The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

by

The end of primary education as we know it?

The government seems seriously to be considering requiring all schools – and yes, that includes all primary schools – to become academies. A white paper setting out such a change may come later this month while, as Robin Alexander pointed out last month, the government has been arguing that ‘all schools should become academies or free schools’ for more than a year.

This would be the biggest change to institutional oversight in the primary sector since the 1988 Education Reform Act, at least. It would enable the Conservative party at long last to achieve what it set out to do less successfully 25 years ago through grant maintained schools: the bypassing of local authorities.

But is it going to herald change for the better, or is it a risky break with what has been a reasonably successful post-war primary education framework in favour of something much less democratic, potentially much more commercialised, arguably much more at risk of capture by vested interests, and certainly much less stable?

A research report I have written for the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, to be published this spring, considers the academies policy in detail. Here is what I found:

Evidence that academy status has improved primary schools since the first primary academies came into existence in 2010 is patchy-going-on-non-existent.

This is perhaps the most obvious finding. The headline is that there is little firm evidence that academy status in itself has improved primary schools. This doubt about evidence perhaps unsurprisingly includes that provided by the Department for Education, which last year was taken to task by the UK Statistics Authority for presenting official test data on sponsored academies without context and was asked by the cross-party Commons Education Select Committee to stop ‘exaggerating’ academy success.

The committee itself said that, as of January 2015:

We have sought but not found convincing evidence of the impact of academy status on attainment in primary schools.

Meanwhile, eight of the nine larger academy chains which have been inspected by Ofsted have come in for criticism.

It is true that the academies policy has been credited by the Commons Education Select Committee with injecting extra dynamism into state education. But the evidence for this seems very indirect.

There is little evidence that academies have used the autonomy which the government says is the centrepiece of the policy on the things that the government usually talks about in relation to it.

Although ministers have tended to argue that academies have greater freedoms over the curriculum, teachers’ pay and conditions and the length of the school day and term, independent studies have tended to find that such theoretical liberties are often not taken up.

For example, although academies can depart from national curriculum arrangements, the existence of an assessment regime which focuses on the national curriculum and against which schools’ futures are decided severely limits their scope for manoeuvre.  Indeed, professionals surveying the current highly prescriptive stipulations of primary English assessments might greet suggestions of professional teaching freedom anywhere within the state-funded sector with a hollow laugh.

The academies policy, with the freedom it gives to multi-academy trusts to control what goes on within a chain of schools, provides no guarantee of meaningful autonomy of any kind for individual schools run by an overarching trust.

At the level of the individual school operating as one of several within a multi-academy trust (MAT), the very concept of school-centred autonomy may not exist as currently understood. Decision-making can be controlled by the MAT board, with the governors of each school having little or no power. If this as a trend continues and many or all schools enter into multi-academy trusts run in such a centralised way – and several leaders of large MATS have confirmed this is what happens in their organisations in the past year– it will be highly significant. Effectively it will bring to an end nearly 30 years of local management of schools, which, ironically, the Conservatives introduced in 1988.

To put it another way, we will have replaced a system whereby heads and governing bodies were given some freedom to manage their own affairs, but subject to oversight and influence by a locally democratic body, with one where a central body which is not subject to local democracy can run a group of schools in a top-down manner.

The academies policy does give meaningful autonomy to academy trusts, at the level of the trust, rather than to single schools within a MAT, in relation to some aspects of what they do. But the question then becomes whether such freedoms are appropriate. Such freedoms come in several categories.

Admissions. For example, the movement of many institutions from ‘community school’ status, run under the auspices of local authorities, to semi-independent academies makes each such academy trust its own admissions authority, rather than having admissions controlled by its local authority.

Yet why would a non-selective school need to control its own admissions? It seems difficult to identify any benefits, from the perspective of a system which sought to treat all local children fairly. However, the potential downsides have been powerfully voiced by, for example, the independent Pearson/RSA Academies Commission. It found that

Academies’ autonomy over admissions has attracted controversy and fuelled concerns that the growth of academies may entrench rather than mitigate social inequalities.

Governance. The academies scheme genuinely gives trusts great freedom in terms of how they set themselves up. At the top of academies’ governance structure sit ‘members’. Members have the ability to appoint and dismiss the other powerful figures within the trust’s governance structure, the trustees. Yet there can be as few as three members controlling multi-academy trusts, which in turn can run large numbers of schools. In some cases, these members seem to know each other well, sometimes as husband and wife. In others, a major figure involved in the day-to-day running of the MAT – say, the chief executive – is also a member sitting at the top of its governance structure.

This seems at odds with established good corporate governance practice and appears to create the clear risk that only a small number of people can be in effective control of large sums of public money and of important public institutions.

Finance. The large sums of taxpayers’ money now finding their way to some senior academy executives – and thus away from the classroom – combined with the payment of public funds to companies in which those governing academy trusts sometimes have an interest, raise additional concerns. Specifically, they highlight the clearly debatable freedoms which have been given to academy trusts over financial affairs.

As DfE’s Academies Financial Handbook puts it, the academies system hands trusts ‘wide discretion’ over the spending of public money, with auditors and the government then checking afterwards that this has been done correctly. In the non-academy sector, the local authority retains ultimate responsibility for spending. Readers will no doubt have views on which procedure is better, but financial goings-on in the academies sector at the very least give rise to concerns.

The system for deciding who runs academies is lacking in transparency and democracy

Decisions such as which organisation gets to take over a school under the new Regional Schools Commissioner (RSC) system are not taken in public; no detailed decision-making documents are available to taxpayers, parents, pupils or staff; there is no detail even on the rules by which such decisions are made, if they exist. Virtually no education stakeholders have any role in the decision-making process. The system is effectively controlled from Whitehall, as RSCs report ultimately to ministers. Though taking decisions with big implications for local communities, they are not subject to any local accountability.

