The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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None of the above?

There’s an election looming. Hopefully, teachers will take the opportunity to revenge themselves just a little on the government that gave us Gove and hollow promises of workload reform. Hopefully, they will manage to make it to the polling station and put a lovely big black cross next to any party that appears vaguely aware of the very real pain they are enduring.

Of course, funding is a crucial issue. There’s talk of strikes and the NAHT warns of ‘harsh, austere’ times ahead – particularly troubling for those in sixth-form or FE colleges. But the seemingly inevitable funding cuts would be better borne if accompanied by a change in the political zeitgeist. The hectoring ‘must-do-better’ tone that trickles down to the classroom from the two main parties is an outrage. Currently 40 per cent of NQTs bail out after their first year, but it’s not just the naïve newbies who are finding it hard. It’s also the experienced ones who finally just can’t take it any more – 68 per cent considered chucking it in last year. This is not surprising given that the job routinely demands a 70-hour working week from people it equally routinely smears as inadequate.

Sadly, though, both Labour and Conservatives are persisting with the tough talk though there may be a glimmer of hope in Tristram Hunt’s recent speech to the NASUWT. That aside, both parties still tediously insist on the importance of raising standards. Labour’s Changing Britain Together – a product of Agenda 2015 – takes the banal rhetoric further, demanding that standards are ‘driven up’. When I go into my classroom in the morning and look at the children sitting there, I wonder how precisely should I achieve this driving up? Hell, yes, it sounds tough, but these are small children not US Navy Seals.

There is little discussion about how standards are to rise as funding falls. Nor is there much sign of sensible political debate as to what these raised standards look like. Teaching children to recognise a fronted adverbial or to do subtraction by decomposition at ever younger ages does not appear to me – nor to the CPR Trust with its support for a broad, balanced and rich curriculum – to be valid aims. As we are poised once again to embark on the enervating ‘run up’ to Sats, the ideal of a system that – in the words of the CPR final report – ‘assesses and reports on children’s achievements in all areas of their learning, with the minimum of disruption,’ seems more remote than ever.

True, Ed Miliband has promised to strengthen ‘creative education,’ but this welcome move away from the Gradgrindian Gove isn’t actually in Changing Britain Together. Instead there is the pledge ‘to bring a relentless focus on the quality of teaching’. Now that sounds jolly. I shall look forward to the spotlight shining in the eyes. And we have the promise ‘to require all teachers to continue building their skills and subject knowledge on the job’. It’s that tone again. The choice of verb tells us much about the party’s attitude to the profession. Doesn’t it understand that most teachers are gagging for training, desperate for any help they can get in the face of a largely hostile Ofsted, beleaguered local authorities and bullying politicians – never mind a new curriculum and the constant reinvention of the assessment wheel?

Also in Labour’s Changing Britain Together is the charge that, under the Tories, ‘underperformance in schools has been allowed to go unchallenged’. Er, sorry, but what planet is Dr Hunt on? How can the shadow education secretary have sanctioned that statement? Teachers and heads are worn out responding to a multiplicity of challenges. Days and nights have been sacrificed to organising mock Ofsteds, to reviewing marking policies, to feeding the Raise Online machine and to crunching statistics until they reveal that every pupil’s performance is improving, steadily and evenly. There is no place for footnotes to explain that this child was ill, or this child’s father ran off with another woman, or this child’s mother lost her job or this child’s dog died or this child, dare I say it, is just not very good at literacy…

What a shame Labour has been so slow to challenge the madness of the current assessment culture. It distracts from the true work of teachers who need, as the CPRT puts it, assessment that ‘enhances and supports learning’ rather than distorting it.

But no, we don’t have assessment that enhances and supports. We just get the tough talk. It’s a little like being bullied. Everyone thinks it’s ok to join in. Take, for example, the person who arrived at our school recently. He was a critical friend ­– with the emphasis on the critical – who spent a lot of time ‘interrogating’ the online performance statistics. Along the way, he announced that pupil background was no excuse for poor performance.

There it is again; that patronising ‘you-must-do-better’ tone. Actually, we do not spend our time making excuses. We spend it patiently teaching and nurturing children, some of whom have extremely challenging home lives and consequently struggle to progress as fast as others. This is a fact and not an excuse. These children fall behind as a result of family disadvantage and poverty. They are the losers in our unequal society. CPR, in its final report, urged the government to give the highest priority to eliminating child poverty. CPRT reinforced the importance of this goal by making its own priority ‘tackling the continuing challenge of social and educational disadvantage and finding practical ways to help schools close the overlapping gaps in social equity and educational achievement’.

