The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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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How well are primary academies doing? And how well is DfE doing with the evidence?

Has DfE, including its supposedly public-minded official statisticians, been misusing data in its drive to force on primary schools its favoured policy of academy status?

The question arises since I performed an analysis that seems to raise serious difficulties about a key statistic used by a minister to defend the academies scheme.

On February 2nd, education minister Nick Gibb was confronted on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme with the findings of a report by the cross-party House of Commons Education Select Committee. The committee, following an inquiry on academies and free schools, had concluded the previous week: ‘We have sought but not found convincing evidence of the impact of academy status on attainment in primary schools.’

The minister responded that sponsored academies – generally previously struggling schools which are taken over by a ‘sponsor’ entering into a contract with the Secretary of State to run the school – were improving faster than the national average.

He said: ‘We do know sponsored academies do improve standards of education in our schools. If you look at the primary sponsored academies, they’ve seen their reading, writing and maths results improve at double the rate seen across all schools.’ He added: ‘Primary [sponsored academies]…have seen their reading, writing and maths results improve at double the rate of local authority schools.’

This seemed to mark a change of position for the DfE, which less than a year ago concluded, in its publication Academies: research priorities and questions that ‘The research evidence [is] primarily based on secondary schools and with more and more primary schools becoming academies, further evidence is needed on what drives those schools to become academies and what makes them viable and sustainable.’

So was Mr Gibb’s statement accurate? Investigating, it became clear that the source was DfE’s Statistical First Release which accompanied the publication of primary league tables on December 12th, 2014. The document is headed with the reassuring logo ‘National Statistics’. It says: ‘Attainment in sponsored academies increased by 7 percentage points between 2013 and 2014, compared to 3 percentage points in converter academies and LA maintained schools.’

This statement seemed factual enough. But doubts began to surface in my mind after digging a tiny bit further into the data.

So, the 420 sponsored academies included in the statistic did indeed improve at faster than the national rate for other schools between 2013 and 2014, rising seven percentage points in the proportion of their pupils achieving level 4 in all of reading, writing and maths, from 61 to 68 per cent. By contrast, the 13,396 non-academy (local authority) schools rose three points, from 77 to 80 per cent, while, among 1,006 converter academies – generally previously successful schools choosing to take on the status – the rise was from 80 to 83 per cent.

The immediate question, though, was whether like was really being compared with like. With both types of school, other than sponsored academies, starting with higher average scores in 2013, sponsored academies would appear to have had more room for improvement.

Another way of looking at that is to say that, clearly, the closer a school gets to 100 per cent of its children achieving level 4s in all three subjects, the less scope it has to improve on this measure; at 100 per cent, it has no scope at all.

This would seem to be a basic statistical point. Yet it was not acknowledged anywhere in this statistical release that the higher rate of progress might be at least in part a product of sponsored academies starting from a lower base. The comparison used in the release, then, might be deemed invalid. Without further information it certainly looked potentially misleading.

The fairer comparison, then, would be to look at schools with the same statistical starting points. In other words, among schools averaging 61 per cent in 2013, did sponsored academies or non-sponsored academies improve faster?

Again, there is no mention of this potential statistical comparison in the release. So I have now performed this data analysis myself, based on the DfE’s official underlying school-by-school assessment data.

Staggeringly, this seems to show that, when schools with the same starting points in 2013 are compared, sponsored academies fared worse than a comparison group of primaries in 2014.

I am not a professional statistician, and the analysis below is rudimentary. But I did it in two ways. First, I decided to look at all schools which, in 2013, had exactly 61 per cent of their pupils achieving at least level four in reading, writing and maths. Remember, this was the average figure for 2013 sponsored academies.

This yielded 113 primaries: six sponsored academies, two converter academies and 105 non-academy state schools. Among the 107 that were not sponsored academies, results improved to 70.7 per cent in 2014, a rise of 10 percentage points.

Second, I widened the comparison group to include a much larger number of primaries: those which had results, in 2013, ranging from 56 to 66 per cent. Again, I made sure that this sample, of 1,650 schools, had an average result of 61 per cent in 2013.

What was the outcome? Well, the schools which were not sponsored academies improved on average to 72 per cent. So that’s an 11 point improvement, compared to a seven point gain in sponsored academies. (The 11 point gain included figures for academy converters; removing them from the sample, non-academy maintained schools – ‘local authority schools’ in Mr Gibb’s phrase – went up 10 percentage points, which again is higher than the seven points of sponsored academies).

So my research seems to point to an opposite conclusion – sponsored academy results rising less quickly than those of a comparison group – to that of the DfE’s official statistical publication.

