The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

by Robin Alexander

True Grit – the sequel

Last January I noted Secretary of State Nicky Morgan’s ambition, surfing the wave of educational fashion, to make Britain ‘a global leader in teaching character … ensuring that young people not only grow academically, but also build character, resilience and grit.’ To that end, DfE invited bids for projects showing how her version of ‘character’ might be built, and on 16 March there was a grand ceremony at which the 2015 Character Awards of £15,000 each were presented to the 27 winners, with an additional £20,000 prize for the lucky best of the best.

In my blog of 30 January I traced the American roots of the current trade in grit – serious thinking about what it takes to cope with today’s world all but swamped by corporatism, psychobabble and John Wayne – and its curious melding with ‘play up, play up and play the game’, that very British but decidedly passé transmogrification of life’s experiences and vicissitudes into a public school playing field peopled by muscular males. I also reported Jeffrey Snyder’s objection to ‘grit and resilience’ as currently formulated on the grounds that it is ‘untethered from morals, values and ethics’, and John White’s concern, rather underlined by the DfE awards themselves, that instead it is ‘tied to an ideology of winners and losers.’

Having now seen the list of awards I must eat some though not all of my words, for among the winners are some undoubtedly impressive and indeed moving initiatives, including several schools striving to raise disadvantaged children’s self-esteem, and these are reassuringly remote from the headline-grabbing crudity of the Nicky Morgan paradigm.

Yet even before the results were announced there were rumblings about the competition procedure, which required interested schools to nominate themselves and then justify their claims to a prize by briefly answering six questions.  One of these asked for evidence of the impact of their character-forming strategies on their students, but critics of the scheme claimed that such evidence counted for less than the eloquence of schools’ answers, that these were not independently checked for accuracy, and that the provision of genuinely verifiable evidence was optional.

We have not been told how many of England’s schools entered this somewhat bizarre competition, but we can safely assume that the overwhelming majority did not.  Most, quite simply, will have been too busy to do so.  Some will have been unwilling to have their names linked to what looked suspiciously like a pre-election political stunt. Others will have been justly offended by the implication that schools don’t attend to their students’ personal and interpersonal development unless DfE instructs them to, and that even then they require a £15,000 incentive. Others again, as my January blog suggested, will have objected to being told to replace their carefully conceived and sensitively nurtured efforts in this direction by a recipe from which ethics, communality, plurality, social responsibility and global understanding were apparently to be excluded.  And, for that matter, the CPR aims of respect, reciprocity, interdependence, sustainability, culture and community?

The ingredients, in fact, of citizenship. But then, Ms Morgan’s government has made citizenship optional at Key Stages 1 and 2.

Which is not to say, as I’ve stressed above, that the winners did not deserve to be recognised for the work they do. But equally deserving of recognition, surely, are the thousands of schools whose teachers value and nurture  ‘character’ with no less commitment and success, but perhaps more consistently manifest that character by not competing with others to advertise the fact.

All of which raises a troubling question about the government’s cynical view of professional motivation. Not only are there many more awards for teaching now than there were, say, thirty years ago – in itself no bad thing in a country that has tended to take this most essential of professions for granted – but the award industry has become increasingly and dangerously politicised, with what Warwick Mansell has calculated as a disproportionate showering of gongs on academy heads at the tendency’s apex.

Fortunately, most teachers are motivated by something more profound and less self-serving than the hope or expectation of such baubles. Indeed, in the matter of leading our children by example, we might argue that it’s the unsung thousands of teachers who disdain ministerial threats and bribes who most truly manifest grit and resilience.

Nicky Morgan modestly lauded her character-building wheeze as ‘a landmark step for our education system.’ If we add together all the landmark steps announced by recent education ministers we’ll have a veritable staircase. Does it, I wonder, lead up or down?

www.robinalexander.org.uk

For other blogs by Robin Alexander click here and/or download CPRT’s book Primary Colours.

 

by Robin Alexander

Mind the Gap

It’s official: money can buy you happiness. Well, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), that is.

But hold on: two years ago the evidence purported to show the opposite, confirming the pessimistic adage, while a quick internet scroll back a decade or two shows ostensibly secure data on this matter flipping backwards and forwards as often as it attracts media attention.

Do those who report these serially contradictory findings about the relationship between wealth and happiness pause to check today’s news against yesterday’s? Or ask whether interviewing a bored billionaire might be missing the point? Or consider instead the genuinely newsworthy but this time entirely consistent findings about poverty, and especially the damaging impact on health, education and wellbeing of childhood poverty?

In 2009, Kate Pickett co-authored the influential study The Spirit Level: why equality is better for everyone.  This showed that the issue is not wealth as such but the extent of the gap between rich and poor, and the way that this most basic of inequalities correlates with a host of others, not least in children’s educational opportunities, experiences and outcomes. This was an argument that politicians of all parties were keen to be seen to embrace, and to which initiatives like New Labour’s Narrowing the Gap and the coalition government’s Pupil Premium bear witness.

Today CPRT publishes Mind the Gap, a new report specially commissioned from the same Kate Pickett, who with Laura Vanderbloemen revisits the evidence that unequal educational outcomes are closely associated with social inequality – and its converse, that more equal societies have narrower attainment gaps and higher average attainment levels (they also perform better on measures of wellbeing and happiness, as it happens).  We urge you to download and read their report; and we hope that CPRT’s regional networks and alliance schools will give a lead in ensuring that it is disseminated and discussed. If you wish to cut straight to the conclusions there’s also a three-page briefing, though the evidence, tables and graphs in the main report deserve and repay attention.

So far, CPRT has published three research reviews in this series. There will eventually be twelve, and from now on the pace of publication increases, with all twelve reports due to be in print by March/April 2016.  Their aim is to update and extend the considerable body of published evidence surveyed for the Cambridge Primary Review in 2007-9 and then revised and combined into a major research compendium in 2010.

