The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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Support for vulnerable children: another ZPD?

To many educational practitioners, especially those who work with younger children, ZPD is one of the most widely-recognised acronyms.  But I was recently reminded of another ZPD, which, although it is unlikely ever to rival Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, should make us think.  In his A Year with Swollen Appendices (p. 301), Brian Eno identifies the ‘Zone of Pragmatic Deceit’, a ZPD which he describes as:

the social and mental inventions that exist to ease the friction between what we claim to stand for […] and what we actually have to do to make things work .

When the Coalition Government came to power in 2010, it was careful to express a concern with ‘vulnerable children’:  there are numerous references in the 2010 White Paper, The Importance of Teaching, for example.  But the White Paper was implemented alongside a range of pragmatic policies which undermined the effectiveness of initiatives like the Pupil Premium, the Coalition’s flagship education policy for combatting socio-economic disadvantage.  As Lupton & Thomson (p. 17) have recently emphasised:

Post-election debate around socio-economic inequalities in education has largely focused on whether the new Conservative government will stick to its pledge to retain the Pupil Premium. A more important question is whether the Pupil Premium can be expected to have any meaningful impact as part of a suite of education and social policies likely to work in the opposite direction.

In Vulnerable Children: needs and provision in the primary phase, a research review commissioned by CPRT which will be published shortly, Sharon Vincent and I examine policies supporting and affecting vulnerable children since the Coalition Government took up office in 2010, and we explore the extent to which changes to policy and practice in this period have had any meaningful impact on the wellbeing and education of vulnerable children.  As such, the report directly addresses the Cambridge Primary Review Trust’s first two priorities: to ‘tackle the continuing challenge of social and educational disadvantage, and find practical ways to help schools to close the overlapping gaps in social equity and educational attainment’ and ‘advance children’s voice and rights in school and classroom’.

Our review relates closely to Mind the Gap, the CPRT report by Kate Pickett and Laura Vanderbloemen, published in September 2015, which examined the evidence associating social and economic inequality with unequal educational outcomes. Inequality and poverty are primary causes of vulnerability in children.  A growing body of evidence demonstrates the strong relationship between vulnerability in childhood (including abuse and neglect and exposure to domestic violence) and issues such as mental health, school underperformance and poor physical health in adulthood. This means that schools have a much broader role in relation to children they identify as vulnerable than merely focusing on educational attainment. In the report we take a dual perspective to approaching the still contentious and under-defined area of vulnerability in children, combining an educational perspective with a social welfare approach in order to shed light from allied but different angles.

One of the challenges we faced in writing the report was to define ‘vulnerable children’, for vulnerability remains a contested term. In 2010, the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review (p. 60) found that:

There is still a risk of ‘vulnerable’ becoming a professional euphemism, couched within a deficit model that views disadvantaged children as a ‘nuisance’, ‘incomplete’ or somehow ‘insufficient’.

Taking as our starting point Ainscow and colleagues’ assertion in one of the CPR research surveys that ‘difference in the primary school population is not so much identified as constructed […] and that implications for policy and practice flow from these constructions’, we review five different taxonomies of vulnerability in policy and research. Their variability was their most striking feature.  Our analysis leads us to propose a needs-based definition of vulnerability, influenced by the more rights and assets-based approaches common in countries such as Scotland, in which vulnerable children are regarded as having special educational, complex and/or additional needs, caused by a range of intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Schools and other agencies working with children need to take such factors into account in an ecological and holistic approach that puts the child and their needs at the centre of support.

In reviewing national, local and in-school policy initiatives relating to vulnerable children, the deficit perspective feared and highlighted in the quotation above is all too evident in policy since 2010. The Troubled Families programme, instigated after the riots of 2011, is a case in point.  Families and local authorities have criticised the use of the word ‘troubled’ and the willingness of politicians like Eric Pickles when Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, to assert when discussing the programme in 2012 that ‘we have sometimes run away from categorising, stigmatising, laying blame. We need a less understanding approach’. Such language contrasts sharply with the long term, universal approach adopted in the Getting It Right for Every Child (GIRFEC) initiative which was introduced in Scotland in 2005. We also discuss a number of policies and initiatives focused on supporting vulnerable children and families and involving school. These include the Pupil Premium, local authority policies such as Liverpool’s families programme, and in-school initiatives such as nurture groups and resilience programmes.

