The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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Assessment, testing and accountability: a suggestion for an alternative framework

The data from the new 2016 tests for 11 year olds in England is gradually trickling out. We have been informed that 48 percent of the children did not reach the new expected standards in reading, writing and mathematics combined (compared to 35 percent in 2015 under the old system) and are at risk of being labelled ‘failures’. In addition, the calculations have been done to identify each Y6 child’s scaled score and progress measure. Parents have been told something like ‘In reading your child got 99 on the scaled score against the expected standard and 1.6 progress score’. Not terrifically helpful, particularly if the parent has become familiar with Levels over the last 28 years.

Combined with the anecdotal evidence about the problems children had with the reading test, and the abandonment of the grammar test for seven year olds after it was inadvertently leaked, it is no surprise that more and more educationists, parents and organisations are calling for a fundamental review.

I have written in previous blogs about the current system and its shortcomings, now exacerbated by the 2016 experience, drawing on Wynne Harlen’s 2014 research report for CPRT Assessment, Standards and Quality of Leaning In Primary Education which outlines the evidence concerning the impact of high stakes testing and compares England’s system with those of a number of other countries. Harlen’s key point that ‘the system …. for primary schools in England still suffers from over-dependence on testing and the use of end of Key Stage 2 tests for too many purposes’ (p. 32) indicates that we must consider a fundamentally different approach .

In this blog I outline the key strands which I think would need to be considered  under any review, with some suggestions concerning what should be incorporated, based on the available evidence.

The three strands for a comprehensive system of assessment and accountability are at individual child level, school level and national level.

At individual child level the focus must be assessment for learning and assessment of learning (i.e. formative and summative assessment). Assessment must be used to help children while they are learning and to find out what they have learned at a particular point in time.  Testing can be a part of this as it can inform overall teacher assessment and help to identify any potential gaps in learning.  However tests cannot give all the information needed to take a rounded view of what children need to learn and what they know and can do. As Harlen states: ‘the evidence shows that when teachers draw on a range of sources of evidence, then discuss and moderate with other teachers, assessment is more accurate’. Depending on the score from an externally marked, single test of reading at 11, for example, to identify reading ability is simply not enough evidence to make a reliable judgement.

As a first move in this direction, the system currently used for seven year olds should be adopted at the end of KS2; teacher assessment based on a range of evidence, including but not determined by a formal test.

In addition the plethora of evidence-based assessment resources available should be utilised to underpin an approach that is qualitative as well as quantitative. For example there are the CLPE/UKLA et al Reading and Writing Scales which can be used for identifying children’s progress as well as indicating next steps for learning. It is also worth looking at the end of each of these scales where there is an extensive bibliography showing how they are firmly based in research evidence. Something DfE might consider doing.

In summary, the principle that assessment of any kind should ultimately improve learning for children is central and should be the criterion against which all assessment practices in and beyond school should be judged.

At school level the focus must be on partnership in assessment as well as accountability. Firstly, that means not only being accountable to parents and the local community the school serves, but also working systematically with them as partners.

Parents have a key role to play in assessment which goes beyond being regularly reported to and includes the sharing of information about the progress of their children both within and beyond school to obtain a fully informed picture. This would be followed by discussions concerning what the school is doing more generally to promote learning across all aspects of learning.

Schools should hold themselves to account through systematic self evaluation. This self evaluation should be externally moderated by local partners, crucially through strengthened local authorities, and nationally through a properly independent HMI. However the system should not feel, as it does to many schools under the current arrangements, as punitive, but developmental and supportive, including when a school is not doing as well as it should.  Any moderated self evaluation should be formative for the school as well as demonstrating accountability.

CPRT responded by making assessment reform one of its eight priorities, aiming to

Encourage 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.

CPRT’s Priorities in Action assessment webpage lists our multifaceted response to this priority including reports, briefings, blogs, parliamentary and government submissions and purpose-designed CPD for schools.

The final report of the Cambridge Primary Review was also clear that inspection needed to change (p. 500) and recommended that a new model be explored which focussed much more on classroom practice, pupil learning and the curriculum as a whole.

In any review of assessment, the accountability system must be reviewed at the same time. That goes for accountability at national level too.

