The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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And the octopus won

I held an election at the school recently. It happened just the day before a similar event took place nationally. The two candidates were an octopus (plastic) and a clown (wooden). This was not intended as a reflection on national politics, they were simply the toys that came to hand as I raced out of the classroom and down to the hall for assembly.

This term the theme for assemblies has been fairness. As I lined the pupils up with their voting slips in front of a cardboard ballot box, I explained that we had gone back in time 200 years. Lord Sam (Year 6) and Duke Timothy (Year 5) were to be in charge of this election and would decide who was to vote. The young aristos very much enjoyed turning away all the pupils, except their two wealthy land-owning mates (Cameron, Year 5, and Freddie, Year 4). And so we carried on, conducting elections right through till 1969 when finally everyone was allowed to vote.

The children, particularly the girls, were refreshingly indignant about the denial of their democratic rights. But what was more interesting was the way they became embroiled in the contest. Who was going to win? Was it going to be the octopus or the clown? Factions quickly developed. Arguments erupted in the corners of the hall. Some were passionate in their advocacy of a particular toy. Some came close to tears when a friend rebelled and voted for the opposition. Yet no policies had been discussed. No one knew what the octopus or the clown stood for despite this being an election to decide the leadership of the school.

You get my point, I’m sure. It was reinforced after the general election when the children told me gleefully that Sats were to be abolished. Yes, I said, but did they know that they were to be replaced with more and harder ‘exams’? They didn’t know and they were, for once, silent. I suspect they would also be silent if they read the Conservative manifesto. In a few bleak words the government outlines its priorities for primary education: ‘Every 11-year-old to know their times tables off by heart and be able to perform long division and complex multiplication. They should be able to read a book and write a short story with accurate punctuation, spelling and grammar.’ That the potential achievements of an 11-year-old should be so stale, flat and unprofitable is heart breaking.

I assume no child was involved in drawing up these priorities. What self-respecting young person would sign up to such dreary targets? A very different set of aims emerges when young people are consulted. The Cambridge Primary Review listened carefully to its many ‘prominent and thoughtful’ child witnesses. Its final report (p 489) recommended that in line with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child ‘children should be actively engaged in decisions which affect their education’ and that schools should increasingly work to ensure pupils’ opinions are listened to in a meaningful way. Children told CPR researchers (final report, p 148) that they ‘relish a challenge,’ that they ‘enjoy succeeding’ and that they like ‘hands-on active learning’ in lessons that are full of variety. They dislike ‘mundane and repetitive’ learning, copying and ‘drill and practice’ exercises.

Children are begging for a broad, balanced and rich curriculum, as sought by CPR and CPRT. They may not express it in those words, but they do express in their actions. They triumphantly find fossils in the school garden. They catch bugs, beetles and dead butterflies and bring them in to show and discuss. They make up great stories while stirring a magic mud potion. They adore playing with electrical circuits and making bits of paper fly off motor spindles. They copy a Turner painting and say ‘Wow, Miss, I didn’t know I was good at art’. They wonder why bruises happen and why we shiver or say things like ‘I know it’s a silly question, Miss, but why did lions evolve?’ They love acting, will volunteer for anything, relish funny books (I wonder if ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ is the kind of book the Tories have in mind) and, of course, some go wild for long division and complex multiplication. ‘Please can I stay in at break and do more maths, Miss?’

So once more, as Warwick Mansell pointed out last week in his CPRT blog, we are back to the ‘basics versus breadth’ debate. Except that there is no debate at government level. The only debate is at school level as heads and teachers struggle to square the circle and reinforce the basics while not losing the breadth. Despite their efforts, largely via intervention programmes run by dedicated TAs and squeezed into every nook and cranny of a school day, some children will not meet those manifesto targets. They will not pass the new Year 6 ‘exams’. Their fate is to have to retake them in Year 7 – how humiliating is that for poor souls struggling to find their feet in their first year at secondary school?

Primary schools will be blamed for failing these children, but the truth is that they have a special need. It will not gain them exemption from the exams, though it ought to. These children are victims of a disadvantaged background where for myriad reasons there is no one at home prepared to listen to times tables or to buy a book, let alone to read it. Primary schools do an awful lot for these children – not least making them feel safe and valued for 30 hours a week. But they cannot and should not run them ragged to meet flawed targets set by a government that doesn’t listen to children and doesn’t have their best interests at heart.

