The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

by Robin Alexander

Evidence with Vision: more CPRT research reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.robinalexander.org.uk

Click here for further information about the CPRT research surveys

Download publications list 

by Robin Alexander

Flying the Primary Colours

CPRT’s weekly blog is approaching its first anniversary.  During the past year teachers, heads, students, journalists and CPRT leaders have written about a wide range of educational issues. Some have done so with joy, some with anger, some with gravity and some with wit. All have shared their belief in a primary education grounded in evidence and vision, that secures children’s skills, enriches their understanding and enlarges their imaginations and lives.

To celebrate this coming anniversary, and because we believe that the blogs are by no means as ephemeral in substance as they are in format, we have brought many of them together in a specially edited volume entitled Primary Colours: Westminster postcards from the Cambridge Primary Review Trust. The collection may be viewed online, printed out, or purchased as a bound book at modest cost.

We are sure that the puns in the title ‘Primary Colours’ will be instantly deciphered, but why ‘Westminster postcards’? Well, education policy has become so pervasive and intrusive, and so deeply controversial as to substance and process, that it would have been irresponsible as well as impossible to ignore it, especially in an election year. So with a new government in place we thought it would be salutary, and perhaps even entertaining, to reverse the flow and present this collection to ministers as both a policy commentary and a reminder of what really matters.

But even assuming that ministers read it, the collection is of at least equal interest to everyone else involved in primary education. Many of the contributions speak directly to the condition of children and teachers, and the empowerment of both groups is a recurrent theme for the Trust itself. Thus alongside the policy critiques are pieces about children’s voice, curriculum, assessment and school leadership, about life in primary schools as it really is, and about some of the moral, social and global challenges which confront, or should confront, our assumptions about what education is for.

That’s just for starters. CPRT has recently commissioned seven new research reviews to supplement the three already published and the two in the pipeline. Kate Pickett’s report on equality, equity and social disadvantage will appear later this month, and between September and next March we’ll be producing expert reports on the educational dimensions and implications of other big and burning issues: vulnerable children, sustainability and global understanding, migration and demographic change, digital futures, teacher education and training, alternative models of accountability and quality assurance, and the trajectory and impact of recent education reforms.

The CPRT reports and briefings published so far are being discussed within our regional networks, in schools and in some teacher education courses. We hope that Primary Colours and the anticipation of further CPRT publications will quicken this trend and that the wealth of new material CPRT is generating will take its place on the must-read list of every intending and practising primary teacher, school leader, teacher educator, researcher and consultant, alongside what remains our key publication: Children, their World, their Education: final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

Click to download, print or order a bound copy of Primary Colours.

by Robin Alexander

Election 2015: here we stand

And so we come full circle. In 2010 the Cambridge Primary Review presented party leaders with eleven post-election policy priorities for primary education. Distilled from the Review’s evidence and from public discussion of its final report, these urged a more principled approach to election perennials such as curriculum, assessment, standards and accountability while asking political leaders to frame such vital matters by something a bit more visionary than ‘zero tolerance’, ‘tough’, ‘relentless’ and those other pugilistic epithets of political choice that betray such a limited view of the education of young children. Judging by the 2015 manifestos, even that was too much to ask.

Yet during the early days of the coalition government we sensed encouraging movement on several of CPR’s priorities. The Pupil Premium aimed to tackle the twin challenges of social disadvantage and educational underperformance, challenges that headed our 2010 list; government enquiries were initiated on curriculum, assessment, professional standards and primary school staffing – the last of these specifically at CPR’s request and with CPR involvement; and the new government’s ministers promised to re-empower teachers after 13 years of Labour prescription and micro-management.

But the honeymoon was short, the enquiries’ outcomes were pre-empted by narrow terms of reference and disdain for evidence and genuine debate, and the old language and mindsets soon reasserted themselves.  With a vengeance, indeed, for the national curriculum became narrower, testing became more obsessive, accountability more punitive, and ministerial interventions more abusive. As for the vision of 21st century primary education that CPR had offered but policymakers had evaded, this advanced no further than the PISA league tables: a reasonable aspiration in terms of standards in the basics, certainly, but hardly a rounded education.

