The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

by Robin Alexander

Over but not out

We mentioned at our highly successful national conference last November that the future of Cambridge Primary Review Trust (CPRT) has been under discussion.

During the past ten years CPRT and its predecessor the Cambridge Primary Review have established an unrivalled foundation of educational evidence, vision and principle for those to whom such things matter (which, dispiritingly, excludes many of our political leaders), and the 2016 conference reminded us of what can be achieved if we are prepared to transcend institutional and professional boundaries and act together.

CPRT was always expected to be time-limited rather than a permanent fixture, a way of giving the spirit and messages of the Review a final push before releasing them to find their own place in the landscape of primary education.  The national map is patchy, but there’s no doubt that in many quarters that place is secure, so the Review’s tenth anniversary was a time not just to celebrate, as we did last November, but also to take stock.

The stock-taking is now complete. Rather than run the risk of fading away through over-familiarity, and mindful of our increasing reliance on voluntary effort, we have decided that the time to stop is now, and that we’ll go out on a high.

Better still, we have been able to secure a deal which will maintain the Trust’s voice, presence and resources for the foreseeable future, albeit in another guise.

Here’s how it will work. CPRT will shortly cease to operate as a company. Its remaining financial assets will be transferred to a holding account to cover outstanding bills and keep its website alive and fully accessible for the next two years.  Meanwhile, the new Chartered College of Teaching (CCoT) has agreed to take over curation of the combined online resource bank of Cambridge Primary Review and Cambridge Primary Review Trust – over 100 publications plus a host of official submissions and other material – and ensure that as a mainstay of CCoT’s ‘knowledge platform’ it continues as an exemplary source of ideas, information and evidence relating to the development and education of young children, and a standard-bearer for what matters as well as what works.

Further, those teachers who have been engaged with CPRT – whether as recipients of our e-mailings or as members of CPRT regional networks and Schools Alliance – will be able to join CCoT at the College’s founding rate. At the same time we are hoping that at least some of our regional networks and alliance schools will take up the opportunity to transform themselves into CCoT regional communities.

Though the timing looks perfect, it isn’t as serendipitous as it may seem. Robin Alexander (CPR Director and CPRT Chair) and Alison Peacock (CCoT’s first Chief Executive) not only worked together during 2010-12 to disseminate CPR’s messages but were also party to the initial discussions in 2013-14 about what is now CCoT, while during 2016 Robin was a member of CCoT’s Research and Evidence Advisory Group. Common to both CPRT and CCoT is the re-empowerment of teachers after two decades of enforced dependency and compliance. The desired shift is encapsulated in that familiar quote from the CPR final report (p 496) that ‘children will not learn to think for themselves if their teachers are merely expected to do as they are told’ and its less familiar exegesis (also p 496):

We need to move to a position where research-grounded teaching repertoires and principles are introduced through initial training and refined and extended through experience and CPD, and teachers acquire as much command of the evidence and principles which underpin the repertoires as they do of the skills needed in their use. The test of this alternative view of professionalism is that teachers should be able to give a coherent justification for their practices citing (i) evidence, (ii) pedagogical principle and (iii) educational aim, rather than offering the unsafe defence of compliance with what others expect. Anything less is educationally unsound.

At the time there were those who found CPR’s definition of professionalism somewhat daunting, though it made perfect sense to professions such as medicine, law and engineering with which teaching claimed parity. In any event, the belief that true professional empowerment and school improvement are conditional on evidence and teachers’ willingness to seek, create and apply it became an increasingly mainstream aspiration. It was incorporated into government rhetoric (though with one recent Secretary of State expressing open contempt for expertise I daren’t rate official endorsement higher than that) and the mission statements of CCoT.  So with CPR/CPRT approaching its tenth anniversary and the professional context of primary teaching looking rather different now than in 2006, joining forces in this way seemed wholly appropriate. We are particularly pleased that it is with the CPR/CPRT evidence bank that the knowledge platform of the Chartered College of Teaching will be launched.

This blog will be one of CPRT’s last. Our next one, we hope, will formally confirm the new arrangements and no doubt offer some valedictory comments.

For now, stay with us and watch this space.

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Education in spite of policy: further reflections on the 2016 CPRT conference

It encapsulated probably the defining contrast I have seen in nearly 20 years covering education: the under-rated commitment and thoughtfulness of much of the teaching profession versus the endless dysfunction, self-centredness and dishonesty of policymakers and the policy process itself.

Here, in the day-long get-together that was the Cambridge Primary Review Trust’s 10th anniversary conference last Friday in London, was an event to convince any observer of the multi-layered professionalism present at least in potential in England’s schools system.

Yet central to the day’s valedictory keynote by Robin Alexander – he is stepping down at the end of next month after 10 years as this remarkable review’s guiding presence – was the force against which the profession seems so often to be battling. This is the largely shallow, frequently failing and usually self-referential Westminster/Whitehall/think tank policy-spewing machine.

‘Education in spite of policy’ was the strapline to Robin’s speech. This is about as good a five-word summary of the state of play in English schooling in 2016 as it gets.1

‘Ever since the 1988 Education Reform Act started transferring hitherto devolved powers from local authorities and schools to Westminster, policy has become ever more inescapable, intrusive and impervious to criticism,’ he said.

What was needed, then, was not more ‘education reform’ but reform of the policy process itself. Hear, hear.

The Cambridge Primary Review’s Final Report, published in 2009, was unflinchingly critical of the above characteristics in a Labour government which, Robin reminded us, sent documents on the teaching of literacy at the rate of roughly one a week to primary schools in the seven years to 2004. Yet there were some aspects which contributors to the review had welcomed: Labour’s Children’s Plan, Sure Start, Narrowing the Gap and the expansion of early childhood care and education.2

The more relevant question now is whether policymaking has worsened since 2010. While Robin welcomed the concept of the pupil premium, he said the current grammar schools proposal flew in the face of evidence, dating back as far as the 1960s, as to its likely damaging impact on those not selected. ‘To have two initiatives from the same government department pulling in opposite directions, both in the name of narrowing the gap, is bizarre. But hey, that’s policy.’

On four of CPRT’s priorities – aims, curriculum, pedagogy and assessment – policy is worse in 2016 than when the report was published in 2009, he suggested. ‘Aims remain a yawning gap between perfunctory rhetoric and impoverished political reality. The new national curriculum is considerably less enlightened than the one it replaced … national assessment … is now even more confused and confusing than it was; and most government forays into pedagogy are naïve, ill-founded and doctrinaire.’

Policymakers can also be a very bad advert for the concept of education in itself, at least when they step away from the soothing rhetoric. Robin reminded us of this with reference to Michael ‘had enough of experts’ Gove and his famous observation that those teachers and academics who disagreed with him were ‘enemies of promise’ and Marxists ‘hell bent on destroying our schools.’

