by CPRT
DfE’s consultation on the proposed performance descriptors for KS1 and KS2 closed on 18 December.
Also:
Read CPRT news item launching discussion of the proposals
Read Warwick Mansell’s CPRT blog critiquing the proposals
Read David Reedy’s CPRT blog on testing and teaching
Read Wynne Harlen’s major new CPRT research review and briefing on assessment
In ministerial speeches ‘evidence-based policy’ is now as almost as routine as ‘I care passionately about …’ and is as likely to be greeted with hollow laughter. So it’s to the credit of the House of Commons Education Select Committee that it has undertaken an enquiry into the use of evidence by the Department of Education, asking DfE to list the evidential basis of a number of policies before inviting the public to comment via a web forum. Nine areas of policy were nominated for these ‘evidence checks’: phonics, teaching assistants, professional measurement metrics, summer-born children, the National College of Teaching and Leadership, universal infant free school meals, the impact of raising the school participation age, music, the school starting age. There was a further section on DfE’s use of evidence generally and this prompted the largest number of responses, including the following which we reprint as our final blog of 2014. It’s longer than usual, but then you won’t be hearing from us again until January.
DFE’s use of evidence
Several contributors to this enquiry commend DfE for its commitment to evidence, but surely this is a minimum condition of good governance, not a cause for genuflection. More to the point are the concerns of Dame Julia Higgins that DfE’s use of evidence is inconsistent (or, as Janet Downs puts it, ‘slippery’) and those many other contributors across the Committee’s nine themes who find DfE overly selective in the evidence on which it draws and the methodologies it prefers.
The principal filters appear to be ideological (‘is this researcher one of us’?) and electoral (‘will the findings boost our poll ratings / damage those of the opposition’?) and such scientifically inadmissible criteria are compounded by DfE’s marked preference for research dealing in big numbers, little words and simple solutions.
In the latter context, we should be wary of endorsing without qualification the view of several contributors that the randomised control trial (RCT) is the evidential ‘gold standard’, trumping all other attempts to get at the truth. Education is complex and contested, and its central questions are as much ethical as technical – a challenge which the fashionable but amoral mantra ‘what works’ conveniently ignores. The RCT language of ‘treatment’ and ‘dosage’ is fine for drug trials but is hardly appropriate to an activity which is more craft and art than science, and in untutored hands the effort to make teaching fit this paradigm may reduce to the point of risibility or destruction the very phenomena it claims to test. I should add that I make these observations not as a disappointed research grant applicant but as recipient of substantial funding from the rightly esteemed Educational Endowment Foundation for a ‘what works’ project involving RCT.
Of the nine ‘evidence check’ memoranda submitted to the Committee by DfE, those on phonics, the school starting age and the National College most conspicuously display some of the tendencies I’ve so far identified. Thus the defence and citations in DfE’s phonics statement neatly sidestep the methodological controversies and evidential disputes surrounding what is now the government’s mandated approach to teaching reading, so the contributor who applauds DfE’s grossly biased bibliography as ‘accurate’ is plain wrong.
DfE’s school starting age citations carelessly – or perhaps carefully – attribute a publication of the Cambridge Primary Review (Riggall and Sharp) to NFER, but again avoid any evidence running counter to the official view that children should be packed off to school as soon as possible; or the more nuanced finding of the Cambridge Primary Review that the real issue is not the starting age for formal schooling but the availability and quality of early years provision, wherever it takes place; or indeed the inconvenient truth that some of this country’s more successful PISA competitors start formal schooling one or even two years later than England.
As for the National College of Teaching and Leadership (NCTL), no independent evidence is offered in support of DfE’s insistence that this agency, and the models of teacher training and school improvement it espouses, justify its consumption of public funds. Only two publications are cited in DfE’s ‘evidence check’. One is NCTL’s statement of accounts; the other a DfE press release which is neither evidence nor independent. Proper evaluation of NCTL became all the more essential when DfE abolished the relatively ‘arms length’ bodies that NCTL subsumed and charged it with ‘delivering’ approved policies. Of course NCTL can be shown to be effective in relation to the delivery of policies x and y. But what if those policies are wrong?