The academies system has also introduced a controversial new feature on education’s landscape: the school takeover. This is when an outside academy trust can be brought in to take over the running of an institution, sometimes whether or not the school community – the parents, staff and pupils – want it.

Conclusion

Moving all schools to primary academy status would seem to herald a major increase in bureaucracy – and a field day for lawyers and auditors – as for thousands of institutions the legal structures on which schools are based are changed. This stands to take resources and the energy of school leaderships away from the core business of what goes on in classrooms.

It also stands to move England towards a system where the claimed greater autonomy of academies over, for example, the curriculum – on which the teaching profession has real expertise –  often seems more rhetorical than real. But it would hand great power to academy trusts over areas such as admissions, where gameplaying in search of a ‘better’ intake seems a clear risk, and finance, where the misuse of public funds is an obvious worry.

It would move the management oversight of schools from governing bodies and local authorities  rooted in their local communities to potentially very small groups of individuals, sometimes friends of each other, supervised essentially from Whitehall. It would allow the writing-out of most parents and taxpayers from meaningful influence and information in relation to major decisions on the future of state-funded schools, including a potential takeover by an outside organisation.

Faced with all of these considerations, one more is worth bearing in mind. As shown by the extensive evidence presented in the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review, considering as it did the system before primary academies:

Primary schools appear to be under intense pressure but are in good heart. They are highly valued by children and parents and in general are doing a good job … [They] may be the one point of stability and positive values in a world where everything else is changing and uncertain. (p 488)

That being so, and taking into account the less attractive aspects of what is being proposed, one question begs itself in relation to this possible change.

It consists of five words: why would you do it?

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 in the spring.

by Robin Alexander

An ideological step too far

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.robinalexander.org.uk

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

by

Learning from difference

Based on a review of research evidence, our forthcoming report, commissioned by the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, concludes that current national policy is limiting the capacity of the English primary education system to respond to pupil diversity. In so doing, it is failing to build on many promising practices that exist in schools.  As also shown in CPRT’s recent report on educational inequality from Kate Pickett and Laura Vanderbloemen, all of this is tending to create further levels of segregation within the system, to the particular disadvantage of learners from minority and economically poorer backgrounds. The report provides an analysis of the factors that are creating these difficulties, taking into account underlying population diversity and the impact of recent changes.

The primary school system has, of course, long had to respond to demographic change – not just inward migration, but within-country migration and population growth. Likewise, schools themselves have had to find ways of educating children from very different backgrounds within the same institution and in the same classroom. Indeed, the most apparently homogeneous classroom is in fact diverse simply because no two children are identical in educational terms.

The most overt markers of difference, such as ethnicity or social class, are simply indicators of the underlying diversity that characterises schools and classrooms. Rapid changes in patterns of diversity, whether they are attributable to migration, population growth, gentrification or any other cause, are important because they present immediate challenges – and opportunities – to the school system. However, the presence or absence of such changes does not alter the fundamental task of schools to educate children who are different one from another.

We believe that it is encouraging that schools now enjoy an enhanced level of autonomy that provides space for them to determine their own responses. They are less beholden to central initiatives, less constrained by detailed curriculum and pedagogical guidance, and more likely to be operating independently of local authority oversight. There are, therefore, undoubtedly opportunities for schools to respond to the diversity of their populations in creative ways. However, our concern is that national accountability requirements are as powerful as ever, limiting creativity and risk-taking by their focus on a narrow conceptualisation of the purposes of education.

We are also concerned that alongside the reduction of external constraints there is far less of the support to schools that went with them. Schools are more likely to be working in isolation, or as part of academy chains, federations and other networks that may or may not provide effective support. Moreover, whilst school budgets have been protected, they have failed to keep pace with rising costs, and the distribution of ‘additional’ funding does not match the educational challenges facing schools as their profile of pupil diversity expands. In this context, much depends on what individual head teachers choose to do – and what the accountability systems will allow them to do. As a result, the school system is a more fragmented one, in which substantial social segregation is reflected and reproduced.

In the report we go on to explain that despite the barriers created by national policy there are primary schools that find creative ways of responding to diversity. In order to build on these promising developments, there is a need for radical new thinking that will encourage greater collaboration and experimentation across the education service. This requires a recognition that differences can act as a catalyst for innovation in ways that have the potential to benefit all pupils, whatever their personal characteristics and home circumstances.  In terms of national policy, this requires a move way from narrow definitions of the purposes of education as criticised by the Cambridge Primary Review, CPRT and, most recently, in Robin Alexander’s submission to the current House of Commons Education Committee enquiry into the purposes and quality of education in England.  There is also a need to create a system in which schools are no longer divided one from another, and from their local communities.

With this in mind, we propose a different way of responding to learner diversity, one that is viewed in relation to what we describe as an ‘ecology of equity’.  By this we mean that the extent to which pupils’ experiences and outcomes are equitable is not dependent only on the educational practices of their schools.  Instead, it depends on a whole range of interacting processes that reach into the school from outside.  These include both the ways in which the local school system operates to support or undermine individual schools, and the underlying social and economic processes that shape the experiences of children and their families.

This suggests that in responding to pupil diversity it is necessary to address three interlinked sets of factors that bear on the learning of children.  These relate to: within-school factors to do with existing policies and practices; between-school factors that arise from the characteristics of local school systems; and beyond-school factors, including the demographics, economics, cultures and histories of local areas.  In the report we consider each of these in turn in order to develop our argument as to what needs to happen in order to strengthen primary schools’ capacity for responding to pupil diversity.

The introduction of this new thinking has major implications for national policy. In particular, it means that those who are closest to children and their communities must have the space and encouragement to make decisions about how all their pupils can be best educated. Crucially, it must allow practitioners to explore new ways of working without fear of the consequences if outcomes are not immediately improved. It should also encourage greater collaboration between schools in order to make the best practices available to a wider number of pupils. This, in turn, requires the development of an intermediary layer capable of interpreting national purposes at the local level; of promoting the networking of schools with each other and with other agencies; and able to learn from creative developments at the local level and feed them back into national policy.

