The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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Marvellous teachers

As a head I want to do all that I can to enable a happy school and ensure that our children have the time of their lives, love learning, and are inspired and aspirational.

I rely on our teachers to make this happen. Recently I have found myself focusing on nurturing their  wellbeing and asking how we enable teachers, as well as pupils, to ‘love learning, be inspired and aspirational’? How can we get the pride and passion back into the profession and use it to have a positive impact on teacher recruitment and retention? One of the aims of CPRT, wellbeing, can help here. Lately we have been prioritising this aim to help us to consider how to re-engage our learning communities with the benefits of a broad and rich curriculum.

Eighteen months ago Seabridge became the lead school for the Keele and North Staffordshire Primary SCITT (KNSPS) and as part of our recruitment drive we’ve been creating an advertisement  with our children focusing on what makes a ‘marvellous’ teacher. We have used Neil Baldwin (Nello), who comes from Newcastle under Lyme, and is the subject of a BBC award winning film Marvellous as our inspiration. His story is inspiring and the film is a great tonic.

In its final report, the Cambridge Primary Review recounted (pp 147-50) what children told the review team they looked for from their teachers. Similarly, and inspired by Neil Baldwin, our children have come up with their own versions of the ‘marvellous’ teacher.  When they think of Baldwin they speak of optimism and a ‘can do’ attitude. The staff at Seabridge have been moved by our children’s expectations of the profession. These have made us pause and take a moment to consider not only what makes for a marvellous teacher, but through the endeavours of such teachers what makes for a marvellous curriculum.

On reflection, and this should not be a surprise, Neil’s story and our children’s hopes have many connections with the aspirations of CPR and CPRT for an effective and purposeful primary education. The CPR/CPRT aim of wellbeing is about attending

… to children’s capabilities, needs, hopes and anxieties … and promoting their mental, emotional and physical wellbeing and welfare … Caring for children’s wellbeing is about inducting them into a life where they will be wholeheartedly engaged in all kinds of worthwhile activities and relationships, defined generously rather than narrowly. It is about maximising children’s learning potential through good teaching and the proper application of evidence about how children develop and learn and how teachers most effectively teach … It requires us to attend to children’s future fulfilment as well as their present needs and capabilities. Wellbeing thus defined is both a precondition and an outcome of successful primary education.

As a CPRT Alliance School, we have developed links with Keele University and KNSPS. This has led to a series of research breakfasts for senior leaders. Both KNSPS and the research breakfasts have focused on the wellbeing of staff and children alike through a broad and balanced curriculum.The research breakfasts provide much needed time to sit and think, discuss and reflect. They have  helped to rekindle my passion and confirm why I love teaching so much. At each breakfast we consider a research paper from CPRT.  Our most recent event focused on the curriculum and assessment, with a discussion of Wynne Harlen’s CPRT research report  on assessment, standards and quality of learning.

We considered how best to prioritise the time to deepen our subject expertise across the entire curriculum. Subject expertise has been recognised as an essential ingredient in being a good teacher by evidence from CPR and many other sources. (Children themselves told the Cambridge Primary Review team that ‘good teachers know a lot about their subject’). We agreed that teachers need time for reflective practice and opportunities to discuss pedagogy and share ideas practice as without this they cannot build professional resilience. The ‘culture of compliance’ criticised in the CPR final report (pp 495-6) has, for many, stripped away their informed creativity, so why don’t we apply to teachers those CPR-evidenced principles that we know are so very enabling for our children?

To achieve this we must invest time and energy in nurturing the well-being of our teachers, so that they can continually develop their professional knowledge and expertise across a curriculum informed by disciplined creativity, one that is broad and balanced while also mindful of teachers own wellbeing.

At Seabridge we have been focusing on fine tuning core subject planning and delivery and refining our marking and feedback to allow us to deliver a curriculum which is more relevant and engaging. We have been busy prioritising and taking the opportunity to highlight the aims and purposes for each subject in order to ensure we have a curriculum which pursues key strands rather than merely a busy curriculum ‘full of stuff’.

This won’t be a quick fix, but the evidence of CPR/CPRT helps us to base our work on informed evidence rather than simply a sense of what works.

After so many years of compliance teachers need to know that it’s acceptable to draw on their passion and pedagogic repertoire, not just the ring binder. Using the aims and principles of CPR and CPRT has encouraged us to move forward in our thinking. It has given us the language to use in order to enable and engage teachers, explore CPR aims such as pupil wellbeing, engagement, empowerment and exciting the imagination.

For school leaders, a culture of engagement and autonomy is needed alongside a level of trust based on professional dialogue. If we don’t allow time for this to happen our teachers might as well be programmed robots.  We need to invest the time to build relationships between teachers, teachers and children, teachers and leaders and teachers and the curriculum: everyone needs to feel valued and relationships in a school are paramount if we want to foster a climate of trust. If we don’t get this right nothing will flourish.  Children, curriculum and teachers all need nourishment.

Our research breakfasts give leaders in our locality the time and space for thinking , while reading and discussing CPR/CPRT evidence gives us collective energy and a license to explore, and being informed deepens our sense of well-being.  If our teachers to grow and become those marvellous teachers that our children deserve they need such opportunities, living their conviction to support and justify a rich curriculum which provides the breadth and balance, inspiration and thirst for lifelong learning that our children need.

In this, school leaders must be the role models. Notwithstanding OFSTED grade descriptors on outstanding effectiveness of leadership and management, take heart from how one of our children put it: ‘a child’s mind only explores how far a teacher allows it!’ This is very close indeed to that famous Cambridge Primary Review quote (final report, p 296): ‘Pupils will not learn to think for themselves if their teachers are expected merely to do as they are told.’

So come on leaders, let us lead with optimism and imagination to ensure our teachers have time to grow and flourish, develop their subject knowledge and cultivate their passion. We know that a ‘one size fits all’ approach doesn’t deliver what children need. At Seabridge we started by making time for research and professional dialogue between teachers and school leaders, and made their wellbeing a priority in the school development plan. Teachers are the essential ingredient for ensuring our children succeed. Mind you, if Neil Baldwin has anything to do with it our school will have no teachers left! He has already signed one of our teachers up to play in his football team.

