Childrens’ voices and rights in primary education
Carol Robinson’s new CPRT research review and briefing about childrens’ voices and rights in primary education published today.
View/download full report
View/download briefing
View Robin Alexander’s blog
New evidence on childrens’ voices and rights. But does DfE get it?
Children, their World, their Education. The basic premise of the Cambridge Primary Review (CPR) was as clear in the title of its final report as in its choice of investigative themes and questions: education is meaningful only when educators understand and coherently respond to the nature and needs of children and the society and world in which they are growing up. Mastering the practical skills of teaching is a necessary but not sufficient condition, and as an educational rationale mantras like ‘effective teaching’ take us to the nearest 3Rs test but no further.
A more comprehensive rationale was crystallised in the twelve aims for primary education that were at the heart of CPR’s final report and that now inform the work of an ever-increasing number of schools. In preparing the ground for these, CPR met and listened to children and those who work with them, and many more children added to these face-to-face conversations by writing in. We also commissioned reviews of research on children’s development, learning and lives inside and outside school.
One of these research reviews was on children’s voice and today CPRT publishes its sequel: Carol Robinson’s update of the report that she and Michael Fielding first produced in 2007 and then revised in 2010 for inclusion in The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys.
Last month saw the 25th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). The UK is a signatory, but just how far short of the UN’s ideals we fall is daily all too apparent in the media and in CPRT’s recent blogs on young carers, the government’s proposed policy ‘family test’, and the fate of those millions of children caught up in conflict or lacking access to education as a basic human right. Nor is CPRT convinced that the new national curriculum has yet registered that these matters demand a more serious and committed response than DfE has so far provided, though we are certainly convinced that making citizenship optional in primary schools transmits entirely the wrong signal.
Yet all is not gloom, doom and hollow promises. Carol Robinson’s report documents the encouraging growth of research and practice in the area of children’s agency, voice and rights, and of impressive movements like Rights Respecting Schools. Always at risk of being treated tokenistically, children’s voice in many schools now means considerably more than stage-managed deliberations on food and wet playtimes. This progress should be celebrated.
Probably not at DfE, though: its recent advice on promoting ‘British’ values rightly encourages schools to ‘ensure that all pupils … have a voice that is listened to’ but confines that voice to the task of demonstrating ‘how democracy works by actively promoting democratic processes such as a school council whose members are voted for by the pupils.’ To DfE, then, voice equates with vote, and we know how little, in Britain’s electoral system, votes count for, or how little notice our democratically-elected government takes of the voices of others than those who toe the party line, not least on educational matters. But we won’t tell our children about this, will we, for in the official account of British values parliamentary democracy is the envy of the world.
In fact, the most basic test of the seriousness with which we treat what children think and say is not the election of a school council – valuable though its deliberations can be – but the extent to which empowering, exploring and building on children’s articulated ideas is central to our every teaching encounter and to the everyday assessment for learning which at best informs both children and ourselves. Children’s voices will remain unheard, and their understanding will advance thus far and no further, if ‘speaking and listening’ means that teachers do all the speaking and children all the listening; or if the writing through which children express their ideas is confined to repeating those of the teacher.
That’s why CPRT’s eight priorities include not only a commitment to ‘advance children’s voice and rights … in accordance with the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child’ but also contingent commitments to the development of patterns of teaching and assessment for learning in which genuine dialogue is paramount. This term we have published Wynne Harlen’s report on assessment and Carol Robinson’s on children’s voices. Next term we’ll be presenting reports from Usha Goswami, David Hogan, Dennis Kwek and Peter Renshaw on learning and teaching. In parallel, we are working with Pearson to develop jointly-branded CPD programmes in these areas. All these initiatives are united by the imperatives of childhood.
It is classroom pedagogy that most tellingly liberates children’s voices; but in the wrong hands it is pedagogy that most decisively suppresses them.
View/download Carol Robinson’s CPRT research report Children, their voices and their experiences of school: what does the evidence tell us?
View/download a four-page briefing on Carol Robinson’s report.
View/download Wynne Harlen’s CPRT research report Assessment, standards and quality of learning in primary education and/or the accompanying four-page briefing.
Find out more about these and CPRT’s other research initiatives.
Find out more about the joint CPRT/Pearson CPD programmes on children’s voice, assessment and other topics.
Read the DfE guidance ‘Promoting fundamental British values as part of SMSC in schools’ (November 2014).
Supporting new teachers: snake oil, evidence or what?
Everyone knows that feelings of inadequacy are not helpful in the classroom. As soon as the tears start to roll, the learning stops. And the teaching too, because feeling inadequate is just as destructive of teachers’ ability to perform as it is of children’s.
It is depressingly easy to make a new teacher feel inadequate: one reason surely that around 40 per cent of us leave within the first five years of qualifying, according to Ofsted. Workload is the major issue of course, but combine a huge burden of work with the feeling that you don’t know how to do it properly and the result is … nail-biting anxiety, sleepless nights and finally, for many, departures for pastures less demoralising.