Mel Ainscow wrote this blog in collaboration with Alan Dyson and Lise Hopwood. All three work at The University of Manchester Institute of Education.  Their jointly-authored CPRT research report ‘Primary schools responding to diversity: barriers and possibilities’ will be published early in 2016. It complements the CPRT report from Kate Pickett and Laura Vanderbloemen ‘Mind the Gap: tackling social and educational inequality’ which we published last September. 

by

Support for vulnerable children: another ZPD?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by

Crisis in childhood: the loss of play

A widely recognised and dramatic cultural change over the last two generations, in the UK and many other modern, urbanised and technologically advanced countries, is the change in children’s life experiences. The generation of ‘baby-boomers’ born just after World War II experienced a childhood in which they played out in the street or in the local fields and parks, in groups of children often of very mixed ages. This relative freedom and experience of free play and unstructured time has now very largely disappeared. As I have noted in The Importance of Play, it is currently estimated that around half of all children world-wide now live in urban settings, and experience very reduced opportunities for free play, and particularly free play outdoors, and in natural environments. And as documented in the Cambridge Primary Review final report (pp 53-62), parental concerns about traffic, ‘stranger danger’, germs, disease and so on, have resulted in children’s home lives being structured and supervised to an extent which would have been regarded as bizarre only a couple of generations ago.

This is not simply a romanticising of the past, but is a cause for serious concern. The anthropologist Peter Gray has demonstrated that the loss of free play opportunities for children over the last 50 years has been accompanied by alarming increases in children’s mental health problems.

There is also good evidence that rich play opportunities in the home support children’s transition into school. A recent study by the developmental psychologist Jane Barker in the United States, for example, showed that the more unstructured time children had while out of school, including both indoor and outdoor unsupervised free play and family excursions to settings such as the seaside and museums, the better their ‘executive functioning’ – a crucial set of cognitive skills that support children’s abilities to concentrate, to maintain their attention on task, and that are consequently highly predictive of academic achievement.

In the UK, a study led by Claire Hughes found that the strongest predictor of language and cognitive development among children at the point of starting school was an item completed by their teachers indicating that the child ‘talks about fun activities at home’.

However, we know that the stresses of urban living, particularly for those living in poverty, often significantly reduce the amount of fun and playfulness in the home context, and it is clear that this loss of play experiences in children’s early years reduces their preparedness for school.

One obvious means by which the negative effects of reduced play opportunities in the domestic context could be ameliorated would be the provision of rich play experiences in pre-school and in early schooling. This was a key recommendation of the Cambridge Primary Review, which noted that children in the UK start formal schooling at an unusually young age and reported that evidence from international comparisons and from research, backed up by the opinions of those teachers and parents who argued (p 168) that ‘children are ill-served by starting school at four and embarking on formal, subject-based learning almost immediately.’

Consequently, though subject to concerns about baseline testing, CPR welcomed the Labour government’s Early Years Foundation Stage and recommended (p 491) that it should be extended to age 6, and that the feasibility of raising the school starting age to that age should be examined. However, anticipating the misreading of this recommendation which duly occurred, CPR stressed that the central issue was not the school starting age as such but ‘the character and quality of what our youngest children encounter, whether in pre-school or school settings.’

Tragically, however, in direct contradiction to all the evidence, the trend in UK education policy has been in completely the opposite direction. In the name of ‘raising standards’ and ‘increased rigour’, today’s young children in nursery and primary schools in the UK, the USA and some other developed and developing countries, are being subjected to a long-discredited curriculum which emphasises learning facts at the expense of developing the skills and dispositions that support children in becoming powerful, confident and enthusiastic learners. Many commentators have rightly expressed concern that, at the start of the 21st century, when, more than ever, we need to be educating our children to be creative problem-solvers, innovators and confident, adaptable learners, this is a totally counter-productive situation. Among the many other concerns about this current direction of travel of education policy for our youngest children is the loss of teaching approaches and learning opportunities grounded in activities which are playful. In the UK, opportunities for young children to learn through playful activities are now almost or completely absent from Year 1 onwards in many primary schools, and under increasing threat in Reception classes and even pre-school settings. The current accountability regime, and the relentless, high-stakes, formal testing of even our very youngest children (baseline assessment at age 4, phonics test at age 6, and the threat of the re-introduction of KS1 SATs at age 7) have seen to that.

While there is much that we still do not understand about how play supports learning and mental health, the evidence of its benefits for a number of areas of development is unequivocal.    As I have reviewed elsewhere  this evidence comes from a wide range of anthropological, neuroscientific, psychological and educational studies. From anthropological studies of children’s play in extant hunter-gatherer societies, and evolutionary psychology studies of play in the young of other mammalian species, it is clear that play is an adaptation which evolved in early human social groups that enabled humans to become powerful learners and problem-solvers. Neuroscientific studies have shown that playful activity leads to synaptic growth, particularly in the frontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for all the uniquely human higher mental functions. Studies in developmental psychology have shown that a playful approach to language learning, as opposed to formal instruction, offers the most powerful support for the early development of phonological and literacy skills. Play has also been shown to support intellectual and emotional ‘self-regulation’, a key predictor of educational achievement and a range of other positive life outcomes.

Within educational research, a number of longitudinal studies have provided evidence of long-term outcomes. In a 2002 US study, for example, Rebecca Marcon demonstrated that, by the end of their sixth year in school, children whose pre-school model had been academically-directed achieved significantly lower marks in comparison to children who had attended child-initiated, play-based pre-school programmes.

