The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

by

Education after Brexit

Amanda Spielman, the new Chief Inspector of Schools, has recently suggested, with exquisite understatement, that the next few years are ‘not going to be easy’ for schools as political focus is likely ‘to shift away from education as the government’s time and attention (is) consumed by the process of Britain leaving the EU.’ While a period of calm and consolidation after the hyper-reform of the Gove years might be welcome, it is hard to see the economic uncertainty of Brexit doing anything but exacerbating current pressures in the system, particularly the looming crisis in school funding.

More immediate fears were in evidence at the recent ‘Cradle to Grave’ Conference held by the University and College Union. Speaker after speaker addressed the post-Brexit rise in hate crime, the insecurity of  EU nationals working and studying in Britain, the enduring anxiety of refugees already settled here and the sheer meanness of the government’s decision to rescind its commitment, under the Dubs amendment, to take in three thousand child refugees.

One questioner from the floor crystallised the anxiety felt by many when she asked the hall: ‘Is this fascism?’  Others highlighted the newly important role that educators, from the primary phase through to postgraduate studies, will play in the coming years, not just in helping vulnerable students but in promoting deeper understanding of current developments and more tolerant debate.

Of course Brexit has already had a huge impact on the education landscape, with the government’s decision to lift the ban on expanding selective education, rejecting the consensus of the Coalition years that the way forward was to support non-selective free schools and academies.  In September, the government published its Green Paper consultation on the question – the rather inappropriately titled, ’Schools that Work for Everyone’.

As Comprehensive Future pointed out in its official response to the document, every question was framed around the assumption that more selection is the right way forward, with respondents asked only to offer suggestions as to how this might work best.

What’s clear is that the Brexit vote has emboldened, and promoted, a cohort of politicians sidelined during the Gove/Morgan years, all of whom believe passionately in grammars. Several of them, David Davis, Michael Fallon and Boris Johnson, have key roles on the front bench. Those with long memories will recall that Fallon has form. As an education minister in 1991 he attacked primary schools for promoting ‘much happiness but little learning,’ as if the two are mutually exclusive. Other leading Eurosceptics and pro-grammar supporters, like Graham Brady MP,  Chair of the powerful backbench 1922 Committee, now have more influence on education policy than they have done for years.

In short, a very different kind of Tory is currently in charge. Out with the golden public school boys of the Cameron era who fell in love with the proto-traditional Gove-ian vision of comprehensive education: in with the striving less well-off Conservatives who put their own rise up the ranks down to the miracles of the post-war selective system, itself largely swept away by comprehensive reform.

May’s arguments for the expansion of grammars have deliberate echoes of this earlier period when selection was seen as the means by which the less privileged could make it up the class ladder.  The trouble is, there is no tangible evidence for this claim and in a clear echo of the Brexit debate itself,  all evidence that contradicts it, then and now, is simply disregarded.

Such evidence points unequivocally in one direction: selection divides communities, profoundly harms the education and life chances of poorer children, and hands superior state resources, at a time of scarcity, to the already affluent, with a catastrophic impact on primary aged education. Nor will the government ever find the ‘holy grail’ of a class-blind 11-plus test that it seeks. The plan currently being mooted –  to admit more poorer pupils by lowering the pass mark –  will surely founder on the anger of those middle-class families that treat grammars, and other forms of socially biased admissions arrangements, as their right.

Leading academics, numerous school heads, Chief Inspectors past and present, have spoken out against the plan to such an extent that even media and public opinion has now shifted on the issue. Only this week the Education Select Committee declared the policy ‘deficient in evidence’ and a distraction from the clear tasks facing our cash-strapped school system.

For all this the government ploughs on, having allocated £50 million a year to the scheme, with officials and ministers consulting existing grammar school heads on further expansion of selection throughout the country.

For now, then, our main hope must lie in resistance in Parliament if and when a new Education Bill, overturning the decades-long consensus on selective education, is introduced. We know the Labour Party, and other opposition groups, are fiercely opposed and that a significant group of Tory MPs are deeply uneasy at the proposals. Many in the Lords are also plainly unhappy at the plan.

In the coming months, therefore, it is vital that we all put pressure on MPs and Lords to counter this move in any way possible. We have won the public argument. That government is not listening makes it all the more vital that we win the vote.

Melissa Benn is a writer and campaigner and current Chair of Comprehensive Future, a cross-party campaign to end selective education. She was a keynote speaker at CPRT’s 2016 national conference. 

by

Free schools and free markets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr Timothy said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One offered this insight:

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

Yes, indeed it does.

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

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

by

The times they are a-changin’

Several years ago, in a life before teaching, a colleague of mine, who had drunk thirstily at the wellspring of self-improvement books, declared herself to be ‘made positively kryptonite’ by the language of paradigm shifts, synergisation and pro-activity. I have thought subsequently what an asset she might have been to the world of education. Being forged of the stuff that would bring Superman to his knees would be a very handy teacher attribute to possess; especially at this time of settling into a new school year.

