The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

by Robin Alexander

Onwards and upwards

In my blog on 3 March I confirmed what we intimated at CPRT’s national conference in November: the Trust is closing but we have negotiated arrangements for securing its legacy and enabling interested groups and individuals to continue the CPR/CPRT-inspired work they have started. I can now provide further details.

Winding up

CPRT has ceased trading as a not-for-profit company and during the next two months will wind up its affairs.

  • Some CPRT regional networks may wish to continue their good work, and we hope they will, though they won’t be doing so under the banner of CPRT.
  • The CPRT Schools Alliance is disbanded as a CPRT entity, but some Alliance schools will wish, under different auspices, to maintain the regional and national links they have forged and the activities they have initiated. Again, we encourage them to do so.
  • There is one more CPRT publication in the pipeline and we’ll tell you about this when it appears.
  • The CPRT website will remain live for at least the next two years in order that its resources continue to be universally available. There may even be the occasional post and update.
  • The combined physical and electronic archive of the Cambridge Primary Review and the Cambridge Primary Review Trust has been lodged permanently in the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York, with access for bona fide researchers. The collection includes CPR/CPRT publications, committee papers, media coverage and official correspondence and much else, and is a rich – and vast – research resource. Find out more here.

Carrying on

The agreement between CPRT and the Chartered College of Teaching (CCoT) has now been ratified.

  •  A smaller but still substantial archive, containing electronic copies of all CPR and CPRT reports and briefings and many other publications, is in the process of being copied to CCoT where it will have inaugural pride of place on the ‘knowledge platform’ through which CCoT aims to support evidence-informed practice. CCoT will curate the CPR/CPRT publications bank; that is to say, they will sort, index and link our material to other evidence on the knowledge platform, and they will actively promote it as a key resource for thinking primary teachers and their schools.
  • Those who are not teachers or CCoT members will still be able to access CPR/CPRT publications via either the CPRT website or the Borthwick Institute.
  • Teachers on CPRT’s mailing list, who work in CPRT Schools Alliance schools, or are associated with CPRT regional networks, may apply to become Founding Members of the College at a preferential rate. Find out about CCoT membership here.
  • In addition to the advertised benefits of membership of England’s new national professional body, including of course access to the knowledge platform, members will be offered generous discounts on the two CPR publications that are not available electronically – Children, their World, their Education and The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys . They will also be able freely to download Primary Curriculum 2014 , which hitherto has been available only as a hard copy purchase. We are grateful to Routledge and Pearson for these offers.
  • A group drawn from three of CPRT’s regional networks has been exploring possibilities for a new network, possibly under the auspices of CCoT, which itself will be encouraging and supporting such ventures. Anyone interested in joining this group should contact Julia Flutter.
  • Julia – formerly of CPR and CPRT and now on the staff of CCoT – has also offered to handle any questions about the CCoT membership offer and opportunities for post-CPRT networking.

by Robin Alexander

Over but not out

We mentioned at our highly successful national conference last November that the future of Cambridge Primary Review Trust (CPRT) has been under discussion.

During the past ten years CPRT and its predecessor the Cambridge Primary Review have established an unrivalled foundation of educational evidence, vision and principle for those to whom such things matter (which, dispiritingly, excludes many of our political leaders), and the 2016 conference reminded us of what can be achieved if we are prepared to transcend institutional and professional boundaries and act together.

CPRT was always expected to be time-limited rather than a permanent fixture, a way of giving the spirit and messages of the Review a final push before releasing them to find their own place in the landscape of primary education.  The national map is patchy, but there’s no doubt that in many quarters that place is secure, so the Review’s tenth anniversary was a time not just to celebrate, as we did last November, but also to take stock.

The stock-taking is now complete. Rather than run the risk of fading away through over-familiarity, and mindful of our increasing reliance on voluntary effort, we have decided that the time to stop is now, and that we’ll go out on a high.

Better still, we have been able to secure a deal which will maintain the Trust’s voice, presence and resources for the foreseeable future, albeit in another guise.

Here’s how it will work. CPRT will shortly cease to operate as a company. Its remaining financial assets will be transferred to a holding account to cover outstanding bills and keep its website alive and fully accessible for the next two years.  Meanwhile, the new Chartered College of Teaching (CCoT) has agreed to take over curation of the combined online resource bank of Cambridge Primary Review and Cambridge Primary Review Trust – over 100 publications plus a host of official submissions and other material – and ensure that as a mainstay of CCoT’s ‘knowledge platform’ it continues as an exemplary source of ideas, information and evidence relating to the development and education of young children, and a standard-bearer for what matters as well as what works.

Further, those teachers who have been engaged with CPRT – whether as recipients of our e-mailings or as members of CPRT regional networks and Schools Alliance – will be able to join CCoT at the College’s founding rate. At the same time we are hoping that at least some of our regional networks and alliance schools will take up the opportunity to transform themselves into CCoT regional communities.

Though the timing looks perfect, it isn’t as serendipitous as it may seem. Robin Alexander (CPR Director and CPRT Chair) and Alison Peacock (CCoT’s first Chief Executive) not only worked together during 2010-12 to disseminate CPR’s messages but were also party to the initial discussions in 2013-14 about what is now CCoT, while during 2016 Robin was a member of CCoT’s Research and Evidence Advisory Group. Common to both CPRT and CCoT is the re-empowerment of teachers after two decades of enforced dependency and compliance. The desired shift is encapsulated in that familiar quote from the CPR final report (p 496) that ‘children will not learn to think for themselves if their teachers are merely expected to do as they are told’ and its less familiar exegesis (also p 496):

We need to move to a position where research-grounded teaching repertoires and principles are introduced through initial training and refined and extended through experience and CPD, and teachers acquire as much command of the evidence and principles which underpin the repertoires as they do of the skills needed in their use. The test of this alternative view of professionalism is that teachers should be able to give a coherent justification for their practices citing (i) evidence, (ii) pedagogical principle and (iii) educational aim, rather than offering the unsafe defence of compliance with what others expect. Anything less is educationally unsound.