The irony is that, certainly in the UK, much of the motivation for moving towards a more instructional model of teaching at ever-earlier phases of schooling appears to derive from a desperation to match the scores achieved in PISA tests by 15 year olds in countries such as China, Singapore & Korea, where the limitations of this approach are now widely recognised, and where moves are being made to move to more creative and often play-based pedagogies. The development of material-based outdoor play facilities in the Anji district of China is a good example of this kind of development.

As a consequence of current UK education policies, our children are amongst the least happy in the world, with worrying increases in mental health problems, and well-informed, inspirational teachers are leaving the profession in droves. The very likely impact of these trends for the quality of children’s education is only too evident.

At the same time, however, there are encouraging signs. The crisis in play opportunities, in the home context and in early schooling, is now widely recognised and many national and international bodies are working at the level of policy to develop responses to it. Even in the UK, the All Party Parliamentary Group on a Fit and Healthy Childhood, originally established through concern over the shocking rise in childhood obesity, has recognised the crucial role that play has in supporting all aspects of children’s development, and has issued a specific report on the importance of play for children’s healthy development physically, mentally, emotionally and in relation to school achievement.

There is also, currently, an exciting resurgence in serious scientific research attempting to understand the essential components of play, what happens in the brain when we play, how playfulness develops, and what experiences support it, how it relates to other important aspects of development, and in what ways playful activities and pedagogies might be developed in schools. Several recent edited volumes attest to the number of young researchers world-wide who are beginning to take an interest in play as an important topic for enquiry.

At Cambridge, the LEGO Foundation have sponsored the Play, Learning and Narrative Skills (PLaNS) project demonstrating the potential of a playful approach to supporting primary school children’s development as writers. We have also now just launched, supported by a further generous donation from the same source, the Play in Education, Development and Learning (PEDAL) research centre, which will be led by an endowed Professorship, and has been set up to conduct rigorous scientific research to address the many important questions relating to the role of play and playfulness in human development.

Play is sometimes dismissed as essentially trivial, as something young children do but which serves no purpose and which they grow out of. The evidence we have, however, from an increasingly rich and rigorous research literature, is that play is a fundamental human characteristic which supports our unique qualities as creative problem solvers, as innovators and as a highly adaptive species. Arguably, our culture, our science and our technological achievements all arise, at least in part, from our playfulness. We put our children’s future at risk, and their ability to deal with the many difficulties that the human species will confront through the 21st century and beyond, if we do not recognise the importance of play and begin to develop policies, both in relation to our domestic arrangements, and our schooling systems, that support and nurture their natural and adaptive playfulness.

David Whitebread is based at Cambridge University Faculty of Education, where he is acting director of the new PEDAL centre.

by Robin Alexander

Face the music

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 www.robinalexander.org.uk

by Robin Alexander

Jerome Bruner at 100

APA interviewer: ‘You’ll be turning 100 this year …’
Jerome Bruner: ‘Yes! Isn’t that nifty?’

Today is the 100th birthday of Jerome Bruner, one of contemporary education’s greatest. Admirers around the world are celebrating this more than nifty event and wishing him well. CPRT gladly joins them. Happy birthday, Jerry!

There was a time when trainee teachers explored education’s founding ideas and knew something about those who generated them. Latterly, educational ideas of any kind have been lampooned by one English Education Secretary as ‘barmy theory’, while their purveyors have been called ‘enemies of promise’ by another – and oh how the tabloids stamped and cheered. Nowadays, trainee teachers must concentrate on ‘requirements’; that is to say, policy diktats whose authority resides not in evidence or argument, let alone wisdom, but simply in the fact of their being imposed and policed from above.

So let us take time to celebrate one for whom ideas, evidence and argument really matter, who is indeed wise, and who over the past seventy years has drawn us into conversation and held us there – for such is the power of his wonderfully lucid and engaging prose. Bruner’s conversation, like Bakhtin’s an unending one, is about human development, cognition, learning, schooling, culture, law, narrative and much else; in sum, to coin the question underpinning his revolutionary 1960s curriculum Man, a Course of Study, about what it is to be human.

Consider the cognitive revolution, scaffolding, constructivism, the spiral curriculum, paradigmatic and narrative modes of cognitive functioning, folk pedagogy and … the list goes on. Insights such as these inform so much of our current thinking about the conditions for productive learning and teaching that we may take them for granted, and many in our profession may not even know their source.

Chris Watkins is one of several who have written splendid birthday blogs and tributes, and I can do no better than refer you to him and to them via the links below. But first, here are some familiar Bruner quotes to greet as friends old or new.

Education research should never have been conceived as principally dedicated to evaluating the efficacy or impact of ‘present practices.’ … The master question from which the mission of education research is derived is: What should be taught to whom and with what pedagogical object in mind?

We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.

A quiet revolution has taken place in developmental psychology … It is not only that we have begun to think again of the child as a social being – one who plays and talks with others, learns through interactions with parents and teachers – but because we have come once more to appreciate that through such social life the child acquires a framework for interpreting experience, and learns how to negotiate meaning … Making sense is a social process.

The reality that we impute to the worlds we inhabit is a constructed one … Reality is made, not found.

Language is for using, and the uses of language are so varied, so rich, and each use so preemptive a way of life, that to study it is to study the world and, indeed, all possible worlds.

We can trace three themes in relation to discourse … discourse as scaffolding … discourse as the negotiation of meaning … discourse as the transfer of cultural representations.

Education is not just about conventional school matters like curriculum or standards or testing. What we resolve to do in school only makes sense when considered in the broader context of what the society intends to accomplish through its educational investment in the young. How one conceives of education … is a function of how one conceives of culture and its aims, professed and otherwise.

Intellectual activity is anywhere and everywhere, whether at the frontier of knowledge or in a third-grade classroom.

To play is not just child’s play. Play … is a way of using mind, or better yet, an attitude towards the use of mind. It is a test frame, a hot house for trying out ways of combining thought and language and fantasy.

The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion – these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.

The main objective of teaching is to… open up a wider range of possibilities… to go beyond the information given.

