subjects, the less scope it has to improve on this measure; at 100 per cent, it has no scope at all.
This would seem to be a basic statistical point. Yet it was not acknowledged anywhere in this statistical release that the higher rate of progress might be at least in part a product of sponsored academies starting from a lower base. The comparison used in the release, then, might be deemed invalid. Without further information it certainly looked potentially misleading.
The fairer comparison, then, would be to look at schools with the same statistical starting points. In other words, among schools averaging 61 per cent in 2013, did sponsored academies or non-sponsored academies improve faster?
Again, there is no mention of this potential statistical comparison in the release. So I have now performed this data analysis myself, based on the DfE’s official underlying school-by-school assessment data.
Staggeringly, this seems to show that, when schools with the same starting points in 2013 are compared, sponsored academies fared worse than a comparison group of primaries in 2014.
I am not a professional statistician, and the analysis below is rudimentary. But I did it in two ways. First, I decided to look at all schools which, in 2013, had exactly 61 per cent of their pupils achieving at least level four in reading, writing and maths. Remember, this was the average figure for 2013 sponsored academies.
This yielded 113 primaries: six sponsored academies, two converter academies and 105 non-academy state schools. Among the 107 that were not sponsored academies, results improved to 70.7 per cent in 2014, a rise of 10 percentage points.
Second, I widened the comparison group to include a much larger number of primaries: those which had results, in 2013, ranging from 56 to 66 per cent. Again, I made sure that this sample, of 1,650 schools, had an average result of 61 per cent in 2013.
What was the outcome? Well, the schools which were not sponsored academies improved on average to 72 per cent. So that’s an 11 point improvement, compared to a seven point gain in sponsored academies. (The 11 point gain included figures for academy converters; removing them from the sample, non-academy maintained schools – ‘local authority schools’ in Mr Gibb’s phrase – went up 10 percentage points, which again is higher than the seven points of sponsored academies).
So my research seems to point to an opposite conclusion – sponsored academy results rising less quickly than those of a comparison group – to that of the DfE’s official statistical publication.
It would have been easy for the DfE’s professional statisticians to have published a similar assessment. But they did not. Nor did they publish any statistical caveats about the sponsored academy-to-national-average improvement comparison they chose to use.
Why does this matter? It seems to me to be very important on the ground, where I hear regularly of communities struggling with campaigns against academy status being forced on them by DfE, in the face of claims by ministers that this should be the only option for school improvement.
Indeed, DfE guidance says that, in schools deemed inadequate, ministers’ ‘expectation’ is always that they should become sponsored academies.
Last month, David Cameron went further, proposing that thousands of schools deemed by Ofsted not to be inadequate but merely to ‘require improvement’ should become sponsored academies in the event of a new Conservative government.
But if statistical evidence on an area absolutely central to the current political debate about education is being made to say the opposite of what a reasonable person might think the data actually tell us, acknowledging the need to compare like with like, we have serious problems. Is evidence being made to fit policy, rather than vice-versa?
I’d make one final point. In a recent article, Cambridge Primary Review Trust chair Robin Alexander, wrote: ‘Deep and lasting improvements in England’s education system will be secured only when, in their discourse and their handling of evidence, policymakers practise the best that has been thought and said rather than preach it, exemplify the educated mind rather than demean it.’
It is staggering that the DfE’s statistical publication was first released without the basic caveats and checks which would be expected of statistics students completing their assignments, and was then endorsed by a minister of education. And a minister of education with an enthusiasm for mathematics, at that. What kind of an example does this set for pupils? We all deserve better.
I invited DfE to comment on the content of this blog but it did not respond.
Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist and author of Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing (Methuen, 2007).
The stance of ministers and DfE towards evidence has been a constant concern of CPRT and CPR, as it must be for any organisation that cares about the probity and efficacy of education policy and seeks to generate the kind of evidence that a well-founded education system requires. CPRT’s concern is shared by the House of Commons Education Select Committee, which in 2014 launched an online enquiry into DfE’s use of evidence. Robin Alexander’s submission to this enquiry was published as the CPRT blog on 19 December.
by CPRT
If you didn’t watch last night’s opening episode in the new C5 four-part series about Gascoigne Primary School, Barking, catch up via the repeats. If any grandstanding politician still believes that all that a teacher needs is subject knowledge, then this should sort them out. The human and logistical challenges confronted and resolved by Bob Garton and his colleagues would fell lesser mortals, and the responsive and articulate children in last night’s episode really did them proud. Compulsive viewing.