Listening to the speech, and sitting in on a couple of seminars and the day’s final plenary, was to be reminded of another contrast: between the decades of experience many contributors to the conference had to offer and the callowness of those often now shaping policy. I am loth to personalise, but to listen to Robin and to set his isolation from substantial involvement in policy 3 against the likes of Rachel Wolf, now opining on ‘the next round of education reform’ and the revelation that policymakers ‘must focus on what goes on inside the classroom’ a few years into a career almost entirely free of experience outside the policy bubble is to despair.4

So what of the depth elsewhere in the conference? I was fascinated by talks on the merits of philosophy in primary schools; and on the phenomenally popular, Cambridge University-based NRICH maths programme, whose director, Ems Lord, asked the provocative question: ‘is [maths] mastery enough?’ I found presentations on the ideas behind Learning without Limits,5 by academics at the universities of Cambridge, East Anglia and Edinburgh, as about the most thought-provoking I have heard.

And the final plenary, offering the thoughts of author/journalist Melissa Benn, another distinguished academic in Andrew Pollard and a headteacher in Sarah Rutty, offered much good sense. I was taken by Melissa’s description of a ‘brilliant’ – ie it sounded great – speech in 2013 by Gove, on the subject of primary education, which nevertheless showed a ‘wilful ignorance of the history of education’; welcome to post-truth politics. I was also struck by Andrew’s notion of evidence-informed, rather than evidence-based education, as the former implied the use of value judgement, which was important. However, in relation to policy, in stating that the Department for Education runs ‘consultations which turn out to be pseudo-consultations’, he reminded us how distant any kind of evidence can often feel from the directives.

Finally, Sarah launched into a quickfire, and bleakly humorous, tour de force on what it felt like to be on the end of policy suffused by a ‘lack of trust, lack of empathy, lack of joined-up thinking’, including those endless, and sometimes, she suggested, borderline incomprehensible missives from the Standards and Testing Agency about assessment changes.

‘As a headteacher, I feel a bit bullied if I’m honest. The government are not listening to our voices. They are certainly not listening to the voices of the children,’ she said.

The title of the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review, of course, was ‘Children, their World, their Education.’ Yet policy, in imposing constant change on schools because this fits both its own internal logic and the political needs of those in charge, staggeringly rarely, in reality, stops to consider the effects on those it is meant to help.

If it did, why would it have introduced major increases in the number of children likely to be deemed failing at 11 as a result of changes in the national assessment and curriculum systems without, as far as I know, having carried out any impact study as to the possible effects on pupils?

If it did, why would it have tried to force major disruptive and expensive structural change on thousands of primary schools without any good evidence that this will help pupils?

If it did, why would it publish a green paper on increasing selection without, seemingly, any consideration of the potential impact on pupils not deemed academic enough to pass a selective test?

Professionalism in spite of policy remains, sadly, the only hope for England’s schools.

Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist and author of ‘Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing’ (Methuen, 2007) and the recent CPRT report ‘Academies: autonomy, accountability, quality and evidence‘  (May 2016). Read more CPRT blogs by Warwick here.

 

1 – As is also implicit in a blog I wrote in the spring.

2 – CPR was not alone in this view. Another major review, the Nuffield Review of 14-19 Education and Training, England and Wales led by Richard Pring, also concluded in 2009. It investigated the notion that ‘there have been too many fragmented and disconnected interventions by government which do not cohere in some overall sense of purpose’.

3 – He has reminded me that as well as the 1991-2 ‘three wise men’ enquiry’ he has served on quangos such as CATE and QCA while his persistence over spoken language, in the face of that notorious ministerial objection that classroom talk is no more than ‘idle chatter’, succeeded in getting it reinstated, albeit reluctantly, in the current national curriculum. But my general point stands: on the one hand we have the rich but largely untapped experience and expertise that this conference brought together in abundance; on the other the supplanting of such experience and expertise by ideologically compliant special advisers and ‘expert groups’.

4 – Among several remarkable claims in Rachel Wolf’s blog is that ‘too many schools still resist testing as an “evil”’.   Really? No, they’d no doubt like to resist some of the more damaging impacts of high-stakes testing, but policymaking hangs all on test results, so…

5 – The papers on Learning without Limits will be on the programme’s website from next week.

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Free schools and free markets

Why isn’t policy done better in this country? We have some of the world’s best-known and most prestigious universities, churning out hundreds if not thousands of social science graduates every year, each of them educated to understand their subjects to a decent level of depth, sophistication and nuance.

And yet policymaking in England so often comes via papers which are so full of holes that I can only imagine they would be covered in the red ink of a lecturer’s corrections if produced, for example, by an undergraduate student as part of a research project. How must it feel for individuals to give up what they have learned as they progress towards influence at the heart of government?

Those were my thoughts a few months ago on surveying the atrocious white paper ‘Education Excellence Everywhere’. They surfaced again on coming across a report of a recent speech on free schools which may also have formed the basis for the government’s current super-controversial move to allow more grammar schools.

This latest document was a report of a speech in May by Nick Timothy, who at the time was the director of the free schools support group the New Schools Network but who is now Theresa May’s joint chief of staff and is widely credited with having had heavy influence over the formulation of the grammar school policy. I wrote about it in the Guardian last month.

In the speech, as reported by the Centre for the Study of Market Reform of Education (CMRE), the organisation to which it was given, Mr Timothy sets out a vision whereby free schools – the government’s name for new schools, overseen by the Department for Education – would return to their original mission.

This, the speech suggests, was not simply to provide new classroom places where demographics meant they were desperately needed. This has become the role of many recent free schools in the face of England’s surging pupil numbers. But no, the distinctive original rationale of the policy, Mr Timothy argued, was to open frees where there were sufficient places, but where the schools on offer to parents were not good enough. Mr Timothy reportedly told his invited audience:

The original logic of the free schools policy was that new schools should be set up in the communities served by failing schools: this would improve standards, give parents more choice, and allow new schools to innovate,

According to the CMRE report of his speech, he added:

The government is trying to create a market in the education system. This … is the right track for reform, but at the moment there’s a risk that we’re building in the potential for market failures too. A functioning market needs enough genuinely new entrants to challenge existing providers, enough capacity for competition to be meaningful, enough information for providers and users alike, ways of breaking up failing or monopolistic providers, and exit points for providers that aren’t doing a good enough job. The direction of travel is the right one, but there’s a lot that still needs to be done.

Underlying this talk, then, is a view of the free schools policy being used to set off market mechanisms which, it is envisaged, both help parents by responding to a demand for high quality education in the free schools which are created and spur other schools to improve for fear of failing to compete effectively for parental ‘custom’, and perhaps then having to close.

To be fair, it is an interesting model. If free schools were to work as described above, it sounds as if they would be a positive influence on the quality of English education. Wouldn’t it be great if there were this unending supply of ‘good schools’, funded by the government and set up where any group of parents wanted them? More seriously, the notion of teachers and possibly parents throwing themselves into free school projects to put their own stamp on innovative education provision also seems to me to have some face-value merit. And Mr Timothy has clearly thought through a few possible problems in the detail of how such market mechanisms need to work if they are to function effectively.

Yet the speech as reported was undermined by a basic failure to consider some of the more fundamental difficulties facing any avowedly free market approach to schools reform such as this.

The first problem is affordability. The premise of the talk was to create more school places, with the speech raising the possibility that this could include grammar schools.

Mr Timothy said:

If you can prove parental demand for your proposed school, then subject to all the other quality checks, you should be able to open it.