It would have been easy for the DfE’s professional statisticians to have published a similar assessment. But they did not. Nor did they publish any statistical caveats about the sponsored academy-to-national-average improvement comparison they chose to use.

Why does this matter? It seems to me to be very important on the ground, where I hear regularly of communities struggling with campaigns against academy status being forced on them by DfE, in the face of claims by ministers that this should be the only option for school improvement.

Indeed, DfE guidance says that, in schools deemed inadequate, ministers’ ‘expectation’ is always that they should become sponsored academies.

Last month, David Cameron went further, proposing that thousands of schools deemed by Ofsted not to be inadequate but merely to ‘require improvement’ should become sponsored academies in the event of a new Conservative government.

But if statistical evidence on an area absolutely central to the current political debate about education is being made to say the opposite of what a reasonable person might think the data actually tell us, acknowledging the need to compare like with like, we have serious problems. Is evidence being made to fit policy, rather than vice-versa?

I’d make one final point.  In a recent article, Cambridge Primary Review Trust chair Robin Alexander, wrote: ‘Deep and lasting improvements in England’s education system will be secured only when, in their discourse and their handling of evidence, policymakers practise the best that has been thought and said rather than preach it, exemplify the educated mind rather than demean it.’

It is staggering that the DfE’s statistical publication was first released without the basic caveats and checks which would be expected of statistics students completing their assignments, and was then endorsed by a minister of education. And a minister of education with an enthusiasm for mathematics, at that. What kind of an example does this set for pupils? We all deserve better.

I invited DfE to comment on the content of this blog but it did not respond. 

Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist and author of Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing (Methuen, 2007).

The stance of ministers and DfE towards evidence has been a constant concern of CPRT and CPR, as it must be for any organisation that cares about the probity and efficacy of education policy and seeks to generate the kind of evidence that a well-founded education system requires.  CPRT’s concern is shared by the House of Commons Education Select Committee, which in 2014 launched an online enquiry into DfE’s use of evidence. Robin Alexander’s submission to this enquiry was published as the CPRT blog on 19 December.

by Robin Alexander

True grit

Those who thought that the departure of Michael Gove might give schools a breather before the 2015 election, liberating them from the weekly explosion of initiatives and insults, reckoned without the ambition of his successor. These days, few education secretaries of state are content to do a good job, deeming it more important to leave an indelible mark in the name of ‘reform’. To this lamppost tendency Nicky Morgan appears to be no exception.

Her wheeze, and it’s a biggish one, is to make Britain ‘a global leader in teaching character and resilience … ensuring that young people not only grow academically, but also build character, resilience and grit.’ To that end, DfE has invited bids for projects showing how ‘character’ can be built, and on 16 March there’ll be a grand ceremony at which the 2015 Character Awards of £15,000 each will be presented to 27 schools, with a £20,000 prize for the best of the best. Morgan modestly defines her chosen legacy as ‘a landmark step for our education system.’

In the same way that New Labour claimed, witheringly but inaccurately, that before the imposition of its national literacy and numeracy strategies England’s primary teachers were ‘professionally uninformed’, so Nicky Morgan’s happy discovery of something called ‘character’ implies that schools have hitherto ignored everything except children’s academic development; and that creativity, PSHE, moral education, religious education and citizenship, not to mention those values that loom large in school prospectuses, websites and assemblies and above all in teachers’ daily dealings with their pupils, were to do with something else entirely. Remember the not-so-hidden ‘hidden curriculum’? If there is a ‘landmark step’ then, it is not character education but its political appropriation and repackaging.

So what, in Morgan’s book, constitutes ‘character’? Its main ingredients, as listed in the guidance to applicants for the DfE grants and character awards, are ‘perseverance, resilience and grit, confidence and optimism, motivation, drive and ambition.’ (Readers will recognize ‘resilience’ as one of the most overused words of 2014). Rather lower down the list come ‘neighbourliness’, ‘community spirit’, ‘tolerance’ and ‘respect.’

Like so much in recent English education policy, this account of character is imported from the United States. The Morgan character attributes are almost identical to those in the eponymous Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed: grit, curiosity and the hidden power of character, and in Dave Levin’s evangelising Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). Here, then, we have a melding of the no-holds-barred values of corporate America with that fabled frontier spirit portrayed by John Wayne. ‘Grit’ anchors the education of character in both worlds.