Schools deal with the consequences of disadvantage every day. When they succeed in closing the gap just a little, they are picking up the pieces of political failure and should be thanked not rebuked. Every time a minister agrees to a policy that will exacerbate rather than reduce inequality, he or she needs to visit a classroom and see the consequences for children who have, for many reasons, no one to help them practise their times tables, learn their spellings or to read them a bedtime story.

Labour, like the Lib Dems, the Green Party, Plaid Cymru and the SNP, appears committed to investment in the vital early years as a means of redressing the balance slightly. Its manifesto highlights the fact that poverty and inequality are increasing. Teachers, with support, can do much to help create a more equal society. Overworked and rebuked, they can’t. They will just leave. It’s time for Labour to wake up and smell the cheap staffroom coffee.

Stephanie Northen is a teacher and journalist. She was one of the authors of the Cambridge Primary Review final report and is a member of the Board of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust.

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Time for some insubordination

Before July 14, I was happy. OK, I’m lying, but who cares about the feelings of someone barely out of NQT nappies? Certainly not the education politicians who can break teachers with a brisk sweep of a policy brush – ‘Heh, let’s abolish levels!’ ‘Tell you what, let’s assess all subjects … all the time!’ (Pause for righteous fear and loathing.) Yet, though the powers-that-be are not remotely interested in the content of my opening sentence, they are interested in its grammar. They care about my use of the word ‘before’.

How do I know? Well, back in July, I read these three sentences on the Department for Education website:

‘We left the cinema before the end of the film.’

‘The train ticket is cheaper before 9:00 in the morning.’

‘I brush my teeth before I have breakfast.’

I then read the accompanying question: which of the sentences uses the word ‘before’ as a preposition and which as a subordinating conjunction? Hmm. Tricky. First, I had to put aside any normal thoughts such as train tickets are actually more expensive before 9am. And isn’t it better to brush your teeth after breakfast? Never mind the human drama that lurked behind the decision to leave the cinema early. Spilled popcorn? Spilled tears? The sight of a lover with a rival… Stop!

Yes, I admit it. I didn’t know the answer. As a child of the 1960s, I was not taught grammar any more than I was taught the scientific composition of the paint we used in art. ‘Today, children, we will be learning how to collect and dry the corpses of female cochineal beetles. Artists can use the resulting red colour to paint fabulous sunsets…’

In that BG (Before Gove) era, the explicit teaching of grammar was regarded as harmful. Young imaginations risked being cabined, cribbed, confined. Young minds would be pained by concepts too abstruse for them to grasp. No longer.  The question on the use of the word ‘before’ appears in the sample Grammar, Spelling and Punctuation test, published on July 14, and intended to be taken by Year 6s in 2016. Hedged about by caveats and disclaimers, this test is nevertheless the only concrete example of the ordeal that awaits the current Year 5s – and their teachers. Remember, the 2016 test is going to be Much Harder (ungrammatical use of capital letters for emphasis) than its three predecessors as it is the first to be based on Mr Gove’s new primary English curriculum – the one which devotes 15 more pages to spelling and grammar appendices than it does to actual aims and content.

The sample test does include a little story, no doubt a sop for those who pleaded for grammar to be taught in context. What a shame it is a pitiful non-story about a squirrel in a park notable only for an unnaturally large number of semi-colons and colons. Helpful hints for teachers also appear. One reads ‘this question assesses the ability to transform given verb stems into the past progressive form, and understanding of the term.’ Clear as mud is the simile that springs to mind. Don’t the powers-that-be realise that some children in Year 6 struggle to remember their full stops and capital letters? Shocking maybe, but true.

Gove’s decision, back in 2012, to impose a formal grammar test on Year 6 children was hotly debated at the time. The NUT and the NAHT talked of a boycott. Michael Rosen argued powerfully that this pernickety, ‘there-is-a-right-answer’ approach to grammar was wrong-headed in linguistic terms. He also warned that it was yet another mechanism to control schools and would add to the ‘army of passive, failed people’ needed to keep wages down. Even the government’s own advisers warned against it.

So of course in 2013 the Spag test, based on the old curriculum, went ahead. Now the protests have faded – or at least so it seems to me. Occasionally last year, I would look up from my marking/assessment/lesson planning/resource hunting/display mounting/behaviour managing/weeping to wonder why no one was shouting any more that teaching young children about fronted adverbials was not going to help them read, write or function as human beings FULL STOP.