Consequently, when the Cambridge Primary Review Trust was launched in 2013, we felt obliged to retain some of CPR’s 2010 priorities alongside others that the new organisation wished to pursue. So in the current list of CPRT priorities, to which I return below, curriculum and assessment remain in need of genuine reform rather than the ideological gerrymandering to which we have been treated, and closing the wealth/wellbeing/attainment gap is still at the top of our list because what government has given with one hand via the Pupil Premium it has taken away with another through economic and social policies that have made Britain the most unequal OECD country in Europe in terms of income distribution, with 3.5 million of its children living in poverty (with numbers predicted to rise further) and one million people dependent on food banks.

That is not all. At the end of CPR’s final report we noted the intense pressures to which by 2009 primary schools were subject but applauded their vital communal role in a changing, fractured and unequal society and their maintenance, against the odds, of a stable core of humane and enlightened values. This being so – and it was an outstanding achievement – we felt able to conclude that on balance the condition of England’s primary education system, though severely stressed and in need of rebalancing, was sound.

Others, though agreeing with CPR’s judgement about individual schools, were less sanguine about the system as a whole. If in 2010 this was open to debate, in 2015 it no longer is. For the word ‘system’ implies unity, coherence, consistency and hence equity, and in England these conditions no longer apply.

Thus the checks and balances vital to education in a democracy have been swept away, and without local mediation schools have little protection from ministers’ caprice, megalomania or what NAHT’s Russell Hobby calls their ‘crazy schemes’ – those back-of-the-envelope bids for media headlines that teachers and school leaders are forced by legislation or Ofsted’s compliance checks to implement, regardless of their cost to children’s education or teachers’ self-esteem.

The schooling structure itself is deeply fractured by gross discrepancies in the level and quality of local support on which schools can draw, and the ideological drive for academies and free schools. This sector, expanded by dint of grand promises, ominous threats and questionable evidence, is privileged by greater freedoms, grandiose management titles, inflated top salaries and, some suggest, gongs in return for compliance. Meanwhile, rank and file staff are under unprecedented pressure and the number of teachers prematurely leaving the profession is at a ten-year high. Not only mid-career burnout either: though the exact number is disputed, it is clear that many teachers leave within a year of qualifying.

Hardly a ‘system’ worthy of the name, then, let alone one which it is at ease with itself.

Yet the paradox identified in the Cambridge Primary Review final report – of individual schools doing wondrous things for and with their pupils, not least in circumstances of exceptional social challenge and against a background of system fragmentation and policy folly – continues to apply. These blogs have so far included reports from two such schools with which CPRT is working closely, and the blog that will follow this one provides inspiring evidence from a third, Sarah Rutty’s school in Leeds. What is doubly impressive is that Sarah, together with Jo Evans and Iain Erskine, who provided the earlier blogs from schools, so manage the taxing circumstances of education in 2015 that they are able both to lead outstanding schools and to give time, energy and experience to supporting the work of CPRT.

But those wider social challenges are not receding and one of them, population growth and the widening gap between the number of school places required – 900,000 over the next decade – and the number available – is likely to become very pressing indeed during the next parliamentary term.

Indeed it already is. In some local authorities, only a minority of parents secure their first choice of primary school for their children, and this transfers pressure from schools to families, with children facing longer journeys to and from school, siblings attending different schools, increased traffic congestion, and diminishing opportunities for friendships made within school to be maintained outside it. Primary schools, meanwhile, get bigger and bigger.  They cope, as our schools always do, with this as with other externally-induced challenges. Yet at what cost to children and teachers?

Which brings us to the election manifestos. In this last matter there is widespread concern that the coming crisis over primary school places has neither registered with the political parties nor been included in their costings. Maintaining school spending at current levels won’t be enough. Is this policy lacuna emblematic of a more general loss of touch with reality?