If children had the vote I wonder if the Tory manifesto would have been different.

By the way, the octopus (plastic) won the school election. Make of that what you will.

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.

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Basics versus breadth, yet again

It was a moment when, listening in the audience, I found myself saying internally: ‘Hold on a minute: that’s not right.’ Or, at least: ‘Hold on a minute: that is debatable, at best’.

The event was a conference this week in central London at which a well-known figure from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development was making claims about the links between pupils’ scores in international tests and their countries’ future economic growth rates.

But the statement at which my ears particularly pricked up did not come from Andreas Schleicher of the OECD. Nor was it on the conference’s main subject matter: the widely-reported if fishy-sounding claim that the UK ‘would gain £2 trillion’ by raising test scores by a few points.

No, it came from another high-profile education figure, on the issue of breadth versus ‘basics’ in the curriculum.

Amanda Spielman, one of the founders of the 31-school Ark chain of academies who is also the chair of England’s exams regulator, Ofqual, said that it was nice to see the OECD acknowledging that schools sometimes needed to focus on the ‘basics’ of English and maths, even if, she implied, this had to be at the expense of other subjects.

Ms Spielman said: ‘There is a trade-off between breadth of curriculum and a focus on the achievement of these basic skills.’

Reiterating, she said: ‘Here is one of those areas of policy where there are trade-offs, and being explicit that there are trade-offs helps the discussion.’

Here, I thought, was a startling repudiation of the view of the Cambridge Primary Review, among other evidence sources.

And, sure enough, here, on page 493 of the Review’s final report, is its warning of a mistaken ‘policy-led belief that curriculum breadth is incompatible with the pursuit of standards in “the basics”, and that if anything gives way it must be breadth … Evidence going back many decades, including reports from HMI and Ofsted, consistently shows this belief to be unfounded. Standards and breadth are often positively related, and high-performing schools achieve both,’ says the report.

So I pressed Ms Spielman on this. Alongside questioning whether her comments were in line with what research said, I put it to her that while I, personally, had enjoyed both English and maths all the way until the age of 18 at school, the thought of having to take time out of my other subjects for extra lessons in these ‘basics’ would not have been attractive.

She then qualified her position, in two ways. First, she said it wasn’t a case of removing any subjects other than English and maths completely, but of merely sometimes needing extra lessons in those subjects. This was particularly the case when working, as Ark in many cases does, with children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

That sounded fair enough, but the question (or non-question) as to whether children need to do well in literacy and numeracy – they do – has always seemed to me to be different from the one of exactly how this is to be achieved. Is the answer more lessons in these particular subjects? Or is it using the rest of the curriculum creatively to ensure that those basics are mastered, while children’s interests are nurtured and these other subjects are pursued as ends in themselves?

I have never seen that answering ‘yes’ to the first question means the answer to the second has to be ‘yes’, but this seemed to be the implication of the comments.

Ms Spielman’s second way of expanding on what she said was to argue that she was speaking specifically about secondary education, rather than primary. I emailed her for extra information after the talk, and she told me:

‘I was not saying that the primary curriculum should be more limited than it is now…what I was saying is that there are times when there is a clear risk that a child will not reach a satisfactory level of basic education, however that is defined. For example, a child coming into secondary school working three years below expectations might typically fall into that category. The secondary school has to decide how to educate that child to the best of their abilities, using all the information at their disposal.

‘One option is to stick with a “standard” Key Stage 3 curriculum, in which the child’s achievement in all subjects is likely to be constrained by their relatively weak literacy and maths, even with ameliorating “interventions”. A second option is to adopt the “depth before breadth” model used by Ark, which prioritises basic education (and prioritising here does not mean abandoning the rest of the curriculum) … A third option is to set an “alternative” curriculum that aims to develop the student in areas that do not require high levels of literacy/maths.’ The implication was that Ms Spielman and Ark favoured the second option. She said this was in line with the OECD’s stress that all children should achieve at least ‘basic education’.

Expanding still further to stress that she was talking about secondary and not primary, Ms Spielman said: ‘I completely agree with Cambridge Primary Review in principle: when the school is doing a proper job, there should be no need for trade-offs: the problems arise when the preceding phases of education have not been good enough. Primaries have the opportunity to get it right from the beginning; secondaries don’t.’

