The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

by Robin Alexander

From phonics check to evidence check

In ministerial speeches ‘evidence-based policy’ is now as almost as routine as ‘I care passionately about …’ and is as likely to be greeted with hollow laughter. So it’s to the credit of the House of Commons Education Select Committee that it has undertaken an enquiry into the use of evidence by the Department of Education, asking  DfE to list the evidential basis of a number of policies  before inviting the public to comment via a web forum. Nine areas of policy were nominated for these ‘evidence checks’: phonics, teaching assistants, professional measurement metrics, summer-born children, the National College of Teaching and Leadership, universal infant free school meals, the impact of raising the school participation age, music, the school starting age. There was a further section on DfE’s use of evidence generally and this prompted the largest number of responses, including the  following which we reprint as our final blog of 2014. It’s longer than usual, but then you won’t be hearing from us again until January.

DFE’s use of evidence

Several contributors to this enquiry commend DfE for its commitment to evidence, but surely this is a minimum condition of good governance, not a cause for genuflection. More to the point are the concerns of Dame Julia Higgins that DfE’s use of evidence is inconsistent (or, as Janet Downs puts it, ‘slippery’) and those many other contributors across the Committee’s nine themes who find DfE overly selective in the evidence on which it draws and the methodologies it prefers.

The principal filters appear to be ideological (‘is this researcher one of us’?) and electoral (‘will the findings boost our poll ratings / damage those of the opposition’?) and such scientifically inadmissible criteria are compounded by DfE’s marked preference for research dealing in big numbers, little words and simple solutions.

In the latter context, we should be wary of endorsing without qualification the view of several contributors that the randomised control trial (RCT) is the evidential ‘gold standard’, trumping all other attempts to get at the truth. Education is complex and contested, and its central questions are as much ethical as technical – a challenge which the fashionable but amoral mantra ‘what works’ conveniently ignores. The RCT language of ‘treatment’ and ‘dosage’ is fine for drug trials but is hardly appropriate to an activity which is more craft and art than science, and in untutored hands the effort to make teaching fit this paradigm may reduce to the point of risibility or destruction the very phenomena it claims to test. I should add that I make these observations not as a disappointed research grant applicant but as recipient of substantial funding from the rightly esteemed Educational Endowment Foundation for a ‘what works’ project involving RCT.

Of the nine ‘evidence check’ memoranda submitted to the Committee by DfE, those on phonics, the school starting age and the National College most conspicuously display some of the tendencies I’ve so far identified. Thus the defence and citations in DfE’s phonics statement neatly sidestep the methodological controversies and evidential disputes surrounding what is now the government’s mandated approach to teaching reading, so the contributor who applauds DfE’s grossly biased bibliography as ‘accurate’ is plain wrong.

DfE’s school starting age citations carelessly – or perhaps carefully – attribute a publication of the Cambridge Primary Review (Riggall and Sharp) to NFER, but again avoid any evidence running counter to the official view that children should be packed off to school as soon as possible; or the more nuanced finding of the Cambridge Primary Review that the real issue is not the starting age for formal schooling but the availability and quality of early years provision, wherever it takes place; or indeed the inconvenient truth that some of this country’s more successful PISA competitors start formal schooling one or even two years later than England.

As for the National College of Teaching and Leadership (NCTL), no independent evidence is offered in support of DfE’s insistence that this agency, and the models of teacher training and school improvement it espouses, justify its consumption of public funds. Only two publications are cited in DfE’s ‘evidence check’. One is NCTL’s statement of accounts; the other a DfE press release which is neither evidence nor independent. Proper evaluation of NCTL became all the more essential when DfE abolished the relatively ‘arms length’ bodies that NCTL subsumed and charged it with ‘delivering’ approved policies. Of course NCTL can be shown to be effective in relation to the delivery of policies x and y. But what if those policies are wrong?