In the logic of this system, without this creation of new institutions, instigating surplus places in the system as a whole, the market mechanism he envisages would not work properly, since schools need to face a genuine risk of closure through failing to recruit enough pupils. And that is only possible when there are not enough pupils for the classroom spaces available in local schools.

But providing this surplus capacity – opening up more classrooms than is strictly necessary to ensure every local pupil has a classroom seat – is expensive. Keeping places empty is, rightly, a tough sell to taxpayers. Why not simply concentrate on making sure that the limited number of places available to parents are all good, it could be argued.

The extra day-to-day cost of providing unfilled places is not the only financial issue. The capital costs of opening new institutions and closing those which fail to attract pupils also seem likely to be very expensive, as experience is increasingly telling us.

A second, practical, problem is the availability of sites to allow new schools to be built. A string of investigations I have done on the proposed siting of frees in a variety of strange and often expensive locations mainly in and around London suggest this a serious issue, as is the general environmental impact of a choice policy which presumably assumes pupils are able to travel to a range of potential institutions competing for their ‘custom’.

A third problem may be the experience of pupils being taught in schools which either are on the verge of closure having been forced into a fight for scarce resources, or in new schools which are similarly faced with a struggle with their rolls. In an article last year, Fiona Millar gave a vivid example of two schools in Suffolk which were competing in what one commentator described as a ‘race to die’ and which reportedly led to a reduced curriculum and staff redundancies in one of the schools.

The experience of school closure itself can be traumatic and disruptive for the young people who must go through it. Yet these are the very ‘consumers’ which free market education reform advocates presumably want to help. The system advocated here seems to embrace school failures as part of its model with Mr Timothy’s detached insistence that ‘exit points for providers which aren’t doing a good enough job,’ are vital.

The sense of imposed market reform trampling over the history of a school and pupils’ experiences was one I felt profoundly after interviewing a group of parents and students for a feature on the closure of Woodlands comprehensive in Coventry in July.

A fourth consideration should be the likely effect on the teaching force of creating, as seems the aim, a system built on perpetual fear that institutions must improve or close.

The fifth question for all of this is what the alternatives are. To read a speech such as this is to get the sense that this rather complicated market apparatus is the only way that institutions might improve. Yet consideration of alternatives surely might prompt a different view. Given the costs of oversupply and the creation and abolition of schools, and the risk of a bad experience for pupils as some schools are deliberately rendered unviable, simply providing more government support, including leadership resources, to struggling existing institutions will strike many as a better approach. Put another way, is it better to put possibly hundreds of millions of pounds into creating more empty school places through free schools, in the hope that the market mechanisms in which Mr Timothy seems to have so much unquestioning faith might kick in, or simply to invest the cash directly in improving existing provision?

None of these issues seemed to be considered in this speech, leaving it vulnerable to accusations of a naïve pro-market fundamentalism. This is staggering given that thinking through the possible downsides as well as the potential of market mechanisms in various policy areas, including impacts on users of services and the public purse, would surely feature in any respectable undergraduate economics course.

Thinking this over took me back to a talk I gave to a group of public policy economists, many of them not working in education, earlier this year.

One offered this insight:

I’ve always been puzzled by this drive to try to impose market principles on education. There are surely some basic problems, such as the fact that competition effects don’t seem to work unproblematically, and closing schools will be difficult for pupils. Yet it seems to persist. †

Yes, indeed it does.

† – This quote is paraphrased from memory; I wasn’t taking notes.

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

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The call of the wild

So at last what many of us have instinctively understood is backed by evidence from England’s largest outdoor learning project. The weight of evidence is compelling. A hefty 95 percent of children surveyed said outdoor learning makes lessons more enjoyable, 90 percent said they felt happier and 72 percent said that they got on better with others.

These findings are from the four year Natural Connections Demonstration project to help over 40,000 primary and secondary school children – particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds – from 125 urban and rural schools to experience the benefits of the natural environment by empowering teachers, who often lack confidence in teaching outside, to use the outdoors to support everyday learning.

93 percent of schools said outdoor learning improves pupils’ social skills, 92 percent said it improves pupils’ health and wellbeing and engages them with learning, and 82 percent saw a positive impact on behaviour.

The evidence for teachers is impressive too. 79 percent of teachers surveyed said outdoor learning had a positive impact on their teaching practice, 69 percent said it had a positive impact on their professional development, 72 percent said outdoor learning improved their health and wellbeing and 69 percent said it had a positive impact on their job satisfaction.

But with evidence from the Monitoring of Engagement with Natural Environment (MENE) survey that only 8 percent of children (aged 6-15) in England visited the natural environment with their schools in an average month during 2013-2015, there is a real need to change perceptions about the value of outdoor learning. A blog from Natural England’s Principal Adviser for Outdoor Learning, Jim Burt, on Busting the myths on outdoor learning in schools goes a long way towards removing the barriers. For me, it’s the final myth ‘unless we can show outdoor learning has an impact on exam results we won’t be able to convince schools’ that will have the most traction with school leaders. Jim Burt writes

Obviously attainment is critical. Even in the relatively short time frame of the project, nearly 57 per cent of schools reported a positive impact on attainment that they felt was attributable to outdoor learning. Much higher percentages of teachers reported positive impacts on the other areas such as a child’s engagement and their motivation to learn, commenting that these underpinned academic performance. This reflects a growing body of evidence highlighting the important contribution that personal attributes such as resilience, self-esteem and self-efficacy make to a child’s overall performance.

These findings chime well with the CPRT aims relating to those individual qualities and capacities which schools should foster and build upon in every child, and which infuse the work of some of CPRT’s alliance schools. Making the most of outdoor learning opportunities, children from The Spinney Primary School, Cambridge, regularly enjoy play based learning in their little Wild Wood whilst children from Shrubland Street Primary School, Leamington Spa make the most of their playground whilst also regularly visiting their local green spaces.

The Natural Connections Demonstration Project enabled the participating teachers and their schools to make the most of their local outdoors. Environment Minister Rory Stewart said

What’s clever about this project is it listens to teachers, it works with the grain of an individual school, and it works out how to get children into the outdoors while improving their curriculum experience.

All teachers and school leaders can benefit from the project’s learning. Published this week, a teacher’s guide Transforming Outdoor Learning in Schools-Lessons from the Natural Connections Demonstration Project features teachers and pupils across the project talking about the benefits the project brought to their school, alongside practical advice on how teachers can successfully embed outdoor learning in their school.

Speaking at Wallscourt Farm Academy, Bristol, at the launch of the project’s findings, Natural England’s Chairman, Andrew Sells said

The Natural Connections project has empowered teachers to make the most of what’s right on their doorstep and helped children experience the joy of the natural environment. It’s brought a real culture change into schools, making learning in the outdoors a regular part of school life – and it’s inspiring to see children more engaged with learning and happier and healthier as a result.

With such a mandate as educators, and particularly at this time when primary schools in England are spending increasing time and energy on preparing their children to meet the new standards in reading, writing and mathematics, let’s consider the importance with which some countries with high ranking education systems treat outdoor learning. See Jim Burt’s blog yesterday Are we at the turning point for outdoor learning? With such a groundswell of evidence, how can one afford to resist the call of the wild?