We conclude our report by noting that although there is a growing evidence base relating to the effectiveness of pre-school interventions, far less is known about the effectiveness of interventions during the primary phase. Some of the factors that have been identified as key to the success of interventions in the early years, such as targeting multiple areas of need and multi-agency working, are likely to be equally effective in the primary phase.  A body of evidence suggests that early intervention across the age range and focused on the whole family improves wellbeing, protects children and makes financial sense. Evidence also shows that narrowly-focused programmes attempting to address single issues are unlikely to deliver the desired outcomes for vulnerable children.

One of the implications for policy and practice with which we end the report is that a strengths, assets and solution-focused approach is necessary to build resilience in children and families to equip them with coping skills so they can sustain progress once formal supports have been withdrawn.  As the current furore over the proposed cuts to tax credits – which will disproportionately affect vulnerable children – indicates, it is difficult to see how this could be effected as long as pragmatic needs and deceits encourage policy makers to take with one hand even before they give with the other.

Michael Jopling is Professor of Education at Northumbria University and CPRT’s Regional Co-ordinator for the North East. 

The CPRT report on vulnerable children by Michael Jopling and Sharon Vincent will be published in late December or early January. 

by Robin Alexander

Face the music

Opera North has reported dramatic improvements in key stage 2 test results in two primary schools, one in Leeds, the other in Hull, and both in areas deemed severely deprived. ‘Dramatic’ in this instance is certainly merited: in one of the schools the proportion of children gaining level 4 in reading increased from 78 per cent in 2014 to 98 per cent in 2015, with corresponding increases in writing (75 to 86 per cent) and mathematics (73 to 93 per cent).

But what, you may ask, has this to do with opera?  Well, since 2013 the schools in question – Windmill Primary in Leeds and Bude Park Primary in Hull – have been working with Opera North as part of the Arts Council and DfE-supported In Harmony programme. This aims ‘to inspire and transform the lives of children in deprived communities, using the power and disciplines of community-based orchestral music-making.’  Opera North’s In Harmony project, now being extended, is one of six, with others in Gateshead, Lambeth, Liverpool, Nottingham and Telford. In the Leeds project, every child spends up to three hours each week on musical activity and some also attend Opera North’s after-school sessions. Most children learn to play an instrument and all of them sing. For the Hull children, singing is if anything even more important. Children in both schools give public performances, joining forces with Opera North’s professional musicians. For the Leeds children these may take place in the high Victorian surroundings of Leeds Town Hall.

Methodological caution requires us to warn that the test gains in question reflect an apparent association between musical engagement and standards of literacy and numeracy rather than the proven causal relationship that would be tested by a randomised control trial (and such a trial is certainly needed).  But the gains are sufficiently striking, and the circumstantial evidence sufficiently rich, to persuade us that the relationship is more likely to be causal than not, especially when we witness how palpably this activity inspires and sustains the enthusiasm and effort of the children involved. Engagement here is the key: without it there can be no learning.

It’s a message with which for many years arts organisations and activists have been familiar, and which they have put into impressive practice.  To many members of Britain’s principal orchestras, choirs, art galleries, theatres and dance companies, working with children and schools is now as integral to their day-to-day activity as the shows they mount, while alongside publicly-funded schemes like In Harmony, the Prince’s Foundation for Children and the Arts pursues on an even larger scale the objective of immersing disadvantaged children in the arts by taking them to major arts venues and enabling them to work with leading arts practitioners.  Meanwhile, outside such schemes many schools develop their own productive partnerships with artists and performers on a local basis.

Internationally, the chance move of a major German orchestra’s headquarters and rehearsal space into a Bremen inner-city secondary school created first unease, then a dawning sense of opportunity and finally an extraordinary fusion of students and musicians, with daily interactions between the two groups, students mingling with orchestra members at lunch and sitting with them rehearsals, and a wealth of structured musical projects.

But perhaps the most celebrated example of this movement is Venezuela’s El Sistema, which since 1975 has promoted ‘intensive ensemble participation from the earliest stages, group learning, peer teaching and a commitment to keeping the joy of musical learning and music making ever-present’ through participation in orchestral ensembles, choral singing, folk music and jazz. El Sistema’s best-known ambassador in the UK – via its spectacular performances at the BBC Proms – is the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, and it is El Sistema that provides the model for In Harmony, as it does, obviously, for Sistema Scotland with its ‘Big Noise’ centres in Raploch (Stirling), Govanhill (Glasgow) and Torry (Aberdeen).