Current arrangements at primary level are both narrow, only focusing on some aspects of core subjects, and useless for making comparisons across time as the criteria and tests keep changing. A system of sample surveys should be formulated to monitor national standards. These would be based on a large number of components and be able to extend well beyond the core subjects if a rolling programme was organised. England would then be able to judge whether primary education as a whole, in all its aspects, based on a comprehensive set of aims, was being successful and was improving over time. Currently this is impossible to do.

Thus is not surprising that more and more people and organisations are, alongside CPRT, calling for a fundamental review of assessment, testing and accountability and that a major campaign is about to get underway. This campaign is to be called ‘More than A Score’ and a major conference has been announced for December 3rd. CPRT fully supports this campaign.

This move to a more effective approach would not be a simple process. As CPR’s final report stated in 2010 ‘Moving to a valid, reliable and properly moderated procedures for a broader approach to assessment will require careful research and deliberation’ (p. 498)

It will take some time, but I believe, for all involved, it will be well worth the effort.

Just as this blog was being prepared, Justine Greening, Secretary of State for Education, made an announcement about primary school assessment. This included a commitment to ‘ setting out steps to improve and simplify assessment arrangements’, the abandonment of Y7 resits, and no new tests to be introduced before the 2018/19 academic year. There is a welcome acknowledgement in the tone of the statement that current arrangements are not working, although the last point has alarming implications about the introduction of further, unnecessary, high stakes tests.

The Secretary of State also announced another consultation, to take place next year, on assessment, testing and accountability. We have seen many of these so called ‘consultations’ before where the views of educationalists and the evidence from research and experience have been completely ignored.

Another ‘consultation’ is not needed, What is needed is a thorough, independent, review where all stakeholders are represented and a government that is prepared to listen and respond positively.

David Reedy is a co-Director of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, and General Secretary of the United Kingdom Literacy Association.

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Time for radical change: grammar testing in England’s primary schools  

It has not been a good couple of weeks for testing in England’s primary schools.

There have been leaks of both the KS1 and KS2 spelling, grammar and punctuation tests, leading to the KS1 test being scrapped for this year and accusations by ministers that malign forces are at work to undermine the government’s education reform process.

Baseline assessment for four year olds has also gone, as its unreliability for accountability purposes became so obvious that continuation became untenable. (Not that the problems with testing and accountability are unfamiliar to teachers or parents, as Stephanie Northen and Sarah Rutty reminded us in their powerful recent blogs).

Even before his problem with subordinating conjunctions, Nick Gibb was complaining about the current situation in a speech at the ASCL curriculum summit on 27 April:

You do not need me to tell you that the implementation of the new key stage one and key stage two tests has been bumpy, and I and the department are more than willing to accept that some things could have been smoother. The current frameworks for teacher assessment, for example, are interim, precisely because we know that teething problems that exist in this phase of reform need to leave room for revision.

‘Teething problems’ is a bit of an understatement.

The Cambridge Primary Review Trust is committed to looking at what the widest range of available evidence tells us about assessment and assessment reform, including from experience such as Stephanie’s and Sarah’s as well as formal research, and it argues that decisions should be made at both policy and classroom level based upon that evidence.

I want to briefly look at the research evidence on the grammar tests for seven and eleven year olds and the government’s claims for them, to complement and add to the blogs of the last fortnight.

Nick Gibb argued in his ASCL speech, as well as on earlier occasions, that testing is a way of raising standards in the core areas of reading, writing and mathematics. He said:

Against those who attack the underlying principle of these reforms, I stand firm in my belief that they are right and necessary. Our new tests in grammar, punctuation and spelling have been accused by many in the media of teaching pupils redundant or irrelevant information. One fundamental outcome of a good education system must be that all children, not just the offspring of the wealthy and privileged, are able to write fluent, cogent and grammatically correct English.

He thus conflates performance in these tests with writing fluently and cogently. But the evidence that a test will help the children to get better at writing when it asks six and seven year olds to identify an adverb in ‘Jamie knocked softly on his brother’s bedroom door’ or to decide whether ‘One day, Ali decided to make a toy robot’ is a question, statement, command or an exclamation, simply doesn’t exist. The experience of this year’s Y2 and Y6 children, before the requirement to do the Y2 test was dropped, was in many cases, that of separate grammar lessons where they were trained for the test, making sure they could identify word classes and sentence types through decontextualised exercises, so that they would be able to answer questions like these. If the test is reintroduced in 2017 this will happen again, distorting the curriculum with little or no benefit to pupils.