All this is very interesting, I thought. Many, I guess, might commend the Ark approach as reported here. I am not a teacher, so I do not have first-hand experience of any of these approaches.

But two things are, perhaps, worth saying. First, it does seem true that Ark is prepared to devote more time to literacy and numeracy, at least for some pupils.  Curious to find out more about Ark’s ‘depth before breadth’ stipulation, I looked it up on Ark’s website and found the following: ‘When pupils secure firm foundations in English and mathematics, they find the rest of the curriculum far easier to access. That’s why we prioritise depth in these subjects, giving pupils the best chance of academic success.’

The site adds: ‘We also dedicate more time to literacy and English than other schools to encourage a love of reading and develop fluent communication skills. We have two programmes that focus specifically on phonics teaching and early spoken language skills.’ There is no mention of this applying only to secondary schools.

This suggests to me that the issue of whether some or all pupils need more time to be spent on literacy and numeracy is very much a live one, and is therefore worth debating. Does the amount of time spent on the subjects matter, I wonder, or is it better to concentrate on teaching quality in existing timeframes for these subjects, while maximising curriculum breadth? I’m not sure, but the Cambridge Primary Review evidence suggests this would be worth debating.

Indeed, evidence is relevant both from the United States – where in 2011, as CPRT’s Robin Alexander reported during the UK government’s national curriculum review, a commission advising  the White House showed that many studies found links between pupils’ greater involvement in the arts and higher reading and numeracy test scores and increased engagement with school, with pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds seemingly benefiting especially – and from the UK, where a report published last month by the National Union of Teachers said that England’s accountability regime was pushing schools to ‘offer a narrow education at the expense of a broad and balanced curriculum’. Both of these reports, in common with the Cambridge Primary Review, would seem to raise questions about the ‘trade-off’ thesis.

Second, and coincidentally, over the weekend a friend from an arts background told me that she recently visited an Ark primary, which educates many disadvantaged pupils, and had been put off by a ‘literacy and numeracy above all else’ approach. My friend worried about creative subjects losing out as a result. The idea that this might be the case would, no doubt, be denied strongly by Ark. But her child will nevertheless not be attending the school.

As I put it to Amanda Spielman at the conference, is there a danger of setting up a divide between schools using perhaps narrower curricular methods in disadvantaged communities, and more rounded offerings from schools with a more middle-class intake? After all, do not leading schools in the independent sector pride themselves on their rounded curricula?

Whatever the answer to these questions, with Ark arguably the most successful of England’s major academy chains, and its methods therefore perhaps likely to be influential in the future, it seems now might be a good time to revisit this debate.

Warwick Mansell, now one of CPRT’s regular bloggers, is a freelance journalist and author of ‘Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing’ (Methuen, 2007).

Warwick Mansell is right. The argument that standards in ‘the basics’ are incompatible with a broad and rich curriculum was rejected in the Cambridge Primary Review final report on the basis of both children’s educational needs and evidence from inspection and research. This is why CPRT’s eight priorities include this: ‘Develop a broad, balanced and rich entitlement curriculum which responds to both national and local need, eliminates the damaging division of status and quality between core and non-core, and teaches every subject, domain or aspect to the highest possible standard.’

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Supporting new teachers: snake oil, evidence or what?

Everyone knows that feelings of inadequacy are not helpful in the classroom. As soon as the tears start to roll, the learning stops. And the teaching too, because feeling inadequate is just as destructive of teachers’ ability to perform as it is of children’s.

It is depressingly easy to make a new teacher feel inadequate: one reason surely that around 40 per cent of us leave within the first five years of qualifying, according to Ofsted. Workload is the major issue of course, but combine a huge burden of work with the feeling that you don’t know how to do it properly and the result is … nail-biting anxiety, sleepless nights and finally, for many, departures for pastures less demoralising.

Here is just one example of the ease with which a new teacher can be forced to reach for the tissues. Recently I went on a reading course linked to the new curriculum. All was going swimmingly until, towards the end of the day, the trainer mentioned spelling – an area given a starring role in the new English curriculum. Now I had been feeling confident about spelling, courtesy of a respected website that has created weekly word lists, including rules, for each year group. It’s true that some of its choices are a little eccentric – ‘nondescript’ and ‘cohabit’ are not the words I would pick to teach eight-year-olds about prefixes – but never mind. At least I had one area of the curriculum sorted.