I want … to leapfrog over the issue of school subjects and curricula in order to deal with a more general matter: the mode of thinking that helps children … create a version of the world in which … they can envisage a place for themselves … I believe that story making, narrative, is what is needed for that … The importance of narrative for the cohesion of a culture is as great as it is in structuring an individual life … What we all do for each other is to keep telling our stories. That is how we live with the ordinary and its setbacks.

School reform without concomitant economic reform is simply not sufficient.

www.robinalexander.org.uk 

Read Chris Watkins’s IoE blog celebrating Jerome Bruner’s 100th.

Read Jerome Bruner’s centenary interview for the American Psychological Association (the APA referred to at the head of this blog).

Read the tribute from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

Watch a televised interview with Jerome Bruner for the Association of Psychological Science.

Buy Jerome Bruner’s two-volume selection from his writing from 1957 to 2006, In Search of Pedagogy.

 

 

by

Test of truth

Are ministers continuing to misuse data in promoting their favoured policies?

Nick Gibb, the schools minister, seems not to have taken on board the implications of a recent letter from the statistics watchdog, stemming from one of my previous CPRT blogs, about how primary schools’ test results should be interpreted and presented.

When the provisional 2015 Key Stage 2 results for England were published last week, Mr Gibb was quoted in the DfE’s press release celebrating big gains overall in average results since Labour left office in 2010. The minister also highlighted, again, the performance of academies, and in particular that of sponsored academies – typically struggling schools whose management is transferred to an outside body which signs a contract with the Secretary of State – as improving faster than the national average.

However, in doing so he ignored a warning from the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) about over-interpretation of data. The DfE release also seemed to be heavily skewed in favour of a particular narrative, when, as I suggest below, other interpretations are available. And the national data themselves seem to beg questions about what, in reality, has driven the big recent jumps in pupil performance.

That UKSA intervention was prompted after I wrote my CPRT blog in February and followed this up with one for NAHT which argued that seemingly big improvements in sponsored academy KS2 results last year may have been nothing to do with academy status. Rather, I argued, they seemed to follow a national trend, whereby schools of all types with low statistical starting points had improved faster than the national average.

I wrote to the UKSA citing the two blogs and arguing that a DfE statistical release published in December 2014, on which ministers had relied to support their academies policy, should have investigated whether improvements in sponsored academy results came not as a result of the schools’ governance structures, but simply reflected a broader statistical trend for all types of schools.

Ed Humpherson, UKSA director general for regulation, wrote to DfE in July to suggest that while ministers were entitled to use the contents of DfE’s December 2014 statistical release when they commented on the academies policy, the paper itself should have made clear that ‘the differences in the rates of improvement [of academies versus other schools] were not necessarily caused by school type.’ He also recommended that future statistical publications should see DfE ‘commenting on limitations’ when interpreting these statistics, in order to ‘make it clearer to Ministers and to other users that the statistics could not be used to infer a causal link between school type and either attainment or rates of improvement.’

Last week came the first test of how DfE and ministers would react to this advice, with the first statistical publication revealing this year’s KS2 results, and the accompanying press release. Mr Humpherson’s warning seems to have been taken on board to some extent in the DfE statistical release, but – perhaps unsurprisingly – not at all by the minister.

The new DfE statistical release  has a section on academy performance, as was the case last year. Again, it notes how sponsored academies improved faster than the average for all schools. This time, though, it says  that when interpreting differential rates of improvement between types of school ‘it should be noted that the extent to which a school improves is related to a range of factors. Schools with the lowest previous outcomes tend to see the largest improvements…’

For me, this does not go far enough in stating clearly, in line with UKSA, that differences in improvement rates between schools of different types may be nothing to do with whether the institution is an academy or not.

Yes, this extra line of interpretation is an improvement on last year, and in that sense should be welcomed. However, it appears not to have been clear enough for Mr Gibb, whose press release claims: ‘The results…show that sponsored primary academies…are improving more quickly than those run by local authorities.’ Most controversially, Mr Gibb is also quoted as saying: ‘These results vindicate our decision to expand the valuable academies programme into primary schools.’

So, Mr Gibb is inferring a causal link between school type and results, seemingly against the advice of the UKSA.

As mentioned in previous blogs, this is not a purely political or statistical debate with only abstract implications. No, this possibly erroneous and misleading interpretation is likely to have profound implications on the ground, as struggling primary schools are pushed, often controversially, towards sponsored academy status on evidential grounds which still seem dubious.

Of course it may be that this year’s sponsored academy results do not fit the statistical pattern of previous years. It may be that they have improved substantially, while other previously low-performing local authority schools have not. We will not know for sure if that is the case until all school-by-school results are published towards Christmas. But such a phenomenon seems unlikely, based on what has happened in the recent past.

We do also already have further data for 2015 which cast Mr Gibb’s pronouncements in the press release in a somewhat different light from that intended. In the DfE release, Mr Gibb talks not only of major improvements since 2010, with 90,000 more pupils achieving the expected levels in maths and literacy, but of the results in different local authority areas. The narrative with regard to the latter is almost entirely negative. In fact, throughout this release, the only messages to come through are that ministers and their policies are proving successful; that the types of schools favoured by ministers in their reforms are proving successful; and that particular local authorities – yes, that’s government, but not the national government presided over by ministers  – are underperforming and so are facing a ‘crackdown’.

Remarkably, there is no mention at all that other actors in this annual statistical drama – children, their schools and teachers, and their parents – may have played a part in improving results.

In relation to local authorities, the release features a table of ‘best performing local authority areas’ and ‘worst performing local authority areas’, but the text focuses only on the latter, with Mr Gibb promising to write to directors of LAs at the bottom of the rankings to get them to ‘explain how they intend to improve the teaching of reading and arithmetic in the primary schools under their control’.