‘The gap’ has always been a prominent theme for CPR/CPRT. As CPR said then, and as the new CPRT report reminds us now:

Britain remains a very unequal society. Child poverty persists in this, one of the world’s richest nations. Social disadvantage blights the early lives of a larger proportion of children in Britain than in many other rich nations, and this social and material divide maps with depressing exactness onto the gap in educational attainment … While recent concerns should be heeded about the pressures to which today’s children are subject, and the undesirable values, influences and experiences to which some are exposed, the main focus of policy should continue to be on narrowing the gaps in income, housing, health, care, risk, opportunity and educational attainment suffered by a significant minority of children, rather than on prescribing the character of the lives of the majority. (Children, their World, their Education , p 488).

It was the apparent intractability of this challenge, and politicians’ seeming imperviousness to the illogicality or perhaps hypocrisy of trumpeting their efforts to close the gap in educational attainment while pursuing policies that widen the contingent gaps in income, health and wellbeing, that led CPRT to nominate as its top priority the pursuit of equity. Of course, equity and equality are not synonymous. But if the level of income into which far too many of our children happen to be born so severely conditions their educational prospects and future lives, and if – as Pickett and Vanderbloemen remind us – children do better if their parents have higher incomes and higher levels of education, then this is hardly fair or just and equity and equality become inseparable.

The new report doesn’t just document the gaps. It also assesses efforts by policymakers to close them.  One of these is the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), substantially part-funded by DfE to identify and evaluate promising school-based initiatives designed to narrow the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their peers. One such EEF initiative is CPRT’s own project Classroom talk, social disadvantage and educational attainment, whose programme of intensive support for dialogic teaching begins its trial phase next week in schools in Birmingham, Bradford and Leeds.

Policy initiatives such as these can and do make a difference, as do the impressive efforts of politically independent charities like the Sutton Trust and the Prince’s Foundation for Children and the Arts. But of course what has by far the greatest impact, for it does not depend on the vagaries of externally funded interventions and is sustained into the longer term, is the work of those thousands of teachers who simply by being there, and by combining skill with compassion and energy, are able day after day to refute the unbending determinism of the ‘cycle of disadvantage’.

So when Kate Pickett and Laura Vanderbloemen conclude that ‘reducing educational inequality will ultimately depend on reducing social and economic inequality’ they are neither yielding to that same determinism nor discounting the achievements of the many teachers who help their pupils to succeed against the odds. Rather, they are reminding us of the typically British folly of educational and economic policies which are unjoined-up to the point of being self-defeating, while encouraging politicians to meet the challenge of inequitable inequality holistically rather than piecemeal.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

Download the new CPRT report ‘Mind the Gap: tackling social and educational inequality.’

Download a short briefing about this report.

For other blogs by Robin Alexander click here and/or download CPRT’s book Primary Colours.

by Robin Alexander

Now we are (nearly) ten

This is CPRT’s last blog before holidays, staff changes and asbestos close its office for the month of August.  The asbestos is in the ceiling void of our 1960s building; its removal, we are assured, will be without risk to any of us. The staff change, nothing to do with asbestos, is the departure for Liverpool of our excellent administrator Greg Frame, and his replacement on 1st September by Matt Coward.

So this is a good time to take stock and flag some of our plans for 2015-16. They are nothing if not ambitious.

In the two years since its launch in 2013, the Cambridge Primary Review Trust has established itself as a substantial and distinctive educational presence. Substantial in respect of scale as well as significance; distinctive in the vast and unrivalled corpus of evidence and hard thinking in which its work is grounded.  Not just the Cambridge Primary Review of course, but also – because the quest for evidence cannot cease – research undertaken by the Trust itself. Much of this material, from both the Review and the Trust, is readily accessible via the CPRT website, which provides a formidable and essential resource for anybody involved in primary education.

Consider the scale of CPRT’s operation as it stands today. It has thirteen regional networks which, after an admittedly halting start in some cases, are forging ahead with teacher conferences, action research, reading groups and other activities. The once separate CPRT Schools Alliance  is firmly dovetailed into this regional structure so that local activities respond to local concerns. The number of such schools is growing and from September that growth will accelerate sharply. Together, the Regional Network Forum (which brings together network co-ordinators and Alliance representatives) and the Board of the Trust have identified a number of strategies for bringing the fruits of these regional activities into the national mainstream and we shall implement them during 2015-16.

So: if you are reading this blog but are not yet involved in CPRT’s regional activities, or if you lead a lively school and value a professional culture of ideas and debate rather than mere compliance, please consider joining us via one of the regional networks and/or the Schools Alliance. To find out more, and to join us, follow the links in the previous paragraph.

Schools, too, are involved in our CPD collaboration with Pearson. So far this has yielded regional curriculum conferences in conjunction with eleven of the subject associations, the much praised handbook Primary Curriculum 2014, and school-based CPD programmes on curriculum audit, children’s voice and assessment without levels. The next stage of the collaboration is now under consideration.

Meanwhile, CPRT has initiated fourteen research projects. Each seeks to address one or more of the Trust’s priorities – equity, voice, community, sustainability, aims, curriculum, pedagogy, assessment. Through specially commissioned research reviews we invite leading experts to assess published evidence bearing on these priorities and identify implications for policy and practice. Three of the resulting reports have already been published, one is in production for launch in September, and a further eight will follow before next March. (See our blog of 3 July for topics, authors and anticipated publication dates).

Then, with help from Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the extensive paper, electronic and media archive of the Cambridge Primary Review has been lodged in the Borthwick Institute awaiting final cataloguing and indexing, at which point it will become available to researchers.