By and large, the claims made for such initiatives are as likely to be social and personal as musical, though Geoffrey Baker  has warned against overstating their achievements and even turning them into a cult. Thus Sistema Scotland’s Big Noise is described as ‘an orchestra programme that aims to use music making to foster confidence, teamwork, pride and aspiration in the children taking part’.  There are similar outcomes from Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen’s move into the Tenever housing estate, with dramatic improvements reported in pupil behaviour and the school’s reputation transformed from one to be avoided to one to which parents from affluent parts of the city now queue to send their children.

Similarly, the initial NFER evaluation report on In Harmony cites ‘positive effects on children’s self-esteem, resilience, enjoyment of school, attitudes towards learning, concentration and perseverance’ with, as a bonus, ‘some perceived impact on parents and families including raised aspirations for their children, increased enjoyment of music and confidence in visiting cultural venues, and increased engagement with school.’  Children and the Arts sees early engagement with the arts through its Quest and Start programmes as a way of ‘raising aspirations, increasing confidence, improving communication skills andunlocking creativity.’ Such engagement is offered not only in ‘high-need areas where there is often socio-economic disadvantage or low arts access’ but also, through the Start Hospices programme, to children with life-limiting and life-threatening illnesses and conditions.

The SAT score gains from Opera North’s In Harmony projects in Leeds and Hull add a further justificatory strand; one, indeed, that might just make policymakers in their 3Rs bunker sit up and take notice.  For while viewing the arts as a kind of enhanced PSHE – a travesty, of course – may be just enough to keep these subjects in the curriculum, demonstrating that they impact on test scores in literacy and numeracy may make their place rather more secure.

This, you will say, is unworthily cynical and reductive. But cynicism in the face of policymakers’ crude educational instrumentality is, I believe, justified by the curriculum utterances and decisions of successive ministers over the past three decades, while the reductiveness is theirs, not mine. Thus Nicky Morgan excludes the arts from the EBacc, but in her response to the furore this provokes she reveals the limit of her understanding by confining her justification for the arts to developing pupils’ sense of ‘Britishness’, lamely adding that she ‘would expect any good school to complement [the EBacc subjects] with a range of opportunities in the arts’.  ‘A range of opportunities’ – no doubt extra-curricular and optional – is hardly the same as wholehearted commitment to convinced, committed and compulsory arts education taught with the same eye to high standards that governments reserve for the so-called core subjects.  Underlining the poverty of her perspective, Morgan tells pupils that STEM subjects open career options while arts subjects close them.

What worries me no less than the policy stance – from which, after all, few recent Secretaries of State have deviated – is the extent to which, in our eagerness to convince these uncomprehending ministers that the arts and arts education are not just desirable but essential, we may deploy only those justifications we think they will understand, whether these are generically social, behavioural and attitudinal (confidence, self-esteem) or in the realm of transferable skills (creativity, literacy, numeracy), or from neuroscience research (attention span, phonological awareness, memory). The otherwise excellent 2011 US report on the arts in schools from the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities falls into the same trap of focussing mainly on social and transferable skills, though it does at least synthesise a substantial body of research evidence on these matters which this country’s beleaguered advocates of arts education will find useful.

Let me not be misunderstood: the cognitive, personal and social gains achieved by El Sistema, Children and the Arts, In Harmony and similar ventures are as impressive as they are supremely important for children and society, especially in cultures and contexts where children suffer severe disadvantage.  And if it can be shown that such experiences enhance these children’s mastery of literacy and numeracy, where in the words of CPRT’s Kate Pickett, they encounter a much steeper ‘social gradient’ than their more affluent peers, then this is doubly impressive.

But the danger of presenting the case for arts education solely in these terms, necessary in the current policy climate though it may seem to be, is that it reduces arts education to the status of servant to other subjects, a means to someone else’s end (‘Why study music?’ ‘To improve your maths’) rather than an end in itself; and it justifies the arts on the grounds of narrowly-defined utility rather than intrinsic value. It also blurs the vital differences that exist between the various arts in their form, language, practice, mode of expression and impact.  The visual arts, music, drama, dance and literature have elements in common but they are also in obvious and fundamental ways utterly distinct from each other. They engage different senses, require different skills and evoke different responses – synaptic as well as intellectual and emotional. All are essential. All should be celebrated.

