The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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Equality: do we really mean it?

The start of a new calendar year is a time traditionally given over to resolutions and promises to change. Good intentions often falter because we fail to identify or address the root causes of our existing patterns of behaviour. We wouldn’t need that diet if we really understood and applied the principles of healthy eating, for example.  Nothing magical happens on January 1st that will enable us to adopt a way of life we have studiously avoided for the previous 365 days. It takes effort to establish new patterns and habits.

I think this resistance to change might offer a possible explanation as to why, as 2016 starts, we as a society are still fighting for an equality which has been enshrined in law since 2010. I am referring to the right not to be discriminated against as a result of gender reassignment or sexual orientation, protected characteristics under UK law.

Now, there will be some who are uncomfortable with these being part of a blog about primary education, and to them I say: that is exactly my point. After 5 years it should not be the case that so many educators have failed to consider their public duty in relation to the Equalities Act. After five years, one could expect a profession guided by an underpinning set of values that are meant to include tolerance, democracy and mutual respect to have addressed these issues sensitively. So why will Christmas 2015 be remembered by one child as the one where the gendered gift given by the school reminded them they are expected to identify and conform to conventional expectations relating to the gender assigned at their birth? Why was 2015 the year where the child in reception was told to put both of her mothers on one Mother’s Day card rather than make them one each to show the uniqueness of her relationship with them? Why in 2015 were LGBT teachers still questioning whether they should come out at work for fear of the response from their colleagues, senior management and parents, despite the fact that the law is on their side?

Those who want easy answers will dismiss these instances with either a comment about political correctness gone mad or, worse, a blanket ban on all gendered events or language to do with LGBT issues. This is ironic, as CPRT has actually given us the simplest answer of all: listen to the children’s voices and work with them to develop an inclusive classroom that celebrates the diversity of their families. Recognise their rights and the rights of their families.

Carol Robinson’s 2014 CPRT report on Children’s Voice details how a Rights-Respecting School can enhance children’s learning through making them feel ‘valued, cared for, respected and listened to’ (p.5). It acknowledges the positive effect developing such a classroom culture has on staff collegiality and the relationship between teachers and pupils. It seems bizarre then that any primary school leadership team would be complicit in discrimination based on LGBT rights, and yet I hear regularly of incidents such as those above. The reason I am an advocate for CPRT is because as CPR’s evidence and CPRT’s aims and priorities make clear, it advocates a more equal society; reports like Carol’s demonstrate how important it is to keep reviewing and refining the response to CPRT aims until we no longer hear these anecdotes because they no longer happen.

CPRT Priority 2 is to advance children’s voice. It is possible to teach about the meaning behind Mother’s Day and to ask the children about all of their mother-figures, allowing them to make cards for all. The same will work on Father’s Day. If a child does not have a mother or father figure, we can discuss what qualities we think these people should have and pick the person we feel demonstrates them. It may be a fictional character or a famous person. It is not up to us to reassign the card to someone who makes us feel more comfortable: let the children write their card for whomsoever they choose.

As for gendered gifts, either make the effort to find out which they would prefer (regardless of their assigned gender) or give all children the same. Next December, a simple communication from Father Christmas asking them to tick a box next to the options will allow us to find out the children’s preference. We are not asking the children if they feel they are transgender: we are simply acknowledging their diversity and not expecting them to conform to gender stereotypes.

If none of this convinces, then maybe an argument that will persuade us to address such inequity is the link between equity, educational achievement and bullying as recorded in the evidence attached to CPRT Priority 1. In their 2015 CPRT research report Mind the Gap, Kate Pickett and Laura Vanderbloemen point out that ‘inequalities in educational outcomes are more profound in more unequal countries’ and that ‘average levels of educational attainment and children’s engagement in education are better in more equal societies’; and the 2014 Teachers’ Report produced by Stonewall states that ‘Almost half of primary school teachers (45 per cent) say that pupils at their school have experienced homophobic bullying or name-calling.’

It would not be unreasonable to look beyond socio-economic issues to include wider inequalities; to link the number of teachers citing homophobic incidents in primary settings with an inequality in recognising the diversity of our school population. Bullying and discrimination affect attainment; they affect children’s engagement in school and they are something we should be addressing until no child is a victim. The CPRT Children’s Voice report highlighted UNICEF UK’s finding that staff and pupils in rights-respecting environments often commented on the low incidents of bullying. It would seem to suggest that the best way of tackling issues of bullying and discrimination is to develop an ethos that respects people’s rights according to the laws of our society.