The biggest of our research ventures, the Educational  Endowment Foundation (EEF) project on dialogic teaching and social disadvantage, moves in September into its trial phase in schools in Birmingham, Bradford and Leeds after a pilot in London. Initiated by CPRT and led jointly by the Trust and the Institute for Effective Education (IEE) at the University of York, this project is developing and evaluating a professional support programme designed to ensure that classroom talk is of the character and quality which will have a measurable impact on pupils’ engagement and learning and will hence help close the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and the rest. The auspices from related  projects both here and in the United States are good, and we hope that the CPRT/IEE project’s findings will finally bury the deplorable perception – against which we campaigned vigorously during the national curriculum review and with some success, but which is still discernible in the DfE programmes of study – that spoken language is somehow incidental to the ‘real’ business of children’s education.

With that precedent in mind, CPRT engages with the policy process whenever and wherever it can, regularly submitting evidence to formal consultations and seeking discussions with policy stakeholders;  but also, where necessary – which seems to be rather too often these days – using its blog and other public platforms to expose those ministerial utterances and initiatives that seem to be particularly misguided, or which blatantly privilege ideology and prejudice over evidence and the common good.

All these strands of CPRT’s work will continue during 2015-16, and alongside the publication of a further nine research reports and briefings we anticipate continuing expansion of the regional networks and Schools Alliance. But there will be two further developments.

The first is a series of regional conferences for school leaders on ‘Making our schools research active’. The self-sustaining school system towards which England is supposed to be moving will not be viable without the high-protein sustenance afforded by evidence; evidence not only of the kind generated by large funded initiatives like the CPRT/IEE dialogic teaching project but also that which arises from the efforts of schools themselves, especially when they work in collaboration with other schools and/or with dedicated research providers. Hence, for example, CPRT’s South West Research Schools Network.

So in March 2016 our Leeds and West Yorkshire network will pilot a ‘Making our schools research active’ event which will explore models and cases for sourcing, generating and applying research in situ, making the research consciousness familiar and habitual rather than extraneous or rarefied. This will then be rolled out as a regional roadshow, hosted by each of CPRT’s other networks in turn.

The other initiative for 2015-16 takes advantage of not one anniversary but two. In April 2016 the Trust, supported by Pearson, will have been in busy existence for three years, while October 2016 marks the tenth anniversary of the launch of the Cambridge Primary Review itself. That month, therefore, we hope to hold a major national conference. It will be both retrospective and prospective, and honest as well as celebratory. It will set what CPR and CPRT aimed to achieve against what they have actually achieved, and it will examine areas where they have been less successful and ask why. It will subject national primary education policy, the inescapable and often strident accompaniment to all that we have attempted, to the same degree of critical scrutiny, perhaps testing the proposition that schools succeed in spite of policy, not because of it.

If all this sounds a tad introspective, the conference will also showcase and celebrate what by then will be a substantial body of CPRT-supported work from schools, regional networks and researchers that builds on CPR’s aims and evidence, and it will invite other individuals and organisations to swell the cornucopia with their own ideas and experience. On this basis we hope that we can recover a primary education of relevance, quality, humanity and excitement, rescuing it from the ossified politics of tests, phonics and long division.

We believe that in the coming school year the Cambridge Primary Review Trust will have a great deal to offer. We hope you agree.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

For other blogs by Robin Alexander click here and/or download CPRT’s book Primary Colours.

by Robin Alexander

Evidence with Vision: more CPRT research reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.robinalexander.org.uk

Click here for further information about the CPRT research surveys

Download publications list 

by Robin Alexander

Flying the Primary Colours

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.robinalexander.org.uk

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

by Robin Alexander

Election 2015: here we stand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.robinalexander.org.uk

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

by Robin Alexander

Teaching to the text: England and Singapore

Hearken, if you will, unto DfE Minister Nick Gibb:

I would like to see all schools, both primary and secondary, using high quality textbooks in all subjects, bringing us closer to the norm in high performing countries … In this country, textbooks simply do not match up to the best in the world, resulting in poorly designed resources, damaging and undermining good teaching … Ministers need to make the case for more textbooks in schools, particularly primary schools.

At the conference of the Publishers Association (PA) and the British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA) at which Minister Gibb thus nailed his colours to a rather colourless mast, he did rather more than ‘make the case’ and modestly depart. (Minister Liz Truss had delivered the same message to the same audience a year earlier, to little effect). In the discussion that followed his speech Gibb said that publishers should produce the textbooks that teachers need, not what they want, and that if they don’t do so then DfE may have to introduce state approval or kitemarking of textbooks, as in some other countries.

There’s a lot to unpack and unpick here: the assumption that among PISA top performers it’s textbooks that make the difference (the familiar confusion of association with causality); that what appears to hold for secondary students tested by PISA must therefore hold for their primary school peers; that what works for maths works for all other subjects; that what teachers want for their pupils is not what those pupils need (teachers may wish to count to ten before responding); that PISA is all that matters; and that government has both the right and the competence to act as arbiters of textbook quality and impose its judgements on every teacher and child in the land.

There are also the familiar contradictions. In the same speech, the Minister characterised his government’s ‘new approach to educational policy’ since 2010 as ‘designed to foster the autonomy of the teaching profession and sweep away the prescriptive and ideological national strategies’. The national strategies were indeed prescriptive, but replacing one kind of prescription by another seems a decidedly odd way to foster professional autonomy.  In any case, weren’t textbooks, albeit in ring binder form, central to Labour’s national strategies?

Ah, but the difference is that Labour’s policies were ‘ideological’ while the current government’s are dispassionate and objective.  But to this helpful separation of the good guys from the bad (for without ministerial guidance how would we possibly tell the difference?) the Minister adds a further semantic tease.  For while Labour’s textbooks/ring binders were ideological, the neglect of textbooks in English schools relative to their heavy use in Singapore (the system the Minister wants us to copy) was ideological too.  Thus Gibb complains of ‘ideological hostility to the use of textbooks, particularly in primary schools.’