At the time there were those who found CPR’s definition of professionalism somewhat daunting, though it made perfect sense to professions such as medicine, law and engineering with which teaching claimed parity. In any event, the belief that true professional empowerment and school improvement are conditional on evidence and teachers’ willingness to seek, create and apply it became an increasingly mainstream aspiration. It was incorporated into government rhetoric (though with one recent Secretary of State expressing open contempt for expertise I daren’t rate official endorsement higher than that) and the mission statements of CCoT.  So with CPR/CPRT approaching its tenth anniversary and the professional context of primary teaching looking rather different now than in 2006, joining forces in this way seemed wholly appropriate. We are particularly pleased that it is with the CPR/CPRT evidence bank that the knowledge platform of the Chartered College of Teaching will be launched.

This blog will be one of CPRT’s last. Our next one, we hope, will formally confirm the new arrangements and no doubt offer some valedictory comments.

For now, stay with us and watch this space.

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Education in spite of policy: further reflections on the 2016 CPRT conference

It encapsulated probably the defining contrast I have seen in nearly 20 years covering education: the under-rated commitment and thoughtfulness of much of the teaching profession versus the endless dysfunction, self-centredness and dishonesty of policymakers and the policy process itself.

Here, in the day-long get-together that was the Cambridge Primary Review Trust’s 10th anniversary conference last Friday in London, was an event to convince any observer of the multi-layered professionalism present at least in potential in England’s schools system.

Yet central to the day’s valedictory keynote by Robin Alexander – he is stepping down at the end of next month after 10 years as this remarkable review’s guiding presence – was the force against which the profession seems so often to be battling. This is the largely shallow, frequently failing and usually self-referential Westminster/Whitehall/think tank policy-spewing machine.

‘Education in spite of policy’ was the strapline to Robin’s speech. This is about as good a five-word summary of the state of play in English schooling in 2016 as it gets.1

‘Ever since the 1988 Education Reform Act started transferring hitherto devolved powers from local authorities and schools to Westminster, policy has become ever more inescapable, intrusive and impervious to criticism,’ he said.

What was needed, then, was not more ‘education reform’ but reform of the policy process itself. Hear, hear.

The Cambridge Primary Review’s Final Report, published in 2009, was unflinchingly critical of the above characteristics in a Labour government which, Robin reminded us, sent documents on the teaching of literacy at the rate of roughly one a week to primary schools in the seven years to 2004. Yet there were some aspects which contributors to the review had welcomed: Labour’s Children’s Plan, Sure Start, Narrowing the Gap and the expansion of early childhood care and education.2

The more relevant question now is whether policymaking has worsened since 2010. While Robin welcomed the concept of the pupil premium, he said the current grammar schools proposal flew in the face of evidence, dating back as far as the 1960s, as to its likely damaging impact on those not selected. ‘To have two initiatives from the same government department pulling in opposite directions, both in the name of narrowing the gap, is bizarre. But hey, that’s policy.’

On four of CPRT’s priorities – aims, curriculum, pedagogy and assessment – policy is worse in 2016 than when the report was published in 2009, he suggested. ‘Aims remain a yawning gap between perfunctory rhetoric and impoverished political reality. The new national curriculum is considerably less enlightened than the one it replaced … national assessment … is now even more confused and confusing than it was; and most government forays into pedagogy are naïve, ill-founded and doctrinaire.’

Policymakers can also be a very bad advert for the concept of education in itself, at least when they step away from the soothing rhetoric. Robin reminded us of this with reference to Michael ‘had enough of experts’ Gove and his famous observation that those teachers and academics who disagreed with him were ‘enemies of promise’ and Marxists ‘hell bent on destroying our schools.’

Listening to the speech, and sitting in on a couple of seminars and the day’s final plenary, was to be reminded of another contrast: between the decades of experience many contributors to the conference had to offer and the callowness of those often now shaping policy. I am loth to personalise, but to listen to Robin and to set his isolation from substantial involvement in policy 3 against the likes of Rachel Wolf, now opining on ‘the next round of education reform’ and the revelation that policymakers ‘must focus on what goes on inside the classroom’ a few years into a career almost entirely free of experience outside the policy bubble is to despair.4

So what of the depth elsewhere in the conference? I was fascinated by talks on the merits of philosophy in primary schools; and on the phenomenally popular, Cambridge University-based NRICH maths programme, whose director, Ems Lord, asked the provocative question: ‘is [maths] mastery enough?’ I found presentations on the ideas behind Learning without Limits,5 by academics at the universities of Cambridge, East Anglia and Edinburgh, as about the most thought-provoking I have heard.

And the final plenary, offering the thoughts of author/journalist Melissa Benn, another distinguished academic in Andrew Pollard and a headteacher in Sarah Rutty, offered much good sense. I was taken by Melissa’s description of a ‘brilliant’ – ie it sounded great – speech in 2013 by Gove, on the subject of primary education, which nevertheless showed a ‘wilful ignorance of the history of education’; welcome to post-truth politics. I was also struck by Andrew’s notion of evidence-informed, rather than evidence-based education, as the former implied the use of value judgement, which was important. However, in relation to policy, in stating that the Department for Education runs ‘consultations which turn out to be pseudo-consultations’, he reminded us how distant any kind of evidence can often feel from the directives.

Finally, Sarah launched into a quickfire, and bleakly humorous, tour de force on what it felt like to be on the end of policy suffused by a ‘lack of trust, lack of empathy, lack of joined-up thinking’, including those endless, and sometimes, she suggested, borderline incomprehensible missives from the Standards and Testing Agency about assessment changes.