Sandra Mitchell is headteacher of Seabridge Primary School, Newcastle under Lyme, and a member of CPRT’s Schools Alliance. Seabridge Primary School is within CPRT’s West Midlands network. If you would like to support the development of the region’s activities please contact the coordinator, Branwen Bingle.

 

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Reflections from an NQT: surviving or thriving?

Last June, Sadie posted about training for primary teaching and looked forward to becoming an NQT. Here’s the sequel.

Rewind to Sunday 31st August and you would have found me sitting on my sofa staring down the barrel of my first year as a teacher, wondering what the new academic term would bring. My classroom was beautifully decorated, I had planned my first few weeks of teaching and I was armed with plenty of ‘back to school’ activities to get to know my new class. Adrenaline had kicked in and I was looking forward to making a difference to the children of the inner-city academy I had chosen for my first teaching role. I felt well-rested, eager and raring to go.

Flash forward to present day: I’ve survived my first term as an NQT and the metaphorical onion has revealed its layers, the reality of teaching has become apparent and during the past four months I have experienced a rollercoaster of emotions. It has been exhilarating, exhausting and at times overwhelming.

Initially, I felt as though I was treading water, simply keeping afloat. For the first time in a long time I felt insecure and out of my depth, I continually questioned everything I was doing. It quickly became clear that teacher training does not fully prepare you for the challenges encountered during your first post as a fully-fledged teacher. It is an immense learning curve. I learnt more in those first few weeks than I had in my entire training year. Move over PGCE, welcome to the world of full-time teaching.

The deprived school in East London was a stark contrast to the primaries in Cornwall and Devon where I had completed my training. I was dealing with a high proportion of children with English as an Additional Language (EAL) and over half of my class were considered to have Special Educational Needs (SEN). The high volume of SEN and EAL pupils forced me to adapt my teaching and think outside the box. Thankfully, this is where pedagogy came into play and all those research papers I scrutinised during my PGCE began to form the basis of my teaching across this diverse range of pupils.

To make matters worse, I was also tackling extreme behaviour issues and became aware early on that embedding consistent behaviour strategies in the day-to-day routine was key to ensuring Sarah wouldn’t run out of the classroom when she was feeling frustrated or that Fred wouldn’t lash out at other children when he couldn’t keep his temper under control.

Combine all this with the announcement that two executive heads were parachuting in due to the secondary’s ‘catastrophic GCSE results’, the ensuing resignation of the primary head teacher, and you’ve got all the ingredients for a pretty tough start to an NQT year, but I’ve not let it put me off… yet.

My first term was a blur of planning, marking, getting to grips with behaviour management strategies, learning about my pupils, getting to know colleagues and spending more time than expected within the four walls of the classroom. My partner forgot what I looked like and when I did surface at home late into the evening I spent a lot of time drinking coffee, marking, planning, completing paperwork and preparing resources, not to mention compiling evidence towards to the teaching standards for my NQT file and striving to meet weekly targets set by my NQT mentor.

As a full time primary teacher, I expected to teach 80 percent of my 30-hour timetabled week, with only 10 percent of time allocated to completing NQT tasks, observations, reflections and training, and a further 10 percent allocated to the two remaining, yet fundamental, aspects of the role: marking and planning. An incredible burden is placed on this 10 percent and, no matter how hard I tried, I found it impossible to keep up – leaving all outstanding tasks to be completed in my own time.

Those who know me well would describe me as incredibly organised and highly efficient, qualities I pride myself on. Yet I found myself struggling to get everything done – there simply wasn’t enough time in the day. I led a miserable existence for those first seven weeks. I was working 14-16 hour days on a regular basis, which was completely unsustainable of course. Inevitably, I became ill and despite the fear of falling even further behind I took a sick day. Physically and mentally exhausted, I began to question whether I had made the right decision by pursuing a career in teaching. I hate to admit it, but for the first time I had serious doubts about my future within this new profession.

Thankfully after half term something clicked. I realised that I was trying to be a perfectionist – working too hard, ticking every box, exceeding expectations and trying to make every lesson amazing. I took some time to reflect on my teaching and acknowledged that, in education, resilience is a daily necessity. I wanted to be the perfect teacher, but teaching is a lifetime’s craft. I will never perfect it, nor will I ever complete my ‘to do’ list. Once I accepted this, I began to master the art of resilience. Although I still work on Sundays and am yet to fully establish the elusive work-life balance, I’m working on it. I’ve begun to know when to stop, when to let go and when to switch off, I’ve started to look after myself and feel less guilty about meeting friends, pursuing hobbies or having an evening off.

My teaching philosophies and principles are steeped in the work of the Cambridge Primary Review and the Cambridge Primary Review Trust and I have always endeavored to demonstrate these in my day-to-day practice, but when you’re bogged down by bureaucracy it’s easy to forget about the great intentions and aspirations you had at the start of the year.

My first term of teaching has provided so many challenges that I’ve inadvertently discovered so much more about myself. I have become less self-critical, more forgiving of my own mistakes. Whereas I was once left feeling battered and bruised by observation pressures, scrutiny and the persistent need to develop subject knowledge across the curriculum, I now focus on the positives; recognising my own successes, reflecting on mistakes, identifying areas for improvement and developing a reassuring support network. My colleagues and fellow NQTs have been an invaluable source of support through the highs and lows, both in school and online.

Recently, when re-reading the CPR final report, I had my own light-bulb moment (the kind that I love seeing in the children so much). I remembered precisely why I became a teacher in the first place: to make a difference. The key aims and priorities outlined by CPR and CPRT reminded me that being a teacher isn’t simply about teaching the curriculum; it really is about so much more.

I strive for this kind of principled approach not only to the curriculum, but also the whole experience that I offer children in my care. At times I have been a therapist, a mediator, a comedian, a disciplinarian, a motivator, a guardian and a source of comfort. I use the CPRT aims as aspirational tools to remind me what’s important – over and above government priorities. The CPR final report  provides the evidence to remind us that we can (and must!) trust ourselves as professionals to provide for pupils’ development and learning. Great teaching doesn’t have to be complicated, it’s about getting the simple things right.