Gascoigne Primary School, as it happens, is participating in the Cambridge Primary Review Trust/York University/Educational Endowment Foundation project on dialogic teaching and social disadvantage.
by Iain Erskine
In 2003, Fulbridge Primary School came out of Special Measures and in 2012 it was judged ‘outstanding’ in every Ofsted inspection area. Along the way, we were assessed by Creative Partnerships and in 2008 we gained the status of a National School of Creativity. In 2013, we converted into an Academy. In December 2014, we were invited to be a Whole Education Pathfinder school. Most significantly however, we became a member of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust’s Schools Alliance in 2014 and adopted the principles, priorities, vision, aims and curriculum domains of the Cambridge Primary Review.
Once we left the Special Measures Club we decided that more of the same would not work, so we embarked on a curriculum and school development journey that can fairly be called never-ending. On this journey we have been lucky enough to learn from the likes of Roger Cole, Mick Waters, Mathilda Joubert, Alan Peat, Lindy Barclay and Andy Hind. But it’s our decision to accept the invitation to work with the Cambridge Primary Review Trust that will have the biggest impact.
Before the Cambridge Primary Review we had been working to develop a curriculum based on creativity, first hand experiences and the local environment. This suited our school, its pupils, teachers and community. But when the CPR final report appeared we discovered that it encapsulated both what we had been aspiring towards and what we had not yet addressed. So it not only aligned with what we were already doing but also offered us a way forward that would lead to further improvements. In this we heeded the parting comment of our lead Ofsted inspector: ‘Remember: “outstanding” is not perfect’.
So what have we done since becoming a member of CPRT’s Schools Alliance?
From September 2014 we started teaching, assessing and planning by reference to CPR’s eight curriculum domains: arts and creativity; citizenship and ethics; faith and belief; language, oracy and literacy; mathematics; physical and emotional health; place and time; science and technology. These are not unlike DfE’s seven early years areas of learning and development – and indeed the CPR report made it clear that its domains were intended to encourage curriculum continuity from early years to primary and from primary to secondary – so we decided to adopt them throughout the school, from nursery to year 6. This meant that there would be significant changes to our assessment processes too, because assessment without levels was introduced nationally at the same time.
To demonstrate genuine commitment to a broad and balanced curriculum we wanted to assess children’s learning in every domain, so a great deal of thought, research and work went into creating an approach which provides effective assessment without losing the exciting and innovative curriculum that we created, which we believe, in CPR’s words, ‘engages children’s attention, excites and empowers their thinking and advances their knowledge, understanding and skill.’
The time to make changes is when you are doing really well; don’t leave it until things start going wrong. The master of this principle was of course Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, hence the unparalleled success that the Red Devils have enjoyed over many years. So we too have adopted that principle in the hope of creating a Theatre of Dreams at Fulbridge as he did at Old Trafford.
September 2014 brought major changes and initiatives such as the new national curriculum, the SEND code of practice and of course the new assessment requirements and we too changed many of our structures. Meanwhile we have had a new 240-place building constructed which allows us to move from a 3 to 4 form entry school.
We are an enthusiastic Google Apps school, so all the new structures were created in Google Drive on Excel sheets, a format that allows everyone to contribute and add to the master document that will cover all our short, medium and long term planning. This process proved to be a great way to ensure participation and ownership by all staff. Alongside this we are working with Pupil Asset, who have created a bespoke tracking system that will tell you – if you really want to know – whether a child with size ten feet, blue eyes and ginger hair is over or underperforming compared to national averages.
Planning, teaching and assessing are the keys to everything that happens in our classrooms. We took the government’s proposed freedoms as a genuine invitation and made sure that each part of the cycle linked to the others. Thus, we use the same criteria to plan, teach and assess. To start the process we look at what we want to assess, having merged the CPR’s eight curriculum domains with the new national curriculum. We have created areas of assessment within each domain, aligning them with the attainment targets from the primary curriculum. In addition, we looked at how this linked to the topics and themes we teach, taking away parts of the new curriculum we didn’t want to use and adding any parts that were missing – the most serious omission being oracy.