I make this claim because the research evidence over many years is unequivocal. Debra Myhill, who with her colleagues at Exeter University has extensively investigated the teaching of grammar and has shown that explicit attention to grammar in the context of ongoing teaching can help pupils to improve their writing, summarised that evidence in an April 2013 TES article. She wrote:

I did a very detailed analysis of the test and I had major reservations about it. I think it’s a really flawed test. The grammar test is totally decontextualised. It just asks children to do particular things, such as identifying a noun. But 50 years of research has consistently shown that there is no relationship between doing that kind of work and what pupils do in their writing. I think children will do better in the test than they are able to in their writing because it isolates the skills so that children only have to think about one thing at a time.

Myhill adds that the test will tend to overestimate children’s ability to manipulate grammar and make appropriate choices in their writing.  It would be much more valid to assess children’s ability to manipulate grammar by looking at how they do so in the context of the pieces of writing they do in the broad curriculum they experience. This test is therefore unreliable. It is also invalid.

In her CPRT research report on assessment and standards Wynne Harlen defines consequential validity as ‘how appropriate the assessment results are for the uses to which they are put’. A test which focuses on labelling grammatical features may be valid in testing whether children know the grammatical terms, but it is not valid for making judgements about writing ability more generally. The evidence emphatically does not support Nick Gibb’s claim that the test will lead to ‘fluent, cogent and grammatically correct English’. These grammar tests will not and cannot do what the government’s rhetoric claims.

The Cambridge Primary Review Trust, like the Cambridge Primary Review, supports the use of formal assessments, in which tests have a role, as part of a broader approach to identifying how well children are learning in school and how well each school is doing, though like many others it warns against overloading such assessments with tasks like system monitoring. Wynne Harlen’s reports for CPR and CPRT, and the assessment chapters (16 and 17) in the CPR final report, remain excellent places to examine the evidence for a thoroughgoing review of the current assessment and accountability arrangements, including the place of testing within them, in England’s primary schools.

As I reminded readers in a previous blog the Cambridge Primary Review in 2010 cited assessment reform as one of eleven post-election priorities for the incoming government. Six years and a new government later,  a fundamental review of assessment and testing is still urgently needed.

Assessment reform remains a key CPRT priority. For a round-up of CPR and CPRT evidence on assessment see our Priorities in Action page. This contains links to Wynne Harlen’s CPR and CPRT research reports mentioned above, relevant blogs, CPRT regional activities, CPR and CPRT evidence to government consultations on assessment, and the many CPR publications on this topic

David Reedy is a co-Director of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, and General Secretary of the United Kingdom Literacy Association.

 

by Robin Alexander

An ideological step too far

Secretary of State Nicky Morgan is reportedly looking to recruit the next head of Ofsted from the United States.

Even if she were to locate, with due objectivity and rigour (words much used by ministers but seldom exemplified in their actions), a variety of American educators with the requisite expertise and professional standing, her quest would be perplexing. For it would signal that no home-grown British talent can match that imported from an education system which reflects a national culture very different from ours, is mired in controversy, and, though it has individual teachers, schools and school districts of matchless quality, performs as a system below the UK on international measures of pupil achievement.

But that is not all. A check on the touted names makes it clear that the search is less about talent than ideology.  The reputation of every US candidate in which the Secretary of State is said to be interested rests on their messianic zeal for the universalisation of charter schools (the US model for England’s academies), against public schools (the equivalent of our LA-maintained schools), and against the teaching unions.  This, then, is the mission that the government wants the new Chief Inspector to serve.

Too bad that the majority of England’s primary schools are not, or not yet, academies. Too bad that Ofsted, according to its website, is supposed to be ‘independent and impartial’; and that Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills is required to report to Parliament, not to the political party in power; and that he/she must do so without fear or favour, judging the performance of all schools, whether maintained or academies, not by their legal status or political allegiance but by the standards they achieve and the way they are run.  Too bad that on the question of the relative efficacy of academies and maintained schools the jury is still out, though Ofsted reports that while some truly outstanding schools are academies, many are not. And too bad that the teaching unions are legally-constituted organisations that every teacher has a right to join and that, by the way, they have an excellent track record in assembling reliable evidence on what works and what does not.