The Committee has received many unhappy comments from parents about schools’ draconian responses to term-time absences. These highlight a further problem: there are important areas of educational policy, at both school and national level, where evidence is rarely or never on view and parents and the electorate are expected to comply with what may be little more than unsubstantiated claims. In the case of those blanket bans on term-time absence about which so many parents complain to the Committee, as with the tendency to fill more and more of children’s (and parents’) waking hours with homework (i.e. schoolwork done at home) of variable and in some cases little educational value, there appears to be a deep-seated assumption that schools have a monopoly of useful learning. The Cambridge Primary Review scotched this mistaken and indeed arrogant belief in the comprehensive research review on children’s lives outside school that it commissioned from Professor Berry Mayall. Except that the then government preferred summarily to reject the evidence and abuse the Review team rather than engage with the possibility that schools might do even better if more of them understood and built on what their pupils learn outside school.

So although the Education Committee has applied its ‘evidence check’ to nine areas of policy, it might also consider extending its enquiry in two further directions: first, by examining the evidential basis of policies and initiatives, such as those exemplified above, about which teachers, parents and indeed children themselves express concern; second by adding some of those frontline policies which DfE has justified by reference to evidence but which are conspicuously absent from the Committee’s list.

Examples in the latter category might include: (i) the government’s 2011-13 review of England’s National Curriculum; (ii) the development of new requirements for assessment and accountability in primary schools; (iii) the rapid and comprehensive shift to school-led and school-based initial teacher education; (iv) the replacement of the old TDA teacher professional standards by the current set; (v) the strenuous advocacy and preferential treatment of academies and free schools. Each of these illustrates, sometimes in extreme form, my initial concerns about politico-evidential selectivity and methodological bias.

Thus in the 2011-13 national curriculum review ministers deployed exceptionally reductionist and naive interpretations of the wealth of international evidence with which they were provided by DfE officials and others. They resisted until the last moment overwhelming evidence about the educational centrality of spoken language. They ignored Ofsted warnings, grounded in two decades of school inspection (and indeed evidence going back long before Ofsted) about the damage caused by a two-tier curriculum that elevates a narrow view of educational basics above all else – damage not just to the wider curriculum but also the ‘basics’ themselves. And they declined to publish or act on their own internal enquiry which confirmed the continuing seriousness of the challenge of curriculum expertise in primary schools, an enquiry which – and this much is to ministers’ credit – DfE undertook in response to, and in association with, the Cambridge Primary Review. The report of that enquiry, and the wider evidence that informed it, still awaits proper consideration. A job for the Education Committee perhaps?

Similarly, DfE, like its predecessor DCSF, has stubbornly held to its view – challenged by the Education Committee as well as numerous research studies and the Bew enquiry – that written summative tests are the best way both to assess children’s progress and hold schools and teachers to account, and that they provide a valid proxy for children’s attainment across the full spectrum of their learning.

Then, and in pursuit of what has sometimes looked suspiciously like a vendetta against those in universities who undertake the research that sometimes rocks the policy boat, DfE has ignored international evidence about the need for initial teacher education to be grounded in equal partnership between schools and higher education, preferring the palpable contradiction of locating an avowedly ‘world class’ teacher education system in schools that ministers tell us are failing to deliver ‘world class’ standards. Relatedly, DfE has accepted a report from its own enquiry into professional standards for teachers which showed even less respect for evidence than the earlier and much-criticised framework from TDA, coming up with ‘standards’ which manage to debase or exclude some of the very teacher attributes that research shows are most crucial to the standards of learning towards which these professional standards are supposedly directed.

Finally, in pursuit of its academies drive government has ignored the growing body of evidence from the United States that far from delivering superior standards as claimed, charter schools, academies’ American inspiration, are undermining public provision and tainted by financial and managerial corruption. England may not have gone that far, but new inspection evidence on comparative standards in academies and maintained schools (in HMCI’s Annual Report for 2013-14) should give the Committee considerable pause for thought about the motivation and consequences of this initiative.

In relation to the Committee’s enquiry as a whole, the experience of the Cambridge Primary Review (2006-10) and its successor the Cambridge Primary Review Trust is salutary, depressing and (to others than hardened cynics) disturbing. Here we had the nation’s most comprehensive enquiry into English primary education for half a century, led by an expert team, advised and monitored by a distinguished group of the great and good, supported by consultants in over 20 universities as well as hundreds of professionals, and generating a vast array of data, 31 interim reports and a final report with far-sighted conclusions and recommendations, all of them firmly anchored in evidence, including over 4000 published sources.