The manifestos themselves were helpfully prefigured in Greg Frame’s recent blog and detailed in the BBC’s excellent policy guide, while the blogs of both Warwick Mansell and Stephanie Northen drew attention to the conflicting languages, within both the Conservative and Labour manfestos, of support and retribution.

It is of course easy to dismiss manifestos as cynical posturing; worse, as in the case of the LibDems’ 2010 commitment to scrapping university tuition fees, as promises waiting to be broken. It is certainly the case that what matters is what political parties do, not what they say they will do. The promise most regularly and predictably broken by both Conservative and Labour is to reduce government prescription and give teaching back to teachers. Fine sentiments in opposition, but observe what happens when your friendly ministerial wannabe succumbs to the power of the big desk, ministerial car, obsequious officials, callow advisers and hungry press: ‘For I also am set under authority … and I say unto one, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it.’ Small wonder that most ministers lose touch with reality within a few minutes of arriving in Sanctuary Buildings.

At this election, then, those voters for whom education matters would do well to pay greater attention to each party’s record than to their manifesto promises. It’s an exercise from which none of the three main parties emerges unscathed. And after this election we must hope that what may be a novel chemistry of votes, personalities and minority parties will create political space for what really matters. Such as, of course, the priorities that CPRT has been pursuing since 2013. Here they are again:

  • Equity. Tackle the continuing challenge of social and educational disadvantage, and find practical ways to help schools to close the associated gaps in educational attainment.
  • Voice. Advance children’s voice and rights in school and classroom in accordance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
  • Community. Promote community engagement and cohesion through school-community links and a community curriculum that supplements and enriches the national curriculum, and by developing communal values in school and classroom.
  • Sustainability. Embed sustainability and global citizenship in educational policy and practice, linking to the UN agenda for global education after 2015.
  • Aims. Develop and apply a coherent vision for 21st century primary education; enact CPR’s aims through curriculum, pedagogy and the wider life of the school.
  • Curriculum. Develop a broad, balanced and rich entitlement curriculum which responds to both national and local need, eliminates the damaging division of status and quality between core and non-core, and teaches every subject, domain or aspect to the highest possible standard.
  • Pedagogy. Develop a pedagogy of repertoire, rigour, evidence and principle, rather than mere compliance, with a particular emphasis on fostering the high quality classroom talk which children’s development, learning and attainment require.
  • Assessment. Encourage approaches to assessment that enhance learning as well as test it, that support rather than distort the curriculum and that pursue standards and quality in all areas of learning, not just the core subjects.

To which, in light of the experience of the past five years, I propose two more. One is from CPR’s 2010 list of policy priorities which seems as remote a possibility now as it was then, yet for that very reason needs to be repeated. The other arises from the discussion above.

  • Policy. Reverse the centralising thrust of recent policy. End government micro-management of teaching. Re-invigorate parental and community engagement. Replace myth, spin and the selective use of evidence by genuine debate. Restore the checks and balances which are vital to the formulation of sound policy.
  • The education system. Call a halt to those policies that have so severely fragmented England’s education system, setting school against school, increasing inequalities in provision, encouraging bullying and scapegoating in the name of accountability, and destroying professional morale. Aim instead for coherence, consistency, the equitable distribution of resources, accountability for policy as well as teaching, and a culture of mutual support and respect. Replace political posturing and ministerial machismo by a sustainable vision for children, their world and their education.

Yet, and to return to that judgement about the state of England’s education system in the Cambridge Primary Review final report, if the policy process requires reform far more radical than anything ministers have imposed on schools, it’s the schools themselves that continue to provide the best grounds for optimism.  So it’s fitting that this rather depressing assessment of the national scene will be followed, in CPRT’s next blog, by news of an utterly inspiring kind from a primary school in Leeds whose head has joined the CPRT community and is leading one of its networks.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

As with all CPRT blogs, the views expressed above are the author’s own and, apart from the quoted CPRT priorities, do not necessarily reflect the position of the Trust as a whole.