As part of the teacher training we offer at the University of Worcester there is explicit provision relating to equality and diversity, including tackling homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying on all postgraduate and undergraduate primary teaching courses. As a student-led project the university has set up a series of webpages, and other help is available.

So no more excuses: this is something we can resolve to address this year in order to give children the opportunity to express their true voice and celebrate who they and their families really are in all our schools. It is time to respect their rights.

Branwen Bingle of the University of Worcester co-ordinates CPRT’s new West Midlands network. If you would like to join Branwen in developing the network’s school-related activities please contact her here.

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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. 

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From pessimism to hope: global learning and sustainability

When the Cambridge Primary Review conducted its Community Soundings in 2007, it encountered a widespread sense of the world as a threatening place for children. The Review’s Final Report (p 189) explains:

We were frequently told … that the wider world is changing, rapidly and in ways which it is not always easy to comprehend, though on balance they give cause for alarm, especially in respect of climate change and environmental sustainability.

However, it then adds:

Pessimism turned to hope when witnesses felt they had the power to act. Thus, the children who were most confident that climate change need not overwhelm them were those whose schools had replaced unfocussed fear by factual information and practical strategies for energy reduction and sustainability.

I have spent a quarter of a century thinking about how primary schools can help children engage with such information, and adopt such strategies. It remains work in progress. I hope that the following will help teachers as they create their own professional repertoire.

Let us begin with pessimism.

Frightening visions of the world often impinge on children’s consciousness. Aged six in Cardiff, my  teacher told a horrified class about the nearby Aberfan disaster. Could this happen to us? My childhood nightmares revolved around nuclear war and the scene in the Sound of Music where the family crouches in terror, hiding from a Nazi search party. The nature of the challenges has mutated, but there remains much for children to be anxious about.

Spending a morning with year four children in a Worcestershire first school, I observed their efforts to make sense of some enormous numbers on the Worldometers website. As they watched the figures for births, deaths, carbon emissions and arms sales ratchet up in real time, like a demented gaming machine, the children began to decipher what they were seeing. They compared figures and applied what these meant to the real world around them. Within fifteen minutes, the children were cross-referring statistics on global literacy to what they had seen on Newsround about Malala Yousafzai.

The absolute figures for access to water and sanitation showed slow but steady progress. One child related this tellingly to population data: ‘About once every second someone else gets clean water and sanitation. But look at how many people there are: it’s not very nice.’ A nine-year-old child who can not only understand factual information, but interrogate it critically, and thereby create new knowledge, is already on a journey from pessimism to hope. That child will certainly not be easily duped by statistics, although he or she may also be in need of some wider perspectives and some practical solutions.

If we censor the world for children, in all its scariness and wonder, we can end up failing to protect them. In our quite proper desire to keep children safe, this can sometimes seem counter-intuitive. Time and again, however, surveys show that even very young children are already aware from family and the media of what is going on in the world. They will also often be very confused about it. If we delay our responses until children reach an imagined stage of developmental ‘readiness’, we merely allow fear and confusion free rein.

Many schools provide safe spaces where children can talk about what is going on in the world. This might be a daily ‘in the news’ slot, or through circle time, communities of enquiry, or within dedicated humanities, PSHE or RE time. Story can offer a powerful way in, offering as it does the protection that children are dealing with the world of fiction and the imagination.

I saw some powerful work recently from a year five class in West London, based on Pandora’s Box. The class created its own box, into which children placed what they most hated in the world. Importantly, clear ground rules had been established in advance, including the option to keep feelings private. Several families came from conflict zones, and many children related fears about violence and war. Others talked about unfair adult treatment, frightening things that they had witnessed, or deep-seated negative feelings about themselves. This activity was possible because these children had a high degree of trust in their peers and teachers, including a belief that their fears would be heard and responded to. Their own Pandora’s Box set out quite an agenda for the school, embracing curriculum (e.g. the literature, history and geography of war, conflict and refugees), wellbeing and safeguarding. Some of this had implications for the whole school and the local community. However, without the school having bravely provided a safe space for the children to reveal their ‘furies’, they might easily have remained silent and unattended in the children’s hearts and minds.

Pessimism requires a considered response. There is also cause for hope, but we may not hear so much about it. I think our highly-numerate year four child would be encouraged by these figures from the United Nations Development Programme:

  • Since 1990, the number of people living in extreme poverty has declined by more than half.
  • The proportion of undernourished people in the developing regions has fallen by almost half.
  • The primary school enrolment rate in the developing regions has reached 91 percent, and many more girls are now in school compared to 15 years ago.
  • Remarkable gains have also been made in the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.
  • The under-five mortality rate has declined by more than half, and maternal mortality is down 45 percent worldwide.
  • The target of halving the proportion of people who lack access to improved sources of water was also met

(Of course, our canny child would not be alone in asking how these figures had been arrived at, what they omit, and about the use of a term like ‘the developing regions’).