Ideological textbook prescription, ideological opposition to textbooks … Can he have it both ways? Yes indeed, for as used by ministers, ‘ideological’ means merely (of a phenomenon) what the minister doesn’t like, and (of a person) someone who has the audacity to disagree with him. Remember Minister Gibb’s erstwhile DfE colleague Michael Gove? In accordance with established legislative procedure he invited comment on drafts of the new national curriculum, only to  lambast those whose comments were less than fulsomely supportive as ‘enemies of promise … Marxists hell-bent on destroying our schools.’ Clearly, such folk misread the DfE invitation. They should have known that ‘comment’ meant, as no doubt it does in North Korea, ‘applaud’. Who then is the Marxist – the respondent to DfE consultations, Kim Jong-un or Comrade Gove?

Rum cove, politics.  And with the 2015 general election only a few weeks away there’ll be a lot more of this kind of thing before we’re done. So let’s momentarily escape and consider the substantive issue. Gibb’s PA/BESA speech made its case for textbooks by drawing on a paper by Tim Oates that looked at over 200 textbooks in five PISA high-performing jurisdictions, including Singapore, and compared them with England. Textbook use in England, at least in the crucial sense of textbook dependency and compliance, is indeed much lower: in the 2011 TIMSS survey, 70 per cent of Singapore teachers said they used textbooks as the basis for maths teaching compared with only 10 per cent in England; though here textbooks weren’t, as Gibb claimed, viewed with ‘ideological hostility’ but were used by 64 per cent of teachers ‘as a supplement’, which suggests that resources here are used flexibly rather than unquestioningly. Which also sounds reassuringly like teachers exercising the very professional autonomy that Gibb claims his government has fostered.

Oates shows how the best textbooks are well grounded in learning theory as well as subject content, and how they offer range, coherence and clarity in structuring that content for teaching. In other words, they can be, without question, a valuable resource. Further, he reminds us that high stakes tests have narrowed the curriculum (a post-1997 trend chronicled in the Cambridge Primary Review final report  and again, for the period since 2010, in Wynne Harlen’s recent CPRT research review). Interestingly, he suggests that well-structured and ‘expansive’ textbooks ‘could be an antidote to such narrowing’.  He adds that ‘in key jurisdictions, high performing teachers are well-disposed and enthusiastic about textbooks.’

All of this underlines Oates’s concern that opposition to textbooks in England confuses the question of textbook quality with unease about central prescription. But that unease, in view of Gibb’s remarks and the still-vivid memory of Labour’s national strategies and their policing by Ofsted, is hardly surprising; for the Minister is clearly saying that government, not the teaching profession, is the arbiter of textbook quality. Which is exactly the line that Labour took when it imposed its national strategies, extending that presumption of omniscience beyond lesson content to teaching methods, pupil grouping and the allocation of time. There’s a corrosive legacy of blatantly politicized intervention in teaching to which both Labour and Conservative need to own up if they wish their  proposals to be viewed with other than the deepest suspicion.

Back to Oates.  Although he notes that textbook use needs to be embedded in a coherent pedagogy and is just one of a number of ‘control factors’ whereby governments may try to ensure that the curriculum as taught ‘delivers’ the curriculum as prescribed, he does not address the ethical  and political questions raised by this notion and its somewhat chilling vocabulary; for teaching is a moral matter, not merely a technical one. Nor, apparently, has he persuaded ministers to recognise that pedagogy is a system of interdependent elements rather than an aggregation of discrete factors that can be cherry-picked to fuel a media headline or score a political point in the way that ministers are currently doing with textbooks and their predecessors did with whole class teaching.

This alternative perspective is fundamental to my own work on pedagogy going back more than 30 years. It is no less fundamental to what is by far the largest, most detailed and most authoritative research study to date of educational practice in Singapore, a system which both Gibb and Oates wish England to emulate. The Core 2 Research Programme was led by David Hogan, who until recently was Principal Research Scientist at Singapore’s National Institute of Education and for nine years has intensively researched Singaporean schooling. He is currently working with his colleagues Dennis Kwek and Peter Renshaw on CPRT’s new research review on effective teaching.  The Core 2 research is conspicuously absent from both Oates’s paper and ministers’ consciousness.

Core 2 entailed systematic observation, video-recording, interviews and outcome measures in a large and nationally representative stratified sample of Primary 5 (pupils aged 10-11) and Secondary 3 classrooms (14-15) where the unambiguous focus is examination preparation and success. Through multi-level statistical modelling the research team assessed the relationship between various classroom practices, including the use of textbooks, and student achievement in mathematics and English.

The Core 2 findings on the impact of textbooks, though in certain respects positive, are not as straightforward as our Minister would like. Hogan and his colleagues confirm that in Singapore teacher reliance on textbooks is indeed high in mathematics, though not in English. The effects of textbooks are statistically significant in models of the relationship between traditional instruction, direct instruction and student achievement. Overall, however, textbooks do not have a statistically significant impact in either maths or English; and while they do have a statistically significant indirect impact in maths, this is not the case in English.

This subject variation supports scepticism about the Minister’s blanket commitment to a textbook for every subject. But more important is Hogan’s insistence that it’s essential to look well beyond bivariate relationships of the kind that ministers prefer in order to grasp how textbook use and impact are part of the much larger and more complex business of pedagogy, which in turn is embedded in and shaped by culture, history, values and beliefs relating to teaching, learning, knowledge and the goals of education (issues that I investigated in some detail in my own five-nation Culture and Pedagogy).

Thus, in a recent email exchange, David Hogan told me that

In Singapore textbooks are an integral part of an assessment-driven instructional system that effectively integrates elements of traditional and direct instruction … It [does not focus] on learning for deep understanding through carefully designed and calibrated tasks intended to develop a broad range of skills, understandings and dispositions. Rather, it is a highly efficient and effective pedagogical system driven by a limited and highly instrumental and functionalist set of institutional rules.