Foolish thought! Suddenly, I hear the reading course trainer say ‘spelling lists’ and realise that he’s laughing. ‘You see,’ he says, chortling away, ‘spelling lists really don’t work. The children learn those 10 or 12 words but then they never use them again and so they’re forgotten. It just isn’t a good way to teach spelling. A much better way is to teach them is …’

Well, that was it. Feelings of inadequacy again. I’ve been teaching spelling badly; the children will fail their Sats spelling test and we will all sit in the classroom with the tears rolling.

On this occasion though, feelings of inadequacy were overtaken by ones of annoyance. If there is a magic recipe for spelling success, why is it a secret? Surely acquiring this knowledge shouldn’t depend on the random choice of a CPD course?

This doesn’t just apply to spelling of course, but to all areas of the curriculum. Why am I endlessly reinventing the wheel, clumsily and misshapenly, when out there somewhere is someone who knows how it ought to be done?

Finding that mystery expert should not have to rely on anxious trawls of the internet late at night while the bags grow long under the eyes. The web is an invaluable tool and the teachers who donate their lessons for free are generous, public-spirited people. But is downloading Ms Who-ever-you-are’s second-hand lessons really the way to ensure the best possible learning experience for children? After all, while much online content is excellent, quite a lot is shoddy, ill-thought-out and, occasionally, just plain wrong.

Nor should finding the mystery expert depend on dawn raids on school cupboards sifting through piles of commercial schemes in search of whatever is that day’s holy grail. Be it a guide to teaching division using a number line or how to take those first steps in programming, it must deliver its message in an engaging, efficient and easy-for-Miss-to-understand way. Many commercial schemes do just that, but quite a few are ill-conceived, out-of-date and, occasionally, just plain wrong. Hence the warning about snake oil vendors in CPR’s evidence to the Gove national curriculum review.

Of course, not so long ago, new teachers did not have to search for the needle in the curriculum haystack.  They were given sewing machines in the form of the primary national strategies.  As the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review points out (p 417), this suited us newbies because the strategies were ‘all about rules and this is precisely what novice professionals are more likely to need’.  But the Review went on to say (p 307) that the strategies’ bid for total control of what and how teachers taught may have helped those who were newly-qualified or insecure but it wasn’t right for mature professionals with the knowledge and experience to make their own decisions, especially as government prescription was not necessarily better founded than what was available commercially. Hence CPRT’s insistence on the need for ‘a pedagogy of repertoire, rigour, evidence and principle, rather than mere compliance’.

Yet is it outrageous or unprofessional to suggest that new teachers would benefit from a reliable source of expert guidance on what to teach and how best to teach it? Just because the national strategies fell into disrepute, becoming inflexible and monolithic monsters, does that mean we abandon all idea of helping our floundering novices, most of whom have had a mere year’s training?

With standards to be ratcheted up, the pressures on teachers can only increase – as, I fear, will the proportion that leaves within five years of qualifying. One way to tempt them to stay would be to ease the daily burden of having to invent oddly shaped wheels to bump around their classrooms. 

Stephanie Northen is a teacher and journalist. She was one of the authors of the Cambridge Primary Review final report.

In pursuit of CPRT Priority 7, quoted above by Stephanie (‘Develop a pedagogy of repertoire, rigour, evidence and principle, rather than mere compliance’), CPRT has commissioned two new research reviews  to extend and update the evidence on pedagogy provided by CPR. One is on children’s learning, the other on teaching. It is hoped that both will be published next term. CPRT has also embarked on a major project, supported by the Educational Endowment Foundation, on using dialogic teaching to increase engagement and improve educational outcomes among disadvantaged children. More generally, CPRT is working with Pearson, its lead sponsor, to develop CPD programmes which are professionally helpful and based on secure evidence. 

CALLING ALL NQTs. We would like to hear from other recently-qualified primary teachers about the kind of support they need in their first year or two of teaching and the extent to which their needs are met. Please let us know, either publicly by commenting on Stephanie’s blog below, or in confidence by emailing us. This information will help us to take forward CPRT’s professional development programme with Pearson and will also be valuable to those planning the activities of our regional networks. 