The Committee has received many unhappy comments from parents about schools’ draconian responses to term-time absences. These highlight a further problem: there are important areas of educational policy, at both school and national level, where evidence is rarely or never on view and parents and the electorate are expected to comply with what may be little more than unsubstantiated claims. In the case of those blanket bans on term-time absence about which so many parents complain to the Committee, as with the tendency to fill more and more of children’s (and parents’) waking hours with homework (i.e. schoolwork done at home) of variable and in some cases little educational value, there appears to be a deep-seated assumption that schools have a monopoly of useful learning. The Cambridge Primary Review scotched this mistaken and indeed arrogant belief in the comprehensive research review on children’s lives outside school that it commissioned from Professor Berry Mayall. Except that the then government preferred summarily to reject the evidence and abuse the Review team rather than engage with the possibility that schools might do even better if more of them understood and built on what their pupils learn outside school.
So although the Education Committee has applied its ‘evidence check’ to nine areas of policy, it might also consider extending its enquiry in two further directions: first, by examining the evidential basis of policies and initiatives, such as those exemplified above, about which teachers, parents and indeed children themselves express concern; second by adding some of those frontline policies which DfE has justified by reference to evidence but which are conspicuously absent from the Committee’s list.
Examples in the latter category might include: (i) the government’s 2011-13 review of England’s National Curriculum; (ii) the development of new requirements for assessment and accountability in primary schools; (iii) the rapid and comprehensive shift to school-led and school-based initial teacher education; (iv) the replacement of the old TDA teacher professional standards by the current set; (v) the strenuous advocacy and preferential treatment of academies and free schools. Each of these illustrates, sometimes in extreme form, my initial concerns about politico-evidential selectivity and methodological bias.
Thus in the 2011-13 national curriculum review ministers deployed exceptionally reductionist and naive interpretations of the wealth of international evidence with which they were provided by DfE officials and others. They resisted until the last moment overwhelming evidence about the educational centrality of spoken language. They ignored Ofsted warnings, grounded in two decades of school inspection (and indeed evidence going back long before Ofsted) about the damage caused by a two-tier curriculum that elevates a narrow view of educational basics above all else – damage not just to the wider curriculum but also the ‘basics’ themselves. And they declined to publish or act on their own internal enquiry which confirmed the continuing seriousness of the challenge of curriculum expertise in primary schools, an enquiry which – and this much is to ministers’ credit – DfE undertook in response to, and in association with, the Cambridge Primary Review. The report of that enquiry, and the wider evidence that informed it, still awaits proper consideration. A job for the Education Committee perhaps?
Similarly, DfE, like its predecessor DCSF, has stubbornly held to its view – challenged by the Education Committee as well as numerous research studies and the Bew enquiry – that written summative tests are the best way both to assess children’s progress and hold schools and teachers to account, and that they provide a valid proxy for children’s attainment across the full spectrum of their learning.
Then, and in pursuit of what has sometimes looked suspiciously like a vendetta against those in universities who undertake the research that sometimes rocks the policy boat, DfE has ignored international evidence about the need for initial teacher education to be grounded in equal partnership between schools and higher education, preferring the palpable contradiction of locating an avowedly ‘world class’ teacher education system in schools that ministers tell us are failing to deliver ‘world class’ standards. Relatedly, DfE has accepted a report from its own enquiry into professional standards for teachers which showed even less respect for evidence than the earlier and much-criticised framework from TDA, coming up with ‘standards’ which manage to debase or exclude some of the very teacher attributes that research shows are most crucial to the standards of learning towards which these professional standards are supposedly directed.