When we consider the paragons across the pond who are reportedly being considered or wooed in Morgan’s search for Michael Wilshaw’s successor, mere ideology descends into dangerous folly. One of them runs a charter school chain in which the brutal treatment of young children in the name of standards has been captured on a video that has gone viral. Another leads a business, recently sold by the Murdoch empire (yes, he’s there too), that having failed to generate profits in digital education is now trying to make money from core curriculum and testing. A third is the union-bashing founder of a charter school chain that has received millions of dollars from right-wing foundations and individuals but whose dubious classroom practices have been exposed not just as morally unacceptable but, in terms of standards, educationally ineffective. A fourth, yet again a charter chain leader, has published a proselytising set text for the chain’s teachers tagged ‘the Bible of pedagogy for no-excuses charter schools’ that, according to critics, makes teaching uniform, shallow, simplistic and test-obsessed. Finally, the most prominent member of the group has been feted by American and British politicians alike for ostensibly turning round one of America’s biggest urban school systems by closing schools in the teeth of parental protest, imposing a narrow curriculum and high stakes tests, and making teacher tenure dependent on student scores; yet after eight years, fewer than a quarter of the system’s students have reached the ‘expected standard’ in literacy and numeracy.

As head of Ofsted, every one of these would be a disaster. As for the US charter school movement for which such heroic individuals serve as models and cheerleaders, we would do well to pay less attention to ministerial hype and more to the evidence. In England we are familiar with occasional tales of financial irregularity and faltering accountability, and of DfE using Ofsted inspections to bludgeon academy-light communities into submission. But this is as nothing compared with the widely-documented American experience of lies, fraud, corruption, rigged student enrolment, random teacher hiring and firing and student misery in some US school districts and charters, all of which is generating growing parental and community opposition.  Witness the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and this week’s nationwide ‘walk-in’ in defence of  public education.  Yet the culture that American parents, teachers, children and communities are combining to resist is the one the UK government wishes, through Ofsted, to impose. Ministers believe in homework: have they done their own?

However, as prudent fallback Nicky Morgan is said to have identified five British candidates. While these don’t hail from the wilder shores of US charter evangelism, their affiliations confirm the mission ‘to make local authorities running schools a thing of the past’ (Prime Minister Cameron last December), and, to avoid any lingering ambiguity, ‘The government believes that all schools should become academies or free schools’ (from the DfE website).

In pursuit of this agenda, the reported British candidates have immaculate academy and/or Teach First credentials (Teach First is the British teacher training cousin of the evangelistic Teach for America, like charter schools an essential part of the package of corporate reform). Most take home eye-watering salaries. All are within the inner ministerial circle of school leaders whose politically compliant views are rewarded with access, patronage, gongs, and seats on this or that DfE ‘expert group’ whose job is to dress up as independent advice what the government wishes to hear.

Home-spun this second list may be, but it is hardly likely to meet the Ofsted criterion of ‘independent and impartial.’

It should not be like this, and it does not need to be. Like the United States, England has many more outstanding schools, talented teachers and inspirational educational leaders than those few who are repeatedly praised in party conference speeches and with which ministers assiduously pack their ‘expert groups’.  The talent worthy of celebration and reward is not located exclusively in academies or Teach First any more than in individual schools it resides solely in the office of the head (for these days rank and file teachers barely merit a mention even though without their unsung dedication and skill all schools would be in special measures).

The problem with the much longer list of potential candidates for the top Ofsted post is that those who ought to be on it – and they come from maintained schools, academies and other walks of life – don’t necessarily toe the ministerial line. They are not, in Thatcher’s still resonant words, ‘one of us’. Such independent-minded and genuinely talented people may conclude from inspection or research evidence that flagship policy x, on which minister y’s reputation depends, isn’t all it is cracked up to be. They put children before their own advancement. They dare to speak truth to power.