Here is just one example of the ease with which a new teacher can be forced to reach for the tissues. Recently I went on a reading course linked to the new curriculum. All was going swimmingly until, towards the end of the day, the trainer mentioned spelling – an area given a starring role in the new English curriculum. Now I had been feeling confident about spelling, courtesy of a respected website that has created weekly word lists, including rules, for each year group. It’s true that some of its choices are a little eccentric – ‘nondescript’ and ‘cohabit’ are not the words I would pick to teach eight-year-olds about prefixes – but never mind. At least I had one area of the curriculum sorted.
Foolish thought! Suddenly, I hear the reading course trainer say ‘spelling lists’ and realise that he’s laughing. ‘You see,’ he says, chortling away, ‘spelling lists really don’t work. The children learn those 10 or 12 words but then they never use them again and so they’re forgotten. It just isn’t a good way to teach spelling. A much better way is to teach them is …’
Well, that was it. Feelings of inadequacy again. I’ve been teaching spelling badly; the children will fail their Sats spelling test and we will all sit in the classroom with the tears rolling.
On this occasion though, feelings of inadequacy were overtaken by ones of annoyance. If there is a magic recipe for spelling success, why is it a secret? Surely acquiring this knowledge shouldn’t depend on the random choice of a CPD course?
This doesn’t just apply to spelling of course, but to all areas of the curriculum. Why am I endlessly reinventing the wheel, clumsily and misshapenly, when out there somewhere is someone who knows how it ought to be done?
Finding that mystery expert should not have to rely on anxious trawls of the internet late at night while the bags grow long under the eyes. The web is an invaluable tool and the teachers who donate their lessons for free are generous, public-spirited people. But is downloading Ms Who-ever-you-are’s second-hand lessons really the way to ensure the best possible learning experience for children? After all, while much online content is excellent, quite a lot is shoddy, ill-thought-out and, occasionally, just plain wrong.
Nor should finding the mystery expert depend on dawn raids on school cupboards sifting through piles of commercial schemes in search of whatever is that day’s holy grail. Be it a guide to teaching division using a number line or how to take those first steps in programming, it must deliver its message in an engaging, efficient and easy-for-Miss-to-understand way. Many commercial schemes do just that, but quite a few are ill-conceived, out-of-date and, occasionally, just plain wrong. Hence the warning about snake oil vendors in CPR’s evidence to the Gove national curriculum review.
Of course, not so long ago, new teachers did not have to search for the needle in the curriculum haystack. They were given sewing machines in the form of the primary national strategies. As the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review points out (p 417), this suited us newbies because the strategies were ‘all about rules and this is precisely what novice professionals are more likely to need’. But the Review went on to say (p 307) that the strategies’ bid for total control of what and how teachers taught may have helped those who were newly-qualified or insecure but it wasn’t right for mature professionals with the knowledge and experience to make their own decisions, especially as government prescription was not necessarily better founded than what was available commercially. Hence CPRT’s insistence on the need for ‘a pedagogy of repertoire, rigour, evidence and principle, rather than mere compliance’.
Yet is it outrageous or unprofessional to suggest that new teachers would benefit from a reliable source of expert guidance on what to teach and how best to teach it? Just because the national strategies fell into disrepute, becoming inflexible and monolithic monsters, does that mean we abandon all idea of helping our floundering novices, most of whom have had a mere year’s training?
With standards to be ratcheted up, the pressures on teachers can only increase – as, I fear, will the proportion that leaves within five years of qualifying. One way to tempt them to stay would be to ease the daily burden of having to invent oddly shaped wheels to bump around their classrooms.
Stephanie Northen is a teacher and journalist. She was one of the authors of the Cambridge Primary Review final report.
In pursuit of CPRT Priority 7, quoted above by Stephanie (‘Develop a pedagogy of repertoire, rigour, evidence and principle, rather than mere compliance’), CPRT has commissioned two new research reviews to extend and update the evidence on pedagogy provided by CPR. One is on children’s learning, the other on teaching. It is hoped that both will be published next term. CPRT has also embarked on a major project, supported by the Educational Endowment Foundation, on using dialogic teaching to increase engagement and improve educational outcomes among disadvantaged children. More generally, CPRT is working with Pearson, its lead sponsor, to develop CPD programmes which are professionally helpful and based on secure evidence.
CALLING ALL NQTs. We would like to hear from other recently-qualified primary teachers about the kind of support they need in their first year or two of teaching and the extent to which their needs are met. Please let us know, either publicly by commenting on Stephanie’s blog below, or in confidence by emailing us. This information will help us to take forward CPRT’s professional development programme with Pearson and will also be valuable to those planning the activities of our regional networks.