We followed the same process of aligning curriculum domains and assessment strands in our EYFS Developmental Matters statements. Planning, teaching and assessing are now coherently and consistently applied and practised from nursery to year 6. During the current school year we are establishing what works and what fits, modifying elements as necessary so that by the end of the year we will have refined and embedded a system that we can take forward.
In basing all we are doing on the Cambridge Primary Review, we know that what we are doing is based on sound evidence, which makes a refreshing change when we think back to some of the initiatives that successive governments have introduced.
To support all these changes, our website was updated. Links to the CPRT website were easily made, but ensuring that the site’s curriculum area reflected all we are doing as a member of CPRT’s Schools Alliance took more time. After consulting staff and Governors, our new Ethos and Aims statement was uploaded onto the site. This adapts the CPR educational aims to reflect our overall approach and the character of our school community.
Iain Erskine is Head Teacher of Fulbridge Academy, Peterborough and a member of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust Schools Alliance. This is the second in a series of occasional blogs in which Alliance members write about their schools and we provide links to enable you to discover how their vision works in practice.
For further information about Fulbridge Academy, click here.
For other blogs about featured CPRT Schools Alliance schools, click here.
by Julia Flutter
As an educational researcher who has worked in the field of student voice for the past 22 years, I was fascinated to pick up the recent CPRT Research Report by Dr Carol Robinson, Children, their Voices and their Experiences of School: what does the evidence tell us?, introduced in Robin Alexander’s CPRT blog on 12 December.
Carol’s insightful review documents the developing influence of the ‘children’s voices’ movement, and offers an exciting agenda for future practice, policy and research. While the report shows us clearly that much has been gained through researching pupils’ views and the adoption of children’s voices principles, it also acknowledges that there is still a long way to go before these ideas are fully recognised and acted upon, both in the UK and internationally. While Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) confers on every child the right to be consulted and to participate in decision-making, how these principles are put into practice opens up new questions and challenges, particularly for teachers and schools.
Among the questions often raised about the children’s voices principles are the following:
Let’s look at each of these questions in turn.
Is the idea of respecting children’s voices a ‘luxury’ that schools no longer have time for?
After a presentation on our children’s voices research a few years ago, a head teacher stood up and told the audience that he was deeply grateful for the way in which our research had allowed him to re-focus his attention back onto the children in his school and their learning. He spoke of how the pressures and demands of the prevailing educational policy climate had temporarily eclipsed his thinking about the most important concerns. His was a powerful statement about the value of respecting children’s voices: centring teaching practice on children’s voices in this way redirects us back to the things that matter, that make a real difference to children’s achievement and their love of learning. Far from being a luxury, the recommendations in Carol’s report show us that respecting children’s voices lies at the heart of a successful school community and offers a set of principles which every school should embrace.
Has the children’s voices movement overstepped the mark by giving children too great a say in decision-making in schools?
A common criticism of children’s voices principles is the concern that giving children an active say and involvement in decision-making could undermine teachers’ authority in schools. Some teaching unions have opposed children’s roles in interviewing teacher job applicants, for example, on the grounds that such activities might compromise pupil-teacher relationships while this type of decision-making, they argue, represents a step too far in changing the dynamics of power. However, as Jean Rudduck argued, respecting children’s voices does not mean that pupils’ views take precedence over teachers’ authority, nor must it result in a silencing of teachers’ own voices in the decision-making process. While it is important that children’s views are considered seriously and without tokenism, there is a clear balance to be struck, and a school ethos that is framed on values that embrace responsibility, reciprocity and community sets the parameters for ensuring that the voices of all, whether adult or child, are heard and respected. There are many schools around the country which have successfully embedded children’s voices principles in their practice. One of them is the Exeter school featured in Jo Evans’s CPRT blog on 21 January. Over the coming months the CPRT website will be showcasing other schools where CPRT principles, on this and other matters, can be witnessed in action.