‘As a headteacher, I feel a bit bullied if I’m honest. The government are not listening to our voices. They are certainly not listening to the voices of the children,’ she said.

The title of the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review, of course, was ‘Children, their World, their Education.’ Yet policy, in imposing constant change on schools because this fits both its own internal logic and the political needs of those in charge, staggeringly rarely, in reality, stops to consider the effects on those it is meant to help.

If it did, why would it have introduced major increases in the number of children likely to be deemed failing at 11 as a result of changes in the national assessment and curriculum systems without, as far as I know, having carried out any impact study as to the possible effects on pupils?

If it did, why would it have tried to force major disruptive and expensive structural change on thousands of primary schools without any good evidence that this will help pupils?

If it did, why would it publish a green paper on increasing selection without, seemingly, any consideration of the potential impact on pupils not deemed academic enough to pass a selective test?

Professionalism in spite of policy remains, sadly, the only hope for England’s schools.

Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist and author of ‘Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing’ (Methuen, 2007) and the recent CPRT report ‘Academies: autonomy, accountability, quality and evidence‘  (May 2016). Read more CPRT blogs by Warwick here.

 

1 – As is also implicit in a blog I wrote in the spring.

2 – CPR was not alone in this view. Another major review, the Nuffield Review of 14-19 Education and Training, England and Wales led by Richard Pring, also concluded in 2009. It investigated the notion that ‘there have been too many fragmented and disconnected interventions by government which do not cohere in some overall sense of purpose’.

3 – He has reminded me that as well as the 1991-2 ‘three wise men’ enquiry’ he has served on quangos such as CATE and QCA while his persistence over spoken language, in the face of that notorious ministerial objection that classroom talk is no more than ‘idle chatter’, succeeded in getting it reinstated, albeit reluctantly, in the current national curriculum. But my general point stands: on the one hand we have the rich but largely untapped experience and expertise that this conference brought together in abundance; on the other the supplanting of such experience and expertise by ideologically compliant special advisers and ‘expert groups’.

4 – Among several remarkable claims in Rachel Wolf’s blog is that ‘too many schools still resist testing as an “evil”’.   Really? No, they’d no doubt like to resist some of the more damaging impacts of high-stakes testing, but policymaking hangs all on test results, so…

5 – The papers on Learning without Limits will be on the programme’s website from next week.

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Education in spite of policy: reflections on the 2016 CPRT conference

‘It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.’ So observed American science fiction writer Philip K Dick, way back in 1981. Dick, whose work inspired the cult movie Blade Runner, was not talking about education. Thirty-five years ago, such a comment would not have been relevant to schools. It is now.

The current ‘reality’ of primary education is convincing many teachers that insanity might be an inevitable and actually a preferable outcome to continuing in this crazy world where what is educationally wrong is held up as right by those who must be obeyed.

For those of us who daily engage in this topsy-turvy turmoil, the 10th anniversary conference of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust on November 18th was deeply reassuring. It was also by turns depressing, alarming and inspiring, but most of all, for an ordinary classroom teacher such as myself, it was reassuring.

We don’t get out enough. Maybe once a term we escape to talk and share the Catch 22 dilemmas of our working lives. (Don’t teach to the test, but don’t you dare do anything else…) The rest of the time we inhabit classrooms with glass ceilings through which we are scrutinised by Lord Data, he who really must be obeyed, and his many acolytes. Some of these come in paper form, some have only a virtual existence, some, sadly, are only too human. They gaze through the ceiling, tut-tutting and often disagreeing with each other, but we can’t answer back.

Thus it was so heartening to read: ‘What works and what matters: education in spite of policy’ – the title of the conference keynote. Not only was it a relief to be able to applaud the sentiment, but it was also inspiring to realise it was being said in big letters to a hall full of people who all agreed! There was, for example, the new headteacher who took on the job with no training and little experience but who had the guts to get rid of all those time-wasting tracker tick-boxes. There was another head, insistent that she ‘doesn’t want to play their games’, but uncertain how long she can hold out in the face of indifferent Year 6 Sats results. There was the full-time teacher now embarked on a full-time PhD in order to bring philosophic questioning to the primary classroom.

And, of course, there were so many eager to celebrate the moral, ethical, social and cultural aspects of primary education. They daily risk their mental health subverting the accountability systems imposed by politicians, inspectors and academy chain executives to do the right – and sane – thing. As one teacher said: ‘I had my worst time ever as a teacher in May 2016. Those Year 6 Sats ran counter to everything I went into education for.‘ How has this happened? Well, it’s down to a surreal combination of what mad Lord Data says can be measured and what 18th century politicians say 21st century children need to know.

The insanity that is reality was summed up best by Robin Alexander, chair of the Trust, in his keynote speech. Policy is now ‘dangerously counterproductive’. It has become ‘ ever more inescapable, intrusive and impervious to criticism’. Classroom priorities are dictated by politicians increasingly susceptible to personal whim. One only has to remember Michael Gove, responsible for exhuming fronted adverbials, burying calculators and the re-examination of long-dead questions. As Alexander said of an edict from one of Gove’s colleagues: ‘Is it really essential … that every Year 6 pupil should know who shot England’s King William II, especially when this is a question that no historian can answer?’

Such madness is everywhere. Teachers battle with a national curriculum that is, to quote Alexander, neither national nor a curriculum. In the scary era of post-truth politics, the problem is also ‘the sheer dishonesty of the government’s approach’ to what is taught, claiming breadth and balance whilst setting high-stakes tests that enshrine ‘minimalism, narrow instrumentalism and a disdain for culture’. Such machinations are never welcome given that they do a profound disservice to the country’s young children. In times of Brexit and Trump, they are horribly reckless.