There are several ways to unpick that last phrase, by the way. For example, do local authority directors really have much influence over teaching content? Is ‘arithmetic’ all that mathematics amounts to now? Have local authorities really ‘controlled’ schools since the 1988 Education Reform Act, introduced by the Conservatives supposedly to stop LA control happening? But we must move on.

The interesting thing is that, within these latest statistics, DfE did publish LA-by-LA figures which point to some large improvements in recent years. So, two authorities have improved their headline percentage of pupils achieving level four in reading, writing and mathematics by 12 points since 2012. In Hull, the figure rose from well below the national average, at 67 per cent, in 2012, to 79 per cent, just below the national figure. In Portsmouth, the gain was also by 12 points, from 65 to 77 per cent. Another five authorities – Redcar, Herefordshire, Suffolk, East Sussex and Hounslow – improved by at least nine percentage points across the three years. Overall, five of the top seven fastest rising authorities, on this measure, had below-average results in 2012 so have either closed the gap with the national average or have surpassed it.

Some of them, including Hull, it is true, do have a higher than average numbers of academies. Yet outside one very small authority – Rutland, where performance tends to jump around every year – the fastest-rising LA from 2014 to 2015 on this headline measure was South Tyneside, where results surged by seven percentage points. DfE data reveals that South Tyneside has only one sponsored primary academy. Meanwhile, the academy chain widely seen as the most successful in England – Ark Schools – posted average headline results which, at 72 per cent, were a point lower than the lowest-performing local authorities nationally. Will Mr Gibb now be writing to Ark?

It is possible, then, to see from the above statistics how an alternative narrative could have been crafted, perhaps based on ministerial praise for local authority areas which have risen on the Government’s chosen measures. As ever, interpretation of statistics can depend on what the interpreter chooses not to highlight.

One final set of questions present themselves from the press release’s statistics. What do the last few years of generally improving national data actually mean?

Of course, the implications of the press release, as voiced by Mr Gibb, are clear. Results have improved strongly since 2010. This shows, said Mr Gibb, that ‘the government is delivering on its one nation vision for education’ and that ministerial policies are paying off. The national data behind this claim show that the proportion of pupils achieving the expected level 4 in all of reading, writing and maths rose from 62 per cent in 2009 to 80 per cent this year.

But to repeat: why has this happened? I’m not convinced that any of the three policies listed in the DfE press release – introducing higher floor targets, banning calculators from maths tests and introducing a spelling, punctuation and grammar test – have been entirely behind it.

And perhaps the most obvious change that a government can make to teaching and learning – the introduction of a new national curriculum – cannot have contributed here as none of the pupils taking the 2015 tests have experienced the national curriculum introduced by the previous government.

So it is a bit of a mystery. Perhaps readers of this blog can explain why the figures have jumped. I am certainly curious about them, and would like to investigate further. For if anything is to be underlined from recent ministerial interpretations of figures, it is the need continually to ask questions.

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

This is not the first time that our bloggers have had cause to challenge the government’s use of evidence. Click here for further comment.

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

by Robin Alexander

Evidence with Vision: more CPRT research reviews

If this reads less like a blog than a promotion, so be it.

Cambridge Primary Review Trust maintains CPR’s maxim that what primary education needs is vision and evidence.  Not one or the other, but both. For, as the CPR final report noted (Children, their World, their Education, pp 16-17):

The Cambridge Primary Review is firmly grounded in evidence … But not all educational questions are empirical. Many are ethical, for education is a fundamentally moral affair, while others move forward from evidence into territory which is more speculative … This, then, is the age-old distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ questions, or questions of fact and value, or what in the Review we have called matters of evidence and vision, and we readily understand that knowing what is the case may provide no guide at all to determining what ought to be. Indeed, philosophers warn us, as a condition of argument at its most elementary level, of the dangers of making this leap. They even give such errant thinking a name: the naturalistic fallacy. To take two examples, just because primary children’s school lives have been dominated since Victorian days by the 3Rs, or during the same period most children have been taught by generalist class teachers, this does not mean that such practices are inherently right or that they ought to continue indefinitely.

Existing assumptions and practices are there, then, to be questioned for what they are – habits of thought and action which are so deeply ingrained that most people don’t pause to think about them … Equally, through the diligent use of evidence we can uncover the weaknesses of a particular aspect of education, but that evidence of itself may offer no clues to how to put things right. What may be needed is some lateral, not to say visionary, thinking.

So while the fashionable mantra ‘evidence-based practice’ properly reminds us of the need for educational decisions to be grounded as securely as possible in what is known about productive learning and teaching, it tells us rather less about the educational ends to which such learning and teaching should be directed; that is, by what criteria learning should be judged ‘productive’. Hence the extensive discussion of educational aims in the CPR final report, and the eight priorities to which much of CPRT’s work is directed.  Turn that round though, and we see that aims and priorities on their own are not enough either, for grand ideas don’t morph into practical and effective teaching strategies without the application of experience and evidence.

Yet the evidence-vision relationship is complex too. Another example: education for sustainability matters because the evidence clearly shows that the current habits and practices of humankind will, if pursued unchecked, make life on much of our planet unsustainable. But for some, sustainability matters regardless of this evidence, because they believe as a moral imperative that the world we share should be respected and nourished rather than exploited for profit or convenience. And some people have held to this view for many centuries before others became alarmed by the evidence on climate change, environmental degradation and species extinction.

We hope that discussion of both dimensions – is/ought, fact/value, evidence/vision – will be provoked by the next round of research reviews that CPRT is pleased to announce today. So far we have published reports and briefings from three of these reviews. Two more from the first series are on their way, and another seven have just been agreed with their various authors. Here’s the full list.