This loss of distinctiveness is perhaps unwittingly implied by the evaluation of the only Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) project in this area. EEF evaluates ‘what works’ interventions designed to enhance the literacy and numeracy attainment of disadvantaged pupils (including CPRT’s own dialogic teaching project) and its ‘Act, Sing, Play’ project has tested the relative impact of music and drama on the literacy and numeracy attainment of Year 2 pupils. It found no significant difference between the two subjects. So, in the matter of using the arts as a way to raise standards in the 3Rs, do we infer that any art will do?

So, yes, the power of the arts, directly experienced and expertly taught, is such that they advance children’s development, understanding and skill beyond as well as within the realms of the auditory, visual, verbal, kinaesthetic and physical. And yes, it should be clearly understood that while the arts can cultivate affective and social sensibilities, when properly taught they are in no way ‘soft’ or intellectually undemanding, and to set them in opposition to so-called ‘hard’ STEM subjects, as Nicola Morgan did, is as crass as claiming that creativity has no place in science or engineering. But until schools have the inclination and confidence to champion art for art’s sake, and to make the case for each art in its own terms, and to cite a wider spectrum of evidence than social development alone, then arts education will continue to be relegated to curriculum’s periphery.

For this is a historic struggle against a mindset that is deeply embedded and whose policy manifestations include a national curriculum that ignores all that we have to come know about the developmental and educative power of the arts, and indeed about its economic as well as cultural value, and perpetuates the same ‘basics with trimmings’ curriculum formula that has persisted since the 1870s and earlier.

That’s why the Cambridge Primary Review argued that the excessively sharp differentiation of ‘core’ and ‘foundation’ subjects should cease and all curriculum domains should be approached with equal seriousness and be taught with equal conviction and expertise, even though, of course, some will be allocated more teaching time than others. This alternative approach breaks with the definition of ‘core’ as a handful of ring-fenced subjects and allows us instead to identify core learnings across a broader curriculum, thereby greatly enriching children’s educational experience, maximising the prospects for transfer of learning from one subject to another, and raising standards.

Seriousness, conviction, expertise: here we confront the challenge of teaching quality. Schemes like Sistema, In Harmony and those sponsored by Children and the Arts succeed because children encounter trained and talented musicians, artists, actors and dancers at the top of their game.  These people provide inspirational role models and there is no limit to what children can learn from them. In contrast, music inexpertly taught – and at the fag-end of the day or week, to boot – not only turns children off but also confirms the common perception that music in schools is undemanding, joyless and irrelevant. Yet that, alas, is what too many children experience. For notwithstanding the previous government’s investment in ‘music hubs’, Ofsted remains pessimistic as to both the quality of music teaching and – no less serious – the ability of some school leaders to judge it and take appropriate remedial action, finding them too ready to entertain low expectations of children’s musical capacities.

But then this is another historic nettle that successive governments have failed to grasp. In its final report  the Cambridge Primary Review recommended (page 506) a DfE-led enquiry into the primary sector’s capacity and resources to teach all subjects, not just ‘the basics’, to the highest standard, on the grounds that our children are entitled to nothing less and because of what inspection evidence consistently shows about the unevenness of schools’ curriculum expertise. DfE accepted CPR’s recommendation and during 2010-12 undertook its curriculum capacity enquiry, in the process confirming CPR’s evidence, arguments and possible solutions. However, for reasons only DfE can explain, the resulting report was never made public (though as the enquiry’s adviser I have seen it).

In every sense it’s time to face the music.

As well as being Chair of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, Robin Alexander is a Trustee of the Prince’s Foundation for Children and the Arts.

 www.robinalexander.org.uk

by Robin Alexander

Mind the Gap

It’s official: money can buy you happiness. Well, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), that is.

But hold on: two years ago the evidence purported to show the opposite, confirming the pessimistic adage, while a quick internet scroll back a decade or two shows ostensibly secure data on this matter flipping backwards and forwards as often as it attracts media attention.

Do those who report these serially contradictory findings about the relationship between wealth and happiness pause to check today’s news against yesterday’s? Or ask whether interviewing a bored billionaire might be missing the point? Or consider instead the genuinely newsworthy but this time entirely consistent findings about poverty, and especially the damaging impact on health, education and wellbeing of childhood poverty?