For other CPRT blogs by Marianne Cutler click here.

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Academies: statisticians need to raise their game

Two major reports on the effectiveness of the government’s central education policy – turning schools into academies, preferably in chains – have been published in the past two weeks. But do they get to the truth of the policy? Not remotely, I think. I say that even though the reports serve a useful public interest function in holding ministers to account.

The central problem with these reports is that they see the success or not of the academies scheme entirely through the lens of the test and exam results either of individual institutions, or of institutions grouped together in chains or, more loosely, in local authorities. Although this approach purports to offer an ‘objective’ insight into the quality of academies, and by extension the success of the policy itself, in fact it has some serious problems.

The methodology

The two studies I highlight here are, first, one for the Sutton Trust charity, called Chain Effects: the impact of academy chains on low-income students. This is the third in a series which seeks to gauge the success of multi-academy trusts (MATs) by the exam results of disadvantaged pupils on their books. The second, School Performance in multi-academy trusts and local authorities – 2015, is an analysis of results in academy and local authority schools published by a newly-named think tank, the Education Policy Institute (EPI).

The Sutton Trust study produces five exam result measures for 39 MATs, all using the results of each of ‘their’ disadvantaged pupils to pronounce on how well each chain does for these pupils. The EPI paper offers a verdict on the overall performance of academy chains, this one using two exam result measures for pupils which count in official DfE statistics as being educated in these chains.

Both studies, which are statistically much more impressive, say, than a DfE press release – though that may be setting the bar very low indeed – found that the chains varied considerably in terms of their ‘performance’. They therefore garnered media attention for some findings which will not have been welcomed by ministers.

The reports may also be invaluable in another sense. Ministers – and this seems likely to remain the case even with Justine Greening replacing Nicky Morgan as Secretary of State – tend to justify their academies programme largely in terms of institutional exam results. If research considers the academies project on ministers’ own terms and raises serious questions, then that is an important finding.

Problems: teaching to test and inclusion

However, there are two main problems. The first is well-known. It is simply that focusing on exam results as the sole arbiter of success may tell us how effective the institution is at concentrating on performance metrics, but not much about other aspects of education. It may encourage narrow teaching to tests.

Despite the multiple measures used, both of these reports seem to encourage one-dimensional verdicts on which are the ‘best’ academy trusts: the ones which manage to see the pupils who are included in the indicators which the research uses – in the case of the Sutton Trust research, disadvantaged pupils, and in the EPI study, pupils as a whole – achieving the best results.

Yet the reality, it seems to me, is much more complex. A prominent academy chain, which runs schools near where I live, has been known to do well in statistical assessments of its results. Yet some parents I speak to seem not to want to go near it, because of a hard-line approach to pupil discipline and a reportedly test-obsessed outlook. This may generate the results prized in studies such as these, but are these schools unequivocally better than others? I think researchers should at least acknowledge that their results may not be the final word on what counts as quality. My hunch is that these studies may be picking up on academy trusts which are more successful in managing the process of getting good results for their institutions. But is that the same as providing a generally good, all-round education for all those they might educate? The reports offer no answers because they are purely statistical exercises which do not investigate what might be driving changes in results. So we need at least to be cautious with interpretation.

This is especially the case when we move on to perhaps the less obvious concern about these studies. It is that both investigations focus entirely on results at institutional level, counting the success of schools in getting good results out of those pupils who are on their books at the time the statistical indicators are compiled. However, this ignores a potentially serious perverse incentive of England’s results-based, increasingly deregulated education system.

The studies seem entirely uncurious about what is often put to me, by observers of its effects on the ground, as a very serious risk inherent in the academies scheme as currently understood. This is that in deregulating such that each academy trust is given a degree of autonomy, coupled with the pressure on each trust to improve its results, a perverse incentive is created for trusts to become less inclusive.

In other words, they either use admissions to take on more pupils who are likely to help their results, or they try to push out students who are already on their books but less likely to help their results. This concern is referenced in the research review I carried out for CPRT. This quotes a finding from the Pearson/RSA 2013 review of academies which said: ‘Numerous submissions to the Commission suggest some academies are finding methods to select covertly’. The commission’s director was Professor Becky Francis, who is a co-author of the Sutton Trust study, so it is surprising that the latter paper did not look at changing student composition in MATs.

A statistical approach summing up the effectiveness of individual academy chains entirely through the results of individual chains without any way of checking whether they are becoming more selective does not address this issue.

I admit, here, that I have more reasons to be concerned at the secondary, rather than at the primary, level. Since 2014, I have carried out simple statistical research showing how a small minority of secondary schools have seen the number of pupils in particular year groups dropping sharply between the time they arrive in year seven and when they complete their GCSEs, in year 11.

Indeed, one of the top-performing chains in both these reports – the Harris Federation – has recently seen secondary cohort numbers dropping markedly. Harris’s 2013 GCSE year group was 12 per cent smaller than the same cohort in year 8. The 2015 Harris GCSE cohort was 8 per cent smaller than when the same cohort was in year 7. This data is publicly available yet neither report investigates shrinking cohort size. That is not to say anything untoward has gone on – Harris is also very successful in Ofsted inspections, and has said in the past that pupils have left to go to new schools, to leave the UK or to be home-educated – but it certainly would seem worth looking into.

When the Sutton Trust study mentions ‘[academy] chains that are providing transformational outcomes to their disadvantaged pupils’, its figures are based only on those actually in the chains in the immediate run-up to taking exams. Would the analysis change if it included all those who started out at the schools? We don’t know. The fact that DfE data is available suggesting major changes in pupil cohorts but it seems not to have been looked at is remarkable.

In addition, the fact that high-profile research studies purporting to show the success of organisations are not considering alternative readings of their statistics may incentivise organisations not to think about students which they may consider to be harder to educate. Results measures currently provide an incentive to push such students out.

The lack of curiosity is extra surprising, given that the issue of ‘attrition rates’ – schools losing students – has been live in the debate over the success of one of the largest charter school operators in the US, KIPP schools.

As I’ve said: I don’t think this is just a secondary school issue. It is also a potential problem for any research which seeks to judge the success of primary academies solely with reference to the test results of pupils who remain in schools at the time of calculation of ‘performance’ indicators.

For, with reference to the academies scheme in general, as a journalist delving into goings-on at ground level, I frequently come across claims of schools, for example, not being keen to portray themselves as focusing on special needs pupils – and therefore not to attract such youngsters in the first place – or even trying to ease out children who might present behavioural challenges.

These two reports paint a simple picture of ‘more effective’ and ‘less effective’ academy chains. But the reality I see, based on both published evidence and many conversations on the ground, is rather different. I see a system which incentivises leaders to focus on the need to generate results that are good for the school. But is that always in the best interests of pupils? Should a school which sees rising results, but which also seems to be trying to make itself less attractive to what might be termed harder-to-educate pupils, be seen as a success?

These are very important questions. Sadly, the reports provide no answers.

This is the latest in a series of CPRT blogs in which Warwick Mansell, Henry Stewart and others have tested the government’s academies policy, and the claims by which it is so vigorously pursued, against the evidence. Read them here, and download Warwick’s more detailed CPRT research report Academies: autonomy, accountability, quality and evidence.