  1. Wynne Harlen, Assessment, standards and quality of learning in primary education (published November 2014).
  2. Carol Robinson, Children, their voices and their experiences of school: what does the evidence tell us? (published December 2014)
  3. Usha Goswami, Children’s cognitive development and learning (published February 2015).
  4. Kate Pickett and Laura Vanderbloemen, Social and educational inequality: what does the evidence tell us and how can we close the gaps?
  5. David Hogan, Dennis Kwek and Peter Renshaw, Research on teaching: what do we know and how should we act?
  6. Douglas Bourn, Nicole Blum, Frances Hunt and Helen Lawson, Primary education for sustainability, global understanding and citizenship.
  7. Michael Jopling, Vulnerable children: circumstances, needs and provision in the primary phase.
  8. Carol Burnett, Digital futures:  implications for learning and teaching in the primary school.
  9. Mel Ainscow, Alan Dyson and Lise Hopwood, Demographic change, migration and cultural diversity: implications for primary schooling.
  10. Olwen McNamara and Jean Murray, How should primary teachers be trained? Policy and evidence.
  11. Warwick Mansell, The systemic reform of primary education since 2008: what does the evidence tell us?
  12. Kathy Hall and Kamil Øzerk, Autonomy, accountability and quality assurance in primary education:  England and other countries.

The first three reports above, on assessment, voice and learning, are updates of reports published by the Cambridge Primary Review. These are areas where because evidence has accumulated or policy has changed such revisiting is essential. I say ‘changed’ rather than ‘advanced’ because while evidence, properly assembled, respects and builds on what has gone before, the same can less frequently be said for policy, especially in education. To ‘advance’ implies both forward momentum and improvement, whereas all too often education policy offers neither, swinging pendulum-fashion back and forth between hackneyed value extremes or endlessly reinventing, retreading or renaming wheels that, more often than not, are not even round.

Some of the reviews not only revisit earlier CPR evidence but also invite back the same authors as in 2006-10.  Wynne Harlen, Carol Robinson, Usha Goswami, Mel Ainscow, Alan Dyson, Olwen McNamara, Kathy Hall and Kamil Øzerk are all old CPR hands. Their length of engagement with the issues in question, far exceeding that of any ‘here today gone tomorrow’ minister, will be invaluable.

Other reviews in this series tackle issues that featured in CPR but have acquired even greater prominence since then. Such issues are broadly social as well as more specifically educational. Among them are the continuing digital revolution which, alongside its benefits, provokes anxieties about the way digital media dominate young children’s lives and the nature of the material to which they have access. Demographic change and migration, pervasive in the evidence collected by CPR, are even more highly charged politically now than they were then. They raise questions ranging from identity and social cohesion to the professional practicalities of handling, within a single classroom, many languages, cultures and faiths. Education for sustainability and global understanding is prominent of course, not just because it is increasingly urgent but also because it is prioritised in the UN’s post-2015 global education agenda. Then there’s the old, old division of wealth and opportunity that in the UK, and especially England, is exacerbated by government economic and welfare policies while education ministers scurry in with rather expensive sticking plasters to ‘close the gap’. Who better to assess the evidence on this particular theme than Kate Pickett, co-author of The Spirit Level?

Kate Pickett’s review uses international evidence. The one by Kathy Hall and Kamil Øzerk, both of whom work outside the UK, does so even more explicitly, for they are comparing England’s accountability and quality assurance regimes with those in other countries in order to establish whether, as we are regularly told, there is no alternative to what many see as the tyranny of testing, Ofsted and data, not to mention those ministerial threats about ‘coasting’ and enforced change in schools’ legal status. Linked with this is Warwick Mansell’s re-assessment of the trajectory of primary education policy as a whole over the past five years; a trajectory studied closely by CPR between 2006 and 2009 – indeed much too closely for the then government, which resorted to pretty questionable tactics in its attempt to neutralise CPR’s findings and smear CPR personnel.

As with the reports so far published, the new reports will be available for viewing, downloading or printing both in full and as three-page briefings.  Between them, the twelve studies come to the heart of classroom life while exploring the wider world in which children grow up.  Children, their world their education, in fact – and  value.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

Click here for further information about the CPRT research surveys

Download publications list 

by

Can data really define ‘coasting’?

For me, this is the question of the moment, with the Education and Adoption Bill, whose first section is on the charmingly-worded but as-yet-undefined term ‘coasting schools’, having started its passage through Parliament.

The bill promises to sweep a new category of these schools into the reach of the ‘intervention’ powers of the Secretary of State, which include issuing academy orders forcing schools into the arms of new sponsors.

In a blunt exchange at Education Questions in the House of Commons this week, Nicky Morgan, the Education Secretary, reminded her Labour shadow, Tristram Hunt, that the definition of coasting schools would not come until part-way through the passage of the bill, at its committee stage. But I’ve already had a steer on its likely content. The Department for Education’s press office has told me that the ‘coasting’ definition will focus on data, and specifically the school’s performance over time. The idea, I was told – these are not my words – was to home in on schools which have failed to fulfil their pupils’ potential.

If ‘coasting schools’ are to be defined entirely in terms of results data, I think this will be the first time that formal intervention powers by central government will have been triggered completely by assessment statistics. This already appears to be a departure both from a promise reportedly made by David Cameron before the election and from the contents of the Conservatives’ election manifesto.

In March, the Daily Mail warned that ‘coasting schools’ would be targeted under a new Conservative government, with the Prime Minister quoted – depressingly, though predictably given our experience of the past 20 years of education policy-making – as ‘waging all-out war on mediocrity’.

However, the definition of ‘coasting’ suggested in that piece was an Ofsted judgement. Schools falling in the inspectorate’s ‘requires improvement’ category would ‘automatically be considered’ for turning into academies. Only if they could demonstrate clear plans for improvement, as judged by the Regional Schools Commissioners – England’s new cadre of officials appointed by the Secretary of State, taking decisions in private – would they avoid a change of leadership. The manifesto backed this up, saying: ‘Any school judged by Ofsted to be requiring improvement will be taken over…unless it can demonstrate that it has a plan to improve rapidly.’