But there’s a third element. In a speech in Birmingham last November prefiguring the DfE announcement, Morgan said pupils should ‘leave school with the perseverance to strive to win … to revel in the achievement of victory but honour the principles of fair play, to win with grace and to learn the lessons of defeat with acceptance and humility.’ No prizes for spotting the source of that little homily. These are unambiguously the values of England’s nineteenth century public schools: values directed not to the nurturing of mind but to physical prowess on the games field, an education veritably conceived as no more or less than a game of rugby or cricket. And not just education: life and death too, as immortalised in the Newbolt poem in which the playing field morphs into the trenches of 1914-18: ‘There’s a breathless hush in the close tonight / Ten to make and the match to win / The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead / Play up, play up and play the game.’

If character is important, which it surely is, is such an idiosyncratic and unreconstructedly male account of it good enough, and is it for government to impose this or any other notion of character on every child in the land, of whatever inclination, personality, gender or culture? In one of two excellent blogs on this subject that I urge prospective applicants for the DfE awards to read, John White thinks not. He says: ‘Nicky Morgan is not wrong to focus on personal qualities, only about the set she advocates. This is tied to an ideology of winners and losers.’ (As, appropriately, is DfE’s Character Awards scheme itself). He reminds us of the considerably more rounded values framework appended to the version of the national curriculum that was introduced in 2000 and superseded last September, and he argues that ‘no politician has the right to steer a whole education system in this or any other partisan direction.’ For White, Morgan’s foray into character education is further confirmation of the need for curriculum decisions to be taken out of the hands of politicians and given to a body which is more representative, more knowledgeable and culturally more sensitive.

The other recent must-read blog on character education is by Jeffrey Snyder in the United States. He cites evidence that ‘character’ is more likely to be determined by genetically-determined personality traits than the efforts of teachers, and indeed he argues that anyway nobody really knows how to teach it. In this context it’s worth asking what those pupils subjected to 1850s/1950s character-building really learned, and whether there is indeed a correspondence between success on the playing field, in work and in adult life. And since you ask, did fagging and flogging really make for manliness (whatever that is) or were they merely perversions by another name?

Snyder argues, too, that the ‘perseverence, resilience and grit’ account of character ‘promotes an amoral and careerist “looking out for number one” point of view’ adding, tellingly: ‘Never has character education been so completely untethered from morals, values and ethics.’ As a result, ‘character’ is as likely to be harnessed to the pursuit of ends that are evil as to those that are good. ‘Gone’, adds Snyder, ‘is the impetus to bring youngsters into a fold of community that is larger than themselves … When character education fails to distinguish doctors and terrorists, heroes and villains, it would appear to have a basic flaw.’

Snyder’s third objection, and it applies equally to the Morgan view of character and to the Gove definition of essential knowledge, is the sheer narrowness of the educational vision being promoted. In this context, it’s worth asking how the Cambridge Primary Review’s 12 educational aims might be classified. Are ‘wellbeing’, ‘engagement’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘autonomy’ about character or something else? Do such responsive and responsible CPR aims as ‘encouraging respect and reciprocity’, ‘promoting interdependence and sustainability’, ‘empowering local, national and global citizenship’ and ‘celebrating culture and community’ have anything to with resilience and grit?

Actually they do, for it takes considerable grit and resilience to live the values of reciprocity, interdependence and community in a culture of winner-takes-all individualism; or to champion sustainability when the prevailing ethic is rampant materialism and unfettered economic growth; or, as so many educationists have learned to their cost, to hold firm to a principled vision of children’s education in the teeth of government atavism and disdain. Captains of industry and sports personalities do not, as Morgan appears to believe, have a monopoly of courage and determination. In any event, the imperative here is to tie perseverance, grit and resilience to socially defensible aims and values, for, as Snyder noted, that for which we teach children to strive must be educationally worthwhile.

It will be interesting to see what accounts of character, and what strategies for promoting it, DfE rewards when it distributes its grants and prizes for character education on 16 March. With the national strategies Labour gave us what one CPR witness called a ‘state theory of learning’. Will the coalition government’s bequest be a state theory of character? (Which, for those who know about vospitanie in Russian and Soviet education, has similar political overtones). Let’s hope that Morgan’s judges put vision, ethics, social responsibility and plurality back into the frame.

We can presumably trust that proposals to reintroduce fagging and flogging are unlikely to be shortlisted, though these days one never knows.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

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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.

by Robin Alexander

Ministers, evidence and inconvenient truths

I suppose the heading of this blog is a trifle tendentious, though not without justification. The Cambridge Primary Review (CPR) was all about evidence. Some of it ministers liked, some of it they didn’t.  By and large, their reactions reflected not the authority or veracity of the evidence we provided but the degree to which it sustained or challenged their political narrative.  As a result, policies were as likely to be based on ideology, prejudice or populism as on evidence, and those who exposed this fundamental frailty, or highlighted the politically inconvenient truth, were pretty smartly shown the door.