Should we allow children to take responsibility for their own learning?
There is clear evidence from psychological studies showing that encouraging young learners to develop a sense of responsibility for their learning has a significant and positive impact on their achievement and attitudes to learning. US researcher, Carol Dweck, for example, has demonstrated that the children’s motivation and achievement are dependent on having a sense of ownership and responsibility for their learning. Giving children choices in their learning also provides opportunities for teachers to design classroom activities that respond to children’s interests and prior knowledge so that learning becomes more engaging and relevant.
Over to you
To discover more about these ideas
Cambridge Primary Review Trust has been working with Pearson to develop a number of professional development programmes, including one focusing on children’s voices. This exciting new course looks at involving children in the development of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment and is designed for senior leadership teams.
The Rights Respecting Schools programme has been developed by UNICEF to support schools interested in putting the UNCRC recommendations on children’s rights at the heart of their practice. The programme offers training, resources and an award scheme for any organisations working with children and young people around the UK.
On 1 January Julia Flutter joined CPRT’s directorial team, taking responsibility for developing the Trust’s communication strategy.
by CPRT
Those who thought that the departure of Michael Gove might give schools a breather before the 2015 election, liberating them from the weekly explosion of initiatives and insults, reckoned without the ambition of his successor. These days, few education secretaries of state are content to do a good job, deeming it more important to leave an indelible mark in the name of ‘reform’. To this lamppost tendency Nicky Morgan appears to be no exception.
Her wheeze, and it’s a biggish one, is to make Britain ‘a global leader in teaching character and resilience … ensuring that young people not only grow academically, but also build character, resilience and grit.’ To that end, DfE has invited bids for projects showing how ‘character’ can be built, and on 16 March there’ll be a grand ceremony at which the 2015 Character Awards of £15,000 each will be presented to 27 schools, with a £20,000 prize for the best of the best. Morgan modestly defines her chosen legacy as ‘a landmark step for our education system.’
In the same way that New Labour claimed, witheringly but inaccurately, that before the imposition of its national literacy and numeracy strategies England’s primary teachers were ‘professionally uninformed’, so Nicky Morgan’s happy discovery of something called ‘character’ implies that schools have hitherto ignored everything except children’s academic development; and that creativity, PSHE, moral education, religious education and citizenship, not to mention those values that loom large in school prospectuses, websites and assemblies and above all in teachers’ daily dealings with their pupils, were to do with something else entirely. Remember the not-so-hidden ‘hidden curriculum’? If there is a ‘landmark step’ then, it is not character education but its political appropriation and repackaging.
So what, in Morgan’s book, constitutes ‘character’? Its main ingredients, as listed in the guidance to applicants for the DfE grants and character awards, are ‘perseverance, resilience and grit, confidence and optimism, motivation, drive and ambition.’ (Readers will recognize ‘resilience’ as one of the most overused words of 2014). Rather lower down the list come ‘neighbourliness’, ‘community spirit’, ‘tolerance’ and ‘respect.’
Like so much in recent English education policy, this account of character is imported from the United States. The Morgan character attributes are almost identical to those in the eponymous Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed: grit, curiosity and the hidden power of character, and in Dave Levin’s evangelising Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). Here, then, we have a melding of the no-holds-barred values of corporate America with that fabled frontier spirit portrayed by John Wayne. ‘Grit’ anchors the education of character in both worlds.
But there’s a third element. In a speech in Birmingham last November prefiguring the DfE announcement, Morgan said pupils should ‘leave school with the perseverance to strive to win … to revel in the achievement of victory but honour the principles of fair play, to win with grace and to learn the lessons of defeat with acceptance and humility.’ No prizes for spotting the source of that little homily. These are unambiguously the values of England’s nineteenth century public schools: values directed not to the nurturing of mind but to physical prowess on the games field, an education veritably conceived as no more or less than a game of rugby or cricket. And not just education: life and death too, as immortalised in the Newbolt poem in which the playing field morphs into the trenches of 1914-18: ‘There’s a breathless hush in the close tonight / Ten to make and the match to win / The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead / Play up, play up and play the game.’