In 2009, Kate Pickett co-authored the influential study The Spirit Level: why equality is better for everyone.  This showed that the issue is not wealth as such but the extent of the gap between rich and poor, and the way that this most basic of inequalities correlates with a host of others, not least in children’s educational opportunities, experiences and outcomes. This was an argument that politicians of all parties were keen to be seen to embrace, and to which initiatives like New Labour’s Narrowing the Gap and the coalition government’s Pupil Premium bear witness.

Today CPRT publishes Mind the Gap, a new report specially commissioned from the same Kate Pickett, who with Laura Vanderbloemen revisits the evidence that unequal educational outcomes are closely associated with social inequality – and its converse, that more equal societies have narrower attainment gaps and higher average attainment levels (they also perform better on measures of wellbeing and happiness, as it happens).  We urge you to download and read their report; and we hope that CPRT’s regional networks and alliance schools will give a lead in ensuring that it is disseminated and discussed. If you wish to cut straight to the conclusions there’s also a three-page briefing, though the evidence, tables and graphs in the main report deserve and repay attention.

So far, CPRT has published three research reviews in this series. There will eventually be twelve, and from now on the pace of publication increases, with all twelve reports due to be in print by March/April 2016.  Their aim is to update and extend the considerable body of published evidence surveyed for the Cambridge Primary Review in 2007-9 and then revised and combined into a major research compendium in 2010.

‘The gap’ has always been a prominent theme for CPR/CPRT. As CPR said then, and as the new CPRT report reminds us now:

Britain remains a very unequal society. Child poverty persists in this, one of the world’s richest nations. Social disadvantage blights the early lives of a larger proportion of children in Britain than in many other rich nations, and this social and material divide maps with depressing exactness onto the gap in educational attainment … While recent concerns should be heeded about the pressures to which today’s children are subject, and the undesirable values, influences and experiences to which some are exposed, the main focus of policy should continue to be on narrowing the gaps in income, housing, health, care, risk, opportunity and educational attainment suffered by a significant minority of children, rather than on prescribing the character of the lives of the majority. (Children, their World, their Education , p 488).

It was the apparent intractability of this challenge, and politicians’ seeming imperviousness to the illogicality or perhaps hypocrisy of trumpeting their efforts to close the gap in educational attainment while pursuing policies that widen the contingent gaps in income, health and wellbeing, that led CPRT to nominate as its top priority the pursuit of equity. Of course, equity and equality are not synonymous. But if the level of income into which far too many of our children happen to be born so severely conditions their educational prospects and future lives, and if – as Pickett and Vanderbloemen remind us – children do better if their parents have higher incomes and higher levels of education, then this is hardly fair or just and equity and equality become inseparable.

The new report doesn’t just document the gaps. It also assesses efforts by policymakers to close them.  One of these is the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), substantially part-funded by DfE to identify and evaluate promising school-based initiatives designed to narrow the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their peers. One such EEF initiative is CPRT’s own project Classroom talk, social disadvantage and educational attainment, whose programme of intensive support for dialogic teaching begins its trial phase next week in schools in Birmingham, Bradford and Leeds.

Policy initiatives such as these can and do make a difference, as do the impressive efforts of politically independent charities like the Sutton Trust and the Prince’s Foundation for Children and the Arts. But of course what has by far the greatest impact, for it does not depend on the vagaries of externally funded interventions and is sustained into the longer term, is the work of those thousands of teachers who simply by being there, and by combining skill with compassion and energy, are able day after day to refute the unbending determinism of the ‘cycle of disadvantage’.

So when Kate Pickett and Laura Vanderbloemen conclude that ‘reducing educational inequality will ultimately depend on reducing social and economic inequality’ they are neither yielding to that same determinism nor discounting the achievements of the many teachers who help their pupils to succeed against the odds. Rather, they are reminding us of the typically British folly of educational and economic policies which are unjoined-up to the point of being self-defeating, while encouraging politicians to meet the challenge of inequitable inequality holistically rather than piecemeal.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

Download the new CPRT report ‘Mind the Gap: tackling social and educational inequality.’

Download a short briefing about this report.

For other blogs by Robin Alexander click here and/or download CPRT’s book Primary Colours.

Contact

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