Over the last five weeks, I have come to the conclusion that the grown-ups who work in education probably do require a dash of the superhero in their DNA, to be able to deal with the vicissitudes that all throng together at the starting gate of an Autumn Term. It is self-evident that the core business of education is transacted in the territory of change and challenge (the two things that human beings find the most difficult to deal with), the beginning of a new school year makes this even clearer. Every day brings some element of change to a school and the people within it: new teachers; new children; new uniforms; new classrooms; the first-time-ever drama of the lost lunch box or the missing PE kit; the first wet play; the first windy play; anxious mummies and daddies: ‘someone’s “stolen” his jumper and I can’t find it in lost property – they all look the same’ (the first lesson in the power of labelling); more anxious mummies and daddies pleading that their little ones should not have to suffer the life-threatening risk of playing with paint/water/sand/bikes as they will most likely come home a bit messy and liable to catch any number of a range of unspecified (but potentially pretty fatal) diseases carried by paint/water/sand/bikes. These episodes of tiny turbulence ripple through the daily current of school life, until things have settled down, a bit, by half term; children have survived the onslaught of learning through play in early years; routines have been carefully established; teachers and children have lost the, sometimes distracting, patina of novelty.

So here we are, at this stage in the term, looking forward to the calmer waters ahead of us; confident of bringing our children to the safe haven of the National Curriculum’s statutory end of year expectations. A place where all children over the age of six know that exclamations must begin with the word ‘what’ or ‘how’; where children over the age of ten ought, should, must and could use modal verbs to illuminate their writing and where pretty much everyone writes with a neat cursive hand – and so our course is set fair at Bankside. Teachers are now fully in command of change and challenge, having moved beyond its mere management at the start of the year. For learning is indeed about the process of creating transformational change in our children’s understanding, responses or knowledge. And the most powerful way to do this is through challenging their current ideas and moving them onwards and upwards in the process of their self-actualisation.

Except those unforeseen pesky changes just keep coming back to haunt us, on a local level: Dad’s left; Uncle’s come back; the police came round last night; Mummy’s had a baby; Nana died at the weekend; my new stepbrother has been unkind to me; we didn’t have any dinner last night (or the night before); you’ve inadvertently put the book back in the library box that I have loved reading for the last week and now it isn’t here and I am going to let you and everyone else that I am not happy about this. Massive changes; tiny changes, our children’s lives are constructed and framed entirely by these: it is the very nature of being a child and ‘growing up’. And teachers are employed not only to deal with the daily ramifications of all this but also to add to it, through the careful preparation and delivery of life-changing and challenging learning. Life in school is often defined by the ever-present ‘fine line’ between coping with turbulent change and promoting transformational change. And making this the engine of our professional moral purpose.

And more change at a national level presents further challenge to these adults tasked with creating happy, resilient, adaptive and successful schools.  Imagine my surprise when, preparing for the predictable unpredictability of a new school year, I learnt that we can now look forward to all secondary schools being able to become selective grammar schools – and all in the name of social mobility.  I applaud, of course, the aim of any educational policy that intends to address the growing social divide between rich and poor. I am slightly surprised that no headteacher I know seems to have been consulted about this lofty decision; perhaps there was a kindly assumption that we would not want to be troubled by such high-minded stuff – best left to the experts no doubt.

The ambition to close the gaps in educational – and social – outcomes for all our children is a key driver for Bankside and the reason that we are a proud member of CPRT’s Schools Alliance. We want our children to be the best learners that they can be; we use the themes and principles of CPRT as guiding lights to achieve this.  I do wonder how the changes involved in the grammar school proposition (which seems based on a belief that, because of uniform selection at eleven, all children may be better equipped to throw off the shackles of poverty) sit with the carefully researched and pedagogically considered findings of the Cambridge Primary Review’s final report. This is a document designed to support transformational educational practice, to ensure equality for all. The introduction of an 11+ exam, with a pass/fail matrix may transform the lives of those who pass, but, for those who do not, the more predictable outcome of the turbulence associated with failure is a very real prospect,  for all children – even the middle class ones – who underperform on the day of the test.

I would look to a truly transformational educational system, such as that in Finland, to be a model to create more socially equal learners.  A country where there is no selection until 16 and where children run the gamut of the dangers of paint/water/sand/bike play-based learning until the age of seven. Perhaps we might ask the headteachers there, rather than the politicians, how this has been achieved amidst the quotidian hurly burly of the change and challenge of the ‘day job’ – with all the pesky predictable unpredictabilities, and not a grammar school in sight.

Sarah Rutty is Head Teacher of Bankside Primary School in Leeds, part-time Adviser for Leeds City Council Children’s Services, a member of CPRT’s Schools Alliance, and Co-ordinator of CPRT’s Leeds/West Yorkshire network. Read her previous blogs here.

Contact

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