And what stands between the children and the reckless politicians? Obviously CPRT with its enlightened curriculum based on ‘reliable evidence and clear and valid vision’. Some campaigners on the side of the sane – for example Melissa Benn seeing hope in a middle-class rebellion and protests such as More than a Score.

And then there’s us – the classroom teachers.  As Robin Alexander said:

It’s the teachers who have heeded this message that the Cambridge Primary Review Trust celebrates. Their insistence on professional autonomy underpinned by reflection, evidence and vision underlines the force of another often-repeated quote from the final report: ‘Children will not learn to think for themselves if their teachers merely do as they are told.’

Teachers do continue to heed the message of the final report of the CPR. All those at the 10th anniversary conference know it is the right way to go and that it is based on evidence not increasingly dodgy ‘data’. They continue to not merely do as they are told. But, make no mistake, this is a heavy responsibility for the overworked and not-terribly-well-paid teacher to shoulder. How much better if we could make sure, as Shakespeare urged, that: ‘Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.’

Stephanie Northen is a primary teacher and journalist and one of our regular bloggers. She contributed to the Cambridge Primary Review final report and is a member of the Board of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust.

by Robin Alexander

Politics at its worst and best

The politics of fear versus the politics of hate. That is how the protagonists themselves have portrayed the EU referendum campaign, and they are right. As for the politics of truth, they’ve been all but silenced by the shameful alliance of bloated ego and rabble-rousing tabloid. The impressionable were impressed, the thoughtful were frustrated, and on that fragile, divisive and dangerous basis the nation has been asked to vote.

And then MP Jo Cox was murdered, and out of that unspeakable act of physical violence – which some have gone as far as attributing directly to the verbal violence of the referendum campaign – came a reminder of another kind of politics: of reason, hope, compassion, inclusivity, selflessness, courage, inspiration and love. The extraordinary and heartfelt public response to Jo Cox’s death bore witness not only to her truly exceptional qualities and achievements but also to how deeply people yearned for a political discourse that appealed to humanity’s best rather than its worst.

What has this to do with primary education? Everything. Most schools espouse a vision of human relations which is diametrically opposed to the divisive and inflammatory rhetoric to which we’ve been treated during the past few months. Somehow they must hold the line against that rhetoric’s malign pervasiveness and champion with children the possibility of a more generous and inclusive world.  Most schools – at least we hope this is so – make the quest for truth and understanding paramount in their shaping of children’s curriculum experiences, yet myths, lies and obfuscation have been rather more prominent of late in the public sphere.  Where teachers consciously strive to foster and enact something different they confirm the finding of the Cambridge Primary Review (final report, p 488) that ‘primary schools may be the one point of stability and positive values in a world where everything else is changing and uncertain. For many, schools are the centre that holds when things fall apart.’

But there’s another educational resonance, with education policy rather than practice. For the divisive and mendacious rhetoric of some prominent figures in the referendum campaign is very much of a piece with what they or their colleagues have used in relation to education. The Michael Gove who compared experts warning against Brexit to the Nazis who organised a smear campaign against Albert Einstein is the same Michael Gove who as England’s Secretary of State for Education called those who dared to disagree with him ‘Enemies of promise … Marxists hell-bent on destroying our schools’.

Nazis? Marxists? This ideological promiscuity is less significant than the calculated attempt to isolate and divide that such name-calling betokens, and in these two instances, which are by no means unique, accusations of smear might more properly be levelled at Gove himself. Indeed, this ploy, which – in case Labour are inclined to be sanctimonious we might recall was regularly used by them to undermine the Cambridge Primary Review – is seen by some politicians as a legitimate weapon for deployment in relation to the EU, education, migration, or any other policy issue on which they set their sights. Its true enemy, of course, is not ‘promise’ but truth.

While Gove’s successor uses less colourful language, she has shown a similar preference for ideology over truth, most notably perhaps in her airy insistence that every school must be an academy regardless of the absence of convincing and replicable evidence to support her claim that this will deliver school and system improvement. Beyond this case are numerous others where if research delivers inconvenient truths it is ignored or rubbished and its purveyors are abused.

Indeed so pervasive and corrosive were these tendencies during the last decade that the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review opened with a chapter entitled ‘The Review and other discourses’ which contrasted the serious search for evidence with the discourses of dichotomy, derision and myth by which education administrations too frequently advance their preferred causes, and then  warned readers of the probability that what they were about to read would itself be a target of these tendencies (it was). Then, 500 pages later and after presenting its main evidence and findings, the report linked the questionable government handling of many key education issues that its evidence had exposed to the much wider democratic deficit chronicled in the Rowntree Trust’s 2004-6 Power enquiry into the condition of British democracy. The Cambridge report said (pp 481-2):

The prosecution of policy relating to primary education does not stand apart from the trends characterised by … the Power enquiry. Indeed, it convincingly exemplifies many of them: centralisation, secrecy and the ‘quiet authoritarianism’ of the new centres of power; the disenfranchising of local voice; the rise of unelected and unaccountable groups and individuals taking key decisions behind closed doors; the ‘empty rituals’ of consultation; the replacement of professional dialogue by the monologic discourse of power; the politicisation of the entire educational enterprise so that it becomes impossible to debate ideas or evidence which are not deemed to be ‘on message’, or which are ‘not invented here’; and,  latterly coming to light, financial corruption.

The Review and its witnesses have highlighted variations on this larger theme of democratic deficit, many of them centering on the nature and quality of the information on which both sound decision-making and effective education depend: the less than complete reliability of official information, particularly in the crucial domain of standards; its lack of independence; the creation and/or dogged perpetuation of educational myths in order to underwrite an exaggerated account of political progress; the key role of the media in shaping the information that reaches government as well as the information that flows from it; the reluctance of decision-makers to countenance or come to grips with alternative information on which better policies could be founded; the use of misinformation to marginalise or discredit ideas running on other than approved lines, and evidence from other than approved sources.