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Consultation Reminders

There are three national consultations currently under way, and their deadlines are fast approaching. We encourage all CPRT members, supporters and affiliates to participate in these areas of debate. Here are some of the things to consider:

If you would like your ideas to be part of CPRT’s response to these consultations, send them to administrator@cprtrust.org.uk as soon as you can. In relation to the performance descriptors and House of Commons enquiry, we need your thoughts well in advance of the official deadlines.

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Time to stand up, speak out and ask our own questions

As the year rushes to a close and we add Yuletide shopping to our busy lives (alongside school carol concerts and plays perhaps), there are two significant policy initiatives which deserve our time and attention. Both have December deadlines. One might be forgiven for thinking the timing was well judged, that is if policy makers don’t want to hear from the profession…

The House of Commons Education Committee recently launched an online enquiry into the way the DfE uses evidence, with a deadline of December 12th (just before you order that turkey), and the deadline for the DfE consultation into the new performance descriptors is just six days later, on December 18th (just before you wrap those presents).

Both of these initiatives have been the subject of previous CPRT blogs, with Robin Alexander raising pertinent questions about the breadth of the enquiry on evidence and Warwick Mansell observing that the performance descriptors are simply another way of labelling learners, under a different name (this time with the contentious notion of being judged ‘below’ or ‘above’ national standards at aged seven). It is surely time to voice our views. We cannot afford to stand back.

Based on government responses to previous ‘consultations’, there is scant evidence that the perspectives of academics, researchers or teachers will be heard, attended to or indeed in any way influence the outcome. Commas change, but rarely content.

Nonetheless, in gathering with others to talk and listen, whether in school or consortia meetings, in externally organised PD or in university-based groups (such as the CPRT London Teachers Reading Group), we have the chance to revisit our principles and remind each other of the need to consider research evidence and explore its application when back in the classroom.

However, it is not enough to read and debate research – though it is essential. Nor is it enough to respond to such enquiries and consultations – though again this is important. Surely we must also engage as researchers ourselves?  As a profession we must avoid standing back and waiting for others to define the questions for us to answer (as is the case with the performance descriptors consultation, where delimited questions afford little scope for commenting upon wider issues of relevance).

Historically, teachers have been positioned as the objects of research, but in recent decades the involvement of the primary profession in research related practices has diversified, with many studies demonstrating the value of school-university research partnerships. Additionally, practitioners have undertaken their own classroom-based research, framed around self-identified questions, both individually and collectively, as part of teacher action-research networks.

In the South West of England, an arts and creativity focused CPRT action-research project is being run as part of our national research programme. Coordinated by Penny Hay at Bath Spa University and Emese Hall at Exeter University, it involves ten schools and reflects three of the CPRT’s eight priorities: children’s voice and rights; fostering a rich, relevant and broad curriculum and developing a pedagogy of repertoire, rigour, evidence and principle.

Another such CPRT action-research project is developing at Roger Ascham Primary School in Walthamstow, co-ordinated by Robin Desoer from the school and Amelia Hempel Jorgensen and Gill Goodliff from the Open University. It is focused on learner identity, autonomy and self-regulation.  As a Trust we are seeking to evolve a model of school-led CPRT action research which addresses the overall research concern:  how is primary education in England providing education relevant to children’s lives and worlds and how is this improving their life chances?

Whilst Kemmis (2006) suggests that harnessing teacher action research to the school improvement agenda has diluted its critical transformative potential, both projects are seeking to ensure attention is paid to the wider social, cultural and discursive consequences of any new practices developed, and are working to enhance the teachers’ sense of their professional roles and identities. In the midst of the midwinter mayhem, with personal and professional deadlines looming and not enough time in the day, standing up, speaking out and making time to ask our own questions remain important.

Professor Teresa Cremin is a co-director of Cambridge Primary Review Trust.

by Robin Alexander

Ministers, evidence and inconvenient truths

I suppose the heading of this blog is a trifle tendentious, though not without justification. The Cambridge Primary Review (CPR) was all about evidence. Some of it ministers liked, some of it they didn’t.  By and large, their reactions reflected not the authority or veracity of the evidence we provided but the degree to which it sustained or challenged their political narrative.  As a result, policies were as likely to be based on ideology, prejudice or populism as on evidence, and those who exposed this fundamental frailty, or highlighted the politically inconvenient truth, were pretty smartly shown the door.