Warwick has also written extensively about the side-effects of results pressures in schools, most notably in his book ‘Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing’ (Methuen, 2007).

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The power of the arts in primary schools

The arts are essential in life. They can shape and define who we are and how we understand ourselves and our possible selves.  It is a travesty that in some quarters the arts in schools are increasingly regarded as unnecessary.  We see dance, drama, music and visual arts as fundamental to cultural engagement and personal development.  Artistic experience fuels imagination and in turn imagination fuels creativity. Within CPR’s curriculum framework, the arts are linked to creativity as one of eight essential curriculum domains – although CPR emphasises that creativity is not regarded as exclusive to the arts.

The instrumental argument for the inclusion of the arts in education is that they foster transferable skills and boost overall academic achievement, leading to better future work opportunities, enhanced well-being and self-esteem.  In contrast, the essentialist view, underlined in an earlier blog from Robin Alexander, is that the arts are valuable for their own sake and should not just be seen merely as tools for other kinds of learning. Elliot Eisner’s ten lessons the arts teach resonate beautifully with CPR’s aims.  They propose that the arts provide space for personal judgement; help problem-posing and thinking outside the box; promote diversity, respect and intercultural understanding; show that making mistakes can be liberating and open up new opportunities; encourage looking at details and thinking in depth; allow the creation of a personal reality; provide therapeutic benefits and support emotional literacy and make us feel alive.

Children don’t experience learning as separate parcels of knowledge to be opened. They flow from one form, with different ways of exploring and expressing, to another.  They use what Loris Malaguzzi calls ‘100 languages’.  In relation to CPRT’s values and vision, we suggest that positive connections between the arts, as well as non-arts subjects, can maximise creative learning.  Although we may more commonly talk about learning in and through different art forms, the work of Lars Lindström usefully draws attention to also learning about and with the art form.  These distinctions emphasise a wonderful world of possibilities for both teaching and learning.

However, promoted by the DfE, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) Teaching and Learning Toolkit  tells us that arts participation has low impact on ‘academic learning’.  This worries us on two counts: firstly, the type of research approaches used to gather this evidence can never fully capture the subtle qualities of learning in the arts; secondly, it is grossly inaccurate to imply that the arts are non-academic.  Also, we are deeply troubled when it is seen as perfectly acceptable to relegate the arts to extra-curricular activity, seemingly the view taken in the DfE White Paper Educational Excellence Everywhere. In any event, evidence from a much larger body of research  than the single project cited by EEF shows that arts education does indeed have a positive and significant ‘academic’ impact.

Our work with the South West Research Schools connects closely to four of CPRT’s priorities: community, curriculum, voice and pedagogy.  These schools are fully committed to providing rich and stimulating learning experiences and recognise that the arts have much to offer in contributing to this aspiration.

In the Power of the Arts event recently held at Bath’s Royal Literary and Scientific Institute, six of CPRT’s South West Research Schools shared their research findings to date, which led to wider discussions about teaching and learning in the arts and, more generally, a creative school ethos.  Significant messages arising from the discussions underlined the importance of both teachers and children learning as researchers, and the potential of working with the ‘habits of mind’ of artists and creative professionals to develop creative learning skills.

David Allinson, Head Teacher of St Vigor and St John Primary School, Chilcompton, Somerset talked about:

… believing in children’s ideas, with research as a habit of mind – catching learning. We became fascinated in how children’s drawings help them to put ideas together and grow – in how can ideas be revealed, connected and grow through drawing. Some important things came out from what we saw.  The children’s language was more developed, their imagination had grown into a fantastical language, children were catching ideas from each other. The ideas changed because we gave children time, we gave them space to do it in, and gave them attention from a teacher who was very interested in what they were doing, showed attention by writing things down, taking photos. As teachers we need to step back and ask questions about the things that fascinate us. We saw the story unravelling – we were then interested in how we could give children the time space and attention they needed.

Professor Nick Sorensen, Associate Dean, Institute for Education, Bath Spa University closed the day:

Thank you to the primary head teachers who have generously shared their innovative approaches to learning, teaching and professional development, showing how artists and teachers work together to increase children’s self-esteem, self-confidence and independence with the vision to expand the imaginative potential of children and supporting them to become independent learners.

Post Brexit, here is much healing that has to be done and what you’re doing is really important work.  Artists and teachers are united by the fact that they are social beings; their actions have an impact on what happens in society and they reflect what is going on in society. The work that you, and others, are doing takes on a much broader significance and importance given that the context we are working in has changed radically.

What I am interested in is practice, in what great artists and teachers do.  Practice doesn’t exist in isolation but comes out of a culture.  We need to engage in a process of analysis not just to document that what we do which is of value, but to collectively legitimise those practices that may appear to be marginal in order to resolve the tensions between policy expectations and practical realities, between a restricted and restrictive National Curriculum and the stuff that children immediately recognise as ‘real learning’. We need to be able to provide evidence for those practices that foster understanding, cooperation, cross-cultural perspectives and cross-disciplinary learning.

5x5x5=creativity aspires to research and support creativity in children’s learning to increase their aspirations and life skills.  Partnerships between schools and cultural organisations are essential at this time, as we need to draw on our collective imagination to make a real difference to children’s lives.  With determination and a growing sense of community and shared endeavour, we can together ensure that children’s experiences of primary school are enlivened and enriched by the arts.

We agree with artist Bob and Roberta Smith, that ‘art makes children powerful’ and would add that it can also make teachers, as learning and research partners, powerful too.

Emese Hall (University of Exeter) and Penny Hay (Bath Spa University) jointly co-ordinate CPRT’s South West regional network, which includes the South West Research Schools Network and its current focus on the arts and creativity in primary schools. Contact them here for more information.

by Robin Alexander

Politics at its worst and best

The politics of fear versus the politics of hate. That is how the protagonists themselves have portrayed the EU referendum campaign, and they are right. As for the politics of truth, they’ve been all but silenced by the shameful alliance of bloated ego and rabble-rousing tabloid. The impressionable were impressed, the thoughtful were frustrated, and on that fragile, divisive and dangerous basis the nation has been asked to vote.

And then MP Jo Cox was murdered, and out of that unspeakable act of physical violence – which some have gone as far as attributing directly to the verbal violence of the referendum campaign – came a reminder of another kind of politics: of reason, hope, compassion, inclusivity, selflessness, courage, inspiration and love. The extraordinary and heartfelt public response to Jo Cox’s death bore witness not only to her truly exceptional qualities and achievements but also to how deeply people yearned for a political discourse that appealed to humanity’s best rather than its worst.

What has this to do with primary education? Everything. Most schools espouse a vision of human relations which is diametrically opposed to the divisive and inflammatory rhetoric to which we’ve been treated during the past few months. Somehow they must hold the line against that rhetoric’s malign pervasiveness and champion with children the possibility of a more generous and inclusive world.  Most schools – at least we hope this is so – make the quest for truth and understanding paramount in their shaping of children’s curriculum experiences, yet myths, lies and obfuscation have been rather more prominent of late in the public sphere.  Where teachers consciously strive to foster and enact something different they confirm the finding of the Cambridge Primary Review (final report, p 488) that ‘primary schools may be the one point of stability and positive values in a world where everything else is changing and uncertain. For many, schools are the centre that holds when things fall apart.’