In light of this catalogue of embedded and wilful failure to do what democracy, evidence and good sense demand (and little has changed since these words were written), there is something almost ludicrously disingenuous about the pleas we have heard during the past week for people to stop demonising politicians, as if this is merely an unfortunate but curable habit the public has carelessly slipped into.  If politicians believe they should be trusted and respected they should first ask what has caused trust and respect to be so seriously eroded. Expenses claims for moats and duck houses are the more entertaining end of a continuum whose darker reaches include, sadly, some aspects of education policy, notably in the areas of curriculum, assessment, inspection and systemic school reform.

Which brings us back to Jo Cox. Her husband Brendan told reporters that

She feared for our political culture, not just here in the UK but around the world, detailing her belief that the tone of the debate has echoes of the 1930s, with the public feeling insecure, and politicians willing to exploit that sense. He added: ‘I think she was very worried that the language was coarsening, that people were being driven to take more extreme positions, that people didn’t work with each other as individuals and on issues, it was all much too tribal and unthinking.’

Just so: Gove, Johnson, Farage, Sun and Daily Mail take note. But in yesterday’s Guardian Gaby Hinsliff wrote:

She wasn’t just admirable, she was formidable … Cox knew it wasn’t enough just to wring your hands, it’s what you do that counts. When the shock of her death wears off, Westminster will have to remember that. It’s not enough just to talk about standing up for something better, resisting cheap shots, draining the hatred from politics. It’s what you do about it that counts.

The days of automatic respect for the political class are long gone. Respect now must be earned, and by deeds rather than words. Jo Cox’s remarkable example, whether in Batley, Westminster, Darfur or Syria, is the best possible place to start.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

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.

by Robin Alexander

What’s the point?

In case you missed it…

The House of Commons Education Committee has launched an inquiry into the purpose and quality of education in England.  The deadline for receipt of evidence is 25 January 2016 and submissions may be made via the Committee’s  website  or its online forum. We hope that readers of this blog will respond.

Or do we? When the mother of parliaments asks ‘What’s the point of education?’ we might retort, descending to even greater depths of cynicism than usual, ‘What’s the point of telling you? What’s the point of contributing to yet another consultation when on past form nobody takes any notice?’ and indeed, ‘You ask about educational purposes now? After hundreds of so-called reforms? Are you telling us that these reforms have all been, in the strict sense of the word, pointless?’

But then the voice of moderation gently interposes: ‘It’s true that governments have a lamentable tendency to invite consultations and then ignore the results, for good measure lambasting less than obsequious respondents as “enemies of promise”, “the blob”, “Marxists hell-bent on destroying our schools” and worse. But the House of Commons Education Committee is not the government. Its cross-party gathering of backbenchers tries to hold government to account. It launches enquiries in good faith, inviting evidence, listening to witnesses, and by and large represents fairly their views in reports to which the government is obliged to respond. So while government may continue on its reckless rollercoaster of ill-conceived initiatives that capture headlines, massage ministerial vanity and create scholastic mayhem while never asking the really fundamental questions about educational purpose, our backbenchers deserve credit for attempting to redress the balance.’

So I’ve talked myself, and CPRT, into adding this inquiry to the countless others to which we’ve contributed in the hope of making a difference, and we’ll make our submission in the new year. Please add your voices to ours, for the Committee’s three questions are no less important for being at least a century overdue. They are:

  • What should be the purpose of education in England?
  • What measures should be used to evaluate the quality of education against this purpose?
  • How well does the current education system perform against these measures?

There is no better source for tackling the first question – ‘What should be the purpose of education?’ – than chapter 12 in the Cambridge Primary Review final report.  Entitled ‘What is primary education for?’ it traces and compares the rhetorical and actual purposes of public primary education from the nineteenth century to the present day so as to warn us, before we get carried away, that the old utilitarian habits, mindsets and policy vocabularies die hard and in England efforts to promote a more generous vision of education make headway with difficulty if at all.  It’s not so long ago that a minister announced, crushing any optimism generated by the national curriculum review, that the purpose of primary education is to make children ‘secondary-ready’, no less and, especially, no more.

Undaunted, chapter 12 then synthesises answers to its question about educational purposes from the thousands of witnesses who gave written or oral evidence to the review before coming up with the now well-known statement of 12 aims that informs the work of CPRT and an increasing number of Britain’s schools. These aims balance individual development and fulfilment (well-being, engagement, empowerment, autonomy) with responsiveness to social, societal and global need (encouraging respect and reciprocity, promoting interdependence and sustainability, empowering local, national and global citizenship, celebrating culture and community). The first eight aims are manifested and nurtured through four pedagogical or process aims (exploring, knowing, understanding and making sense; fostering skill; exciting the imagination; enacting dialogue). Each aim is carefully defined and discussed, and the full set adds up to a vision that celebrates the power, vitality and infinite possibility of young children’s development and education: a long way indeed from that tired ministerial mantra, regularly trotted out in BBC interviews, about ‘learning to read, write and do their times tables’. Yes, that, but so much more as well, and how about practising what the national curriculum preaches and using the not overly technical term ‘multiplication’?

So CPR’s exhaustive consultation on the purposes of education does much of the Select Committee’s work, and we may well send them copies of the CPR final report to remind them.

When we consider the Select Committee’s second question – ‘What measures should be used to evaluate the quality of education against this purpose?’ – we collide once again with political habits, mindsets and vocabularies. For the evaluation procedures preferred by governments entertain only what is measurable (the Committee itself has unwittingly perpetuated that one) and in any event attend only to the narrowest segment of educational purposes and outcomes, deeming the rest not so much unmeasurable as not worth the effort.