If character is important, which it surely is, is such an idiosyncratic and unreconstructedly male account of it good enough, and is it for government to impose this or any other notion of character on every child in the land, of whatever inclination, personality, gender or culture? In one of two excellent blogs on this subject that I urge prospective applicants for the DfE awards to read, John White thinks not. He says: ‘Nicky Morgan is not wrong to focus on personal qualities, only about the set she advocates. This is tied to an ideology of winners and losers.’ (As, appropriately, is DfE’s Character Awards scheme itself). He reminds us of the considerably more rounded values framework appended to the version of the national curriculum that was introduced in 2000 and superseded last September, and he argues that ‘no politician has the right to steer a whole education system in this or any other partisan direction.’ For White, Morgan’s foray into character education is further confirmation of the need for curriculum decisions to be taken out of the hands of politicians and given to a body which is more representative, more knowledgeable and culturally more sensitive.
The other recent must-read blog on character education is by Jeffrey Snyder in the United States. He cites evidence that ‘character’ is more likely to be determined by genetically-determined personality traits than the efforts of teachers, and indeed he argues that anyway nobody really knows how to teach it. In this context it’s worth asking what those pupils subjected to 1850s/1950s character-building really learned, and whether there is indeed a correspondence between success on the playing field, in work and in adult life. And since you ask, did fagging and flogging really make for manliness (whatever that is) or were they merely perversions by another name?
Snyder argues, too, that the ‘perseverence, resilience and grit’ account of character ‘promotes an amoral and careerist “looking out for number one” point of view’ adding, tellingly: ‘Never has character education been so completely untethered from morals, values and ethics.’ As a result, ‘character’ is as likely to be harnessed to the pursuit of ends that are evil as to those that are good. ‘Gone’, adds Snyder, ‘is the impetus to bring youngsters into a fold of community that is larger than themselves … When character education fails to distinguish doctors and terrorists, heroes and villains, it would appear to have a basic flaw.’
Snyder’s third objection, and it applies equally to the Morgan view of character and to the Gove definition of essential knowledge, is the sheer narrowness of the educational vision being promoted. In this context, it’s worth asking how the Cambridge Primary Review’s 12 educational aims might be classified. Are ‘wellbeing’, ‘engagement’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘autonomy’ about character or something else? Do such responsive and responsible CPR aims as ‘encouraging respect and reciprocity’, ‘promoting interdependence and sustainability’, ‘empowering local, national and global citizenship’ and ‘celebrating culture and community’ have anything to with resilience and grit?
Actually they do, for it takes considerable grit and resilience to live the values of reciprocity, interdependence and community in a culture of winner-takes-all individualism; or to champion sustainability when the prevailing ethic is rampant materialism and unfettered economic growth; or, as so many educationists have learned to their cost, to hold firm to a principled vision of children’s education in the teeth of government atavism and disdain. Captains of industry and sports personalities do not, as Morgan appears to believe, have a monopoly of courage and determination. In any event, the imperative here is to tie perseverance, grit and resilience to socially defensible aims and values, for, as Snyder noted, that for which we teach children to strive must be educationally worthwhile.
It will be interesting to see what accounts of character, and what strategies for promoting it, DfE rewards when it distributes its grants and prizes for character education on 16 March. With the national strategies Labour gave us what one CPR witness called a ‘state theory of learning’. Will the coalition government’s bequest be a state theory of character? (Which, for those who know about vospitanie in Russian and Soviet education, has similar political overtones). Let’s hope that Morgan’s judges put vision, ethics, social responsibility and plurality back into the frame.
We can presumably trust that proposals to reintroduce fagging and flogging are unlikely to be shortlisted, though these days one never knows.
by Jo Evans
In 2010 I became head teacher of a primary school in Devon. After assessing the challenges we faced we became involved with the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, and in association with other interested schools we began to research ways to enhance pupils’ engagement in their learning. That small scale project became the bedrock of our school improvement plan. Four years on, the same thread of thinking, firmly embedded in the principles of the Cambridge Primary Review, continues to inform our work.
If you visited us, what would you see that’s distinctive, or that marks us out as a member of CPRT’s Schools Alliance?