But there’s another educational resonance, with education policy rather than practice. For the divisive and mendacious rhetoric of some prominent figures in the referendum campaign is very much of a piece with what they or their colleagues have used in relation to education. The Michael Gove who compared experts warning against Brexit to the Nazis who organised a smear campaign against Albert Einstein is the same Michael Gove who as England’s Secretary of State for Education called those who dared to disagree with him ‘Enemies of promise … Marxists hell-bent on destroying our schools’.

Nazis? Marxists? This ideological promiscuity is less significant than the calculated attempt to isolate and divide that such name-calling betokens, and in these two instances, which are by no means unique, accusations of smear might more properly be levelled at Gove himself. Indeed, this ploy, which – in case Labour are inclined to be sanctimonious we might recall was regularly used by them to undermine the Cambridge Primary Review – is seen by some politicians as a legitimate weapon for deployment in relation to the EU, education, migration, or any other policy issue on which they set their sights. Its true enemy, of course, is not ‘promise’ but truth.

While Gove’s successor uses less colourful language, she has shown a similar preference for ideology over truth, most notably perhaps in her airy insistence that every school must be an academy regardless of the absence of convincing and replicable evidence to support her claim that this will deliver school and system improvement. Beyond this case are numerous others where if research delivers inconvenient truths it is ignored or rubbished and its purveyors are abused.

Indeed so pervasive and corrosive were these tendencies during the last decade that the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review opened with a chapter entitled ‘The Review and other discourses’ which contrasted the serious search for evidence with the discourses of dichotomy, derision and myth by which education administrations too frequently advance their preferred causes, and then  warned readers of the probability that what they were about to read would itself be a target of these tendencies (it was). Then, 500 pages later and after presenting its main evidence and findings, the report linked the questionable government handling of many key education issues that its evidence had exposed to the much wider democratic deficit chronicled in the Rowntree Trust’s 2004-6 Power enquiry into the condition of British democracy. The Cambridge report said (pp 481-2):

The prosecution of policy relating to primary education does not stand apart from the trends characterised by … the Power enquiry. Indeed, it convincingly exemplifies many of them: centralisation, secrecy and the ‘quiet authoritarianism’ of the new centres of power; the disenfranchising of local voice; the rise of unelected and unaccountable groups and individuals taking key decisions behind closed doors; the ‘empty rituals’ of consultation; the replacement of professional dialogue by the monologic discourse of power; the politicisation of the entire educational enterprise so that it becomes impossible to debate ideas or evidence which are not deemed to be ‘on message’, or which are ‘not invented here’; and,  latterly coming to light, financial corruption.

The Review and its witnesses have highlighted variations on this larger theme of democratic deficit, many of them centering on the nature and quality of the information on which both sound decision-making and effective education depend: the less than complete reliability of official information, particularly in the crucial domain of standards; its lack of independence; the creation and/or dogged perpetuation of educational myths in order to underwrite an exaggerated account of political progress; the key role of the media in shaping the information that reaches government as well as the information that flows from it; the reluctance of decision-makers to countenance or come to grips with alternative information on which better policies could be founded; the use of misinformation to marginalise or discredit ideas running on other than approved lines, and evidence from other than approved sources.

In light of this catalogue of embedded and wilful failure to do what democracy, evidence and good sense demand (and little has changed since these words were written), there is something almost ludicrously disingenuous about the pleas we have heard during the past week for people to stop demonising politicians, as if this is merely an unfortunate but curable habit the public has carelessly slipped into.  If politicians believe they should be trusted and respected they should first ask what has caused trust and respect to be so seriously eroded. Expenses claims for moats and duck houses are the more entertaining end of a continuum whose darker reaches include, sadly, some aspects of education policy, notably in the areas of curriculum, assessment, inspection and systemic school reform.

Which brings us back to Jo Cox. Her husband Brendan told reporters that

She feared for our political culture, not just here in the UK but around the world, detailing her belief that the tone of the debate has echoes of the 1930s, with the public feeling insecure, and politicians willing to exploit that sense. He added: ‘I think she was very worried that the language was coarsening, that people were being driven to take more extreme positions, that people didn’t work with each other as individuals and on issues, it was all much too tribal and unthinking.’

Just so: Gove, Johnson, Farage, Sun and Daily Mail take note. But in yesterday’s Guardian Gaby Hinsliff wrote:

She wasn’t just admirable, she was formidable … Cox knew it wasn’t enough just to wring your hands, it’s what you do that counts. When the shock of her death wears off, Westminster will have to remember that. It’s not enough just to talk about standing up for something better, resisting cheap shots, draining the hatred from politics. It’s what you do about it that counts.

The days of automatic respect for the political class are long gone. Respect now must be earned, and by deeds rather than words. Jo Cox’s remarkable example, whether in Batley, Westminster, Darfur or Syria, is the best possible place to start.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

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Do sponsored primaries perform better than maintained schools?

The education white paper proposes the conversion of all schools in England to academies by 2022. If this takes place, the vast majority of schools affected will be primaries. Of the 15,343 mainstream schools that are not currently academies, 13,822 (90 per cent) are primary schools.

This is a massive change in the structure of the primary sector, with very little evidence of any benefits. The Education Select Committee report Academies and free schools stated in January 2015 that ‘there is at present no convincing evidence of the impact of academy status on attainment in primary schools’.

The Department for Education has carried out very little research on the subject, as Secretary of State Nicky Morgan confirmed in a letter to NUT Deputy General Secretary Kevin Courtney in April 2016:

We have not undertaken a ‘similar schools’ analysis for primary schools as, to date, there have been a relatively small number of schools with results for more than one academic year.

This prompts the question of why all primary schools should be forced to become academies when even the government admits that it lacks evidence to support its claim that the policy will produce school improvement. In fact there is growing evidence that it may do the opposite.

The one claim for primary school standards in the white paper is that:

2015 results show that primary sponsored academies open for two years have improved their results, on average, by 10 percentage points since opening, more than double the rate of improvement in local authority maintained schools over the same period.

This is an odd statement. It is not saying that all sponsored primaries perform better than the average. It is not even saying that sponsored primaries that have been open for two years or more perform better. It is only claiming that the specific subset of sponsored primaries that have been open for two years, and no more than two years, performed well.

The statement also compares two very different sets of schools. The results of sponsored academies tend to start from a lower base and so they have more room to grow. Many primary schools already have SAT results at 80 per cent or 90 per cent and so are unlikely to grow at the same pace.

The key question is whether a sponsored academy will improve more or less than a non-academy that starts from the same point in terms of results. Despite the Secretary of State’s claim, there is now a significant amount of data to enable us to explore that question, with 416 sponsored primaries having at least two years of SAT results.

In December 2015, DfE released data showing SAT results, for 2015 and previous years, for every primary school in the country. This analysis is based on dividing sponsored academies into quintiles, or five equal groups, based on their prior year 2014 results. The growth from 2014 to 2015 has then been compared to local authority maintained schools with results in the same ranges.