Since even in relation to literacy the current assessment procedures are said by many to be barely fit for purpose, prospects for a pattern of assessment that does full justice to the larger educational purposes proposed by CPR’s witnesses, and to the rich curriculum that these purposes require, look pretty bleak. So if questions about educational purposes are to have any point at all, they must go hand in hand with reforms of curriculum and assessment considerably more radical than any recent government has either permitted or had the imagination to envisage.

The Select Committee’s third question – ‘How well does the current education system perform against these measures?’ – plunges us deeper into the quagmire, for it muddles ‘ought’ and ‘is’. That is to say, it appears to ask us to adjudicate on the achievement of current educational practice by reference to evaluation procedures which either exist but are unfit for purpose, or which have yet to be devised.

That’s as maybe. But will teachers contribute to the Select Committee’s inquiry or will it be left to others? I ask because during the past few weeks I’ve been visiting schools in connection with CPRT’s project on classroom talk and social disadvantage and for every teacher who is excited by the power of talk in learning and teaching and is eagerly striving to improve it, there is another who is so overwhelmed by government requirements and directives – the new national curriculum, new assessment arrangements, safeguarding, the spectre of Ofsted, endless form-filling and box-ticking – that they can barely entertain anything else.

Too poleaxed by policy to think about pedagogy? Too addled by assessment to think about aims? Has teaching come to this?

All in all, this well-intentioned Select Committee inquiry is a bit of a minefield.  But let that not deter it or us.  There may be a point. Happy New Year.

http://www.robinalexander.org.uk

  • Download the Cambridge Primary Review Trust statement of educational aims here .
  • Submit evidence to the House of Commons Education Committee inquiry here .
  • Join the inquiry’s online forum here .
  • One of CPRT’s eight priorities is  ‘Develop and apply a coherent vision for 21st century primary education; enact CPR’s aims in curriculum, pedagogy and the wider life of the school.’ Read about CPRT’s work in pursuit of this priority here.

This blog was originally published by CPRT on December 18, 2015.

by Robin Alexander

Face the music

Opera North has reported dramatic improvements in key stage 2 test results in two primary schools, one in Leeds, the other in Hull, and both in areas deemed severely deprived. ‘Dramatic’ in this instance is certainly merited: in one of the schools the proportion of children gaining level 4 in reading increased from 78 per cent in 2014 to 98 per cent in 2015, with corresponding increases in writing (75 to 86 per cent) and mathematics (73 to 93 per cent).

But what, you may ask, has this to do with opera?  Well, since 2013 the schools in question – Windmill Primary in Leeds and Bude Park Primary in Hull – have been working with Opera North as part of the Arts Council and DfE-supported In Harmony programme. This aims ‘to inspire and transform the lives of children in deprived communities, using the power and disciplines of community-based orchestral music-making.’  Opera North’s In Harmony project, now being extended, is one of six, with others in Gateshead, Lambeth, Liverpool, Nottingham and Telford. In the Leeds project, every child spends up to three hours each week on musical activity and some also attend Opera North’s after-school sessions. Most children learn to play an instrument and all of them sing. For the Hull children, singing is if anything even more important. Children in both schools give public performances, joining forces with Opera North’s professional musicians. For the Leeds children these may take place in the high Victorian surroundings of Leeds Town Hall.

Methodological caution requires us to warn that the test gains in question reflect an apparent association between musical engagement and standards of literacy and numeracy rather than the proven causal relationship that would be tested by a randomised control trial (and such a trial is certainly needed).  But the gains are sufficiently striking, and the circumstantial evidence sufficiently rich, to persuade us that the relationship is more likely to be causal than not, especially when we witness how palpably this activity inspires and sustains the enthusiasm and effort of the children involved. Engagement here is the key: without it there can be no learning.

It’s a message with which for many years arts organisations and activists have been familiar, and which they have put into impressive practice.  To many members of Britain’s principal orchestras, choirs, art galleries, theatres and dance companies, working with children and schools is now as integral to their day-to-day activity as the shows they mount, while alongside publicly-funded schemes like In Harmony, the Prince’s Foundation for Children and the Arts pursues on an even larger scale the objective of immersing disadvantaged children in the arts by taking them to major arts venues and enabling them to work with leading arts practitioners.  Meanwhile, outside such schemes many schools develop their own productive partnerships with artists and performers on a local basis.

Internationally, the chance move of a major German orchestra’s headquarters and rehearsal space into a Bremen inner-city secondary school created first unease, then a dawning sense of opportunity and finally an extraordinary fusion of students and musicians, with daily interactions between the two groups, students mingling with orchestra members at lunch and sitting with them rehearsals, and a wealth of structured musical projects.

But perhaps the most celebrated example of this movement is Venezuela’s El Sistema, which since 1975 has promoted ‘intensive ensemble participation from the earliest stages, group learning, peer teaching and a commitment to keeping the joy of musical learning and music making ever-present’ through participation in orchestral ensembles, choral singing, folk music and jazz. El Sistema’s best-known ambassador in the UK – via its spectacular performances at the BBC Proms – is the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, and it is El Sistema that provides the model for In Harmony, as it does, obviously, for Sistema Scotland with its ‘Big Noise’ centres in Raploch (Stirling), Govanhill (Glasgow) and Torry (Aberdeen).

By and large, the claims made for such initiatives are as likely to be social and personal as musical, though Geoffrey Baker  has warned against overstating their achievements and even turning them into a cult. Thus Sistema Scotland’s Big Noise is described as ‘an orchestra programme that aims to use music making to foster confidence, teamwork, pride and aspiration in the children taking part’.  There are similar outcomes from Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen’s move into the Tenever housing estate, with dramatic improvements reported in pupil behaviour and the school’s reputation transformed from one to be avoided to one to which parents from affluent parts of the city now queue to send their children.