Finally, in pursuit of its academies drive government has ignored the growing body of evidence from the United States that far from delivering superior standards as claimed, charter schools, academies’ American inspiration, are undermining public provision and tainted by financial and managerial corruption. England may not have gone that far, but new inspection evidence on comparative standards in academies and maintained schools (in HMCI’s Annual Report for 2013-14) should give the Committee considerable pause for thought about the motivation and consequences of this initiative.
In relation to the Committee’s enquiry as a whole, the experience of the Cambridge Primary Review (2006-10) and its successor the Cambridge Primary Review Trust is salutary, depressing and (to others than hardened cynics) disturbing. Here we had the nation’s most comprehensive enquiry into English primary education for half a century, led by an expert team, advised and monitored by a distinguished group of the great and good, supported by consultants in over 20 universities as well as hundreds of professionals, and generating a vast array of data, 31 interim reports and a final report with far-sighted conclusions and recommendations, all of them firmly anchored in evidence, including over 4000 published sources.
Far from welcoming the review as offering, at no cost to the taxpayer, an unrivalled contribution to evidence-based policy and practice in this vital phase of education, DCSF – DfE’s predecessor – systematically sought to traduce and discredit it by misrepresenting its findings in order to dismiss them, and by mounting ad personam attacks against the Review’s principals. Such behaviour in the face of authoritative and useful evidence was unworthy of holders of elected office and, for the teachers and children in our schools, deeply irresponsible.
It is with some relief that we note that DfE’s stance towards the Review and its successor the Cambridge Primary Review Trust has been considerably more positive under the Coalition than under Labour, and we record our appreciation of the many constructive discussions we have had with ministers and officials since 2010. Nevertheless, when evidential push comes to political shove, evidence discussed and endorsed in such meetings capitulates, more often than not, to the overriding imperatives of ideology, expediency and media narrative. This, notwithstanding the enhanced research profile applauded by other contributors, remains the default.
This particular Education Committee enquiry was set up as a web forum, with a deadline of 15 December. The DfE evidence checks and the comments they provoked may be viewed here.
DfE’s use of evidence attracted 154 comments, followed by summer-born children (111), phonics (90) and the school starting age (64).
by CPRT
Carol Robinson’s new CPRT research review and briefing about childrens’ voices and rights in primary education published today.
View/download full report
View/download briefing
View Robin Alexander’s blog
Children, their World, their Education. The basic premise of the Cambridge Primary Review (CPR) was as clear in the title of its final report as in its choice of investigative themes and questions: education is meaningful only when educators understand and coherently respond to the nature and needs of children and the society and world in which they are growing up. Mastering the practical skills of teaching is a necessary but not sufficient condition, and as an educational rationale mantras like ‘effective teaching’ take us to the nearest 3Rs test but no further.
A more comprehensive rationale was crystallised in the twelve aims for primary education that were at the heart of CPR’s final report and that now inform the work of an ever-increasing number of schools. In preparing the ground for these, CPR met and listened to children and those who work with them, and many more children added to these face-to-face conversations by writing in. We also commissioned reviews of research on children’s development, learning and lives inside and outside school.
One of these research reviews was on children’s voice and today CPRT publishes its sequel: Carol Robinson’s update of the report that she and Michael Fielding first produced in 2007 and then revised in 2010 for inclusion in The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys.
Last month saw the 25th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). The UK is a signatory, but just how far short of the UN’s ideals we fall is daily all too apparent in the media and in CPRT’s recent blogs on young carers, the government’s proposed policy ‘family test’, and the fate of those millions of children caught up in conflict or lacking access to education as a basic human right. Nor is CPRT convinced that the new national curriculum has yet registered that these matters demand a more serious and committed response than DfE has so far provided, though we are certainly convinced that making citizenship optional in primary schools transmits entirely the wrong signal.