Yet isn’t this exactly what an ‘independent and impartial’ Ofsted is required to do, and what, give or take the odd hiatus, most HM Chief Inspectors have done – so far? And isn’t it exactly what a genuine democracy needs in order that well-founded policies gain a hearing, ill-founded policies are abandoned before they do lasting damage, and the education system is ‘reformed’ in the ameliorative sense rather than merely reorganised as part of the latest ministerial vanity project?

But no, for by politicising public education to the extent heralded by the 1988 Education ‘Reform’ Act and entrenched ever more deeply by each successive government since then, ministers are signalling that power matters more than improvement, compliance more than honesty, dogma more than reasoned argument; and that in the battle between ideology and evidence – a battle in which the Cambridge Primary Review and CPRT have been strenuously engaged for the past ten years, often to their cost – ideology trumps every time. The government’s attempt to ‘fix’ the agenda of England’s independent inspectorate by appointing one of its own persuasion as chief inspector is not just an ideological step too far. It is an indefensible abuse of political power.

Talking of Trump, is he on Nicky Morgan’s bucket list too?  Go on, Secretary of State – in for a penny, in for a trillion dollars.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

If you would like to learn more about educational ‘reform’ in the United States, try the blogs of Diane Ravitch  and Gene Glass, and recent books by Ravitch and Berliner and Glass. For a catalogue of US charter school irregularity see Charter School Scandals.  For Jeff Bryant’s reflections on this week’s ‘walk-ins’ in support of US public schooling, click here.

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Musings from The Wild Wood

I’m sitting in the Spinney’s Wild Wood with a laptop balanced precariously on my knee hoping that the Muse of the wood will inspire my writing. The air is fresh, the sunlight is dappled and a female blackbird is singing enthusiastically on a branch above. I sigh. My exhalation is an expression of relief and peace. I always sigh when I come into this fresh, green space.

The Wild Wood is really a rather modest place: a copse of trees, a small lake, a clearing with a log seat circle and an imperial gazillion of nettles, and yet the Spinney children often cite it as one of their favourite locations. It’s a place to explore, to be curious, to be creative and where the natural environment awakens the imagination.

The Wild Wood was re-discovered about two years ago – like Mary Lennox finding the Secret Garden – it’s set behind a high fence, there’s a gate with a padlock, and a ditch to navigate before you can get in. The tricky ditch caused me much consternation at first. I had to consider the little ones, health and safety and risk assessment. I investigated the options including the prices for various wooden bridges, the cost of which came close to a thousand pounds. Finally after a fruitless week or two, inspiration struck and I dragged two wooden pallets into place, which have since served their purpose very well.

The Foundation Stage children were the first to go in. Their initial exploratory steps were tentative and wary, crossing the makeshift bridge on hands and knees, but as the days went by and confidence grew they soon bounded over the pallets with growing assertiveness. Once inside and following the teachers’ briefing the children were off; free to explore, to discover, to build, to climb trees, and to graze knees. The teachers had to embrace a new paradigm to facilitate the children’s learning, allowing the children to take the lead, allowing experiences and stories to grow and to expand and be without the customary limits and boundaries of time. You can find out about some of the wonderful learning that has taken place in partnership with CCI by clicking here.

Several years ago, when my daughter was about two, I had the privilege to participate in a British Council CPD visit to Sweden and experience the Swedish school system for a week. The group visited several schools and I learnt a great deal, a visit to a kindergarten in the forest being one of the most memorable. School started at 8:00 in the morning and about 30 children between 18 months and 7 years were being taught in a long beautiful chalet building. It was warm and cosy inside and there were nightlights flickering on window ledges. Other than registration, gathering to sing songs and listen to stories there was no formal instruction. The children were regulating their curriculum, choosing from a wide range of activities inside and outside of the building.

I was struck by the level of trust and the confidence that the staff had in the children’s abilities for self-directed learning and keeping themselves safe. There was the usual variety of toys, construction sets, dressing up clothes, small world play and craft activities as well as woodwork in one corner of the room. The woodwork bench was well equipped with hammers, nails and saws. Occasionally, staff would intervene if a child requested it but predominantly the children were persevering and constructing their own wooden structures, sawing, hammering, drilling and designing without any adult interference. In contrast to the provision that had been set out by the teachers, I also noticed some of the children going over to their school drawer independently at times, to pull out a smaller crafting activity such as Hama beads. This requires great hand-eye co-ordination and is a gentler, quieter activity.