Despite all its trials and tribulations, teaching truly is one of the most rewarding and fulfilling careers there are and at the beginning of the year I promised myself I would remember this. It’s not always easy to cultivate a positive outlook, especially in the depths of a dark and gloomy January, but it really does make a difference and I feel so much better for it. It reflects in my teaching too. If I’m tired the kids won’t get the best from me. I need to look after myself. We all do. So, once I’ve finished this blog you’ll find me on my sofa relaxing and enjoying the last few moments of the Christmas break, before the New Year – and the new term – begins.

Having completed her PGCE, Sadie Phillips is teaching at a primary school in London. Read her previous CPRT blog and follow her at @SadiePhillips.

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Digital literacy is more than coding

It is just over a year since the introduction of computing as a named subject within England’s National Curriculum. While research exploring schools’ experience of this change will no doubt be forthcoming, it seems timely to reflect on opportunities that may be missed through this re-working of technology in the curriculum.

Like others I was frustrated by the idea of children in Key Stage 2 being taught to create PowerPoints (an example often used to deride the old ICT curriculum) when many were already using digital technology in far more sophisticated ways outside school. Like others I’m excited by the work being done to support children to code, demystifying skills that had seemed the preserve of the few and equipping them to engage in all kinds of creative and exploratory activities. What concerns me though is that the enthusiasm for programming  – and the training, expenditure and resources associated with it –  may detract from issues and questions that are equally or perhaps even more important in a digital age.

I take a broad look at such issues and questions in a report commissioned by the Cambridge Primary Review Trust which will be published in the new year: The Digital Age and its Implications for Learning and Teaching in the Primary School.  Part 1 of the report summarises research related to how we use digital technology in everyday life, including how it is used by children, and identifies challenges and opportunities facing primary education. Recognising that children’s experiences are often uneven, it proposes that we need to do far more than equip children with skills or knowledge, whether these are the ‘matters, skills and processes’ associated with the computing curriculum or with frameworks such as Go On UK’s Basic Digital Skills Framework. The report proposes that we need to consider cultural, social, creative, ethical, and civic questions and explore technology use in relation to fundamental debates about how we see education and the role of schools. This involves thinking about technology in relation to things that have long been priorities in many primary schools and indeed the Cambridge Primary Review Trust: pedagogy, social justice, relationships, creativity, community.

Part 2 explores how research is shaping ideas about how schools respond to these challenges and opportunities, while Part 3 proposes implications for policy-makers and education leaders, and recommendations for schools and teachers.  Research is considered in terms of five broad ‘traditions’ representing different perspectives on how schools might take account of the digital age. These traditions include: technology across the curriculum; 21st century skills; computer science; participation, learning and digital media; and new literacies. The point here is that different kinds of research (often involving different communities of educationalists and researchers) are generating different kinds of insights and there is a need to explore how these different traditions, whose aims are sometimes complementary and sometimes not, intersect.

There isn’t space here to explore all five traditions discussed in my review. However, considering the contribution of one of these – new literacies – illustrates some ways in which our response to the digital age needs to go beyond the computing curriculum as specifed by DfE.

Literacy in everyday life is commonly understood to be changing rapidly and researchers in the field of new literacies are helping to describe these changes and explore implications for literacy in schools.  More than ever, people produce as well as access texts, negotiating their lives online. These literacies are multimodal, incorporating images, moving images and hyperlinks, for example, and increasingly mobile as people keep in touch with others and search for information on the move. And then of course there are all the associated concerns about personal and financial security, state supervision and use of social media by sexual predators and terrorist groups. Thinking about how technology intersects with social, cultural, political and economic activity has never been more pressing.  And in the light of this, never has it been more important for children to be able to navigate digital resources creatively and critically, to consider how to put them to use, and review what others’ uses mean for what they might or are able to do.

Creative, cultural, critical dimensions are also relevant to lots of the activities taking place during computing lessons. In many schools children are using programs like Scratch and Kodu to create animations and games. This process involves thinking about aesthetics, coherence and how players or viewers will interact with what they produce. These are things that researchers and practitioners in the field of new literacies have long argued should be part of literacy provision. An expanded literacy curriculum would recognise the wide range of media that children use and encounter, and the diverse literacy practices in which they do and could engage in their current and future lives.

And yet English in the national curriculum includes no explicit references to digital media at all. Schools are of course free to interpret programmes of study as they choose and many integrate film, computer games, social media and so on in innovative ways, and of course the ‘digital literacy’ element of computing goes some way to addressing these issues. However, as I explore with Becky Parry and Guy Merchant in a new book  Literacy, Media, Technology: past, present, future (Bloomsbury, forthcoming) much of this is hindered by a curriculum, accountability framework and testing arrangements that do not appear to value the mobile, multimodal literacies that are so common in everyday life.

So I applaud the new emphasis on programming but also argue that, in ensuring that all can draw on digital technologies in ways that are personally fulfilling and economically, socially and politically empowering, we need to consider how provision for digital technologies relates to the values and aspirations that underpin our wider vision for children’s learning across and beyond the curriculum.  As Neil Selwyn and Kerry Facer argued in The Politics of Education and Technology technology – like everything else in education – is never neutral.

Professor Cathy Burnett leads the Language and Literacy Education Research Group at  Sheffield Hallam University. Her CPRT research report The Digital Age and its Implications for Learning and Teaching in the Primary School will be published early next term.

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Rubbish RE?

Under the heading of ‘Rubbish RE’, the National Association of Teachers of Religious Education (NATRE) has listed ten pitfalls of RE teaching:

Repetition; boredom; stereotypes flourishing; no time, no reflection; dissipating RE in cross-curricular work; all religions presented as the same; covert indoctrination; misinformation; information to the point of invisibility; specialism (don’t make me laugh).