Principles pursued with confidence. We strive for a principled approach not only to the curriculum but also the whole experience we offer to children in our care. The Trust’s aims have been used as aspirational tools to remind us of what is important over and above government priorities. If you visit our website you can see how we have made our educational philosophy explicit to parents and others. My previous school moved from being deemed inadequate by OFSTED to outstanding, and my experience of leading this process gave me the confidence to take responsibility for the independent path we have chosen to follow in my present school.
Planning informed by CPRT priorities. While continuing to drive for improved progress and attainment in English and mathematics we have incorporated CPRT priorities into the actions we take in relation to these goals and strategic planning more widely. Thus (i) we work to help pupils take greater responsibility for their own learning (Pupil Voice, Community); (ii) we ensure that assessment drives the progress and attainment of every pupil rather than merely measures it (Equity, Assessment); and (iii) keeping our aims firmly in mind we use high-quality teaching to achieving the very best outcomes for all (Pedagogy, Curriculum, Aims).
Practice informed by evidence. To ensure that evidence continues to inform our practice we operate a tiered approach to action research. This includes termly and half-termly whole school classroom-based research projects with shared foci, lesson study in cross year/school groupings, and individual research projects. Following recent training as part of CPRT’s South West Research Schools Network, we are now going one stage further and developing pupil-led research projects. All this in-school research activity links to the three strategic strands listed above and gives a depth to our school’s practice which it would not have if we merely followed government guidelines or requirements to the letter. Researching and discussing research are therefore no less fundamental to our approach to professional development and performance management and have enabled us to provide leadership for research and development in more than one teaching school.
Flexible curriculum, responsive teaching. Keeping the curriculum meaningful and engaging is essential but also challenging, and we have developed a number of ways to monitor and refine it. Of these, the most obvious yet important is engaging pupils in frequent discussion about their learning. In addition, an assessment tool called Pupil Attitudes to Self and School (PASS) provides quantitative whole-school data, while our home learning approach is pupil driven: the more positive the response in the home learning to learning experiences in school, the more inspiring the topic. Our teachers are now used to adjusting the curriculum in line with evidence from these sources so that it is truly responsive to pupils and their world.
Values-based staff recruitment. Being a church school we recruit people who in the first instance can show how they will contribute to its distinctiveness. But as a member of CPRT Schools Alliance we also ask candidates to observe our children and teachers at work and identify how what they observe reflects CPR aims and CPRT priorities. This enables us to identify those who are genuinely receptive to the values and principles in which the school’s teaching is embedded.
Revisiting core ideas. In a period of increasing instability and sudden policy shifts it’s all too easy to be deflected from the long-term educational path one has mapped out. Re-reading the CPR final report and revisiting the CPRT aims and priorities reminds us why we are in teaching, and it provides the evidence and arguments to justify our belief that we can and must trust ourselves as professionals to provide for our pupils’ development and learning.
Jo Evans is Head Teacher of St Leonard’s C of E Primary School in Exeter, and Joint Leader of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust’s Schools Alliance.
by Natalie Bradbury
If you had the chance to introduce your pupils to original works of art in the classroom (such as framed paintings and prints, sculptures, ceramics and embroideries), would you take it? And what would you do with it?
Almost seventy years ago, a scheme was established which aimed to enable to teachers and educators to do just that. Set up in 1947 under the name of the Society for Education through Art, Pictures for Schools was founded and driven by painter and educator Nan Youngman, art adviser to Cambridgeshire’s innovative Director of Education Henry Morris.
Pictures for Schools took the form of a series of annual exhibitions held at prestigious London galleries until 1969. Artworks by established artists, students and recent graduates were sold at prices designed to be within the reach of educational buyers. Directors of Education and art advisers from local authorities made the trip to London to purchase work for burgeoning town, city and county art collections for loan to schools. Northern buyers included Rochdale, Manchester, Lancashire and Carlisle, along with the West Riding and Newcastle, West Bromwich, Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottingham regularly visited from the Midlands, and authorities in Bristol and Dorset purchased work for schools in the South West. London County Council, Bromley, Harrow, Croydon, Cambridge, Hertfordshire, Essex, Kent and Great Yarmouth were among the main purchasers from the South East.