Because CPR hoped to make a difference in policy circles as well as in the classroom, it investigated not only its various chosen aspects of primary education – childhood, learning, teaching, curriculum, assessment, leadership, school organisation, teacher education and so on – but also the evidence on which policies relating to each of these were based.

The relationship between policy and evidence that CPR uncovered was on occasions somewhat murky. The most problematic instance was the matter of educational standards over time and what causes them to rise and fall. CPR had commissioned no fewer than six independent research reviews in this area from teams of leading academics at five universities and NFER. Against the findings of the resulting six reports and other data CPR set official claims about trends in standards and the impact on those trends of government policies and initiatives.

Without going into detail that can be read in its final report (Children, their World, their Education, pages 471-4), CPR reported both good and less good news on standards – which in a large educational system serving a highly diverse society at a time of rapid change is what one would expect – but also a succession of grand political claims about standards, tests, accountability and school improvement that under scrutiny all too often dissolved into unsubstantiated assertion or downright falsehood.

This week there are two developments that enable us to bring the story up to date and consider the record of the current government. Has it maintained Labour’s uneasy relationship with evidence or has it displayed a more even-handed stance in the interest of making its policies as well founded as possible? In so doing, has it been prepared to accommodate the inconvenient truth?

The first pertinent development is the decision of the House of Commons Education Committee to launch an on-line enquiry into the way DfE uses evidence. The Committee has selected nine areas for scrutiny: phonics, teaching assistants, professional measurement metrics, the National College, summer-born children, universal infant free school meals, raising the participation age, music education, and the school starting age. In each case, DfE has been asked first to state the policy and second to cite the evidence on which it is based, and we the public are then asked to comment. In addition, lest it be thought that this list is too exclusive – there is no mention, for example, of the national curriculum, national assessment, standards, international comparisons, inspection, teacher education, academies, free schools or many other prominent and hotly debated areas of policy – respondents are invited to comment on DfE’s use of evidence in more general terms.

Cambridge Primary Review Trust will certainly respond, and we hope those reading this blog will do likewise. The deadline is Friday 12 December.

The other development is closer to home. In 2007, Cambridge Primary Review commissioned a research-based report on the pros and cons of different approaches to assessment from Professor Wynne Harlen, one of the best-respected experts in this field. This was revised for publication in 2010 in The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys.

Earlier this year we invited Professor Harlen to revisit and update her 2010 report to contribute to the CPRT’s pursuit of its eight priorities, one of which is assessment reform, taking account of recent developments (including the performance descriptors announced last week). This she has now done. Wynne’s 40-page report is accompanied by a three-page briefing or executive summary and both can be viewed and/or downloaded from the CPRT website.

Wynne Harlen’s CPRT report ends with separately-itemised implications for teachers, school leaders, teacher educators and policy makers.  Wynne stresses the need for teaching strategies in which assessment for learning is fully embedded, especially in teachers’ questioning and feedback, and she urges government  to raise the profile of properly moderated teacher assessment and to provide assessment guidance in all subjects rather than confine its efforts to literacy and numeracy. In this matter she reinforces one of CPR’s core messages, that literacy and numeracy tests are not valid proxies for quality and standards across the curriculum as a whole, and children have a right to a curriculum in which every element is taught to the highest possible standard regardless of how much or how little time is allocated to it, so we need valid and reliable information on how, in all such curriculum areas, they are progressing.

Assessment is one of the areas with which the House of Commons enquiry on evidence does not directly deal. However, DfE’s reaction to this new report, which is an aspect of education that is at once extremely important and highly contested, will provide a timely test of its claim that its policies are evidence-based.

More to the point, if the House of Commons enquiry comes up with conclusions that DfE finds unpalatable and therefore dismisses or rejects, we shall know exactly where on the matter of evidence the government truly stands.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

 

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From levels to performance descriptors: labelling by another name?

Tim Oates, who led the ‘expert panel’ that initiated the government’s review of England’s national curriculum, was very clear as to why the old levels system had to go.

Speaking in a video which was uploaded by the Department for Education to YouTube in May, he offered a set of reasons explaining why the 25-year-old levels structure was being ditched.

Top of the list was what seemed a powerful thought: that summing up children’s performance numerically ran the risk of labelling them, and that this could end up harming their education.

Oates said: “Kids are labelling themselves as being a particular level: ‘I’m a level 3 and all my friends are level 4’. That’s very dysfunctional in terms of learning. That’s the first compelling reason [for scrapping levels]: this idea of kids labelling themselves and that being inappropriate in learning. It can actually hold back their learning rather than encourage it.”