Crucially, he added:

In my view it would be a mistake to permit textbooks to drive classroom pedagogy in English primary schools: given the current English assessment regime … it would further enhance the transformation of primary school classrooms into pedagogical facsimiles of secondary school classrooms. This might well improve the performance of English students in TIMSS and PISA, but it will compromise the quality of education they get.

And again, in a recent piece entitled ‘Why is Singapore’s school system so successful, and is it a model for the West?’ David Hogan warned:

Singapore’s experience and its current efforts to improve the quality of teaching and learning do have important, if ironic, implications for systems that hope to emulate its success. This is especially true of those jurisdictions – I have in mind England and Australia especially – where conservative governments have embarked on ideologically driven crusades to demand more direct instruction of (Western) canonical knowledge, demanding more testing and high stakes assessments of students, and imposing more intensive top-down performance regimes on teachers.

In my view, this is profoundly and deeply mistaken. It is also more than a little ironic given the reform direction Singapore has mapped out for itself over the past decade. The essential challenge facing Western jurisdictions is not so much to mimic East Asian instructional regimes, but to develop a more balanced pedagogy that focuses not just on knowledge transmission and exam performance, but on teaching that requires students to engage in subject-specific knowledge building. Knowledge building pedagogies recognise the value of established knowledge, but also insist that students need to be able to do knowledge work as well as learn about established knowledge. Above all, this means students should acquire the ability to recognise, generate, represent, communicate, deliberate, interrogate, validate and apply knowledge claims in light of established norms in key subject domains.

In the long run, this will do far more for individual and national well-being, including supporting development of a vibrant and successful knowledge economy, than a regressive quest for top billing in international assessments.

The distinction arising from the Core 2 research between the pedagogies of performativity (curriculum coverage, knowledge transmission, test preparation and success) and knowledge building (defined in the quote above) is both crucial to our understanding of what goes on in Singaporean schools and highly relevant to the debate about England’s national curriculum and the role of textbooks in its implementation. For Hogan judges that Singapore’s undoubted prowess at performativity has been at the expense of the knowledge-building which is no less essential to social and economic progress and which he believes is one of the strengths of English education. As it happens, he has used these two versions of pedagogy to compare schools in Singapore and London, and on knowledge-building the London schools do well.

There’s clearly a discussion to be had about the narrower question of textbooks and other published resources in primary schools, and I hope this blog will encourage that. As a matter of fact, it’s a discussion in which many of us have been involved, via the Expert Subjects Advisory Group (ESAG) and CPRT’s own collaboration with the subject associations and Pearson, since long before Tim Oates presented his thoughts and Nick Gibb dropped his bombshell. Indeed, it was DfE itself that set up ESAG to help teachers locate and evaluate resources for implementing the new national curriculum in line with the new, post-Labour professional freedoms. Perhaps our Minister has forgotten that.

But the more fundamental debate, which is marginalised by ministers’ obsession with international test performance, is about the proper nature and purposes of 21st century education. To adapt the Minister’s comment at the PA/BESA conference: a test-driven curriculum and a textbook-driven pedagogy may be what Nick Gibb wants, but are they what our children need?

Postscript

Since this blog coincides with the death of Lee Kuan Yew, the man who presided over Singapore’s remarkable economic and social transformation into the international powerhouse that it is today, it’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves of two salient differences mentioned by neither Oates nor Gibb: scale and politics. Singapore is a city state with 5.14 million inhabitants and just 182 primary schools (the corresponding figures for England are 53 million and 16,818). When manageable scale is combined with an authoritarian political regime, government has at its fingertips potent levers for rapid  and wholesale systemic reform.  As a comparativist I believe that it is essential to learn from others, and this blog reminds us that there is certainly much we can learn from Singapore. But, as David Hogan and the Core 2 research show, wrenching one factor in another system’s success from its cultural, political, historical, demographic and pedagogical roots is neither valid nor viable.

The Guardian obituary for Lee credits him with creating ‘a strong, pervasive role for the state and little patience for dissent.’ Given the current government’s track record on appointing advisers and handling evidence perhaps that’s the lesson from elsewhere that ministers would really prefer us to accept.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

Given Nick Gibb’s disarmingly simple claims about textbooks and the much more complex evidence from Singapore it would be extremely helpful to this debate if primary schools rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted would tell us what part textbooks have played in their schools’ success.

We would also like to hear what teachers think – all teachers, not just those from schools deemed outstanding – about the Minister’s campaign for textbooks in all subjects in the primary phase, and his hint about DfE kitemarking. And of course about the kind of pedagogy that serves the larger purposes of primary education.

 

by Robin Alexander

Mindful or mindless?

I’ve been invited to attend a conference on the educational and economic importance of ‘non-cognitive skills’.  The invitation is accompanied by a glossy booklet in which various notables expatiate on the ‘development of character, non-cognitive skills, mindfulness and well-being’.

The invitation arrived while I was checking the final draft of the new CPRT report on children’s cognitive development and learning, commissioned from leading cognitive neuroscientist Usha Goswami and published earlier this week.

The two documents couldn’t be more different. In Goswami’s report, cognition – the ways, in Bruner’s words, that humans ‘achieve, categorise, remember, organise and use their knowledge of the world’ – is at the heart of the educational enterprise. But the conference booklet castigates this focus on cognition, re-labelled ‘cognitive skills’, for neglecting much of what education should be about.

What is going on here? And does it matter?

Let’s take the second question first.  Well yes, how we think about thinking, learning and knowing matters a great deal, and to no group of professionals should it matter more than to teachers, for exciting and advancing these processes in pursuit of an educational vision is their job. Indeed, one of the strengths of the professional world of primary education used to be its belief in the need for classroom relationships and decisions to be grounded in evidence about how young children develop, think and learn. Reflecting this, the first 10 chapters of the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review are devoted to children and childhood.