Similarly, the initial NFER evaluation report on In Harmony cites ‘positive effects on children’s self-esteem, resilience, enjoyment of school, attitudes towards learning, concentration and perseverance’ with, as a bonus, ‘some perceived impact on parents and families including raised aspirations for their children, increased enjoyment of music and confidence in visiting cultural venues, and increased engagement with school.’  Children and the Arts sees early engagement with the arts through its Quest and Start programmes as a way of ‘raising aspirations, increasing confidence, improving communication skills andunlocking creativity.’ Such engagement is offered not only in ‘high-need areas where there is often socio-economic disadvantage or low arts access’ but also, through the Start Hospices programme, to children with life-limiting and life-threatening illnesses and conditions.

The SAT score gains from Opera North’s In Harmony projects in Leeds and Hull add a further justificatory strand; one, indeed, that might just make policymakers in their 3Rs bunker sit up and take notice.  For while viewing the arts as a kind of enhanced PSHE – a travesty, of course – may be just enough to keep these subjects in the curriculum, demonstrating that they impact on test scores in literacy and numeracy may make their place rather more secure.

This, you will say, is unworthily cynical and reductive. But cynicism in the face of policymakers’ crude educational instrumentality is, I believe, justified by the curriculum utterances and decisions of successive ministers over the past three decades, while the reductiveness is theirs, not mine. Thus Nicky Morgan excludes the arts from the EBacc, but in her response to the furore this provokes she reveals the limit of her understanding by confining her justification for the arts to developing pupils’ sense of ‘Britishness’, lamely adding that she ‘would expect any good school to complement [the EBacc subjects] with a range of opportunities in the arts’.  ‘A range of opportunities’ – no doubt extra-curricular and optional – is hardly the same as wholehearted commitment to convinced, committed and compulsory arts education taught with the same eye to high standards that governments reserve for the so-called core subjects.  Underlining the poverty of her perspective, Morgan tells pupils that STEM subjects open career options while arts subjects close them.

What worries me no less than the policy stance – from which, after all, few recent Secretaries of State have deviated – is the extent to which, in our eagerness to convince these uncomprehending ministers that the arts and arts education are not just desirable but essential, we may deploy only those justifications we think they will understand, whether these are generically social, behavioural and attitudinal (confidence, self-esteem) or in the realm of transferable skills (creativity, literacy, numeracy), or from neuroscience research (attention span, phonological awareness, memory). The otherwise excellent 2011 US report on the arts in schools from the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities falls into the same trap of focussing mainly on social and transferable skills, though it does at least synthesise a substantial body of research evidence on these matters which this country’s beleaguered advocates of arts education will find useful.

Let me not be misunderstood: the cognitive, personal and social gains achieved by El Sistema, Children and the Arts, In Harmony and similar ventures are as impressive as they are supremely important for children and society, especially in cultures and contexts where children suffer severe disadvantage.  And if it can be shown that such experiences enhance these children’s mastery of literacy and numeracy, where in the words of CPRT’s Kate Pickett, they encounter a much steeper ‘social gradient’ than their more affluent peers, then this is doubly impressive.

But the danger of presenting the case for arts education solely in these terms, necessary in the current policy climate though it may seem to be, is that it reduces arts education to the status of servant to other subjects, a means to someone else’s end (‘Why study music?’ ‘To improve your maths’) rather than an end in itself; and it justifies the arts on the grounds of narrowly-defined utility rather than intrinsic value. It also blurs the vital differences that exist between the various arts in their form, language, practice, mode of expression and impact.  The visual arts, music, drama, dance and literature have elements in common but they are also in obvious and fundamental ways utterly distinct from each other. They engage different senses, require different skills and evoke different responses – synaptic as well as intellectual and emotional. All are essential. All should be celebrated.

This loss of distinctiveness is perhaps unwittingly implied by the evaluation of the only Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) project in this area. EEF evaluates ‘what works’ interventions designed to enhance the literacy and numeracy attainment of disadvantaged pupils (including CPRT’s own dialogic teaching project) and its ‘Act, Sing, Play’ project has tested the relative impact of music and drama on the literacy and numeracy attainment of Year 2 pupils. It found no significant difference between the two subjects. So, in the matter of using the arts as a way to raise standards in the 3Rs, do we infer that any art will do?

So, yes, the power of the arts, directly experienced and expertly taught, is such that they advance children’s development, understanding and skill beyond as well as within the realms of the auditory, visual, verbal, kinaesthetic and physical. And yes, it should be clearly understood that while the arts can cultivate affective and social sensibilities, when properly taught they are in no way ‘soft’ or intellectually undemanding, and to set them in opposition to so-called ‘hard’ STEM subjects, as Nicola Morgan did, is as crass as claiming that creativity has no place in science or engineering. But until schools have the inclination and confidence to champion art for art’s sake, and to make the case for each art in its own terms, and to cite a wider spectrum of evidence than social development alone, then arts education will continue to be relegated to curriculum’s periphery.

For this is a historic struggle against a mindset that is deeply embedded and whose policy manifestations include a national curriculum that ignores all that we have to come know about the developmental and educative power of the arts, and indeed about its economic as well as cultural value, and perpetuates the same ‘basics with trimmings’ curriculum formula that has persisted since the 1870s and earlier.

That’s why the Cambridge Primary Review argued that the excessively sharp differentiation of ‘core’ and ‘foundation’ subjects should cease and all curriculum domains should be approached with equal seriousness and be taught with equal conviction and expertise, even though, of course, some will be allocated more teaching time than others. This alternative approach breaks with the definition of ‘core’ as a handful of ring-fenced subjects and allows us instead to identify core learnings across a broader curriculum, thereby greatly enriching children’s educational experience, maximising the prospects for transfer of learning from one subject to another, and raising standards.

