The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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A bridge over troubled waters?

In a recent post on this blog, After primary, the ‘wasted years’?, Robin Alexander questioned some of the assumptions behind Ofsted’s recent tendency to compare secondary schools unfavourably with primary. Citing the different educational and professional cultures of the two phases, the challenges of adolescence and the narrow focus of inspections in primary schools, Robin questioned the bluntness of the instrument with which Ofsted is trying to beat secondary schools.

Whether or not we accept the picture of Key Stage 3 painted by Ofsted, however, genuine continuity of learning between primary and secondary schools is, as Robin put it, ‘a historic problem’. The Cambridge Primary Review found that ‘curriculum discontinuity and variations in teaching practice tripped pupils up while they were adjusting to the new social environment of secondary school’, recommending that ‘The sudden curricular and pedagogical changes that mark [pupils’] moves between schools and between key stage “compartments” need to be eased. Transition must become a process, rather than an event.’ (Children, their World, their Education, pp 371-2)

Historic problems are rarely solved overnight, particularly through structural changes, and we should beware politicians who claim otherwise. But might the changes to our school system heralded by the recent education White Paper, concerning though they are to many primary teachers and leaders, provide new opportunities to bridge the primary-secondary divide, and new incentives and mechanisms for schools to work together?

It’s much too soon to make any grand claims about the benefits of academisation, particularly in the primary sector (a point robustly argued by Warwick Mansell in his recent CPRT research report, Academies: autonomy, accountability, quality and evidence). Where things get more interesting, in my view, is in the emerging evidence behind the benefits of formal school partnerships (including multi-academy trusts, but also hard federations of maintained schools), and in the ways in which school leaders and teachers are working within such partnerships.

Two recent reports by the House of Commons Education Committee (a cross-party group of 11 MPs) examined in some detail the impact of strong school-to-school collaboration. The first report, School Partnerships and Cooperation, found that ‘school partnerships and cooperation have become an increasingly important part of a self-improving or school-led system’, and that ‘such collaboration has great potential to continue driving improvement to the English education system’. The report cited substantial evidence for this claim, including a report by the National College of Teaching and Leadership which found that schools in federations appeared to perform better than schools with apparently similar characteristics that had not federated. Digging into the reasons behind the apparent success of such partnerships, the report identified shared accountability as a crucial factor, concluding that ‘school partnerships with clear lines of accountability and some element of obligation are more likely to be successful in achieving gains from collaboration.’

The second report, Academies and Free Schools, set out to explore the impact of these new types of school. In common with other research in this area, it found no evidence so far that academisation in itself raises standards. What it strongly identified, though, was a relationship between school-to-school collaboration and improved outcomes, quoting evidence from the Sutton Trust on the stronger performance of academies in multi-academy trusts over standalone academies, and from Ofsted on the higher likelihood of academies in multi-academy trusts maintaining good or outstanding judgements, compared to standalone academies.

This report found that the benefits of being part of a formal group were particularly strong for primary schools, whose smaller size and greater reliance on local authority support often made standalone academy status more problematic. Again, these benefits were down to the impact of working together, rather than the effect of academisation. For primary schools, the report concluded, ‘the model of partnership … is less important than the level of commitment of the heads and teachers involved’. As one primary head quoted in the report put it, ‘We are accountable for each other, and therefore it is imperative we support each other to improve.’

Simply being part of a group, of course, makes little difference in itself. What matters is what school leaders and teachers do with that partnership. And that’s where the benefits of primary and secondary schools being part of the same structure, accountable for each other, can start to pay off. I’ve spent a lot of time recently talking to, and working with, school leaders and teachers in cross-phase multi-academy trusts and federations, and have seen some interesting practices start to develop.

One multi-academy trust, for example, is restructuring its curriculum to bring together Years 5 to 8 into a single phase. Children still move from primary to secondary school halfway through, but their learning continues seamlessly. In another group, teachers have come together to design a common approach to assessment, which throws into sharp relief any instances of Year 7 dip. In another group, Year 7 teachers ask departing Year 6s to bring their best pieces of work with them when they start secondary school, stick them in their shiny new exercise books, and look back at them to remind themselves of the standard of work of which they were capable last year. In yet another group, Year 6s all take with them to secondary school a ‘pupil passport’, designed to showcase their academic achievements, but also the broader knowledge, skills and dispositions they’ve developed during their seven years at primary school, alongside their sporting and artistic achievements. How much more helpful is that to their Year 7 teachers than simply being told they scored 98 on their SATs, and so haven’t met the expected standard?

None of these ways of working is impossible when schools are separate institutions, of course, and many primary and secondary schools already work effectively together. But a school in a multi-academy trust or federation not only has an added incentive to work more closely with its partners; it also, crucially, can use the structure of the formal partnership to develop new approaches that can genuinely transform children’s experiences, beyond its own four walls.