Such evidence doesn’t stand still, which is why CPR commissioned the research reviews that CPRT is now revisiting and updating. Nor is child developmental evidence on its own a sufficient basis for teaching, though there was a time during the 1960s and 1970s that some believed this and constructed teacher training courses accordingly, thereby offering trainees knowledge of children but not of how to teach them. Now, thankfully, our take on pedagogy is more comprehensive.

So when someone says ‘I’ve seen the future and it’s non-cognitive’ is this the latest stage in the refinement of our account of teachers’ core business or merely the latest educational fashion? What, to return to my other question, is going on here?

My conference booklet answers thus: today’s schools are not equipping tomorrow’s citizens and employees with what they will need in order to cope, work and prosper in a fast-changing world, so something different is needed. Nothing new here of course: during the past few decades pundit after pundit and report after report – including the Cambridge Primary Review – has levelled this same charge at established patterns of schooling in the UK.   The current iteration focuses, with some justice in view of the UK’s poor showing in international studies, on the importance of well-being and children’s capacities to manage their lives positively and productively. This was the claimed impetus for the Secretary of State’s recent intervention on character, grit and resilience (see our blog on 30 January).

But what is worrying about the current packaging of character, grit and resilience under the apparently novel banner of ‘non-cognitive skills’ is the way that far from offering something new it recycles and perpetuates some of the oldest, most damaging and least tenable dichotomies in the book, wrapping them in a brace of terminological contradications.

One such is the conference title’s stunning parodox of non-cognitive mindfulness.  Another is the very concept of a ‘non-cognitive skill’.  Is this possible?  The authoritative Foresight Report on mental capital and wellbeing thinks not.  Though in execution some skills become so habitual that we stop thinking about them, few if any skills are genuinely mindless. Acquired and honed through training and practice, skills also require knowledge and reflection, especially when – as with the skills with which education is particularly concerned – skills are infinitely perfectible. But then the problem here is in part linguistic, for these days every conceivable educational goal is tagged a ‘skill’ and knowledge is nowhere: basic skills, numeracy skills, literacy skills, creative skills, emotional skills, interpersonal skills, hard skills, soft skills, cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills …

Then, recycling that ancient dichotomy, my conference glossy continues: ‘Schools need to teach students not only academic knowledge and cognitive skills, but also the knowledge and non-cognitive skills they will need to promote their mental and physical health and successfully contribute to the economy and society … to counter the idea that promoting cognitive development and academic attainment is all that matters for the economy.’ Here, not only are ‘cognitive’ and ‘academic’ equated; they are also seen as neither conducive to children’s mental health nor economically relevant. So much for maths, science, design and technology and, oh yes, literacy.

Or take this definition, from a companion source: ‘Non-cognitive skills are those academically and occupationally relevant skills and traits that are not specifically intellectual or analytical in nature’. Academic but non-cognitive? Academically relevant but not intellectual?

Or this: ‘Non-cognitive skills include persistence, communication skills and other “soft” skills that are not objectively measured … unlike cognitive skills, which educators can measure objectively with tests.’  So communication, that most basic and demanding of basics, is ‘soft’, non-cognitive and unable to be assessed. And what touching faith in the objective measurability of the rest of the mainstream curriculum.

Or again, pursuing the same eccentric process of re-classification, the conference glossy helpfully includes in its list of ‘non-cognitive skills’ not just familiar items like ‘perseverance’ and ‘self-control’ but also ‘meta-cognitive strategies’ and ‘creativity’.  Apart from the mind-boggling idea that something can at the same time be meta-cognitive and non-cognitive, it’s the assertion that creativity excludes cognition – in the face of centuries of artistic and scientific endeavour – that most brutally nails this nonsense.

Knowledge versus skill, hard subjects versus soft, cognitive versus creative, cognition versus meta-cognition, thinking versus feeling, mind versus body.  Here, sartorially updated for 2015, is that same ‘muddled and reductive discourse about subjects, knowledge and skills’ of which in 2009 the CPR final report complained (pp 245-50); a discourse in which ‘discussion of the place of subjects is needlessly polarised, knowledge is grossly parodied as grubbing for obsolete facts, and the undeniably important notion of skill is inflated to cover aspects of learning for which it is not appropriate.’ Which is why, of course, supposedly ‘non-cognitive’ creativity is relegated to the non-core and Friday afternoons – something that in the interests of a more rounded education the apostles of non-cognitive skills rightly want to change, but for the wrong reasons. What a muddle.

So it was with relief that I turned back to Usha Goswami’s new report for CPRT. For here in place of fads, fancies, cod psychology and epistemological car crashes we have evidence carefully accumulated, searchingly sifted and expertly assessed; and, interestingly, a kind of resolution of the problem of how to define and place those wider attributes we all accept are necessary in today’s world – for I stress that I’m as concerned as anyone that schools should motivate and engage children, build their confidence, help them to manage their learning and their lives, and develop their social and communicative capacities. But, crucially, what the non-cognitive skills people see as separate from academic activity Usha Goswami sees as intrinsic to it. Her stance is not the exclusivity of cognitive versus non-cognitive, but the inclusivity of cognitive plus metacognitive.  In a key section on metacognition and executive functioning (which, taken together, are not far removed from ‘mindfulness’), she writes:

Metacognition is knowledge about cognition, encompassing factors such as knowing about your own information-processing skills, monitoring your own cognitive performance, and knowing about the demands made by different kinds of cognitive tasks. Executive function refers to gaining strategic control over your own mental processes, inhibiting certain thoughts or actions, and developing conscious control over your thoughts, feelings and behaviour … As children gain metaknowledge about their mental processes, their strategic control also improves. Developments in metacognition and executive function tend to be associated with language development, the development of working memory (which enables multiple perspectives to be held in mind) and nonverbal ability.

