The 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

 

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CPRT publishes new report on assessment

CPRT has commissioned a number of reports on research that bears on its eight priorities. The first of these, by Professor Wynne Harlen, has now been published. Entitled Assessment, Standards and Quality of Learning in Primary Education, it may be viewed/downloaded here. A three page briefing/executive summary may also be viewed and/or downloaded.

21 November 2014

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Is there time for reading and research?

At CPRT’s London Teachers Reading Group recently, we debated one of the original CPR research reviews, Children and their Primary Schools: pupils’ voices (Robinson and Fielding, 2010). Shortly to be published in updated form (see below), this reviewed published research on what pupils and former pupils think of their experiences of primary schooling.

A mixture of teachers, academics and local authority colleagues, we brought different perspectives to bear on the challenge of listening to and respecting children’s voices. We discussed the potential of involving children as co-participant researchers and almost immediately the teachers amongst us were keen to take action. Some considered inviting their classes to take photographs and devise captions to present views on the school environment, or to make collages to represent their experiences of literacy in school or at home. The range of evidence the young people collect could then be used to prompt reflection and dialogue about their experiences and feelings and how to respond to these.

We also found ourselves reconsidering the current role of published research in primary education. Tim, who had been teaching for just two years, voiced the view that keeping up to date in this manner was a professional responsibility, and commented that he’d ‘found it fascinating and invigorating’ to read research reports during his PGCE, ‘not only for the essays as it were, but for teaching’.

Yet since then, in the busy maelstrom of school life, he had received scant encouragement to read and debate his understanding, nor to explore the relationship between theory and practice in his classroom. Although he recognised research can help us as educators to re-examine the implicit theories that undergird everyday practice, he felt pressured ‘to deliver, to assess and to raise standards’. He also reflected a sense of professional isolation, since there were few with whom he could debate his reading.

Many in the group felt the emphasis on the ‘what works’ agenda, which they perceived was almost exclusively focused on raising attainment, sidelines the importance of teachers (and children) being involved in research themselves.  There was also agreement that learning is highly contextualised and thus what ‘works’ in one context may not in others.

The conversation was rather generous and gentle on this first occasion but I am sure over time more robust and critically reflective discussions will emerge as we explore our different perspectives, gain critical distance and interrogate the assumptions, values and beliefs that underpin policy and practice.

What might the consequences be if right across the country such teachers’ reading groups developed? Professional space is surely needed to consider quality research evidence, to read new empirical studies and well-established texts, and to debate the methods used and insights claimed.

Teachers, whilst respecting children’s voices, need to be careful not to dismiss their own views, their own potential as researchers, and the value of connecting to the work of others.

The next meeting of CPRT’s London Teachers Reading Group is on November 13th when Carol Robinson’s report on her updated research review will be discussed. Please contact Greg Frame if you would like to attend. All are welcome.

Carol Robinson’s report is one of five mini-projects in which CPRT has commissioned researchers to revisit and re-assess published research relating to CPRT’s eight priorities. The original 28 CPR research surveys were published in 2007-8. They were then revised for publication in The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys (2010).

For information about the Trust’s current research, click here.

 

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

 

by Robin Alexander

What has CPRT been up to?

In September 2013 the Cambridge Primary Review Trust (CPRT) took over from the Cambridge Primary Review (CPR). We had a grand launch event in London chaired by Jonathan Dimbleby, but then CPRT went quiet, publicly at least. As explained in our March post, this was because we were waiting for our new website, delayed for reasons we won’t bore you with. Here it is at last.  Take a look: you’ll find that silence signalled not inactivity but the opposite. For example: 

  • CPR’s evidence on the condition and future of primary education remains unrivalled in its scope, diversity and depth. But evidence cannot stand still and we’ve launched eight new research projects to update and extend the evidence that good quality primary education requires. The new projects include five commissioned research reviews relating to CPRT’s priorities and a joint project with York University on dialogic pedagogy as a tool for tackling disadvantage.  Joining us in this work are some  exceptional talents: epidemiologist Kate Pickett (chronicler of inequality and author of the bestselling The Spirit Level), educational neuroscientist Usha Goswami, assessment and science education expert Wynne Harlen, international pedagogy luminary David Hogan, among others. Find out more
  • CPRT’s regional networks and Schools Alliance have been merged to give each region a core group of schools that are not only judged outstanding by Ofsted but are also committed to the CPR aims and evidence and to finding practical ways to tackle the CPRT priorities. Find out more
  • Regional activity has taken different forms. For example, the South West now has a lively group of CPRT Research Schools. London has a Teachers’ Reading Group.   St Leonard’s School, like an increasing number across the country, builds explicitly on CPR. These are just three examples of regional activity among many.
  • CPRT’s partnership with Pearson, which supports but is entirely independent of our core activities, has produced Primary Curriculum 2014, a well-received series of regional conferences plus an excellent handbook and video, all designed to help schools implement the new National Curriculum within the larger framework of CPR aims and principles. Unusually in the countdown to national curriculum implementation, Primary Curriculum 2014 doesn’t confine itself to the core subjects but treats the whole curriculum with equal seriousness and enthusiasm. This the first stage of a programme of joint CPRT/Pearson support for schools which will also cover issues such as assessment without levels, curriculum audit and children’s voice. Find out more

As for the new website, you’ll see that although it remains the definitive source of information about the Cambridge Primary Review, its evidence and its many  publications, it has the vital feature of interactivity that the old site lacked. Previously there was no shortage of comment, but responding to it required an email. The new site’s blog enables the debate to become more lively and much more inclusive. This first blog is more in the nature of an announcement, but we promise regular postings about a range of issues relating to primary education policy, practice and research, nationally and internationally. We’ll also be inviting guest bloggers.  Watch this space, and then join in. Usual protocols: comment is free but fact is sacred; nothing obscene or defamatory …

Please read our Terms of Use and join in the conversation.

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Contact

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