Other educational buyers, though smaller in number, included primary, secondary and independent schools, and teacher training colleges. Museum services benefited from levels of staffing and support unimaginable today, such as in-house carpenters to frame paintings and create carry-cases for sculptures, and dedicated vans to transport work to schools. Art advisers visited schools to advise on the siting and hanging of paintings, and insurance, and ran weekend courses on the use of art in schools.
Although submissions of all kinds were welcomed – as long as they did not ‘play down’ to children – and some were bold, abstract and vibrant, there was a bias towards representational work such as still-lifes and landscapes. Art educator Marion Richardson, a major influence on Nan Youngman, encouraged her young pupils to seek inspiration in the scenery all around them, and many of the works in Pictures for Schools presented children with sights drawn from the everyday. As well as the London monument pictures of Edward Bawden, which consistently sold well, and stylised prints depicting Oxbridge colleges, best-sellers included the murky industrial landscapes of John Kenneth Long and George Chapman’s stark black and white images of people going about their daily life and work, and children playing in the street. Prints such as linocuts – especially the colourful prints of Peter Green – also proved popular, as they were in a medium easily replicable in the classroom.
The ideas motivating Pictures for Schools were very much of their time. During and after the Second World War, as the rebuilding of Britain was debated in both the public and political spheres, educators called for art education to be given a central position in the new school system. This received support from the Ministry of Education, as part of a project to promote British culture, improve the public’s standards of taste and create a new generation of citizens and educated consumers who were capable of exercising judgment in aesthetic matters and making informed choices and purchases.
By the end of the 1960s, ideas about education were changing and as education budgets were cut Pictures for Schools was forced to come to an end. As early as the 1980s, some of the work in county collections was seen as old-fashioned. In the decades that followed, some work by previously lesser-known artists has risen in value, making it difficult to lend and insure, and several local authorities have realised that the work, often in storage and unseen for years, represents valuable potential income.
Although most county collections have been sold, and it is difficult to ascertain the whereabouts of many artworks once in public ownership, in a few areas of the country it is still possible for schools to borrow work purchased from Pictures for Schools today, along with more modern work. These include embroideries, along with other work purchased from Pictures for Schools in the 1960s by the still-thriving Reading Museum Service. Derbyshire Museum Service, one of the largest, has retained the bulk of its collection. Although some paintings have been sent to local museums for safekeeping the service, based in Derby, continues to invest in new work by visiting local artists. Leeds Art Gallery, meanwhile, has its own school loan scheme, Artemis, which offers workshops to introduce teachers to the collection.
We’ve all seen sculptures sitting outside the school entrance, paintings of grandees in the school hall, or wishy-washy landscapes displayed in reception areas, but the organisers of Pictures for Schools intended that the work in schools should be seen and looked at close-up by children. Here, the use of originals as opposed to reproductions was key, as it was thought to be crucial that children could identify first-hand how the work was made: the mark of the brush-stroke or the pinch of the clay.
One of the shortcomings of Pictures for Schools, however, was that, once the work had been sold, there was no specific guidance given to schools about how to make the most of it. Some of the individual authorities contacted the organisers asking for artists’ contact details with a view to compiling biographical notes, and several authorities later sent out sets of notes with the artworks. One former art adviser from Cambridgeshire, also a teacher in the 1970s, told me that he had passed artworks around the classroom, using them as the starting point for debate and discussion, which is exactly what the organisers envisaged.
Unfortunately, today loan services have to compete for schools’ already precious time and monetary resources, and the debate about the value of arts subjects in the curriculum is ongoing. Is there a place for original artworks in twenty-first century schools or are they an expensive luxury?
Natalie Bradbury is researching a PhD about Pictures for Schools at the University of Central Lancashire, which she blogs about at www.picturesforschools.wordpress.com. She welcomes comments from anyone with experience of Pictures for Schools and county collections and museum services, and can be contacted at NBradbury@uclan.ac.uk.
The arts, creativity and CPRT research schools. Find out more about CPRT’s efforts to enhance the arts and creativity through its South West Research Schools Network.