Primary schools are right to approach the proposals in the White Paper with caution, and not to rush into any decisions. Advice against marrying in haste is as wise as it ever was. But the opportunity for schools to harness the policy agenda to develop collaborative ways of working that could significantly benefit children is, in my view, real and exciting. It won’t close the primary-secondary divide overnight, but it might just build some bridges.

Julie McCulloch is Primary and Governance Specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL). She is also a member of the Board of CPRT.

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Do sponsored primaries perform better than maintained schools?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Stewart is Co-founder of the Local Schools Network

henry@happy.co.uk

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

by Robin Alexander

After primary, the ‘wasted years’?

How should we respond to recent Ofsted reports comparing secondary schools unfavourably with primary?

Last December HMCI Michael Wilshaw told us that secondary schools are less likely than primary to be rated good or outstanding, and that England is ‘a divided nation after age 11’ because the primary/secondary disparity is most acute in the midlands and the north.

This disturbing judgement followed hard on the heels of another. Subtitled ‘The wasted years?’ an earlier Ofsted report claimed that many secondary schools were concentrating on maximising student achievement in Key Stage 4 at the expense of the quality of teaching and learning in Key Stage 3.  Moreover, said Ofsted:

Too many secondary schools did not work effectively with partner primary schools to understand pupils’ prior learning and ensure that they built on this in KS3. Some secondary leaders simply accepted that pupils would repeat what they had already done in primary school … particularly in Year 7. This was a particular issue in mathematics and, to a lesser extent, in English.

Divided after age 11? The wasted years? (Echoes of the divisive consequences of the 1944 Education Act are uncanny though surely unintended). In light of such devastating assessments, and mindful of the minister who notoriously decreed that the chief aim of primary education is to make children ‘secondary ready’, primary teachers might well retort, ‘We are making them secondary ready. But are secondary schools ready to receive them?’

Of course, none of this is new. For decades, researchers have documented patchy arrangements for primary/secondary transfer and the phenomenon of the Year 7/8 attainment ‘dip’. Martin Hughes  confirmed empirically the professional folklore about children’s primary school learning being ignored or dismissed by some Y7 teachers, while Maurice Galton found a significant drop in pupils’ post-transfer interest in maths and science and traced it to Y7 teaching in which there was too much writing and too little discussion and practical activity.

In mitigation it must be stressed that secondary school leaders have been as eager as their primary colleagues to address concerns about inadequate transfer arrangements by improving communication and information exchange and making children’s transition as comfortable as possible. Yet while the Ofsted ‘wasted years’ report acknowledges the success of schools’ efforts to secure such pastoral continuity from primary to secondary, it finds academic continuity a more intractable problem, and it confirms Maurice Galton’s finding that the failings are pedagogical no less than structural. Startlingly so, for there can be few requirements for effective teaching more obvious than discovering and building on what the child has already learned. How can those castigated by Ofsted not understand this most elementary of principles?

But is it that simple? In exploring diagnoses and cures we should remember, obvious though it may be, that the worlds of primary and secondary are very different, not just in respect of school size and organisation but also culturally and developmentally. Large primary schools are growing larger but they remain mostly smaller than secondary. While the primary curriculum, unless it capitulates completely to the pressures of testing and inspection, remains reasonably broad and uniform from reception to the end of Year 6, the secondary curriculum is an altogether more complex enterprise, starting broadly before it narrows and fragments into multiple options as pupils progress from KS3 to KS4. And though some primary schools are deploying teachers’ specialist expertise more flexibly than they did, say, twenty years ago, in most primary schools generalist teaching remains the default.

These defining features of primary schools shape a distinctive professional culture. Working with young children all day, every day and across what is supposed to be a ‘broad and balanced’ curriculum encourages a holistic outlook. Primary teachers still talk about the ‘whole child’ and ‘whole curriculum’ as they have done since the 1930s, and long before the invention of PSHE they saw it as their responsibility to give as much attention to children’s personal and social development as to their academic progress.

So to the challenges of pastoral continuity and academic progression at the primary/secondary boundary we might add the experience of moving between distinct educational and professional cultures. There’s no mention of this in Ofsted’s ‘wasted years’ report.

Human development is a factor too. The primary years – what Alan Blyth called ‘the midlands of childhood’ – are a period of rapid physical, cognitive, social and linguistic development but this follows a fairly steady trajectory. About teenage growth spurts, hormonal surges, sleep patterns, eating habits, identity crises, mood swings, emotional turbulence, peer power, ambivalence towards adult authority and all the rest we need do no more than remind ourselves how very different pre-adolescent and adolescent children can be, including, as we now know from neuroscience, in the structure of their brains. Ofsted says nothing about this either. Yet I recall the late Ted Wragg  – an instinctive and gifted teacher of children of any age – turning to me during a somewhat rarified QCA discussion about the Year 7/8 dip to mutter, ‘Have they forgotten what adolescence is like?’