Seriousness, conviction, expertise: here we confront the challenge of teaching quality. Schemes like Sistema, In Harmony and those sponsored by Children and the Arts succeed because children encounter trained and talented musicians, artists, actors and dancers at the top of their game.  These people provide inspirational role models and there is no limit to what children can learn from them. In contrast, music inexpertly taught – and at the fag-end of the day or week, to boot – not only turns children off but also confirms the common perception that music in schools is undemanding, joyless and irrelevant. Yet that, alas, is what too many children experience. For notwithstanding the previous government’s investment in ‘music hubs’, Ofsted remains pessimistic as to both the quality of music teaching and – no less serious – the ability of some school leaders to judge it and take appropriate remedial action, finding them too ready to entertain low expectations of children’s musical capacities.

But then this is another historic nettle that successive governments have failed to grasp. In its final report  the Cambridge Primary Review recommended (page 506) a DfE-led enquiry into the primary sector’s capacity and resources to teach all subjects, not just ‘the basics’, to the highest standard, on the grounds that our children are entitled to nothing less and because of what inspection evidence consistently shows about the unevenness of schools’ curriculum expertise. DfE accepted CPR’s recommendation and during 2010-12 undertook its curriculum capacity enquiry, in the process confirming CPR’s evidence, arguments and possible solutions. However, for reasons only DfE can explain, the resulting report was never made public (though as the enquiry’s adviser I have seen it).

In every sense it’s time to face the music.

As well as being Chair of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, Robin Alexander is a Trustee of the Prince’s Foundation for Children and the Arts.

 www.robinalexander.org.uk

by Robin Alexander

Jerome Bruner at 100

APA interviewer: ‘You’ll be turning 100 this year …’
Jerome Bruner: ‘Yes! Isn’t that nifty?’

Today is the 100th birthday of Jerome Bruner, one of contemporary education’s greatest. Admirers around the world are celebrating this more than nifty event and wishing him well. CPRT gladly joins them. Happy birthday, Jerry!

There was a time when trainee teachers explored education’s founding ideas and knew something about those who generated them. Latterly, educational ideas of any kind have been lampooned by one English Education Secretary as ‘barmy theory’, while their purveyors have been called ‘enemies of promise’ by another – and oh how the tabloids stamped and cheered. Nowadays, trainee teachers must concentrate on ‘requirements’; that is to say, policy diktats whose authority resides not in evidence or argument, let alone wisdom, but simply in the fact of their being imposed and policed from above.

So let us take time to celebrate one for whom ideas, evidence and argument really matter, who is indeed wise, and who over the past seventy years has drawn us into conversation and held us there – for such is the power of his wonderfully lucid and engaging prose. Bruner’s conversation, like Bakhtin’s an unending one, is about human development, cognition, learning, schooling, culture, law, narrative and much else; in sum, to coin the question underpinning his revolutionary 1960s curriculum Man, a Course of Study, about what it is to be human.

Consider the cognitive revolution, scaffolding, constructivism, the spiral curriculum, paradigmatic and narrative modes of cognitive functioning, folk pedagogy and … the list goes on. Insights such as these inform so much of our current thinking about the conditions for productive learning and teaching that we may take them for granted, and many in our profession may not even know their source.

Chris Watkins is one of several who have written splendid birthday blogs and tributes, and I can do no better than refer you to him and to them via the links below. But first, here are some familiar Bruner quotes to greet as friends old or new.

Education research should never have been conceived as principally dedicated to evaluating the efficacy or impact of ‘present practices.’ … The master question from which the mission of education research is derived is: What should be taught to whom and with what pedagogical object in mind?

We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.

A quiet revolution has taken place in developmental psychology … It is not only that we have begun to think again of the child as a social being – one who plays and talks with others, learns through interactions with parents and teachers – but because we have come once more to appreciate that through such social life the child acquires a framework for interpreting experience, and learns how to negotiate meaning … Making sense is a social process.

The reality that we impute to the worlds we inhabit is a constructed one … Reality is made, not found.

Language is for using, and the uses of language are so varied, so rich, and each use so preemptive a way of life, that to study it is to study the world and, indeed, all possible worlds.

We can trace three themes in relation to discourse … discourse as scaffolding … discourse as the negotiation of meaning … discourse as the transfer of cultural representations.

Education is not just about conventional school matters like curriculum or standards or testing. What we resolve to do in school only makes sense when considered in the broader context of what the society intends to accomplish through its educational investment in the young. How one conceives of education … is a function of how one conceives of culture and its aims, professed and otherwise.

Intellectual activity is anywhere and everywhere, whether at the frontier of knowledge or in a third-grade classroom.

To play is not just child’s play. Play … is a way of using mind, or better yet, an attitude towards the use of mind. It is a test frame, a hot house for trying out ways of combining thought and language and fantasy.

The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion – these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.

The main objective of teaching is to… open up a wider range of possibilities… to go beyond the information given.

I want … to leapfrog over the issue of school subjects and curricula in order to deal with a more general matter: the mode of thinking that helps children … create a version of the world in which … they can envisage a place for themselves … I believe that story making, narrative, is what is needed for that … The importance of narrative for the cohesion of a culture is as great as it is in structuring an individual life … What we all do for each other is to keep telling our stories. That is how we live with the ordinary and its setbacks.

School reform without concomitant economic reform is simply not sufficient.

www.robinalexander.org.uk 

Read Chris Watkins’s IoE blog celebrating Jerome Bruner’s 100th.

Read Jerome Bruner’s centenary interview for the American Psychological Association (the APA referred to at the head of this blog).

Read the tribute from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

Watch a televised interview with Jerome Bruner for the Association of Psychological Science.

Buy Jerome Bruner’s two-volume selection from his writing from 1957 to 2006, In Search of Pedagogy.

 

 

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