Yet all is not gloom, doom and hollow promises. Carol Robinson’s report documents the encouraging growth of research and practice in the area of children’s agency, voice and rights, and of impressive movements like Rights Respecting Schools. Always at risk of being treated tokenistically, children’s voice in many schools now means considerably more than stage-managed deliberations on food and wet playtimes. This progress should be celebrated.
Probably not at DfE, though: its recent advice on promoting ‘British’ values rightly encourages schools to ‘ensure that all pupils … have a voice that is listened to’ but confines that voice to the task of demonstrating ‘how democracy works by actively promoting democratic processes such as a school council whose members are voted for by the pupils.’ To DfE, then, voice equates with vote, and we know how little, in Britain’s electoral system, votes count for, or how little notice our democratically-elected government takes of the voices of others than those who toe the party line, not least on educational matters. But we won’t tell our children about this, will we, for in the official account of British values parliamentary democracy is the envy of the world.
In fact, the most basic test of the seriousness with which we treat what children think and say is not the election of a school council – valuable though its deliberations can be – but the extent to which empowering, exploring and building on children’s articulated ideas is central to our every teaching encounter and to the everyday assessment for learning which at best informs both children and ourselves. Children’s voices will remain unheard, and their understanding will advance thus far and no further, if ‘speaking and listening’ means that teachers do all the speaking and children all the listening; or if the writing through which children express their ideas is confined to repeating those of the teacher.
That’s why CPRT’s eight priorities include not only a commitment to ‘advance children’s voice and rights … in accordance with the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child’ but also contingent commitments to the development of patterns of teaching and assessment for learning in which genuine dialogue is paramount. This term we have published Wynne Harlen’s report on assessment and Carol Robinson’s on children’s voices. Next term we’ll be presenting reports from Usha Goswami, David Hogan, Dennis Kwek and Peter Renshaw on learning and teaching. In parallel, we are working with Pearson to develop jointly-branded CPD programmes in these areas. All these initiatives are united by the imperatives of childhood.
It is classroom pedagogy that most tellingly liberates children’s voices; but in the wrong hands it is pedagogy that most decisively suppresses them.
View/download Carol Robinson’s CPRT research report Children, their voices and their experiences of school: what does the evidence tell us?
View/download a four-page briefing on Carol Robinson’s report.
View/download Wynne Harlen’s CPRT research report Assessment, standards and quality of learning in primary education and/or the accompanying four-page briefing.
Find out more about these and CPRT’s other research initiatives.
Find out more about the joint CPRT/Pearson CPD programmes on children’s voice, assessment and other topics.
Read the DfE guidance ‘Promoting fundamental British values as part of SMSC in schools’ (November 2014).
by CPRT
There are three national consultations currently under way, and their deadlines are fast approaching. We encourage all CPRT members, supporters and affiliates to participate in these areas of debate. Here are some of the things to consider:
If you would like your ideas to be part of CPRT’s response to these consultations, send them to administrator@cprtrust.org.uk as soon as you can. In relation to the performance descriptors and House of Commons enquiry, we need your thoughts well in advance of the official deadlines.
by Teresa Cremin
As the year rushes to a close and we add Yuletide shopping to our busy lives (alongside school carol concerts and plays perhaps), there are two significant policy initiatives which deserve our time and attention. Both have December deadlines. One might be forgiven for thinking the timing was well judged, that is if policy makers don’t want to hear from the profession…
The House of Commons Education Committee recently launched an online enquiry into the way the DfE uses evidence, with a deadline of December 12th (just before you order that turkey), and the deadline for the DfE consultation into the new performance descriptors is just six days later, on December 18th (just before you wrap those presents).
Both of these initiatives have been the subject of previous CPRT blogs, with Robin Alexander raising pertinent questions about the breadth of the enquiry on evidence and Warwick Mansell observing that the performance descriptors are simply another way of labelling learners, under a different name (this time with the contentious notion of being judged ‘below’ or ‘above’ national standards at aged seven). It is surely time to voice our views. We cannot afford to stand back.