At about 10:30 about 20 of the children went into the hallway to dress in their outdoor attire. Again the children were doing this by themselves, pulling on boots, shuffling into salopettes and wrapping warm scarves around themselves. Although the older ones helped the younger ones the process of getting ready took some time and this independent dressing was clearly part of the learning process as well.

The kindergarten was set at the foot of a mountain range and there was a rough stony path adjacent to the chalet that headed into the forest. Accompanied by three teachers, the children took each others’ hands and, walking in pairs, headed up the steep slope. Teeny-tinnies not much older than my daughter were confidently picking their way up the mountain. After a 15-minute steady climb we came to a clearing. The children and adults sat on the ground in a circle, and I observed as the teacher pulled out laminated cards depicting various wild birds, woodland animals, and different tree varieties for the children to identify and name.

When this activity concluded the teacher signalled for the children to go off and play. The children dispersed in an instant, heading off in every direction and vanishing into the woods! My immediate instinct was to follow, to ensure that the children were safe. One of the teachers put her hand on my arm to halt my pursuit. She smiled. ‘Let them go’, she said, ‘they will be fine.’

The Swedish and English teachers gathered and chatted for a few minutes. ‘Now’, said the teacher eventually ‘you can go and see if you wish.’  I wandered off towards the sound of giggles and happy children and saw about six of them climbing all over a huge tree trunk lying on the ground. Even on its side, the trunk was about as tall as the children and they were taking it in turns to walk along, arms outstretched and balancing the length of the beam. The children had set their own physical challenge and were delighting in every child who successfully traversed from one end to the other.

Although several years ago now, this short visit to Sweden was instrumental in shaping parts of my pedagogy and has influenced my leadership of learning at The Spinney.  I learnt that we must trust children; we must nurture their creative instinct; we must believe in their innate curiosity and their appetite to learn; we must allow for them to surprise and delight us; there must be times for concentrated endeavour as well as periods of focused calm; we must devise opportunities for them to create, collaborate, communicate, dream, imagine and problem solve. We must have confidence in children’s abilities to shape aspects of their own learning using their natural curiosity to lead the way. With thoughtful, kind and caring adults children will strive in the classroom and thrive in nature. With the right nurturing conditions children will imagine, invent, create, experiment and like the branches that surround me as I type, will grow towards the sun.

The Spinney Primary School is proud to be a member of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust Schools Alliance and to be part of this growing network of researchers and schools. The Cambridge Primary Review’s aims for primary education chime well with our school ethos and pedagogy. The Spinney has seven values. Pre-eminent of these is a child-centredness which underpins the quotidian as well as the strategic long term. Valuing children for who they are today, rather than simply what they will be in the future is also at the heart of the CPRT vision and I am excited by the opportunity to work with other colleagues and schools who recognise that childhood (and Wild Woods) are inspiring and magical places to be. 

‘Exploration is grounded in that distinctive mixture of amazement, perplexity and curiosity which constitutes childhood wonder; a commitment to discovery, invention, experiment, speculation, fantasy, play and growing linguistic agility which are the essence of childhood.’  (From Aim 9 of the Cambridge Primary Review’s Twelve Aims for Primary Education.)

Rachel Snape is Headteacher of the Spinney Primary School, Cambridge.

www.spinney.cambs.sch.uk  @RaeSnape 

Discover more about the CPRT Schools Alliance here. View or download membership criteria and procedure.

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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Are we nearly there yet?

February saw a flurry of government announcements about assessment in English schools.

On 4 February information about reception baseline assessment was published. In summary this states that from September 2015 schools may use a baseline assessment on children’s attainment at the beginning of the reception year. DFE has commissioned six providers which are listed in the document. Schools can choose the provider they prefer. This is not compulsory but the guidance states:

Government-funded schools that wish to use the reception baseline assessment from September 2015 should sign up by the end of April. In 2022 we’ll then use whichever measure shows the most progress: your reception baseline to key stage 2 results or your key stage 1 results to key stage 2 results.