The chart below is based on the new Level 4b benchmark but the results are the same if the old Level 4 benchmark is used, or if Level 5 is used. The first thing that is clear is that schools with a lower starting point in their 2014 results do indeed grow at a faster pace. Those with fewer than 41 per cent achieving a 4b in reading, writing and maths in 2014 saw their results grow on average over 15 per cent in one year. In contrast those with results between 59 per cent and 67 per cent grew at less than 5 per cent and those with results of 68 per cent or more actually saw their results, on average, fall.

However what is also clear is that, in each of the five comparisons, it was the maintained schools that grew at a faster pace. On average maintained schools increased their Level 4b SAT benchmark by 6.4 per cent more than similar sponsored academies. In a one form entry primary that is equivalent to two extra pupils achieving the benchmark.

The difference is very clear. Regression analysis shows that the data demonstrating that maintained schools perform better than similar sponsored academies is very robust, being statistically significant at the 99 per cent level.

This analysis is freely available for checking at http://bit.ly/KS2Regression.

The white paper has already come in for substantial criticism. As well as Labour and trade union opposition many Conservative MPs and local authorities have objected. Currently 84 per cent of primary schools are rated good or outstanding by Ofsted. It is not clear why the government feels the need to change a structure that seems to be working well.

Indeed the evidence indicates that the mass conversion of primary schools, as well as being extremely disruptive, could lead to a slower improvement in results. In 2014 Ofsted noted the difference between secondary and primary schools after the main period of academy conversion in the secondary sector:

Children in primary schools have a better chance than ever of attending an effective school. Eighty-two per cent of primary schools are now good or outstanding, which means that 190,000 more pupils are attending good or outstanding primary schools than last year. However, the picture is not as positive for secondary schools: only 71 per cent are good or outstanding, a figure that is no better than last year. Some 170,000 pupils are now in inadequate secondary schools compared with 100,000 two years ago. (Ofsted annual report 2014, 8)

Ofsted’s evidence on the disparity in standards between primary and secondary schools also featured in the CPRT blog on 15 April. On that basis, using secondary school results to support the drive to turn all primary schools into academies is hardly convincing.

The available evidence provides no justification for a policy of forced conversion of primary schools to academies. Indeed it suggests that it could lead to the same slowdown in improvement, with more students in schools rated ‘inadequate’, that has occurred in the secondary sector.

Henry Stewart is Co-founder of the Local Schools Network

henry@happy.co.uk

Readers may also wish to read Warwick Mansell’s recent blog on the government’s academies drive. His full-length CPRT report reviewing the evidence for the government’s structural changes will be published within the next few weeks.

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We need to talk about structures

It has been a seductive slogan, for several reasons. But ‘standards, not structures,’ the oft-invoked rallying cry of those who want to cast themselves as fair-minded pragmatists in the now-very-inflamed academies debate, has been an error, I think. For, as has been becoming clearer in recent days, last week’s white paper spelling out the policy of forcing schools towards academy status has at last pushed serious questions about the detail of the academies policy to the fore, and we do need to talk about structures.

The phrase ‘standards, not structures’ – first made popular during Tony Blair’s first term in office – is an attempt to take what is seen as ideology out of the debate as to how state-funded schools should be run. Instead of viewing one type of organisational arrangement – local authority versus academy – as superior and then defending it to the end, the argument goes that we should be agnostic on that. Instead, we should worry only about the quality of education provided to pupils; acknowledge the obvious truth that good practice, or not, exists on either side of this ideological debate; and then move on. In terms of what kind of organisational structure we have in English education, basically we should join the majority of the public and not care: what happens in the classroom is all that matters.

As I say, this argument, set out in those terms, is very powerful. My perception is that ‘standards, not structures’ is used principally, and to a certain extent very effectively, as a weapon against ministers who have been seen to favour academies as an end in themselves. It is very difficult to argue that this is not their position, when a white paper has been published which says all schools are to be turned into academies, but when there is no clear research evidence in favour of the policy. (My last blog discussed this, and it will be set out in detail in my forthcoming research review for the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, especially in relation to primary schools.)

‘Standards, not structures’, was deployed again in Sunday’s Observer newspaper by David Blunkett, who introduced the original academies policy back in 2000. Here, in a well-argued analysis of many of the central problems of this extraordinary white paper, Blunkett said it was part of an ‘ideological agenda that put the structure of our school system before classroom standards’.

He’s right, of course. A government which really cared above all about the quality of what went on in schools, took seriously all the evidence it had and genuinely put children rather than politics first, as the white paper claims to do, would not be proceeding in this manner. Before pushing thousands of schools through a costly and energy-diverting change such as this, it would want to know for sure that improvement would follow. If you want a further insight into the fragility of the evidence base, by the way, just consider Nicky Morgan’s first response when asked about it on last Thursday’s BBC Question Time. The main piece of evidence she could muster on academy quality was a set of statistics embracing changing Ofsted grades for all schools, academies or not.

So the implementation of this policy is, of course, ideological. But that does not mean that arguments about it should stop at a consideration of supposedly ideology-neutral statistics. In fact, we do need to consider arguments away from pure ‘standards’ questions, too.

A personal view is that the obsession over, say, whether school test and exam results are better on the academy or non-academy side, or whether either is improving Ofsted results faster, though important, has obscured real debate about the detail of the really quite fundamental structural changes schools go through in moving to academy status.

And I find myself increasingly thinking about structures – is this the best way of setting up our schools system, irrespective of often small movements in data? – when fielding calls from whistleblowers as I do when writing news stories about the academies system. I would highlight a few structural issues now.

Structure of control

The academies policy, of course, originated under Labour as the suggested answer to usually long-standing problems in inner-city secondary schools. Where institutions had struggled for many years, if not decades, the thinking was that something bold and new had to be tried. The answer was to give great influence to an outside sponsor who, initially usually in response to a promise to donate £2 million, would be given effective control over the school, with only the Secretary of State, overseeing matters from Whitehall, as a democratic backstop.

This was controversial, as it took schools away from local democratic influence and gave great power to sometimes controversial individuals who might have been seen by the ministers backing the scheme to be dynamic. However, if there were worries about an over-concentration of power, they might have been viewed by ministers as a price worth paying in the hope of finally bringing about improvement.

Fast forward to 2016, though, and this, effectively, is the model being proposed for every state-funded school in England by 2022. Academy trusts can be set up with a very small number of ‘members’ – sometimes, only three – at the apex of their governance structures. They can appoint and dismiss the other governors.

It is true that academy trusts can be set up in a much more democratic manner. Yet some of the larger current multi-academy trusts clearly are run as described above, with a small number of individuals having great power. This is made possible because the essential overarching philosophy of the way they are set up has not changed from the original scheme under Labour.

This is not just an abstract debate, either, in my experience. In recent years, as a journalist contacted by people raising concerns, I’ve heard about: a prominent couple running an academy chain, who have particular views as to what should be in the curriculum, imposing that curriculum on schools despite opposition from professionally-trained teachers; an American firm which is influential in running a school ensuring that ‘its’ curriculum is taught in that school; and high remuneration packages finding their way to two individuals who are both among only three or four controlling ‘members’ of the academy chain paying their salaries. This looks to me to suggest an over-concentration of power with regard to taxpayer-funded bodies, serving many pupils.