The argument that that an understanding of children’s development is essential to an   understanding of the Y7/8 dip is clinched by the NFER finding that it occurs in many other countries besides England. That being so, the unique pattern of English secondary schooling can hardly be expected to shoulder all the blame. Equally, the NFER finding should prompt us to reconsider the relationship between human development, the structure of schooling and the timing of the school day – a relationship which, as the few surviving middle schools will remind us, was central to the rationale for their formation.

These cultural, developmental and comparative considerations in no way excuse such inadequacies of Y6/7 communication, attainment tracking, staffing and teaching as are recorded and illustrated in Ofsted’s ‘wasted years’ report. However, they do confirm that the task of ensuring steady academic progress from the upper years of Key Stage 2 into and through Key Stage 3 is more complex than Ofsted may have grasped; that couching the issue in terms of blame rather than explanation may be what ministers demand but it is hardly helpful; and that pinning the entirety of that blame on secondary schools is neither fair nor productive.

We might enter further notes of reservation. ‘Across England’ says HMCI Wilshaw, ’85 per cent of primary schools are good or outstanding compared with 74 per cent of secondary schools.’ This finding came from inspection data collected before the introduction of Ofsted’s Common Inspection Framework  in September 2015. The new framework, says Ofsted, ‘ensures more comparability through inspection when children and learners move from one setting to another. It supports greater consistency across the inspection of different remits.’ This is in effect an admission that under the previous framework – the one that yielded the ‘nation divided’ and ‘wasted years’ findings – using Ofsted data to compare different setting types was an uncertain science. If that structure applied to settings catering for similar age ranges (the concern of the new framework) it must have applied no less, and probably more, to inspection-based comparisons between primary and secondary.

Even more fundamentally, Ofsted reports only what it inspects, and the frameworks, whether old or new, ignore or trivialise aspects of both primary and secondary education that many schools – and certainly CPRT – regard as desirable or even essential. To take one example, the new Ofsted framework uses the phrase ‘across the curriculum’ on several occasions, but like its predecessor ‘broad and balanced’ this is little more than tokenistic, for English and mathematics are the only aspects of the curriculum that are named or about which specific inspection judgements are required. For those who believe that the quality and standards of education reside in more than literacy and numeracy ‘outcomes’, vital though these are, Ofsted’s 11 percentage point claim of primary schools’ superiority over secondary may be deemed questionable. What, I always want to know, is going on in addition to what Ofsted inspects, and does it matter? In all but the most slavishly Ofsted-driven schools, a great deal, and yes it does.

Notwithstanding all this, converging evidence from inspection and research certainly confirms that in the matter of primary-secondary transfer and progression we have a historic problem that has not yet been fully addressed. As well as learning from those schools – secondary as well as primary – that manage these matters effectively, and there are many of them, what can be done?

Well, academies may be contentious but the rapid growth of federations, multi-academy trusts and all-through schools opens up opportunities for the cross-phase exchange, in pursuit of a more seamless experience of schooling for every child, not just of information and ideas but also personnel. In this matter, it is significant that ASCL, formally the secondary school leaders’ union, is now also open to primary leaders and has appointed a primary specialist. CPRT is working with the first holder of this post, Julie McCulloch, to explore and develop the primary-secondary relationship.

Finally, whether we accept Ofsted’s alarming judgement about a ‘wasted’ Key Stage 3, we must I think acknowledge that the education of children aged 11 to 14 has not received the national attention it deserves. Perhaps it too has tended to be viewed as no more than a prelude or anteroom to what follows, in this case the trials and triumphs of Key Stage 4. I find it significant that during the past decade there have been two major independent enquiries into post-early years education – the Cambridge Primary Review (4-11) and the Nuffield 14-19 Review – but that no such attention has been devoted to education between the ages of 11 and 14. True, Labour had a KS3 strategy, but this  was a pedagogical prescription rather than an educational enquiry, its focus was as narrow as that of the primary strategies it emulated and it ignored or pre-empted the questions about structures, purposes, curriculum, assessment and indeed pedagogy that the Cambridge and Nuffield reviews rightly sought to address.

So: what, fundamentally, should Key Stage 3 be about, and what do children aged 11-14 most need from that phase of their education? Following CPR and Nuffield we need an independent 11-14 review; or even – so as to include continuity, progression and pupil maturation from Key Stages 2 to 3 as discussed here – a review of education 10-14, from Blyth’s ‘midlands of childhood’ into adolescence.

In any event, there is no room whatever for complacency in the primary world about Ofsted’s criticisms of KS3 provision. We should care as much about what happens to our children after primary education as during it.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

The full text of Robin Alexander’s keynote at the March 2016 Annual Conference of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) may be viewed/downloaded here.

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.

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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.

Contact

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