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Consultation Reminders

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.

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Is there time for reading and research?

At CPRT’s London Teachers Reading Group recently, we debated one of the original CPR research reviews, Children and their Primary Schools: pupils’ voices (Robinson and Fielding, 2010). Shortly to be published in updated form (see below), this reviewed published research on what pupils and former pupils think of their experiences of primary schooling.

A mixture of teachers, academics and local authority colleagues, we brought different perspectives to bear on the challenge of listening to and respecting children’s voices. We discussed the potential of involving children as co-participant researchers and almost immediately the teachers amongst us were keen to take action. Some considered inviting their classes to take photographs and devise captions to present views on the school environment, or to make collages to represent their experiences of literacy in school or at home. The range of evidence the young people collect could then be used to prompt reflection and dialogue about their experiences and feelings and how to respond to these.

We also found ourselves reconsidering the current role of published research in primary education. Tim, who had been teaching for just two years, voiced the view that keeping up to date in this manner was a professional responsibility, and commented that he’d ‘found it fascinating and invigorating’ to read research reports during his PGCE, ‘not only for the essays as it were, but for teaching’.

Yet since then, in the busy maelstrom of school life, he had received scant encouragement to read and debate his understanding, nor to explore the relationship between theory and practice in his classroom. Although he recognised research can help us as educators to re-examine the implicit theories that undergird everyday practice, he felt pressured ‘to deliver, to assess and to raise standards’. He also reflected a sense of professional isolation, since there were few with whom he could debate his reading.

Many in the group felt the emphasis on the ‘what works’ agenda, which they perceived was almost exclusively focused on raising attainment, sidelines the importance of teachers (and children) being involved in research themselves.  There was also agreement that learning is highly contextualised and thus what ‘works’ in one context may not in others.

The conversation was rather generous and gentle on this first occasion but I am sure over time more robust and critically reflective discussions will emerge as we explore our different perspectives, gain critical distance and interrogate the assumptions, values and beliefs that underpin policy and practice.

What might the consequences be if right across the country such teachers’ reading groups developed? Professional space is surely needed to consider quality research evidence, to read new empirical studies and well-established texts, and to debate the methods used and insights claimed.

Teachers, whilst respecting children’s voices, need to be careful not to dismiss their own views, their own potential as researchers, and the value of connecting to the work of others.

The next meeting of CPRT’s London Teachers Reading Group is on November 13th when Carol Robinson’s report on her updated research review will be discussed. Please contact Greg Frame if you would like to attend. All are welcome.

Carol Robinson’s report is one of five mini-projects in which CPRT has commissioned researchers to revisit and re-assess published research relating to CPRT’s eight priorities. The original 28 CPR research surveys were published in 2007-8. They were then revised for publication in The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys (2010).

For information about the Trust’s current research, click here.

 

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Seize the moment: the future of primary education

One of our Schools Alliance members, Fulbridge Academy, Peterborough, has issued a call to fight the narrow strictures placed on educators by successive governments and pursue a broad, balanced curriculum for all children in line with the findings of the Cambridge Primary Review.

As we approach the General Election in May 2015, watch this inspiring declaration of core educational principles and contribute to the Cambridge Primary Review Trust’s quest to identify what the next government’s policy priorities should be for primary education.

by Robin Alexander

Does education pass the family test?

In 2010, Michael Gove renamed Labour’s Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) the Department for Education (DfE), at a stroke ejecting Ed Balls’s tiresomely winsome munchkins from the Sanctuary Buildings atrium, ending baffled discussion about whether DCSF stood for comedy and science fiction or curtains and soft furnishings, and heralding a gimmick-free return to core business.

Then last week, with the Gove supremacy a receding memory but with Govine policies firmly in place for the duration, the PM announced that from November 2014 every new government policy ‘will be assessed for its impact on the family.’  The PM’s admission that too many existing policies have failed his ‘family test’ must prompt us to ask whether he had in mind the doings of the demoted Gove.  After all, who needs munchkins to tell them that children’s needs and family circumstances are as inextricably the business of schools and hence DfE as are curriculum, tests and standards?