A key structural question might, then, be: is the original architecture of academy governance, set up for the very particular circumstances of a small number of secondary schools which had struggled, now right for all English  primary and secondary schools?

Autonomy for individual schools

This is probably a key one for school governing bodies considering how to react. The white paper effectively spells the end of the settlement between local authorities and individual institutions, ironically  set up by the Conservatives in 1988, whereby autonomy was given to headteachers and governing bodies, but with the local authority influencing in the background.

Now, the favoured multi-academy trusts can run a whole chain of schools in a top-down manner if they choose. Schools contemplating joining one would be well advised to try to pin down MATs on precisely what freedoms they might be allowed if they join them.

Complaints when things go wrong

It’s a fast-solidifying view of mine that worrying about ‘standards, not structures’, is fine so long as all is well in an institution. It is when things start to go wrong that there are problems. For, over the past four years I’ve been contacted by many people concerned about various goings-on within academies. These include staff bullying, inappropriate spending, the ‘gaming’ of Ofsted inspections, pupils going missing from the system and institutionalised exam cheating.

A refrain of many of these whistleblowers has been concern as to who academies are accountable to. In theory, central government, through the Education Funding Agency and Department for Education, investigates. But we have often found that these remote Whitehall agencies, who, after all, now have thousands of institutions to oversee, are not interested. Nor, by the way, generally is the new intermediate tier of academy oversight, the Regional Schools Commissioner.  To be sure, local authorities, a natural first port of call for a whistleblower in the past, are far from perfect. Yet the ability of an individual to complain, for example, to their local councillor about a particular issue with a local authority school, will be lost in a move to an all-academy system. The general concept of an appeal to a truly local body outside of the instititution itself has fallen by the wayside. The white paper promises that local authorities will focus on protecting, for example, the needs of ‘vulnerable’ children. But without real power, how are they to do this?

These are just a few structural issues. I could mention more, such as questions about the merits of teacher pay and conditions deregulation – is it really best for the taxpayer to have a kind of ‘race to the top’ going on in terms of academy chief executive pay, with salaries in the range of £200-£400,000 now not unheard-of? – the now-well-discussed removal of parents from academy governance structures or the fact that much education law can now be formulated privately, away from the Parliamentary gaze, in the form of academy funding agreements with the Secretary of State.

The bigger issue is that all of these structural changes, which may centre on the de-democratisation and deregulation of state schooling, are important. They should not be seen as subservient to questions about often small changes in test and exam results, for example, or Ofsted outcomes. The country needs to ask itself whether these structural reforms are really in the best interest of pupils. In making this whole issue much more contentious, by proclaiming that all schools are to be forced into the status, ministers  may actually have done this debate a favour. At least now these questions might get more attention.

Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist and author of ‘Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing’ (Methuen, 2007). His CPRT research report on recent systemic reforms in the primary sector will be published next term. This blog, a sequel to the one posted on 4 March, was prompted by the publication on 17 March of the White Paper ‘Educational Excellence Everywhere’.

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Baseline assessment – we’re not buying

Last autumn hundreds of thousands of four-year-old children, as diverse as any group pulled from the population, were each assigned a single number score which purported to predict their future progress in learning. They had been baselined.

They arrived in reception classes from school nurseries, from private or voluntary nurseries, from childminders, and from homes where they had no previous experience of early years provision.  They came from families awash with books, talk and outings, from families struggling with the economic and emotional pressures of life, and from troubled backgrounds and foster care.  Some were hale and hearty while others had a range of health conditions or special needs.  Some were fluent in English and some spoke other languages with little or no English.  And some were nearly a year older than the youngest, 25 percent of their life at that age. Yet with no quarter given for such differences, they were labelled with a simple number score within six weeks of arriving at school.

In the face of widespread and vehement opposition (including from CPRT’s directors) DfE had decided on baseline assessment not to support children’s learning, but as a primary school accountability measure for judging schools when these children reach Year 6. Unsurprisingly, recent press reports indicate that lack of comparability between the three approved schemes may mean the baseline policy will be scrapped – possibly in favour of a simple ‘readiness check’.  Frying pans and fires come to mind.

The fact is, there is no simple measure that can accurately predict the trajectory of a group of such young children. This is not to deny a central role for assessment.  Teachers assess children on arrival in a formative process of understanding who they are, what they know and understand, how they feel and what makes them tick, in the service of teaching them more effectively.

As CPRT has frequently pointed out in its evidence to government assessment reviews and consultations, the confusion of assessment with accountability results in a simplistic number score which ignores the range and complexity of individual learning and development, over-emphasises the core areas of literacy and maths required by the DfE, and places a significant additional burden on teachers in those important early weeks of forming relationships and establishing the life of a class.

Recent research by the Institute of Education into the implementation of baseline assessment confirms that teachers found the process added to their workloads, yet only 7.7 percent thought it was an ‘accurate and fair way to assess children’ and 6.7 percent agreed it was ‘a good way to assess how primary schools perform’.

What is the harm?  Aside from the waste of millions of pounds of public money going to the private baseline providers, there is concern about the impact of the resulting expectations on children who receive a low score within their first weeks in school, and who may start out at age four wearing an ‘invisible dunce’s cap’. CPRT drew attention to this risk in its response to the accountability consultation, saying ‘Notions of fixed ability would be exacerbated by a baseline assessment in reception that claimed to reliably predict future attainment.’ For children whose life circumstances place them at risk of low achievement in school, being placed in groups for the ‘slower’ children and subjected to an intense diet of literacy and numeracy designed to help them ‘catch up’ will deny them the rich experiences that should be at the heart of their early years in school to provide them with the foundation they need.

Better Without Baseline echoes CPR’s statement on assessment in its 2010 list of policy priorities for the Coalition government. CPR urged ministers to:

Stop treating testing and assessment as synonymous … The issue is not whether children should be assessed or schools should be accountable – they should – but how and in relation to what.

Unfortunately policy makers are seduced by the illusion of scientific measurement of progress, using children’s scores to judge the quality of schools.  Yet there are more valid ways to approach accountability.  Arguing for a more comprehensive framework, Wynne Harlen said in her excellent research report for CPRT:

What is clearly needed is a better match between the standards we aim for and the ones we actually measure (measuring what we value, not valuing what we measure). And it is important to recognise that value judgements are unavoidable in setting standards based on ‘what ought to be’ rather than ‘what is’.

Baseline assessment is not a statutory requirement, and this year some 2000 schools decided not to opt in; that remains a principled option for the future.  We can hope that government will think again, and remove the pressure on schools to buy one of the current schemes.   What is needed is not a quick substitute of another inappropriate scheme such as a ‘readiness check’, but a full and detailed review of assessment and accountability from the early years onward, where education professionals come together to discuss and define what matters.  The aim should be to design a system of measurement that is respected, useful and truly supports accountability not only for public investment but most importantly to the learners we serve.

Nancy Stewart is Deputy Chair of TACTYC, the Association for Professional Development in Early Years.

Contact

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