Instead, there are now numerous education resources and organisations promising to help teachers with their modal verbs and relative clauses. The message seems to be, ‘No one really believes in teaching this stuff, but here’s a way to do it.’ But if no one believes in teaching it, perhaps – radical thought here – it shouldn’t be taught. What a shame teachers are not permitted, in accordance with CPRT principles, ‘to exercise the responsible and informed autonomy that is the mark of a mature profession’.

After all, as the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review pointed out, ‘the goal of literacy must be more than just functional’. Literacy should confer the skill ‘not just to read and write but to make these processes genuinely transformative, exciting children’s imagination, extending their boundaries and enabling them to contemplate lives and worlds possible as well as actual’.

I did extend some boundaries this summer. Sadly I was not planning literacy lessons rich with talk of how to write wondrous stories, whimsical poems and powerful letters to politicians. Instead, I was shamefully and secretly working on my grammar. My time could have been so much better spent – and so could the children’s. Let’s ditch the grammar test before* it is too late.

* subordinating conjunction or preposition? You decide.

Stephanie Northen is a teacher and journalist. She was one of the authors of the Cambridge Primary Review final report.

by Robin Alexander

Does education pass the family test?

In 2010, Michael Gove renamed Labour’s Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) the Department for Education (DfE), at a stroke ejecting Ed Balls’s tiresomely winsome munchkins from the Sanctuary Buildings atrium, ending baffled discussion about whether DCSF stood for comedy and science fiction or curtains and soft furnishings, and heralding a gimmick-free return to core business.

Then last week, with the Gove supremacy a receding memory but with Govine policies firmly in place for the duration, the PM announced that from November 2014 every new government policy ‘will be assessed for its impact on the family.’  The PM’s admission that too many existing policies have failed his ‘family test’ must prompt us to ask whether he had in mind the doings of the demoted Gove.  After all, who needs munchkins to tell them that children’s needs and family circumstances are as inextricably the business of schools and hence DfE as are curriculum, tests and standards?

Labour appeared to understand this relationship, up to a point. So the Cambridge Primary Review found widespread support for Sure Start, EYFS, Every Child Matters, the Children’s Act, the Childcare Act, Every Parent Matters, the Children’s Plan and Narrowing the Gap, an impressive procession of ‘joined-up’ initiatives through which the Labour government sought to reduce childhood risk, increase childhood protection, support families and maximise educational opportunities. But CPR also reported growing and often intense opposition to the same government’s apparatus of high stakes testing, higher stakes inspection, performance tables, naming, shaming and closely prescribed pedagogy, all of which also impacted on children and families, with outcomes that remain hotly contested.

In any event, this so-called standards agenda was widely thought to exacerbate what, in her important research survey for CPR, Berry Mayall called the ‘scholarisation’ of childhood: the incursion of schooling and its demands ever more deeply into children’s lives at an ever younger age, leaving little room for a childhood unimpeded by pressures which in many other education systems, including some that perform better than the UK in the international PISA tests, start a year or even two years later than in England. When Britain came bottom of a rather different performance table, UNICEF’s comparative rating of childhood well-being in rich countries, opponents of these tendencies drew the obvious conclusion.

Hence the reaction: Sue Palmer’s best-selling ‘Toxic Childhood’, the Children’s Society Good Childhood Enquiry, and latterly the Save Childhood Movement. And hence, true to the laws of policy physics, the ministerial counter-reaction, from Labour’s ‘these people are peddling out-of-date research’ – a lamely unoriginal and transparently defensive response to unpalatable evidence – to the Coalition’s earthier recourse to personal abuse: ‘Marxists intent on destroying our schools … enemies of promise … bleating bogus pop-psychology’.

Meanwhile, the rich became richer and the poor poorer.

In relation to children and families, then, there is all too often a pretty fundamental policy disconnect. Education policy may give with one hand but take with another; and education policy strives to narrow the gap that economic policy no less assiduously maintains and even widens, not pausing to ask why the gap is there in the first place.  For surely Treasury ministers know as well as their DfE colleagues how closely the maps of income, health, wellbeing and educational achievement coincide; that unequal societies have unequal education systems and unequal educational outcomes; and that equity is a significant factor in other nations’ PISA success – though in all this we need to avoid facile cause-effect claims and we know that fine schools can and do break the mould.  Yet will the ‘family test’ be applied as stringently to the policies of Chancellor Osborne, I wonder, as to those of Education ex-Secretary Gove? Or will the social and educational fallout of austerity be written off as unavoidable collateral damage?

But I suspect that linking the policy dots is not what the new family test is about and each policy will be assessed in isolation. In any case, how many new education policies, if any, will the government introduce in the eight months before the 2015 general election? And at a time when the demography of childhood and parenting is more diverse than ever, how exactly is ‘family’ defined? Isn’t the family test both too muddled and too late?