Because CPR hoped to make a difference in policy circles as well as in the classroom, it investigated not only its various chosen aspects of primary education – childhood, learning, teaching, curriculum, assessment, leadership, school organisation, teacher education and so on – but also the evidence on which policies relating to each of these were based.

The relationship between policy and evidence that CPR uncovered was on occasions somewhat murky. The most problematic instance was the matter of educational standards over time and what causes them to rise and fall. CPR had commissioned no fewer than six independent research reviews in this area from teams of leading academics at five universities and NFER. Against the findings of the resulting six reports and other data CPR set official claims about trends in standards and the impact on those trends of government policies and initiatives.

Without going into detail that can be read in its final report (Children, their World, their Education, pages 471-4), CPR reported both good and less good news on standards – which in a large educational system serving a highly diverse society at a time of rapid change is what one would expect – but also a succession of grand political claims about standards, tests, accountability and school improvement that under scrutiny all too often dissolved into unsubstantiated assertion or downright falsehood.

This week there are two developments that enable us to bring the story up to date and consider the record of the current government. Has it maintained Labour’s uneasy relationship with evidence or has it displayed a more even-handed stance in the interest of making its policies as well founded as possible? In so doing, has it been prepared to accommodate the inconvenient truth?

The first pertinent development is the decision of the House of Commons Education Committee to launch an on-line enquiry into the way DfE uses evidence. The Committee has selected nine areas for scrutiny: phonics, teaching assistants, professional measurement metrics, the National College, summer-born children, universal infant free school meals, raising the participation age, music education, and the school starting age. In each case, DfE has been asked first to state the policy and second to cite the evidence on which it is based, and we the public are then asked to comment. In addition, lest it be thought that this list is too exclusive – there is no mention, for example, of the national curriculum, national assessment, standards, international comparisons, inspection, teacher education, academies, free schools or many other prominent and hotly debated areas of policy – respondents are invited to comment on DfE’s use of evidence in more general terms.

Cambridge Primary Review Trust will certainly respond, and we hope those reading this blog will do likewise. The deadline is Friday 12 December.

The other development is closer to home. In 2007, Cambridge Primary Review commissioned a research-based report on the pros and cons of different approaches to assessment from Professor Wynne Harlen, one of the best-respected experts in this field. This was revised for publication in 2010 in The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys.

Earlier this year we invited Professor Harlen to revisit and update her 2010 report to contribute to the CPRT’s pursuit of its eight priorities, one of which is assessment reform, taking account of recent developments (including the performance descriptors announced last week). This she has now done. Wynne’s 40-page report is accompanied by a three-page briefing or executive summary and both can be viewed and/or downloaded from the CPRT website.

Wynne Harlen’s CPRT report ends with separately-itemised implications for teachers, school leaders, teacher educators and policy makers.  Wynne stresses the need for teaching strategies in which assessment for learning is fully embedded, especially in teachers’ questioning and feedback, and she urges government  to raise the profile of properly moderated teacher assessment and to provide assessment guidance in all subjects rather than confine its efforts to literacy and numeracy. In this matter she reinforces one of CPR’s core messages, that literacy and numeracy tests are not valid proxies for quality and standards across the curriculum as a whole, and children have a right to a curriculum in which every element is taught to the highest possible standard regardless of how much or how little time is allocated to it, so we need valid and reliable information on how, in all such curriculum areas, they are progressing.

Assessment is one of the areas with which the House of Commons enquiry on evidence does not directly deal. However, DfE’s reaction to this new report, which is an aspect of education that is at once extremely important and highly contested, will provide a timely test of its claim that its policies are evidence-based.

More to the point, if the House of Commons enquiry comes up with conclusions that DfE finds unpalatable and therefore dismisses or rejects, we shall know exactly where on the matter of evidence the government truly stands.

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

 

Contact

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