Based on government responses to previous ‘consultations’, there is scant evidence that the perspectives of academics, researchers or teachers will be heard, attended to or indeed in any way influence the outcome. Commas change, but rarely content.
Nonetheless, in gathering with others to talk and listen, whether in school or consortia meetings, in externally organised PD or in university-based groups (such as the CPRT London Teachers Reading Group), we have the chance to revisit our principles and remind each other of the need to consider research evidence and explore its application when back in the classroom.
However, it is not enough to read and debate research – though it is essential. Nor is it enough to respond to such enquiries and consultations – though again this is important. Surely we must also engage as researchers ourselves? As a profession we must avoid standing back and waiting for others to define the questions for us to answer (as is the case with the performance descriptors consultation, where delimited questions afford little scope for commenting upon wider issues of relevance).
Historically, teachers have been positioned as the objects of research, but in recent decades the involvement of the primary profession in research related practices has diversified, with many studies demonstrating the value of school-university research partnerships. Additionally, practitioners have undertaken their own classroom-based research, framed around self-identified questions, both individually and collectively, as part of teacher action-research networks.
In the South West of England, an arts and creativity focused CPRT action-research project is being run as part of our national research programme. Coordinated by Penny Hay at Bath Spa University and Emese Hall at Exeter University, it involves ten schools and reflects three of the CPRT’s eight priorities: children’s voice and rights; fostering a rich, relevant and broad curriculum and developing a pedagogy of repertoire, rigour, evidence and principle.
Another such CPRT action-research project is developing at Roger Ascham Primary School in Walthamstow, co-ordinated by Robin Desoer from the school and Amelia Hempel Jorgensen and Gill Goodliff from the Open University. It is focused on learner identity, autonomy and self-regulation. As a Trust we are seeking to evolve a model of school-led CPRT action research which addresses the overall research concern: how is primary education in England providing education relevant to children’s lives and worlds and how is this improving their life chances?
Whilst Kemmis (2006) suggests that harnessing teacher action research to the school improvement agenda has diluted its critical transformative potential, both projects are seeking to ensure attention is paid to the wider social, cultural and discursive consequences of any new practices developed, and are working to enhance the teachers’ sense of their professional roles and identities. In the midst of the midwinter mayhem, with personal and professional deadlines looming and not enough time in the day, standing up, speaking out and making time to ask our own questions remain important.
Professor Teresa Cremin is a co-director of Cambridge Primary Review Trust.
I suppose the heading of this blog is a trifle tendentious, though not without justification. The Cambridge Primary Review (CPR) was all about evidence. Some of it ministers liked, some of it they didn’t. By and large, their reactions reflected not the authority or veracity of the evidence we provided but the degree to which it sustained or challenged their political narrative. As a result, policies were as likely to be based on ideology, prejudice or populism as on evidence, and those who exposed this fundamental frailty, or highlighted the politically inconvenient truth, were pretty smartly shown the door.
Because CPR hoped to make a difference in policy circles as well as in the classroom, it investigated not only its various chosen aspects of primary education – childhood, learning, teaching, curriculum, assessment, leadership, school organisation, teacher education and so on – but also the evidence on which policies relating to each of these were based.
The relationship between policy and evidence that CPR uncovered was on occasions somewhat murky. The most problematic instance was the matter of educational standards over time and what causes them to rise and fall. CPR had commissioned no fewer than six independent research reviews in this area from teams of leading academics at five universities and NFER. Against the findings of the resulting six reports and other data CPR set official claims about trends in standards and the impact on those trends of government policies and initiatives.
Without going into detail that can be read in its final report (Children, their World, their Education, pages 471-4), CPR reported both good and less good news on standards – which in a large educational system serving a highly diverse society at a time of rapid change is what one would expect – but also a succession of grand political claims about standards, tests, accountability and school improvement that under scrutiny all too often dissolved into unsubstantiated assertion or downright falsehood.