The final comment is NATRE’s, not mine. A lot of the ‘rubbish RE’ characterised above illustrates the ‘muddled discourse about subjects, knowledge and skills’ described in the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review (pp 245-9), and other Review concerns are carried forward into recent research reports from the Cambridge Primary Review Trust. Prejudice and inequality leading to stereotyping are discussed in Kate Pickett and Laura Vanderbloemen’s Mind the Gap; this topic will also be picked up by Michael Jopling and Sharon Vincent in their report on vulnerable children, which will be published in the New Year.

Teachers’ curriculum knowledge is the final item in the NATRE list. This too is a recurrent CPR/CPRT preoccupation (CPR final report, pp 431-4), while in her recent CPRT blog Squirrel on acid  Stephanie Northen commented:

Most teachers, in fact most humans, would struggle to become expert enough to teach English, maths and science – never mind French, computing, history, geography, art, music, RE, PE … This is especially so given that good teaching requires so much more than knowledge.

A recent report by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Religious Education entitled RE: The Truth Unmasked presents some striking figures about RE in the primary classroom. For instance: only 44 per cent of pupils are taught RE by their class teacher and 25 per cent are taught RE by a teaching assistant during their class teacher’s PPA time. Although, as the report notes, RE being taught by an HLTA does not generally affect the performance of pupils, it does underline the perceived low status of RE within schools. In as far as too often it impacts on the quality of teaching, this over-sharp status differentiation was something that the CPR final report argued against (p 505):

Children have a right to a curriculum which is consistently well taught regardless of the perceived significance of its various elements or the amount of time devoted to them.

This is echoed in the fourth of CPRT’s eight priorities:

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.

An initial teacher educator who provided evidence to the All Party RE Group noted that a ‘lack of confidence in RE was the main reason why so many teachers avoided teaching it’. This lack of confidence first took root during teacher training’ (para. 2.8). Linda Whitworth of Middlesex University is reported (p 10) as noting that approximately 50 per cent of her students had concerns about teaching RE. These concerns included fear of causing offence, not being accurate about religions, and the difficulty of managing their own beliefs and attitudes in a multicultural classroom.

Whitword’s comments are paralleled by NATRE’s 2013 report which found that 24.4 per cent of trainee teachers had no training to deliver RE and 48.5 per cent received less than three hours across their programme. RE: The Truth Unmasked went further, finding that even RE leaders in primary schools lacked training in the discipline with 67 per cent of them lacking degree qualifications including religious studies or theology and 37 per cent holding no RE qualification at all. As CPR’s final report noted:

For as long as initial teacher training is directed [solely] at the role of the generalist class teacher, it will be hard pressed to provide what is required, especially on the one-year PGCE route.

Like any other subject, RE requires appropriate professional knowledge. Within this subject, as NATRE notes, there is no room for misinformation. RE gives rise to questions requiring accurate answers, and a lack of appropriate education may warp pupils’ perceptions of other faiths, beliefs and religious practices.

The place of RE in the curriculum was discussed at length in CPR’s final report. Evidence was provided by, among many others, John Hall, Dean of Westminister and former Chief Education Officer of the Church of England Education Division. He said (p233):

Religious Education in any faith-based school is not simply a subject making up a proportion of the taught curriculum. It pervades the whole life of the school (p 233)

While the submission from Bradford’s SACRE submission added (p 233):

[RE] …deals with some of the world’s most significant and ancient teachings and literatures and is, at its best, a challenging subject area.

What needs emphasis here is ‘at its best.’ When we strip down the curriculum stance of CPR and CPRT to its core value, it calls for not only religious education but the primary curriculum as a whole to be at its best.

A different perspective, also presented as evidence to CPR, comes from the British Humanist Association (BHA). BHA (p 234)

accepted the cultural case for teaching about religion but within a framework of even-handed and sympathetic exploration of belief, morality and worldviews from both religious and non-religious perspectives.

This view which is close to the wise words of Katy (age 7) in the prospectus of St Leonard’s C of E Primary School in Exeter – a member of CPRT’s Schools Alliance.  Of RE at her school Katy says:

Everyone is included. It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in God and Jesus.

In line with all this, CPR’s final report argued (p 268), though with careful qualifications, that faith and belief should be one of the eight domains of a genuinely broad and balanced curriculum:

On the question of religious education, we take the view that religion is so fundamental to this country’s history, culture and language, as well as to the daily lives of many of its inhabitants, that it must remain within the curriculum, even though some Review witnesses argued that it should be removed on the grounds that England is a predominantly secular society or that religious belief is for the family rather than the school. However, while denominational schools see their mission as the advancement of particular religious beliefs and moral codes, non-denominational schools should remain essentially secular, teaching about religion with respect and understanding, but not attempting to inculcate or convert. Further, other beliefs, including those about the validity of religion itself, should also be explored. This approach helps us to resolve the quandary of moral education, for in teaching about a religion its ethical elements can be handled with the same sympathetic objectivity as we commend for the treatment of its beliefs and rituals.

CPR has gone out on a limb here, for an Opinium survey of 2013 religious education was rated the ‘least beneficial subject’. Almost certainly, this says more about the quality of RE teaching than the value of RE as such. RE is a valuable asset in the primary curriculum; introducing students to diversity and multiculturalism. It explores ethical issues and allows children to engage in difficult conversations in a safe and constructive environment. It allows for the breaking down of social, economic and cultural barriers and helps children to grow into confident citizens of a global community.

Matt Coward is Administrator of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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Life after levels

Since September 2015, national curriculum levels are no longer being used for statutory assessments in schools in England. Schools are now required to develop new approaches to their own in-school assessment and this provides welcome opportunities for evolving purposeful assessment. But for many schools, gearing up for life after levels involves a step change in approach, and the challenges should not be underestimated.

The final report of the Commission on Assessment without Levels (September 2015)  reminds us of the principles and purposes of assessment: (i) in-school formative assessment, (ii) in-school summative assessment and (iii) nationally standardised summative assessment. The report provides helpful guidance on writing school assessment policies, and raises important questions for teachers and school leaders when they consider data collection and reporting – what uses the assessments are intended to support, the quality of the assessment information, the frequency for collecting and reporting, and the time required to record the information – noting that much of teachers’ time that could be better spent in classrooms is unnecessarily taken up with data management systems. I am sure we could all agree with that.