The Cambridge Primary Review final report said (Children, their World, their Education, pp 267 and 493): ‘The most conspicuous casualties [of the so-called ‘standards agenda’ of a narrow curriculum and high-stakes tests] are the arts, humanities and those kinds of learning which require time for talking, problem-solving and extended exploration of ideas … We wish to encourage a vigorous campaign to advance public understanding of the arts in education, human development, culture and national life, coupled with a more rigorous approach to arts teaching in schools.’
What do you think?
We ended 2014 with one official consultation. We begin 2015 with another. The two couldn’t be more different.
In December we responded to the online enquiry of the House of Commons Education Select Committee into the UK government’s use of evidence to inform policy. Not for the first time, but in common with many of the enquiry’s other 500 respondents, we voiced deep concern that despite DfE’s ostensible interest in ‘evidence-informed policy’ its approach to evidence is all too often selective, ideologically partisan and methodologically naive. It remains to be seen whether the Select Committee will call DfE to account on this score, or whether its members will merely shrug and say ‘That’s politics.’ Which, depressingly, it is.
But all this will seem parochial in comparison with the agenda to which another organisation invites us to respond, for it deals with nothing less than the responsibility of national educational systems, including our own, ‘to improve the quality of life, promote decent employment, encourage civic participation and enable all citizens to lead a life with dignity, equality, gender empowerment and justice’. All citizens, everywhere, not just in the UK.
The quotation comes from a UNESCO concept note outlining how progress in global education should be monitored after 2015, the year in which the current UN Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education (which in many countries won’t be achieved) is superseded by an even more ambitious set of goals which apply as much to rich countries as to poor, and tie education firmly to the increasingly urgent global imperatives of equity and sustainable development.
Both of these happen to be among CPRT’s eight priorities, and if you check the new CPRT priorities in action page of our website you’ll see how we and our partners are beginning, within our modest resources, to pursue them. But if you want a sense of the gravity of the challenge we all face, read the UN’s December 2014 synthesis report The road to dignity by 2030: ending poverty, transforming all lives and protecting the planet.
The report ends thus:
Today’s world is a troubled world, one in turmoil and turbulence, with no shortage of painful political upheavals. Societies are under serious strain, stemming from the erosion of our common values, climate change and growing inequalities, to migration pressures and borderless pandemics. It is also a time in which the strength of national and international institutions is being seriously tested. Because of the nature and the scope of this daunting array of enormous challenges, both inaction and business-as-usual must be dismissed as options. If the global community does not exercise national and international leadership in the service of the peoples of the world, we risk further fragmentation, impunity and strife, endangering both the planet itself as well as a future of peace, sustainable development and respect for human rights …
The year 2015 is hence the time for global action … We must take the first determined steps toward a sustainable future with dignity for all. Transformation is our aim. We must transform our economies, our environment and our societies. We must change old mindsets, behaviours and destructive patterns. We must embrace the integrated essential elements of dignity, people, prosperity, planet, justice and partnership. We must build cohesive societies, in pursuit of international peace and stability … We have an historic opportunity and duty to act, boldly, vigorously and expeditiously, to achieve a life of dignity for all, leaving no one behind.
‘Think global, act local’ has become a cliché. Worse, it has been hijacked by multinationals to advance enterprises that are anything but sustainable or equitable. But educators can reclaim it. The UN’s global education agenda is directed at governments, so at the start of 2015 we should demand to know how our own government will respond, or whether this major report and the evidence that informs it, will be kicked into touch like so many before it. But the UN’s education agenda requires no less energetic action in the classroom. Teach local, learn global.
If your school is working to advance the UN – and CPRT – goal of ‘a sustainable future with dignity for all’ and you would be willing to share your ideas with others in the CPRT network, please let us know. Contact administrator@cprtrust.org.uk.
You will find websites of these organisations relevant and helpful:
Sustainable Schools Alliance
Sustainability and Environmental Education
Think Global (the Development Education Association)
Tide Global Learning
TEESNet (formerly UK Teacher Education Network for education for sustainable development and global citizenship)
Read the full December 2014 UN synthesis report on global education after 2015, quoted above.
Contribute to shaping the focus of the 2016 report on Education, sustainability and the post-2015 development agenda (closing date for comments: 28 January).
Read responses to the House of Commons Education Committee enquiry into DfE’s use of evidence.