Labour appeared to understand this relationship, up to a point. So the Cambridge Primary Review found widespread support for Sure Start, EYFS, Every Child Matters, the Children’s Act, the Childcare Act, Every Parent Matters, the Children’s Plan and Narrowing the Gap, an impressive procession of ‘joined-up’ initiatives through which the Labour government sought to reduce childhood risk, increase childhood protection, support families and maximise educational opportunities. But CPR also reported growing and often intense opposition to the same government’s apparatus of high stakes testing, higher stakes inspection, performance tables, naming, shaming and closely prescribed pedagogy, all of which also impacted on children and families, with outcomes that remain hotly contested.

In any event, this so-called standards agenda was widely thought to exacerbate what, in her important research survey for CPR, Berry Mayall called the ‘scholarisation’ of childhood: the incursion of schooling and its demands ever more deeply into children’s lives at an ever younger age, leaving little room for a childhood unimpeded by pressures which in many other education systems, including some that perform better than the UK in the international PISA tests, start a year or even two years later than in England. When Britain came bottom of a rather different performance table, UNICEF’s comparative rating of childhood well-being in rich countries, opponents of these tendencies drew the obvious conclusion.

Hence the reaction: Sue Palmer’s best-selling ‘Toxic Childhood’, the Children’s Society Good Childhood Enquiry, and latterly the Save Childhood Movement. And hence, true to the laws of policy physics, the ministerial counter-reaction, from Labour’s ‘these people are peddling out-of-date research’ – a lamely unoriginal and transparently defensive response to unpalatable evidence – to the Coalition’s earthier recourse to personal abuse: ‘Marxists intent on destroying our schools … enemies of promise … bleating bogus pop-psychology’.

Meanwhile, the rich became richer and the poor poorer.

In relation to children and families, then, there is all too often a pretty fundamental policy disconnect. Education policy may give with one hand but take with another; and education policy strives to narrow the gap that economic policy no less assiduously maintains and even widens, not pausing to ask why the gap is there in the first place.  For surely Treasury ministers know as well as their DfE colleagues how closely the maps of income, health, wellbeing and educational achievement coincide; that unequal societies have unequal education systems and unequal educational outcomes; and that equity is a significant factor in other nations’ PISA success – though in all this we need to avoid facile cause-effect claims and we know that fine schools can and do break the mould.  Yet will the ‘family test’ be applied as stringently to the policies of Chancellor Osborne, I wonder, as to those of Education ex-Secretary Gove? Or will the social and educational fallout of austerity be written off as unavoidable collateral damage?

But I suspect that linking the policy dots is not what the new family test is about and each policy will be assessed in isolation. In any case, how many new education policies, if any, will the government introduce in the eight months before the 2015 general election? And at a time when the demography of childhood and parenting is more diverse than ever, how exactly is ‘family’ defined? Isn’t the family test both too muddled and too late?

For its part, CPRT, like CPR before it, is operating more holistically, and we have invited leading researchers to help us. Kate Pickett, co-author of The Spirit Level – that groundbreaking epidemiological study of the causes, manifestations and consequences of inequality – to help us. In one of five new CPRT research surveys, Kate is revisiting her own and CPR’s evidence on equality, equity and disadvantage and examining more recent data in order to re-assess causes, consequences and solutions. Her report will be published early in 2015. In parallel, we have commissioned research updates on children’s voice, development and learning from Carol Robinson and Usha Goswami; and on assessment and teaching from Wynne Harlen and David Hogan. Squaring the schooling/family circle we have embarked, in collaboration with the University of York, on an Educational Endowment Foundation-supported project to develop and test the power of high quality classroom talk to increase engagement and raise learning standards among those of our children who are growing up in the most challenging circumstances.

You’ll find information about all these projects on the CPRT website. We hope and believe they will pass the family test.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

by Robin Alexander

The parts the National Curriculum doesn’t reach

Numbed by the unrelenting horror of this summer’s news from Gaza, Israel, Syria, Iraq and South Sudan, and the heartrending images of children slaughtered, families shattered and ancient communities uprooted, we ask what on earth we in the West can do.

With our historical awareness heightened by the current centenary of the 1914-18 war and what, in terms of the redrawing of national boundaries, it led to, we also recognise that the fate of countries such as these reaches back in part to political decisions taken, like it or not, in our name and as recently as 2003. So collectively we are implicated if not complicit. If, as H.G. Wells warned soon after the 1918 armistice, history is a race between education and catastrophe, we must surely ask at this time why, for so many, that race has been lost; and whether and how education can do better. If ever we needed a reminder that true education must pursue goals and standards that go well beyond the narrow confines of what is tested, here it is.