In September this year, leaders from 193 countries agreed 17 Sustainable Development Goals, setting out objectives for sustainable human and environmental development for the next fifteen years. Crucially, SDG4 for ‘Quality Education’ also sets the following target:

By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development.

The Cambridge Primary Review and CPRT have been ahead of the game, embracing sustainability and global citizenship as both a priority for the Trust and two explicit aims for all schools. The commitment has been implicit from the very beginning in CPR’s strapline – ‘Children, their world, their education’ – which was also was used for its final report and a 2014 seminar in which CPRT was involved, and there have been three recent CPRT blogs on this issue. The 2014 seminar also drew on pilot work carried out by the cross-European project DEEEP, considering the tricky question of how we measure progress against this UN target.

Frankly, all this may be a bit hard to digest. For me, the test is therefore what best serves the needs of particular children and their education. My instinct is to start with a question: what is happening and why does it matter? We can then move on to what different people are saying about it. It will be important to ensure that children have access to a good range of varied perspectives: this is one place where the specialists can help. From there, children can move on to the ways forward that might be available (there should usually be more than one, even at key stage 1). There may then be appropriate action that children can take: themselves, through others, often both.

From a pedagogical point of view, one of the great things about big global issues is that they may appear abstract, but they are actually very concrete. This means that children are engaging with real questions in real time, and this can lend a clear purpose to their enquiries, their talk, their writing. Moreover, because we are dealing with the real world, we are necessarily engaging with its glorious messiness. The world is perennially changing, what people say about it is contested, and our knowledge of it is constantly being updated. Such global knowledge is enormously rich: there is no answer-book for the big questions that face us in the real world.

This also means that we are to some extent necessarily co-learners. Indeed, it has been argued that human and sustainable development is itself a learning process, in which case we are all de facto participants on a shared learning journey. This can be challenging, but it can also be liberating for both teacher and pupils.

To put this into sharper focus, let us imagine that a year six class is learning about the forthcoming climate change summit in Paris. Yet again, world leaders are going to determine what is to be done about our collective futures. By borrowing an enquiry process that Tide~ has used in the past, we could ask:

  1. What is climate change? There is some solid science here, including the opportunity to take weather measurements, look at leaf-fall and bud-burst. Children could examine what so-called ‘climate sceptics’ have to say, and where the balance of evidence presently resides.
  2. Why does it matter? This allows children to move into geography, and the differential impacts of climate events on, say, the UK, the Sahel and small island states. They could use a ‘mystery’ to explore complex chains of cause and effect across the globe. They could follow online news reports about what people are saying in different places in the lead-up to the Paris summit.
  3. What can we do about it? This includes geography and science. Children could look at technical solutions in design technology, personal action and morality in PSHE and RE, the decision-making processes at Paris. They might write persuasive texts to send to local delegates to Paris. For a whole school response, a scheme such as Eco Schools would come into its own.
  4. What have we learned and how? This is a chance for children to share their learning with others, and with a purpose in so doing. For example, they could create an assembly, a film, a blog or news bulletin for their peers and the community, thereby meeting an ‘extended writing’ brief for National Curriculum 2014. In reviewing the ways they have learned about this issue, they may well devise further questions for the future. This is about empowering children not only as learners, but also as confident citizens.

There is a great deal of material for those wanting to go deeper into the pedagogy and ethics of global learning and sustainability. Elaine Miskell has produced a succinct document on some common pitfalls, and how they can be overcome. Teachers at Tide~ have produced a discussion paper on teaching about climate change as a focus for staff meetings. Thinkers like Vanessa Andreotti have written compellingly about how to challenge development stereotypes.

Eventually, the choice of what to do comes down to the individual teacher, the circumstances and opportunities that exist in her or his school, classroom and community, with specific children in mind. When I think about the many children I meet, like that year four child in Worcestershire, the fears that they share, the tricky questions that they ask, and the potential solutions they undertake, my own anxieties about the world start to feel more hopeful. If children can become agents of their own learning, authors of their own future and makers of sustainable change, those ‘darker visions’ of the world look a little bit brighter.

Ben Ballin works for the educational charity Tide~ global learning. He is also a consultant to the Geographical Association and Big Brum Theatre in Education. The example from Worcestershire  previously appeared in the article ‘The World in Numbers’ in Primary Geography 33.