Of course for many schools, meaningful assessment has been a priority for a long time. Iain Erskine, principal at Fulbridge Academy, a CPRT alliance school, provided some detail on their approaches to assessment in his February blog  and vice principal, Ben Erskine, has expanded on this for their approach to science:

Children pursue and investigate projects each term that are linked to the topic theme they are studying. Each project has realistic and creative links that allow for opportunities to apply their learning in a real sense, learn the science involved, use their enquiry skills, as well as having some kind of design and technology element. At Fulbridge we teach science and technology as one lesson twice a week. Each term has either a biology, chemistry or physics focus and within this focus, the scientific enquiry and the design and technology curriculum areas are taught. Children are then assessed each term against the areas of science (and technology) that has been covered and their confident use of scientific and technical language.

The approach at Fulbridge chimes with the Nuffield Foundation’s Developing policy, principles and practice in primary school science assessment report in 2012, which was led by Professor Wynne Harlen and sets out a proposed framework for the assessment of science in primary schools. The framework (illustrated as a pyramid model on page 21) describes how evidence of pupils’ attainment should be collected, recorded, communicated and used. The report details how assessment data can be optimised for different uses and outlines the support needed to implement the procedures.

So what could this look like in practice? A follow-on initiative, the Teacher Assessment in Primary Science (TAPS) project is taking place from 2013 – 2016. TAPS is funded by the Primary Science Teaching Trust (PSTT) and is based at Bath Spa University, which co-hosts CPRT’s south-west regional network. This initiative has developed the pyramid model for the flow of assessment information through a school and operationalised it into a whole school self-evaluation tool to support schools in identifying strengths and weaknesses in their assessment systems, and to provide an exemplified model of good practice.

Sarah Earle, TAPS project lead, comments:

Schools working with the TAPS team have stepped back from tracking systems to look at what would make a difference to children’s learning. They have explored a wide range of ways to elicit, focus and record children’s ideas to develop more valid assessments, and have taken part in moderating discussions to support reliability of teacher assessment. These discussions need to continue to support a shared understanding across the school, with both a new curriculum and new assessment guidance – in the form of the interim teacher assessment framework for 2015-16 at the end of Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2. Most subject leaders are endeavouring to maintain a focus on working scientifically and on assessment for learning rather than being driven by tracking systems.

Sarah shared some case studies from this project in an article ‘An exploration of whole-school assessment systems’ published in the January/February edition of Primary Science. The case studies described different approaches to assessment but identified a shared number of features of good practice: assessment is embedded in the planning process; children are encouraged to take responsibility for their own learning; assessment is ongoing; and there is a clear understanding of ‘what good science looks like’ across the school.

For example, a key focus for assessment at Northbury Primary School is the elicitation of children’s ideas. Units of work are in outline form, each beginning and ending with a thought shower which allows both children and teachers to see progress at the end of the unit, but perhaps more importantly this gives the teacher a starting point for planning. Detailed plans are not completed in advance which allows lessons to take into account initial questions raised by the children and their starting points. This is particularly important as pupil mobility is high.

Assistant Northbury headteacher and science co-ordinator, Kulvinder Johal, comments:

The TAPS pyramid model has been useful from its inception. The first draft, which I was privy too, helped me to gauge what we were doing well and where our gaps were. The gaps will vary from school to school as we are all strong in different areas. Our gap was in identifying next steps in learning. Coupled with some of the key messages from the Ofsted Maintaining curiosity: science education in schools 2013 report , I realised we needed to set science targets for our pupils, much as we did and do in literacy and numeracy. Now our pupils have science targets that they work towards and that they assess themselves against. Having made progress in this area, we then returned to the TAPS pyramid to see where our focus should be and we realised we needed to do more moderating of science work and so we are beginning to address this issue. The TAPS pyramid leads us to better practice, improvements and new challenges, and is a really useful working document.

Shaw CE Primary School has also used the TAPS pyramid model as a focus for improving their approach to assessment as Carol Sampey, Deputy Head and Fellow of the PSTT, notes:

It has been good to be one of the 12 schools who have worked together with Bath Spa to help develop this tool. In my school, we have discussed what good assessment for learning looks like and last year we used the TAPS pyramid as a generic teaching and learning tool when doing lesson observations. Our view was that if teachers were aware of and then incorporating the ongoing formative assessment strategies in all of their teaching, learning would improve across the board.  Teachers found this helpful and these strategies became a focus of performance management last year. Practice has improved as a result. It has also been helpful in making our teachers more aware of how to involve the pupils in self – assessment. A next step is to begin to use the TAPS pyramid as a resource tool – to try out focus assessment tasks and to look at what other schools have been doing. I am also going to introduce the TAPS pyramid to other schools in our science cluster.

This is an encouraging picture, and for these schools there certainly is life after levels, and not just for science. Since the TAPS pyramid is based on good practice in formative assessment, then many of the examples, such as peer assessment, are relevant across the primary curriculum. The structure could be used for any system of teacher assessment where validity is supported by using a range of information from the classroom and reliability is supported by moderating discussions.

There will be many different approaches to assessment by primary schools across the country in making the most of the opportunities presented by the removal of levels. Sharing ideas, plans and best practice at this time is particularly helpful, and I invite you to share these through CPRT and elsewhere.

Marianne Cutler is Co-Director of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust and Director of Curriculum Innovation at the Association for Science Education.

Assessment reform is one of CPRT’s eight priorities.  CPRT encourages approaches to assessment ‘that enhance learning as well as test it, that support rather than distort the curriculum and that pursue standards and quality in all areas of learning, not just the core subjects.’

See also CPRT’s research report and briefing Assessment, Standards and Quality of Learning in Primary Education by Wynne Harlen (2014)

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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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Primary science: the poor relation?