From September 2016 you’ll only be able to use your reception baseline to key stage 2 results to measure progress. If you choose not to use the reception baseline, from 2023 we’ll only hold you to account by your pupils’ attainment at the end of key stage 2.

The Early Years Foundation Stage Profile (EYFSP) stops being compulsory in September 2016 too.

DfE is therefore essentially ensuring that emphasis is placed on a narrowing measure of attainment in language, literacy and mathematics (with a few small extra bits in most of the six cases), rather than an assessment which presents a much more holistic view of a child’s learning and development. There is a veiled threat implied in the information quoted above. If a school doesn’t use one of these baselines, progress will not be taken into account when a primary school is judged as good or not. Not doing the baseline might be an advantage to a school where children would do very well on it, and then only make expected progress, but still achieve high scores at the end of KS2, and the reverse if children would score very low on the baseline. Are schools now going to gamble whether to do these or not?

There are other serious issues leading to further uncertainty for schools. Almost all the recommended schemes are restricted mainly to language, literacy and mathematics and therefore progress and the school’s effectiveness would be based on a narrow view of what the aims of primary education is for. Five of the six chosen systems do not explicitly draw on parents’ and carers’ knowledge of their children and thus will be based on incomplete evidence. As TACTYC has pointed out, there are fundamental concerns about reliability and validity.

Comparisons between schools and overall judgements would be compromised when there are six different ways to measure the starting points of children in reception. It is inconsistent to allow schools to choose between six providers at baseline but only allow one choice at age 7 and 11.

Finally, as the first time progress will be measured from the baseline at age 11 will be in summer 2023 there will be at least two general elections before then. Will education policy in assessment remain static until then? On current experience that is highly unlikely.

Alongside this inconsistency and uncertainty about the reception baseline the government published its response to the consultations about the draft performance descriptors for the end of KS1 and KS2.

The responses were significantly more negative than positive with the vast majority of  respondents indicating that these descriptors were not good enough and would not be able to do the job they were designed to do. Indeed nearly half thought the descriptors were not fit for purpose.

At the same time, and no doubt as a result of the consultation, DFE announced an Assessment without Levels Commission with the remit of ‘supporting  primary and secondary schools with the transition to assessment without levels, identifying and sharing good practice in assessment’.

This is clearly to address the significant  uncertainty about ongoing and summative assessment at the end of key stages where schools continue to struggle to understand what DfE’s thinking actually is now that levels have been abolished.

Schools in England are in a cleft stick. Do they choose to do one of the baseline tests, which will take considerable time to administer one to one without knowing if it will be used in seven years time or be of use next week to help plan provision? Can they afford to wait for the assessment commission to recommend an approach to assessment without levels or do they get on with it and possibly end up with a system that doesn’t fit with what is recommended?

Thus to answer the question in this blog’s title, the answer on the basis of the evidence above is ‘Who knows?’

What a contrast to the situation in Wales where, also in February, Successful Futures, the review of the curriculum and assessment framework for Wales led by Professor Graham Donaldson, was published.

This states:

Phases and key stages should be removed in order to improve progression, and should be based on a well-grounded, nationally described continuum of learning that flows from when a child enters education through to the end of statutory schooling at 16 and beyond.

Learning will be less fragmented… and progression should be signaled through Progression Steps, rather than levels. Progression Steps will be described at five points in the learning continuum, relating broadly to expectations at ages 5, 8, 11, 14 and 16…. Each Progression Step should be viewed as a staging post for the educational development of every child, not a judgement.

What a sensible and coherent recommendation for assessment policy. Thus Wales may very well end up with a coherent, agreed, national framework for both mapping progress and judging attainment at specific ages within a broad understanding of the overall aims of education.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Professor Donaldson’s review drew significantly on the Cambridge Primary Review’s Final Report in coming to its conclusions.

Maybe England’s policy makers should too.

Assessment reform is a CPRT priority. For a round-up of CPR and CPRT evidence on assessment see our Priorities in Action page. This contains links to Wynne Harlen’s recent CPRT research review, relevant blogs, CPRT regional activities, CPR and CPRT evidence to government consultations on assessment, and the many CPR publications on this topic.

Contact

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