The ‘darker visions’ in Ben’s final paragraph is a reference to the scene-setting in the Cambridge Primary Review final report and a reminder of why the Review and the Trust are committed to equity, global understanding and sustainability. The report said (p 15): ‘This is the era of globalisation, and perhaps of unprecedented opportunity. But there are darker visions. The gap between the world’s rich and poor continues to grow. There is political and religious polarisation. Many people are daily denied their basic human rights and suffer violence and oppression. As if that were not enough, escalating climate change may well make this the make-or-break century for humanity as a whole. Such scenarios raise obvious and urgent questions for public education.’

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.

by Robin Alexander

2015: teach local, learn global

We ended 2014 with one official consultation. We begin 2015 with another. The two couldn’t be more different.

In December we responded to the online enquiry of the House of Commons Education Select Committee into the UK government’s use of evidence to inform policy. Not for the first time, but in common with many of the enquiry’s other 500 respondents, we voiced deep concern that despite DfE’s ostensible interest in ‘evidence-informed policy’ its approach to evidence is all too often selective, ideologically partisan and methodologically naive.  It remains to be seen whether the Select Committee will call DfE to account on this score, or whether its members will merely shrug and say ‘That’s politics.’ Which, depressingly, it is.

But all this will seem parochial in comparison with the agenda to which another organisation invites us to respond, for it deals with nothing less than the responsibility of national educational systems, including our own, ‘to improve the quality of life, promote decent employment, encourage civic participation and enable all citizens to lead a life with dignity, equality, gender empowerment and justice’. All citizens, everywhere, not just in the UK.

The quotation comes from a UNESCO concept note outlining how progress in global education should be monitored after 2015, the year in which the current UN Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education (which in many countries won’t be achieved) is superseded by an even more ambitious set of goals which apply as much to rich countries as to poor, and tie education firmly to the increasingly urgent global imperatives of equity and sustainable development.

Both of these happen to be among CPRT’s eight priorities, and if you check the new CPRT priorities in action page of our website you’ll see how we and our partners are beginning, within our modest resources, to pursue them. But if you want a sense of the gravity of the challenge we all face, read the UN’s December 2014 synthesis report The road to dignity by 2030: ending poverty, transforming all lives and protecting the planet.

The report ends thus:

Today’s world is a troubled world, one in turmoil and turbulence, with no shortage of painful political upheavals. Societies are under serious strain, stemming from the erosion of our common values, climate change and growing inequalities, to migration pressures and borderless pandemics. It is also a time in which the strength of national and international institutions is being seriously tested. Because of the nature and the scope of this daunting array of enormous challenges, both inaction and business-as-usual must be dismissed as options. If the global community does not exercise national and international leadership in the service of the peoples of the world, we risk further fragmentation, impunity and strife, endangering both the planet itself as well as a future of peace, sustainable development and respect for human rights … 

The year 2015 is hence the time for global action … We must take the first determined steps toward a sustainable future with dignity for all. Transformation is our aim. We must transform our economies, our environment and our societies. We must change old mindsets, behaviours and destructive patterns. We must embrace the integrated essential elements of dignity, people, prosperity, planet, justice and partnership. We must build cohesive societies, in pursuit of international peace and stability … We have an historic opportunity and duty to act, boldly, vigorously and expeditiously, to achieve a life of dignity for all, leaving no one behind.

‘Think global, act local’ has become a cliché. Worse, it has been hijacked by multinationals to advance enterprises that are anything but sustainable or equitable.  But educators can reclaim it. The UN’s global education agenda is directed at governments, so at the start of 2015 we should demand to know how our own government will respond, or whether this major report and the evidence that informs it, will be kicked into touch like so many before it.  But the UN’s education agenda requires no less energetic action in the classroom. Teach local, learn global.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

If your school is working to advance the UN – and CPRT – goal of ‘a sustainable future with dignity for all’ and you would be willing to share your ideas with others in the CPRT network, please let us know. Contact administrator@cprtrust.org.uk.

You will find websites of these organisations relevant and helpful:

Sustainable Schools Alliance
Sustainability and Environmental Education
Think Global (the Development Education Association)
Tide Global Learning
TEESNet (formerly UK Teacher Education Network for education for sustainable development and global citizenship)

Read the full December 2014 UN synthesis report on global education after 2015, quoted above.

Contribute to shaping the focus of the 2016 report on Education, sustainability and the post-2015 development agenda (closing date for comments: 28 January).

Read responses to the House of Commons Education Committee enquiry into DfE’s use of evidence.

Contact

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