The report then goes on to document strategies through which in the classroom these capacities can be developed.

In other words, what the non-cognitive skills people present as a curriculum issue is in reality a pedagogical one.  Of course, there are always questions to be asked about the relevance, scope and balance of the curriculum, and England’s new old national curriculum has certainly not answered them. But communication, motivation, engagement, perseverance and self-control do not require the addition of a battery of pseudo-skills to an overcrowded curriculum. They require us to think differently about how we teach what is already there. So, given that one of the non-cognitivists’ main concerns is the contribution of education to the economy, I might just arm myself with an update of Bill Clinton’s 1992 election slogan, turn up at that conference and shout, ‘It’s the pedagogy, stupid.’

www.robinalexander.org.uk

Download Usha Goswami’s new CPRT report Children’s Cognitive Development and Learning.

Download the short briefing on Usha Goswami’s report.

by Robin Alexander

True grit

Those who thought that the departure of Michael Gove might give schools a breather before the 2015 election, liberating them from the weekly explosion of initiatives and insults, reckoned without the ambition of his successor. These days, few education secretaries of state are content to do a good job, deeming it more important to leave an indelible mark in the name of ‘reform’. To this lamppost tendency Nicky Morgan appears to be no exception.

Her wheeze, and it’s a biggish one, is to make Britain ‘a global leader in teaching character and resilience … ensuring that young people not only grow academically, but also build character, resilience and grit.’ To that end, DfE has invited bids for projects showing how ‘character’ can be built, and on 16 March there’ll be a grand ceremony at which the 2015 Character Awards of £15,000 each will be presented to 27 schools, with a £20,000 prize for the best of the best. Morgan modestly defines her chosen legacy as ‘a landmark step for our education system.’

In the same way that New Labour claimed, witheringly but inaccurately, that before the imposition of its national literacy and numeracy strategies England’s primary teachers were ‘professionally uninformed’, so Nicky Morgan’s happy discovery of something called ‘character’ implies that schools have hitherto ignored everything except children’s academic development; and that creativity, PSHE, moral education, religious education and citizenship, not to mention those values that loom large in school prospectuses, websites and assemblies and above all in teachers’ daily dealings with their pupils, were to do with something else entirely. Remember the not-so-hidden ‘hidden curriculum’? If there is a ‘landmark step’ then, it is not character education but its political appropriation and repackaging.

So what, in Morgan’s book, constitutes ‘character’? Its main ingredients, as listed in the guidance to applicants for the DfE grants and character awards, are ‘perseverance, resilience and grit, confidence and optimism, motivation, drive and ambition.’ (Readers will recognize ‘resilience’ as one of the most overused words of 2014). Rather lower down the list come ‘neighbourliness’, ‘community spirit’, ‘tolerance’ and ‘respect.’

Like so much in recent English education policy, this account of character is imported from the United States. The Morgan character attributes are almost identical to those in the eponymous Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed: grit, curiosity and the hidden power of character, and in Dave Levin’s evangelising Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). Here, then, we have a melding of the no-holds-barred values of corporate America with that fabled frontier spirit portrayed by John Wayne. ‘Grit’ anchors the education of character in both worlds.

But there’s a third element. In a speech in Birmingham last November prefiguring the DfE announcement, Morgan said pupils should ‘leave school with the perseverance to strive to win … to revel in the achievement of victory but honour the principles of fair play, to win with grace and to learn the lessons of defeat with acceptance and humility.’ No prizes for spotting the source of that little homily. These are unambiguously the values of England’s nineteenth century public schools: values directed not to the nurturing of mind but to physical prowess on the games field, an education veritably conceived as no more or less than a game of rugby or cricket. And not just education: life and death too, as immortalised in the Newbolt poem in which the playing field morphs into the trenches of 1914-18: ‘There’s a breathless hush in the close tonight / Ten to make and the match to win / The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead / Play up, play up and play the game.’

If character is important, which it surely is, is such an idiosyncratic and unreconstructedly male account of it good enough, and is it for government to impose this or any other notion of character on every child in the land, of whatever inclination, personality, gender or culture? In one of two excellent blogs on this subject that I urge prospective applicants for the DfE awards to read, John White thinks not. He says: ‘Nicky Morgan is not wrong to focus on personal qualities, only about the set she advocates. This is tied to an ideology of winners and losers.’ (As, appropriately, is DfE’s Character Awards scheme itself). He reminds us of the considerably more rounded values framework appended to the version of the national curriculum that was introduced in 2000 and superseded last September, and he argues that ‘no politician has the right to steer a whole education system in this or any other partisan direction.’ For White, Morgan’s foray into character education is further confirmation of the need for curriculum decisions to be taken out of the hands of politicians and given to a body which is more representative, more knowledgeable and culturally more sensitive.

The other recent must-read blog on character education is by Jeffrey Snyder in the United States. He cites evidence that ‘character’ is more likely to be determined by genetically-determined personality traits than the efforts of teachers, and indeed he argues that anyway nobody really knows how to teach it. In this context it’s worth asking what those pupils subjected to 1850s/1950s character-building really learned, and whether there is indeed a correspondence between success on the playing field, in work and in adult life. And since you ask, did fagging and flogging really make for manliness (whatever that is) or were they merely perversions by another name?

Snyder argues, too, that the ‘perseverence, resilience and grit’ account of character ‘promotes an amoral and careerist “looking out for number one” point of view’ adding, tellingly: ‘Never has character education been so completely untethered from morals, values and ethics.’ As a result, ‘character’ is as likely to be harnessed to the pursuit of ends that are evil as to those that are good. ‘Gone’, adds Snyder, ‘is the impetus to bring youngsters into a fold of community that is larger than themselves … When character education fails to distinguish doctors and terrorists, heroes and villains, it would appear to have a basic flaw.’