This chimed with a finding in the Cambridge Primary Review’s final report, which concluded (on page 316) that reducing children’s learning to a single level “serves to label children rather than to enlighten parents and other children about the range of their achievements”.

Yet labelling children is exactly what the new national curriculum and its associated assessment, the final details of which now have emerged from the DfE, still seems likely to encourage.

If anything, the new version stands to be worse than the old. And this is just one of several of Oates’s reasons for removing levels which seems not to have been addressed in the DfE’s new curriculum, assessment and accountability regime for primary schools.

With the details so fundamental to school life, and therefore vital to get right, I am left marvelling again at the ability of our ultra-politicised, short-termist policy-making structure to produce something so incoherent: so demonstrably at odds even with its own stated aims.

So, to expand on the point about labelling, last month the DfE set out its plans for a new system of “performance descriptors” for primary pupils.

At the end of key stages 1 and 2 in reading, writing, mathematics and science, teacher assessment will see professionals giving their charges what sounds suspiciously like a level, but is not being called one.

At key stage 1, in reading, writing and maths, children will be assessed as either at “mastery standard” or at “national standard”; “working towards national standard”; or “below national standard”.

For key stage 2 writing, an extra performance descriptor is added to the above: “above national standard”.

For the subjects of key stage 2 maths, science and reading – where, presumably, national curriculum tests will provide greater differentiation of pupil performance – and key stage 1 science, there is only one performance standard: “working at the national standard”.

Surveying the above, it seems impossible to comprehend how it gets away from any problem of labelling. Indeed, in replacing, say, a child achieving level two or three in key stage 2 writing with the judgement of “below national standard”, it probably exacerbates the problem as described by Oates, in the linguistic bluntness of the description if nothing else.

The single “working at national standard” – or not – verdict, where it is to be offered, also seems to invite a simple “pass/fail” judgement. This, it is hard to avoid thinking, will set up the view among many children that they are failures at an early age: from the age of seven, in the case of science.

There will be arguments about the defensibility of that, but above all it is hard to see how it can be squared with the stated aim of reducing labelling.

The labelling issue is probably the most glaringly contradictory output of this process, when set against the original rationale for removing levels. But other aspects of the vision, as set out by Oates, seem also to bump up against reality.

So Oates describes another problem of the old levels system: that it encouraged a sense that pupils had to be rushed from one level to the next. “The whole of the system has been focused on getting kids to move quickly through the levels,” he says in the video.

However, again, pushing children on to “tougher” material earlier seems to have been exactly ministers’ thinking in introducing the new national curriculum. And that thinking is reflected in what the new curriculum says.

For example, in maths, pupils are supposed to be progressing through the manipulation of fractions at a younger age than they used to, are to be taught their 12x tables in year four as opposed to knowing up to 10x tables by year six in the old system, and now to be using square and cube numbers during year five.

As teacher Karen Mills told me last year in relation to the latter: “Year 5 children are supposed to be using square and cube numbers. The assumption in the new curriculum is that they are ready for this, but many of them do not really understand the number system. If we try to force them forward on to new material, we are going to lose half of the class.”

And yet here we are, with the new curriculum and assessment regime seemingly being billed enthusiastically by the politicians overseeing the system as pushing children on to more challenging material earlier (as shown here and here).

Finally, Oates talked about the new national curriculum building deep conceptual understanding and focusing on “fewer things in greater depth”. The notion of stripped-down content seems largely true in subjects other than English, maths and science. But the new performance descriptors hardly suggest subjects concentrating on a few essentials.

Indeed, the question as to whether this new curriculum really moves away from the tick-box approach which is widely thought to have troubled its predecessor and its associated assessment seems very real, when one considers the new performance descriptors.

Prompted by the advice of a very experienced assessment expert, I noted that, for a KS1 teacher assessing whether or not a pupil is at national standard level across reading, writing, maths and science, there are 129 assessment bullet points to work through. At KS2, the equivalent figure is 144 bullet points.

There is one final point to make about the performance descriptors: we still seem in the dark about who exactly wrote the consultation document. So, if people are unhappy with this outcome, who can we hold to account for it, or at least explain it?

Criticism of the lack of transparency around the development of this new curriculum has dogged it throughout. Sadly, that is just one aspect of the dysfunctionality around policy-making that this national curriculum review, 2010-14, has exposed so vividly.

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

DfE’s consultation on its proposed performance descriptors ends on 18 December. For the descriptors and how to comment on them, click here.

Contact

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