This week there are two developments that enable us to bring the story up to date and consider the record of the current government. Has it maintained Labour’s uneasy relationship with evidence or has it displayed a more even-handed stance in the interest of making its policies as well founded as possible? In so doing, has it been prepared to accommodate the inconvenient truth?
The first pertinent development is the decision of the House of Commons Education Committee to launch an on-line enquiry into the way DfE uses evidence. The Committee has selected nine areas for scrutiny: phonics, teaching assistants, professional measurement metrics, the National College, summer-born children, universal infant free school meals, raising the participation age, music education, and the school starting age. In each case, DfE has been asked first to state the policy and second to cite the evidence on which it is based, and we the public are then asked to comment. In addition, lest it be thought that this list is too exclusive – there is no mention, for example, of the national curriculum, national assessment, standards, international comparisons, inspection, teacher education, academies, free schools or many other prominent and hotly debated areas of policy – respondents are invited to comment on DfE’s use of evidence in more general terms.
Cambridge Primary Review Trust will certainly respond, and we hope those reading this blog will do likewise. The deadline is Friday 12 December.
The other development is closer to home. In 2007, Cambridge Primary Review commissioned a research-based report on the pros and cons of different approaches to assessment from Professor Wynne Harlen, one of the best-respected experts in this field. This was revised for publication in 2010 in The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys.
Earlier this year we invited Professor Harlen to revisit and update her 2010 report to contribute to the CPRT’s pursuit of its eight priorities, one of which is assessment reform, taking account of recent developments (including the performance descriptors announced last week). This she has now done. Wynne’s 40-page report is accompanied by a three-page briefing or executive summary and both can be viewed and/or downloaded from the CPRT website.
Wynne Harlen’s CPRT report ends with separately-itemised implications for teachers, school leaders, teacher educators and policy makers. Wynne stresses the need for teaching strategies in which assessment for learning is fully embedded, especially in teachers’ questioning and feedback, and she urges government to raise the profile of properly moderated teacher assessment and to provide assessment guidance in all subjects rather than confine its efforts to literacy and numeracy. In this matter she reinforces one of CPR’s core messages, that literacy and numeracy tests are not valid proxies for quality and standards across the curriculum as a whole, and children have a right to a curriculum in which every element is taught to the highest possible standard regardless of how much or how little time is allocated to it, so we need valid and reliable information on how, in all such curriculum areas, they are progressing.
Assessment is one of the areas with which the House of Commons enquiry on evidence does not directly deal. However, DfE’s reaction to this new report, which is an aspect of education that is at once extremely important and highly contested, will provide a timely test of its claim that its policies are evidence-based.
More to the point, if the House of Commons enquiry comes up with conclusions that DfE finds unpalatable and therefore dismisses or rejects, we shall know exactly where on the matter of evidence the government truly stands.
by CPRT
CPRT has commissioned a number of reports on research that bears on its eight priorities. The first of these, by Professor Wynne Harlen, has now been published. Entitled Assessment, Standards and Quality of Learning in Primary Education, it may be viewed/downloaded here. A three page briefing/executive summary may also be viewed and/or downloaded.
21 November 2014
by Warwick Mansell
Tim Oates, who led the ‘expert panel’ that initiated the government’s review of England’s national curriculum, was very clear as to why the old levels system had to go.
Speaking in a video which was uploaded by the Department for Education to YouTube in May, he offered a set of reasons explaining why the 25-year-old levels structure was being ditched.
Top of the list was what seemed a powerful thought: that summing up children’s performance numerically ran the risk of labelling them, and that this could end up harming their education.
Oates said: “Kids are labelling themselves as being a particular level: ‘I’m a level 3 and all my friends are level 4’. That’s very dysfunctional in terms of learning. That’s the first compelling reason [for scrapping levels]: this idea of kids labelling themselves and that being inappropriate in learning. It can actually hold back their learning rather than encourage it.”