We are reminded by Ofsted of the qualities of an effective science education in their 2013 report Maintaining Curiosity, where the best science teaching observed

  • was driven by determined subject leadership that put scientific enquiry at the heart of science teaching and coupled it with substantial expertise in how pupils learn science
  • set out to sustain pupils’ natural curiosity, so that they were eager to learn the subject content as well as develop the necessary investigative skills
  • was informed by accurate and timely assessment of how well pupils were developing their understanding of science concepts, and their skills in analysis and interpretation so that teaching could respond to and extend pupils’ learning.

But regrettably not all primary schools, and probably not even the majority, are offering this quality of experience to their children regularly. The reasons are well documented in the Wellcome Trust’s 2014 report Primary Science: is it missing out?, and the CBI’s Tomorrow’s World: inspiring primary scientists in 2015. At the heart of this lie issues of leadership and accountability. Taking the pressure off science by the removal of statutory tests at the end of primary education in England in 2009 was a move generally welcomed by the science community to address concerns that science teaching had become defined and restricted by those tests. But it resulted in leaders taking broadly two different approaches to science.

Some enthusiastically embraced the new opportunities and freedom to enrich their pupils’ science experience, particularly through practical, enquiry-led teaching.

Others – often those in leadership positions – disappointingly perceived science as less important than the other core subjects of English and mathematics; a tendency noted in the Cambridge Primary Review’s final report. This situation continues today in many schools. In over half the schools visited in Ofsted’s 2013 review, the leaders ‘no longer saw science as a priority’ and its status has declined visibly. In those schools, science has become the poor relation.

This results in an all too familiar picture in these schools: a lack of planning for learning, unclear ideas about what achievement looks like that can be shared and understood by children, inadequate monitoring of the quality of science teaching and a lack of time and resources allocated to it, and little commitment to subject-focused professional development.

Whilst whole school priorities as a focus for professional development are important, research in 2014 by the Centre for the Use of Research and Evidence in Education indicates that pupils are more likely to benefit from subject focused professional development because it changes teachers’ practices by making links between professional learning and pupil learning explicit. This is particularly relevant to primary science where teachers frequently report that they lack confidence in their science subject knowledge to be able to provide their children with the inspirational experience that they seek. The number of primary teachers who may describe themselves in this way is potentially very large – estimates from the Campaign for Science and Engineering in 2015 indicate that only 5% of primary teachers have a science related degree – and for these teachers (in post and in initial teacher education), opportunities to engage with subject-focused professional development will be particularly important and valued. This is especially significant while the new curriculum in England is being implemented, with its increased emphasis on working scientifically, and on different types of enquiry with which teachers are not yet familiar.

This is not a time to be complacent. Putting efforts into planning an effective, rich and actively engaging primary science curriculum that embraces working scientifically – with opportunities to develop, use and apply children’s mathematical and literacy knowledge and skills at its core – will pay dividends. Research by King’s College London’s Aspires project reported in 2013 that by the time young people reach secondary school, they may already have disengaged with science.

But let’s not forget that science is in a strong position, with a vibrant community that offers a vast range of opportunities for leaders and teachers to take charge of their own professional learning journey and to make the most of primary science in their schools. More than any other subject, science has supporters in industry, charitable foundations and learned societies, all keen to help teachers to make primary science a stimulating and rewarding experience for all children. These opportunities include enrichment initiatives from the Royal Society partnership grants and the British Science Association, membership of the Association for Science Education (ASE), professional development through the National Science Learning Network, recognition of one’s own achievements through Chartered Science Teacher (CSciTeach) or the Primary Science Teacher Awards, and the achievements of your school through Primary Science Quality Mark (PSQM).

Taking advantage of these opportunities, there are numerous examples of inspirational science taking place across the country, commonly supported and championed by strong and insightful leaders who recognise the value of reflective professional development and the opportunities to learn from, and contribute to, the many thriving networks of those who are passionate about primary science – including members of CPRT’s Schools Alliance – and who understand the important contribution of science to wider school priorities, culture and ethos.

Cathy Dean, assistant headteacher at Queen Edith Primary School in Cambridge, a member of CPRT’s Schools Alliance with Gold PSQM, comments

‘Queen Edith was motivated to work towards PSQM because of the range of science already being completed in school and we felt that this should be celebrated. The year we completed the PSQM coincided with a Science and Technology Learning Saturday. For this event a working group helped to recruit members of the local community (including parents, university staff and other professionals) to come in and run workshops throughout the day for children and their parents.

We had a very positive response from children, parents and volunteers, and have then used some of those links to enrich our curriculum for future teaching. Completing the PSQM allowed the science subject leader to dedicate time to think about resources and teaching of science in the school and how this could be enhanced. Resources were reorganised and distributed, allowing science lessons to be practical and exciting. Staff meeting time was also dedicated to enhancing the science curriculum. It allowed the science subject leader to work closely with science leaders from other schools, enabling them to share ideas, resources and contacts.’

For this school, and many others, science is certainly not the poor relation.

Marianne Cutler is Co-Director of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust and  Director of Curriculum Innovation at the Association for Science Education.

We’d like to hear from you about the place of science education in your school. Has the new curriculum fostered a different approach? Have you taken advantage of some of the opportunities mentioned here (or any others) to develop your school’s expertise in science education? Please let us know your experience by commenting below.

by Robin Alexander

Teaching to the text: England and Singapore

Hearken, if you will, unto DfE Minister Nick Gibb:

I would like to see all schools, both primary and secondary, using high quality textbooks in all subjects, bringing us closer to the norm in high performing countries … In this country, textbooks simply do not match up to the best in the world, resulting in poorly designed resources, damaging and undermining good teaching … Ministers need to make the case for more textbooks in schools, particularly primary schools.

At the conference of the Publishers Association (PA) and the British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA) at which Minister Gibb thus nailed his colours to a rather colourless mast, he did rather more than ‘make the case’ and modestly depart. (Minister Liz Truss had delivered the same message to the same audience a year earlier, to little effect). In the discussion that followed his speech Gibb said that publishers should produce the textbooks that teachers need, not what they want, and that if they don’t do so then DfE may have to introduce state approval or kitemarking of textbooks, as in some other countries.