But there were indications post-election that the definition was changing. Now it appears that results statistics are going to be the key driver. And that, of course, has big implications.

First, I think it has repercussions for the very controversial language used. A little diversion might be in order here, into the perhaps simpler realm of football.

Imagine, say, a football team, without any great history of success, which gets promoted to the Premier League one season. In its first year in the top tier, it finishes, say, 12th. This is seen as a big achievement, as the club beats many longer-established, richer outfits and comfortably avoids the relegation that comes with finishing 18th or lower. The following season, results are even better, with a 10th place finish the reward. The next two seasons, consistency seems to have been achieved, with 11th and 13th places secured.

However, any outsider looking only at the club’s end of season position over the years might conclude that it has been drifting. Someone could almost call it a ‘coasting’ club in its last two seasons, based on data alone. But while the possible reaction to the club’s statistical direction of travel – sack the manager – may or may not be right, any implication that it was ‘coasting’ and therefore not trying, would be to over-interpret the results. For faced with that ‘coasting’ slur, the club’s manager and any of his coaching staff or players would be incensed. The manager arrives at his desk at 6.30 every morning, hardly has a holiday in the summer and the attention to detail on the training ground is phenomenal.

But the manager does not have total control over the performances of his players and is up against other teams who may be trying similarly hard. He argues that, in a league where he will never have the budgets of the big clubs, survival in the Premier League is success. While results, then, might suggest non-progress, this is based on anything but a sense that the manager is just taking things easy: it is a real triumph.

In contrast, there was the case of a real Premier League football club recently, again having established itself comfortably in mid-table following promotion, where the manager was said by the club’s board to be too laid-back about training. He was replaced by a former player, who has marginally improved its overall position. ‘Coasting’ might have been a more appropriate word in that case, if the characterisation of the former manager’s attitude was right.

My point is that data alone will never tell you whether a football club, or indeed a school, is ‘coasting’ or not. ‘Coasting’ suggests a lack of effort but all we have, with results data, is a statistical end product: the output numbers. Teachers could be working phenomenally hard, and yet failing to improve results as much as outsiders might wish, because schools, in reality, do not have full control over results. These are, inevitably, subject to unpredictability, from the motivation and ability of pupils to ‘perform’ on the big day to the vagaries of marking. And there may be a sense of a zero-sum game: ‘below-average’ schools will always be penalised, even if all schools are working very hard, if the indicators used are based on comparing one school’s results to others’.

Are we really happy, I wonder, to bandy around a word, with all its dismissive implications for the professionals whom our system has spent years training and paying, and with whom we entrust our children, when we are unsure of its accuracy in individual cases?

So to use the results as indicators of underlying effort is as lazy – is this ‘coasting’ policy merely following the assumptions of its accustomed comfort-zone? – as it is potentially misleading. And, in implicitly being brazenly unconcerned about who gets labelled in this way, policy-makers seem to compound the insult that the word ‘coasting’ undoubtedly provokes in many in the profession.

I have to say, surveying the school accountability regime as I do, that I find it very hard to believe that many, if any, schools can truly be said to be ‘coasting’. There are, surely, already too many penalties for those schools which fail to improve their pupils’ results, starting with the head losing his or her job following a failing Ofsted, for any of them to take it easy, I reason. And surveys of teacher workload surely make unarguable the case that most professionals are putting in very long hours in term-time – and often adding to them in the holidays – often under considerable pressure.

And yet here have we have the phrase ‘coasting schools’ backed not only by the Prime Minister and his Education Secretary, but written on the face of an education bill, in its first clause.

Individuals whom I respect, working more closely with schools than I am, have countered that there are some institutions which are not working as hard as they could to provide the best possible education for their pupils. Fair enough. But my point remains: data alone will not tell us which ones they are, because there is no straight read-across from outcome data to teacher commitment and motivation. This seems to me be to be another example of policy-makers making heroic assumptions of what can be read into results statistics alone.

We will have to wait until we have a definition in full – if, indeed during this bill’s passage, we get all the details which will be used in reality by those taking decisions on schools – in order to judge the technical reliability of the datasets being used. But with the futures of more schools poised to hinge on results statistics, this is likely to place even greater weight on, for example, marking reliability. Can it withstand the pressures being placed upon it? Again, the assumption is always that it can. But national curriculum tests and GCSEs, for example, have not been designed with the intention that institutions’ existence could rest on them.

A final implication should be obvious to anyone who is interested in the unintended consequences of assessment-driven accountability. Allowing schools to be placed as, in the language of the bill, ‘eligible for intervention’ – in other words, available for a management takeover – on the basis of results data alone will, surely, accentuate teaching to the test. With so much riding on performance on a particular set of indicators, the incentive for schools to concentrate even more narrowly on doing whatever it takes to maximise performance on those particular indicators will be underlined. If, on the other hand, the statistical definition of ‘coasting’ is not precise, teaching to particular indicators may be more tricky but then Regional Schools Commissioners stand to be accused of arbitrariness in selecting which schools count as ‘coasting’.

To ministers and those defending these plans, this is all to the good. The ‘war on mediocrity’ really will force institutions and those working in them to raise their game, with the implication that countless previous reforms in the same vein have not fully succeeded in doing so. Labelling schools, then, as ‘coasting’ – even if the label is in some cases inaccurate – is not a problem and will just reinvigorate professionals who need a bit of a push. And focusing on particular indicators is fine, as these centrally-defined metrics will just spur teachers to prioritise aspects of education which are important.

To this observer, who sees teachers for the hard-working, often stressed individuals they are, and wonders about the message being sent to this and the next generation of professionals about their efforts and about the alienation of policy-making from its implications on the ground, there is a sense of despair.

As ever, and as evidenced and articulated by the Cambridge Primary Review, the hope is that professionals can still educate pupils well in spite of policy-making, rather than because of it.

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

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

Contact

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