This chimed with a finding in the Cambridge Primary Review’s final report, which concluded (on page 316) that reducing children’s learning to a single level “serves to label children rather than to enlighten parents and other children about the range of their achievements”.
Yet labelling children is exactly what the new national curriculum and its associated assessment, the final details of which now have emerged from the DfE, still seems likely to encourage.
If anything, the new version stands to be worse than the old. And this is just one of several of Oates’s reasons for removing levels which seems not to have been addressed in the DfE’s new curriculum, assessment and accountability regime for primary schools.
With the details so fundamental to school life, and therefore vital to get right, I am left marvelling again at the ability of our ultra-politicised, short-termist policy-making structure to produce something so incoherent: so demonstrably at odds even with its own stated aims.
So, to expand on the point about labelling, last month the DfE set out its plans for a new system of “performance descriptors” for primary pupils.
At the end of key stages 1 and 2 in reading, writing, mathematics and science, teacher assessment will see professionals giving their charges what sounds suspiciously like a level, but is not being called one.
At key stage 1, in reading, writing and maths, children will be assessed as either at “mastery standard” or at “national standard”; “working towards national standard”; or “below national standard”.
For key stage 2 writing, an extra performance descriptor is added to the above: “above national standard”.
For the subjects of key stage 2 maths, science and reading – where, presumably, national curriculum tests will provide greater differentiation of pupil performance – and key stage 1 science, there is only one performance standard: “working at the national standard”.
Surveying the above, it seems impossible to comprehend how it gets away from any problem of labelling. Indeed, in replacing, say, a child achieving level two or three in key stage 2 writing with the judgement of “below national standard”, it probably exacerbates the problem as described by Oates, in the linguistic bluntness of the description if nothing else.
The single “working at national standard” – or not – verdict, where it is to be offered, also seems to invite a simple “pass/fail” judgement. This, it is hard to avoid thinking, will set up the view among many children that they are failures at an early age: from the age of seven, in the case of science.
There will be arguments about the defensibility of that, but above all it is hard to see how it can be squared with the stated aim of reducing labelling.
The labelling issue is probably the most glaringly contradictory output of this process, when set against the original rationale for removing levels. But other aspects of the vision, as set out by Oates, seem also to bump up against reality.
So Oates describes another problem of the old levels system: that it encouraged a sense that pupils had to be rushed from one level to the next. “The whole of the system has been focused on getting kids to move quickly through the levels,” he says in the video.
However, again, pushing children on to “tougher” material earlier seems to have been exactly ministers’ thinking in introducing the new national curriculum. And that thinking is reflected in what the new curriculum says.
For example, in maths, pupils are supposed to be progressing through the manipulation of fractions at a younger age than they used to, are to be taught their 12x tables in year four as opposed to knowing up to 10x tables by year six in the old system, and now to be using square and cube numbers during year five.
As teacher Karen Mills told me last year in relation to the latter: “Year 5 children are supposed to be using square and cube numbers. The assumption in the new curriculum is that they are ready for this, but many of them do not really understand the number system. If we try to force them forward on to new material, we are going to lose half of the class.”
And yet here we are, with the new curriculum and assessment regime seemingly being billed enthusiastically by the politicians overseeing the system as pushing children on to more challenging material earlier (as shown here and here).
Finally, Oates talked about the new national curriculum building deep conceptual understanding and focusing on “fewer things in greater depth”. The notion of stripped-down content seems largely true in subjects other than English, maths and science. But the new performance descriptors hardly suggest subjects concentrating on a few essentials.
Indeed, the question as to whether this new curriculum really moves away from the tick-box approach which is widely thought to have troubled its predecessor and its associated assessment seems very real, when one considers the new performance descriptors.
Prompted by the advice of a very experienced assessment expert, I noted that, for a KS1 teacher assessing whether or not a pupil is at national standard level across reading, writing, maths and science, there are 129 assessment bullet points to work through. At KS2, the equivalent figure is 144 bullet points.