There’s a lot to unpack and unpick here: the assumption that among PISA top performers it’s textbooks that make the difference (the familiar confusion of association with causality); that what appears to hold for secondary students tested by PISA must therefore hold for their primary school peers; that what works for maths works for all other subjects; that what teachers want for their pupils is not what those pupils need (teachers may wish to count to ten before responding); that PISA is all that matters; and that government has both the right and the competence to act as arbiters of textbook quality and impose its judgements on every teacher and child in the land.

There are also the familiar contradictions. In the same speech, the Minister characterised his government’s ‘new approach to educational policy’ since 2010 as ‘designed to foster the autonomy of the teaching profession and sweep away the prescriptive and ideological national strategies’. The national strategies were indeed prescriptive, but replacing one kind of prescription by another seems a decidedly odd way to foster professional autonomy.  In any case, weren’t textbooks, albeit in ring binder form, central to Labour’s national strategies?

Ah, but the difference is that Labour’s policies were ‘ideological’ while the current government’s are dispassionate and objective.  But to this helpful separation of the good guys from the bad (for without ministerial guidance how would we possibly tell the difference?) the Minister adds a further semantic tease.  For while Labour’s textbooks/ring binders were ideological, the neglect of textbooks in English schools relative to their heavy use in Singapore (the system the Minister wants us to copy) was ideological too.  Thus Gibb complains of ‘ideological hostility to the use of textbooks, particularly in primary schools.’

Ideological textbook prescription, ideological opposition to textbooks … Can he have it both ways? Yes indeed, for as used by ministers, ‘ideological’ means merely (of a phenomenon) what the minister doesn’t like, and (of a person) someone who has the audacity to disagree with him. Remember Minister Gibb’s erstwhile DfE colleague Michael Gove? In accordance with established legislative procedure he invited comment on drafts of the new national curriculum, only to  lambast those whose comments were less than fulsomely supportive as ‘enemies of promise … Marxists hell-bent on destroying our schools.’ Clearly, such folk misread the DfE invitation. They should have known that ‘comment’ meant, as no doubt it does in North Korea, ‘applaud’. Who then is the Marxist – the respondent to DfE consultations, Kim Jong-un or Comrade Gove?

Rum cove, politics.  And with the 2015 general election only a few weeks away there’ll be a lot more of this kind of thing before we’re done. So let’s momentarily escape and consider the substantive issue. Gibb’s PA/BESA speech made its case for textbooks by drawing on a paper by Tim Oates that looked at over 200 textbooks in five PISA high-performing jurisdictions, including Singapore, and compared them with England. Textbook use in England, at least in the crucial sense of textbook dependency and compliance, is indeed much lower: in the 2011 TIMSS survey, 70 per cent of Singapore teachers said they used textbooks as the basis for maths teaching compared with only 10 per cent in England; though here textbooks weren’t, as Gibb claimed, viewed with ‘ideological hostility’ but were used by 64 per cent of teachers ‘as a supplement’, which suggests that resources here are used flexibly rather than unquestioningly. Which also sounds reassuringly like teachers exercising the very professional autonomy that Gibb claims his government has fostered.

Oates shows how the best textbooks are well grounded in learning theory as well as subject content, and how they offer range, coherence and clarity in structuring that content for teaching. In other words, they can be, without question, a valuable resource. Further, he reminds us that high stakes tests have narrowed the curriculum (a post-1997 trend chronicled in the Cambridge Primary Review final report  and again, for the period since 2010, in Wynne Harlen’s recent CPRT research review). Interestingly, he suggests that well-structured and ‘expansive’ textbooks ‘could be an antidote to such narrowing’.  He adds that ‘in key jurisdictions, high performing teachers are well-disposed and enthusiastic about textbooks.’

All of this underlines Oates’s concern that opposition to textbooks in England confuses the question of textbook quality with unease about central prescription. But that unease, in view of Gibb’s remarks and the still-vivid memory of Labour’s national strategies and their policing by Ofsted, is hardly surprising; for the Minister is clearly saying that government, not the teaching profession, is the arbiter of textbook quality. Which is exactly the line that Labour took when it imposed its national strategies, extending that presumption of omniscience beyond lesson content to teaching methods, pupil grouping and the allocation of time. There’s a corrosive legacy of blatantly politicized intervention in teaching to which both Labour and Conservative need to own up if they wish their  proposals to be viewed with other than the deepest suspicion.

Back to Oates.  Although he notes that textbook use needs to be embedded in a coherent pedagogy and is just one of a number of ‘control factors’ whereby governments may try to ensure that the curriculum as taught ‘delivers’ the curriculum as prescribed, he does not address the ethical  and political questions raised by this notion and its somewhat chilling vocabulary; for teaching is a moral matter, not merely a technical one. Nor, apparently, has he persuaded ministers to recognise that pedagogy is a system of interdependent elements rather than an aggregation of discrete factors that can be cherry-picked to fuel a media headline or score a political point in the way that ministers are currently doing with textbooks and their predecessors did with whole class teaching.

This alternative perspective is fundamental to my own work on pedagogy going back more than 30 years. It is no less fundamental to what is by far the largest, most detailed and most authoritative research study to date of educational practice in Singapore, a system which both Gibb and Oates wish England to emulate. The Core 2 Research Programme was led by David Hogan, who until recently was Principal Research Scientist at Singapore’s National Institute of Education and for nine years has intensively researched Singaporean schooling. He is currently working with his colleagues Dennis Kwek and Peter Renshaw on CPRT’s new research review on effective teaching.  The Core 2 research is conspicuously absent from both Oates’s paper and ministers’ consciousness.

Core 2 entailed systematic observation, video-recording, interviews and outcome measures in a large and nationally representative stratified sample of Primary 5 (pupils aged 10-11) and Secondary 3 classrooms (14-15) where the unambiguous focus is examination preparation and success. Through multi-level statistical modelling the research team assessed the relationship between various classroom practices, including the use of textbooks, and student achievement in mathematics and English.