We know that England’s new national curriculum mandates what DfE deems ‘essential knowledge’ in the ‘core subjects’ (the quotes remind us that these are political formulations rather than moral absolutes) plus, in the interests of ‘breadth and balance’ (ditto) a few other subjects of which much less is said and demanded. But we’ve also been told that the school curriculum is more than the national curriculum. We should therefore take this opportunity to think no less seriously about what is not required than about what is.

One of my keenest memories of the period 2006-9 when the Cambridge Primary Review was collecting and analysing evidence on the condition and future of English primary education is of visiting an urban Lancashire primary school that exemplified England’s ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity. We were there as part of a journey crisscrossing the country to take ‘community soundings‘ – a few days earlier we had been with Roma and Travellers in Cornwall – and having heard from children, teachers, heads, parents and local officials we found ourselves in a small room discussing faith, education and social cohesion with an imam, a rabbi and a priest.

What was illuminating about this encounter, apart from the manifest respect each religious representative had for the other, was the extent of common ground between them. Predating by several years the current DfE consultation on ‘British values‘, our three faith leaders readily identified a moral core for education to which they and we could all subscribe. Significantly, this did not merely look inwards at Britain and to cosy clichés like fair play but unflinchingly outwards to the fractured and despairing world we see daily on our television screens.

Partly in response to soundings such as this, the twelve educational aims proposed by the Cambridge Primary Review included the promotion of respect and reciprocity, interdependence and sustainability, culture and community and local, national and global citizenship; while the Review’s curriculum framework sought to advance the knowledge and understanding with which values in action must always be tempered through domains such as place and time, citizenship and ethics and faith and belief. The last of these was deemed integral to the curriculum because, as our community soundings confirmed, ‘religion is fundamental to this country’s history, culture and language, as well as to the daily lives of many of its inhabitants.’

Yet where is any of this reflected in the national curriculum that England’s schools are about to implement? The exploration of faith and belief (which is not necessarily the same as compulsory RE) remains anomalously outside the walls, even as religion is invoked to justify unspeakable atrocities. World history receives scant treatment, the ethical dimension of science has been removed, culture – however one defines it – gets short shrift and in the primary phase citizenship has disappeared completely.

For the society and world in which our children are growing up is this an adequate preparation? Some of us think not, and this autumn CPRT hopes to join with other organisations to explore curriculum futures which engage more directly and meaningfully with that world, believing that citizenship education is not only more urgent now than ever but that it must be local and global as well as national.

So when schools consider how they should fill the gap between the new national curriculum and the school curriculum they may care to start by reflecting on another gap: between the curriculum as officially prescribed and the condition and needs of the community, society and world in which our children are growing up.

Of course, we speak here of the task for education as a whole, not primary education alone, and we must be mindful of what is appropriate for children at different phases of their development. The vision of a childhood untroubled by adult fears and responsibilities cannot be lightly dismissed, though such a childhood is beyond the reach of millions of the world’s children. Yet consider this, from CPR’s community soundings report: ‘The soundings were pervaded by a sense of deep pessimism about the future, to which children themselves were not immune … Yet where schools engaged children with global and local realities as aspects of their education they were noticeably more upbeat … Pessimism turned to hope when witnesses felt they had the power to act.’

So in the global race between education and catastrophe what exactly should England’s primary teachers do and what should England’s primary children learn? The question is entirely open: please respond.

  • A detailed discussion, informed by extensive evidence, of the wider purposes of primary education and what these imply for the curriculum appears in ‘Children, their World, their Education: final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review‘, chapters 12 and 14.
  • To contribute to the DfE consultation on promoting British values in independent schools, academies and free schools, which closes on the 18 August, click here.
  • Information about CPRT’s coming global citizenship work with other organisations will be posted shortly.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

 

by Robin Alexander

Two worlds of education: lessons from America

‘Education in two worlds’ is the blog of Gene Glass, a leading commentator on American education in the era of marketisation, charter schools, common core standards, high stakes testing and teacher employment practices redolent of 1860s England and ‘payment by results’.