There is one final point to make about the performance descriptors: we still seem in the dark about who exactly wrote the consultation document. So, if people are unhappy with this outcome, who can we hold to account for it, or at least explain it?
Criticism of the lack of transparency around the development of this new curriculum has dogged it throughout. Sadly, that is just one aspect of the dysfunctionality around policy-making that this national curriculum review, 2010-14, has exposed so vividly.
Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist and author of ‘Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing’ (Methuen, 2007).
DfE’s consultation on its proposed performance descriptors ends on 18 December. For the descriptors and how to comment on them, click here.
Carers Trust Swansea Bay has devised a board game to raise awareness of the plight of young carers. These are the UK’s 178,000 children and young people who according to the 2001 census look after a parent or other family member who is chronically sick, disabled or for other reasons needs the kind of help that would normally be provided by adults.
Young carers shop, cook, clean, provide nursing and personal care, get siblings off to school, give emotional support and much, much more. Their average age is 12, over half of them are younger than 14, and according to Barnado’s the number of young carers of primary school age is increasing, with some as young as five. Small wonder that many of them display levels of poise, modesty and maturity that would shame many adults.
The word ‘plight’ is used by the Carers Trust, and in obvious respects it is apposite. Given widespread and growing unease, chronicled and endorsed by the Cambridge Primary Review, about the extreme educational, commercial and social pressures to which young children today are subject, the situation of young carers is particularly acute. For if, as Berry Mayall put it in her evidence to CPR, children’s lives are increasingly ‘scholarised’, what price childhood for those who, in addition to schoolwork, homework and home work (note the distinction) have the added responsibility of providing daily care for others?
Organisations like Carers Trust, the Children’s Society and Barnado’s do a great deal to support young carers and their families, while initiatives like the Carers Trust board game and ‘buddying’ scheme, the Barnado’s counselling and drop-in sessions, and Young Carers in Focus help these children share and put in perspective what otherwise they would experience in vulnerable isolation: the unremitting round of predictable tasks and unpredictable crises; and the way their lives compare not just with those of fellow-carers but also those of children who receive care rather than give it.
Yet it’s also clear that all this can take its toll. According to Carers Trust, ‘Children who provide more than 50 hours of care a week are five times more likely than their peers to report poor physical or emotional health. Child and teenage carers are also more at risk of missing out on schooling, socialising and other life chances in order to provide round the clock care for a loved one.’
We would expect young carers to struggle to keep up at school, but the bullying suffered by many of them may not be so widely known and is therefore doubly reprehensible. Researchers at Nottingham University report that a quarter of young carers have been bullied at school as a direct consequence of the way their caring role marks them out as different, while nearly half of the child respondents to the Nottingham survey did not have a teacher to confide in about their situation.
These additional burdens on young carers are of a kind that schools can and should prevent.
There are three reasons why it is especially important to draw attention to young carers at this time. First, from 17th to 21st November it will be Anti-Bullying Week, and this year a number of charities, including Carers Trust, are combining to draw attention to the extent of bullying suffered by already vulnerable groups such as young carers.
Second, 2014 is the 25th anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, a declaration that commits signatories – including the UK – to do everything in their power to protect and promote children’s rights ‘to survive and thrive, to learn and grow, to make their voices heard and reach their full potential’ and ‘to rest and leisure, to play and recreational activities’. That includes young carers.
The third reason is that on 30 October a group of them, supported by Carers Trust and the Children’s Society, met ministers and health officials to urge them to do more to identify and support what the Royal College of General Practitioners called this ‘hidden healthcare army’. Let us, as their teachers, endorse and publicise their campaign.
Young carers are among the UK’s unsung heroes. Do we give them the care which they in their turn so richly deserve?
Read the Children’s Society Report Hidden from View: the experiences of young carers in England (2013).
Find out about the Young Carers in Focus programme to network, support and empower young carers.