The Core 2 findings on the impact of textbooks, though in certain respects positive, are not as straightforward as our Minister would like. Hogan and his colleagues confirm that in Singapore teacher reliance on textbooks is indeed high in mathematics, though not in English. The effects of textbooks are statistically significant in models of the relationship between traditional instruction, direct instruction and student achievement. Overall, however, textbooks do not have a statistically significant impact in either maths or English; and while they do have a statistically significant indirect impact in maths, this is not the case in English.

This subject variation supports scepticism about the Minister’s blanket commitment to a textbook for every subject. But more important is Hogan’s insistence that it’s essential to look well beyond bivariate relationships of the kind that ministers prefer in order to grasp how textbook use and impact are part of the much larger and more complex business of pedagogy, which in turn is embedded in and shaped by culture, history, values and beliefs relating to teaching, learning, knowledge and the goals of education (issues that I investigated in some detail in my own five-nation Culture and Pedagogy).

Thus, in a recent email exchange, David Hogan told me that

In Singapore textbooks are an integral part of an assessment-driven instructional system that effectively integrates elements of traditional and direct instruction … It [does not focus] on learning for deep understanding through carefully designed and calibrated tasks intended to develop a broad range of skills, understandings and dispositions. Rather, it is a highly efficient and effective pedagogical system driven by a limited and highly instrumental and functionalist set of institutional rules.

Crucially, he added:

In my view it would be a mistake to permit textbooks to drive classroom pedagogy in English primary schools: given the current English assessment regime … it would further enhance the transformation of primary school classrooms into pedagogical facsimiles of secondary school classrooms. This might well improve the performance of English students in TIMSS and PISA, but it will compromise the quality of education they get.

And again, in a recent piece entitled ‘Why is Singapore’s school system so successful, and is it a model for the West?’ David Hogan warned:

Singapore’s experience and its current efforts to improve the quality of teaching and learning do have important, if ironic, implications for systems that hope to emulate its success. This is especially true of those jurisdictions – I have in mind England and Australia especially – where conservative governments have embarked on ideologically driven crusades to demand more direct instruction of (Western) canonical knowledge, demanding more testing and high stakes assessments of students, and imposing more intensive top-down performance regimes on teachers.

In my view, this is profoundly and deeply mistaken. It is also more than a little ironic given the reform direction Singapore has mapped out for itself over the past decade. The essential challenge facing Western jurisdictions is not so much to mimic East Asian instructional regimes, but to develop a more balanced pedagogy that focuses not just on knowledge transmission and exam performance, but on teaching that requires students to engage in subject-specific knowledge building. Knowledge building pedagogies recognise the value of established knowledge, but also insist that students need to be able to do knowledge work as well as learn about established knowledge. Above all, this means students should acquire the ability to recognise, generate, represent, communicate, deliberate, interrogate, validate and apply knowledge claims in light of established norms in key subject domains.

In the long run, this will do far more for individual and national well-being, including supporting development of a vibrant and successful knowledge economy, than a regressive quest for top billing in international assessments.

The distinction arising from the Core 2 research between the pedagogies of performativity (curriculum coverage, knowledge transmission, test preparation and success) and knowledge building (defined in the quote above) is both crucial to our understanding of what goes on in Singaporean schools and highly relevant to the debate about England’s national curriculum and the role of textbooks in its implementation. For Hogan judges that Singapore’s undoubted prowess at performativity has been at the expense of the knowledge-building which is no less essential to social and economic progress and which he believes is one of the strengths of English education. As it happens, he has used these two versions of pedagogy to compare schools in Singapore and London, and on knowledge-building the London schools do well.

There’s clearly a discussion to be had about the narrower question of textbooks and other published resources in primary schools, and I hope this blog will encourage that. As a matter of fact, it’s a discussion in which many of us have been involved, via the Expert Subjects Advisory Group (ESAG) and CPRT’s own collaboration with the subject associations and Pearson, since long before Tim Oates presented his thoughts and Nick Gibb dropped his bombshell. Indeed, it was DfE itself that set up ESAG to help teachers locate and evaluate resources for implementing the new national curriculum in line with the new, post-Labour professional freedoms. Perhaps our Minister has forgotten that.

But the more fundamental debate, which is marginalised by ministers’ obsession with international test performance, is about the proper nature and purposes of 21st century education. To adapt the Minister’s comment at the PA/BESA conference: a test-driven curriculum and a textbook-driven pedagogy may be what Nick Gibb wants, but are they what our children need?

Postscript

Since this blog coincides with the death of Lee Kuan Yew, the man who presided over Singapore’s remarkable economic and social transformation into the international powerhouse that it is today, it’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves of two salient differences mentioned by neither Oates nor Gibb: scale and politics. Singapore is a city state with 5.14 million inhabitants and just 182 primary schools (the corresponding figures for England are 53 million and 16,818). When manageable scale is combined with an authoritarian political regime, government has at its fingertips potent levers for rapid  and wholesale systemic reform.  As a comparativist I believe that it is essential to learn from others, and this blog reminds us that there is certainly much we can learn from Singapore. But, as David Hogan and the Core 2 research show, wrenching one factor in another system’s success from its cultural, political, historical, demographic and pedagogical roots is neither valid nor viable.

The Guardian obituary for Lee credits him with creating ‘a strong, pervasive role for the state and little patience for dissent.’ Given the current government’s track record on appointing advisers and handling evidence perhaps that’s the lesson from elsewhere that ministers would really prefer us to accept.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

Given Nick Gibb’s disarmingly simple claims about textbooks and the much more complex evidence from Singapore it would be extremely helpful to this debate if primary schools rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted would tell us what part textbooks have played in their schools’ success.

We would also like to hear what teachers think – all teachers, not just those from schools deemed outstanding – about the Minister’s campaign for textbooks in all subjects in the primary phase, and his hint about DfE kitemarking. And of course about the kind of pedagogy that serves the larger purposes of primary education.

 

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Planning, teaching, assessing: journey to coherence

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.

Contact

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