Snyder’s third objection, and it applies equally to the Morgan view of character and to the Gove definition of essential knowledge, is the sheer narrowness of the educational vision being promoted. In this context, it’s worth asking how the Cambridge Primary Review’s 12 educational aims might be classified. Are ‘wellbeing’, ‘engagement’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘autonomy’ about character or something else? Do such responsive and responsible CPR aims as ‘encouraging respect and reciprocity’, ‘promoting interdependence and sustainability’, ‘empowering local, national and global citizenship’ and ‘celebrating culture and community’ have anything to with resilience and grit?

Actually they do, for it takes considerable grit and resilience to live the values of reciprocity, interdependence and community in a culture of winner-takes-all individualism; or to champion sustainability when the prevailing ethic is rampant materialism and unfettered economic growth; or, as so many educationists have learned to their cost, to hold firm to a principled vision of children’s education in the teeth of government atavism and disdain. Captains of industry and sports personalities do not, as Morgan appears to believe, have a monopoly of courage and determination. In any event, the imperative here is to tie perseverance, grit and resilience to socially defensible aims and values, for, as Snyder noted, that for which we teach children to strive must be educationally worthwhile.

It will be interesting to see what accounts of character, and what strategies for promoting it, DfE rewards when it distributes its grants and prizes for character education on 16 March. With the national strategies Labour gave us what one CPR witness called a ‘state theory of learning’. Will the coalition government’s bequest be a state theory of character? (Which, for those who know about vospitanie in Russian and Soviet education, has similar political overtones). Let’s hope that Morgan’s judges put vision, ethics, social responsibility and plurality back into the frame.

We can presumably trust that proposals to reintroduce fagging and flogging are unlikely to be shortlisted, though these days one never knows.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

by Robin Alexander

2015: teach local, learn global

We ended 2014 with one official consultation. We begin 2015 with another. The two couldn’t be more different.

In December we responded to the online enquiry of the House of Commons Education Select Committee into the UK government’s use of evidence to inform policy. Not for the first time, but in common with many of the enquiry’s other 500 respondents, we voiced deep concern that despite DfE’s ostensible interest in ‘evidence-informed policy’ its approach to evidence is all too often selective, ideologically partisan and methodologically naive.  It remains to be seen whether the Select Committee will call DfE to account on this score, or whether its members will merely shrug and say ‘That’s politics.’ Which, depressingly, it is.

But all this will seem parochial in comparison with the agenda to which another organisation invites us to respond, for it deals with nothing less than the responsibility of national educational systems, including our own, ‘to improve the quality of life, promote decent employment, encourage civic participation and enable all citizens to lead a life with dignity, equality, gender empowerment and justice’. All citizens, everywhere, not just in the UK.

The quotation comes from a UNESCO concept note outlining how progress in global education should be monitored after 2015, the year in which the current UN Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education (which in many countries won’t be achieved) is superseded by an even more ambitious set of goals which apply as much to rich countries as to poor, and tie education firmly to the increasingly urgent global imperatives of equity and sustainable development.

Both of these happen to be among CPRT’s eight priorities, and if you check the new CPRT priorities in action page of our website you’ll see how we and our partners are beginning, within our modest resources, to pursue them. But if you want a sense of the gravity of the challenge we all face, read the UN’s December 2014 synthesis report The road to dignity by 2030: ending poverty, transforming all lives and protecting the planet.

The report ends thus:

Today’s world is a troubled world, one in turmoil and turbulence, with no shortage of painful political upheavals. Societies are under serious strain, stemming from the erosion of our common values, climate change and growing inequalities, to migration pressures and borderless pandemics. It is also a time in which the strength of national and international institutions is being seriously tested. Because of the nature and the scope of this daunting array of enormous challenges, both inaction and business-as-usual must be dismissed as options. If the global community does not exercise national and international leadership in the service of the peoples of the world, we risk further fragmentation, impunity and strife, endangering both the planet itself as well as a future of peace, sustainable development and respect for human rights … 

The year 2015 is hence the time for global action … We must take the first determined steps toward a sustainable future with dignity for all. Transformation is our aim. We must transform our economies, our environment and our societies. We must change old mindsets, behaviours and destructive patterns. We must embrace the integrated essential elements of dignity, people, prosperity, planet, justice and partnership. We must build cohesive societies, in pursuit of international peace and stability … We have an historic opportunity and duty to act, boldly, vigorously and expeditiously, to achieve a life of dignity for all, leaving no one behind.

‘Think global, act local’ has become a cliché. Worse, it has been hijacked by multinationals to advance enterprises that are anything but sustainable or equitable.  But educators can reclaim it. The UN’s global education agenda is directed at governments, so at the start of 2015 we should demand to know how our own government will respond, or whether this major report and the evidence that informs it, will be kicked into touch like so many before it.  But the UN’s education agenda requires no less energetic action in the classroom. Teach local, learn global.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

If your school is working to advance the UN – and CPRT – goal of ‘a sustainable future with dignity for all’ and you would be willing to share your ideas with others in the CPRT network, please let us know. Contact administrator@cprtrust.org.uk.

You will find websites of these organisations relevant and helpful:

Sustainable Schools Alliance
Sustainability and Environmental Education
Think Global (the Development Education Association)
Tide Global Learning
TEESNet (formerly UK Teacher Education Network for education for sustainable development and global citizenship)

Read the full December 2014 UN synthesis report on global education after 2015, quoted above.

Contribute to shaping the focus of the 2016 report on Education, sustainability and the post-2015 development agenda (closing date for comments: 28 January).

Read responses to the House of Commons Education Committee enquiry into DfE’s use of evidence.

Contact

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