Far from being remote from the situation here in the UK, what Glass, Berliner, Ravitch and others portray as a politically and commercially orchestrated assault on American public schooling in the name of parental choice and improved standards uses strategies that the UK government has consciously imported, adapted or endorsed. This policy cloning is most conspicuous in the treatment of international evidence, the national curriculum, academies, teacher education and testing. For in campaigns educational as well as military, where America goes Britain tends to follow, in the process transferring the language of the battlefield to the classroom.

In their brilliant book 50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools, Berliner and Glass muster research evidence that deconstructs the ‘myths, hoaxes and outright lies’ through which, in their view, US policymakers and their multinational and fundamentalist backers have sought to discredit mainstream schooling and turn public service into private profit. With many of these – especially the ‘grand myth’ of a state schooling system which in comparison with its PISA competitors is in terminal decline – England is only too familiar.

The trouble is, each incoming UK government uses the same terminal decline claim to dismiss the sweeping and often disruptive ‘reforms’ of its predecessor and impose its own, which is tantamount to an admission either that the reforms don’t work or that the system isn’t broken after all and the exercise has more to do with vanity and machismo than progress. Remember Michael Gove, hard on the heels of Labour’s ‘highest standards ever’ national strategies: ‘literacy, down; numeracy, down; science, down; fail, fail, fail!’

1992, 1997, 2010 … We’ve been there so many times that as we approach the 2015 general election party leaders may well find themselves rubbishing their own policies. Let’s hope so.

Hence ‘two worlds’: the world of carefully assembled evidence and educated deliberation, of schooling as it is and could be, and the shallow, hectic and self-regarding world of political rhetoric, spin, myth and scapegoating; a world in which evidence is treated not even-handedly but opportunistically and selectively, and on that basis serves not to shape, test and improve policy but post hoc to validate it; a world in which myths and policies are endlessly recycled and in which, consequently, there’s much change but little real progress. It matters not that in opposition our leaders promise, as they invariably do, a more principled approach. Once in power, just as invariably, they revert.

One strand of the Cambridge Primary Review’s final report that gained less attention than it deserved was its exposure of these tendencies in English primary education. In the course of a wider analysis of the educational policy process the report contrasted the necessary discourse of evidence and deliberation with the actual discourses of dichotomy, derision and myth, and its penultimate chapter demolished no fewer than 14 claims about educational standards that were central to government policy between 1997 and 2010.

So if you fancy a break from the usual holiday reading, try the books below and the blogs of Glass or Ravitch – or indeed Children, their World, their Education, chapters 2, 3 and 23.

There’ll be more on these matters in the autumn and in the run-up to the 2015 election, starting with two abiding ‘grand myths’ about English primary education.

Four for the bookshelf of seekers after educational truth:

  • Berliner, D.C., Glass, G.V. and associates (2014) 50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America’s Schools: the real crisis in education, Teachers College Press.
  • Ravitch, D. (2013) Reign of Error: the hoax of the privatisation movement and the danger to America’s public schools, Knopf.
  • Sahlberg, P. (2010) Finnish Lessons: what can the world learn from educational change in Finland? Teachers College Press.

plus, of course –

  • Alexander, R.J. (ed) (2010) Children, their World, their Education: final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review, Routledge.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

 

by Robin Alexander

From the playing fields of Eton

Tony Little, head of Eton, has intervened in the education debate with claims that are more frequently heard in maintained schools and CPR reports: the exam system is no longer fit for purpose; copying Singapore and Shanghai is not the way to raise standards; there’s more to education than league tables; children need a broad rich curriculum as well as the basics …

No less interesting is DfE’s dismissive response: ‘We make no apology for holding schools to account for the results their pupils achieve in national tests and public examinations. Parents deserve to know that their children are receiving the very best possible teaching.’

Sounds familiar? Yes indeed: here’s DfE’s predecessor, DCSF, responding to one of CPR’s interim reports in 2008: ‘We make no apology for our focus on school standards. We want every child to achieve to the best of their abilities, succeed and be happy, and we know that parents and teachers want that too. The idea that children are over tested is not a view that the government accepts.’

Different government, same script, same scriptwriter, same populist ploy of pitting professionals against parents, same refusal to debate the issues that matter. See ‘Two worlds of education’. QED.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

Contact

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