For its part, CPRT, like CPR before it, is operating more holistically, and we have invited leading researchers to help us. Kate Pickett, co-author of The Spirit Level – that groundbreaking epidemiological study of the causes, manifestations and consequences of inequality – to help us. In one of five new CPRT research surveys, Kate is revisiting her own and CPR’s evidence on equality, equity and disadvantage and examining more recent data in order to re-assess causes, consequences and solutions. Her report will be published early in 2015. In parallel, we have commissioned research updates on children’s voice, development and learning from Carol Robinson and Usha Goswami; and on assessment and teaching from Wynne Harlen and David Hogan. Squaring the schooling/family circle we have embarked, in collaboration with the University of York, on an Educational Endowment Foundation-supported project to develop and test the power of high quality classroom talk to increase engagement and raise learning standards among those of our children who are growing up in the most challenging circumstances.

You’ll find information about all these projects on the CPRT website. We hope and believe they will pass the family test.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

by Robin Alexander

Two worlds of education: lessons from America

‘Education in two worlds’ is the blog of Gene Glass, a leading commentator on American education in the era of marketisation, charter schools, common core standards, high stakes testing and teacher employment practices redolent of 1860s England and ‘payment by results’.

Far from being remote from the situation here in the UK, what Glass, Berliner, Ravitch and others portray as a politically and commercially orchestrated assault on American public schooling in the name of parental choice and improved standards uses strategies that the UK government has consciously imported, adapted or endorsed. This policy cloning is most conspicuous in the treatment of international evidence, the national curriculum, academies, teacher education and testing. For in campaigns educational as well as military, where America goes Britain tends to follow, in the process transferring the language of the battlefield to the classroom.

In their brilliant book 50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools, Berliner and Glass muster research evidence that deconstructs the ‘myths, hoaxes and outright lies’ through which, in their view, US policymakers and their multinational and fundamentalist backers have sought to discredit mainstream schooling and turn public service into private profit. With many of these – especially the ‘grand myth’ of a state schooling system which in comparison with its PISA competitors is in terminal decline – England is only too familiar.

The trouble is, each incoming UK government uses the same terminal decline claim to dismiss the sweeping and often disruptive ‘reforms’ of its predecessor and impose its own, which is tantamount to an admission either that the reforms don’t work or that the system isn’t broken after all and the exercise has more to do with vanity and machismo than progress. Remember Michael Gove, hard on the heels of Labour’s ‘highest standards ever’ national strategies: ‘literacy, down; numeracy, down; science, down; fail, fail, fail!’

1992, 1997, 2010 … We’ve been there so many times that as we approach the 2015 general election party leaders may well find themselves rubbishing their own policies. Let’s hope so.

Hence ‘two worlds’: the world of carefully assembled evidence and educated deliberation, of schooling as it is and could be, and the shallow, hectic and self-regarding world of political rhetoric, spin, myth and scapegoating; a world in which evidence is treated not even-handedly but opportunistically and selectively, and on that basis serves not to shape, test and improve policy but post hoc to validate it; a world in which myths and policies are endlessly recycled and in which, consequently, there’s much change but little real progress. It matters not that in opposition our leaders promise, as they invariably do, a more principled approach. Once in power, just as invariably, they revert.

One strand of the Cambridge Primary Review’s final report that gained less attention than it deserved was its exposure of these tendencies in English primary education. In the course of a wider analysis of the educational policy process the report contrasted the necessary discourse of evidence and deliberation with the actual discourses of dichotomy, derision and myth, and its penultimate chapter demolished no fewer than 14 claims about educational standards that were central to government policy between 1997 and 2010.

So if you fancy a break from the usual holiday reading, try the books below and the blogs of Glass or Ravitch – or indeed Children, their World, their Education, chapters 2, 3 and 23.

There’ll be more on these matters in the autumn and in the run-up to the 2015 election, starting with two abiding ‘grand myths’ about English primary education.

Four for the bookshelf of seekers after educational truth:

  • Berliner, D.C., Glass, G.V. and associates (2014) 50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America’s Schools: the real crisis in education, Teachers College Press.
  • Ravitch, D. (2013) Reign of Error: the hoax of the privatisation movement and the danger to America’s public schools, Knopf.
  • Sahlberg, P. (2010) Finnish Lessons: what can the world learn from educational change in Finland? Teachers College Press.

plus, of course –

  • Alexander, R.J. (ed) (2010) Children, their World, their Education: final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review, Routledge.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

 

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