Far from welcoming the review as offering, at no cost to the taxpayer, an unrivalled contribution to evidence-based policy and practice in this vital phase of education, DCSF – DfE’s predecessor – systematically sought to traduce and discredit it by misrepresenting its findings in order to dismiss them, and by mounting ad personam attacks against the Review’s principals. Such behaviour in the face of authoritative and useful evidence was unworthy of holders of elected office and, for the teachers and children in our schools, deeply irresponsible.

It is with some relief that we note that DfE’s stance towards the Review and its successor the Cambridge Primary Review Trust has been considerably more positive under the Coalition than under Labour, and we record our appreciation of the many constructive discussions we have had with ministers and officials since 2010. Nevertheless, when evidential push comes to political shove, evidence discussed and endorsed in such meetings capitulates, more often than not, to the overriding imperatives of ideology, expediency and media narrative. This, notwithstanding the enhanced research profile applauded by other contributors, remains the default.

 

www.robinalexander.org.uk

This particular Education Committee enquiry was set up as a web forum, with a deadline of 15 December. The DfE evidence checks and the comments they provoked may be viewed here.
DfE’s use of evidence attracted 154 comments, followed by summer-born children (111), phonics (90) and the school starting age (64).

by Robin Alexander

New evidence on childrens’ voices and rights. But does DfE get it?

Children, their World, their Education. The basic premise of the Cambridge Primary Review (CPR) was as clear in the title of its final report as in its choice of investigative themes and questions: education is meaningful only when educators understand and coherently respond to the nature and needs of children and the society and world in which they are growing up. Mastering the practical skills of teaching is a necessary but not sufficient condition, and as an educational rationale mantras like ‘effective teaching’ take us to the nearest 3Rs test but no further.

A more comprehensive rationale was crystallised in the twelve aims for primary education that were at the heart of CPR’s final report and that  now inform the work of an ever-increasing number of schools.  In preparing the ground for these, CPR met and listened to children and those who work with them, and many more children added to these face-to-face conversations by writing in. We also commissioned reviews of research on children’s development, learning and lives inside and outside school.

One of these research reviews was on children’s voice and today CPRT publishes its sequel: Carol Robinson’s update of the report that she and Michael Fielding first produced in 2007 and then revised in 2010 for inclusion in The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys.

Last month saw the 25th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). The UK is a signatory, but just how far short of the UN’s ideals we fall is daily all too apparent in the media and in CPRT’s recent blogs on young carers, the government’s proposed policy ‘family test’, and the fate of those millions of children caught up in conflict or lacking access to education as a basic human right. Nor is CPRT convinced that the new national curriculum has yet registered that these matters demand a more serious and committed response than DfE has so far provided, though we are certainly convinced that making citizenship optional in primary schools transmits entirely the wrong signal.

Yet all is not gloom, doom and hollow promises. Carol Robinson’s report documents the encouraging growth of research and practice in the area of children’s agency, voice and rights, and of impressive movements like Rights Respecting Schools. Always at risk of being treated tokenistically, children’s voice in many schools now means considerably more than stage-managed deliberations on food and wet playtimes.  This progress should be celebrated.

Probably not at DfE, though:  its recent advice on promoting ‘British’ values rightly encourages schools to ‘ensure that all pupils … have a voice that is listened to’ but confines that voice to the task of demonstrating ‘how democracy works by actively promoting democratic processes such as a school council whose members are voted for by the pupils.’ To DfE, then, voice equates with vote, and we know how little, in Britain’s electoral system, votes count for, or how little notice our democratically-elected government takes of the voices of others than those who toe the party line, not least on educational matters.  But we won’t tell our children about this, will we, for in the official account of British values parliamentary democracy is the envy of the world.

In fact, the most basic test of the seriousness with which we treat what children think and say is not the election of a school council – valuable though its deliberations can be – but the extent to which empowering, exploring and building on children’s articulated ideas is central to our every teaching encounter and to the everyday assessment for learning which at best informs both children and ourselves. Children’s voices will remain unheard, and their understanding will advance thus far and no further, if ‘speaking and listening’ means that teachers do all the speaking and children all the listening; or if the writing through which children express their ideas is confined to repeating those of the teacher.

That’s why CPRT’s eight priorities include not only a commitment to ‘advance children’s voice and rights … in accordance with the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child’ but also contingent commitments to the development of patterns of teaching and assessment for learning in which genuine dialogue is paramount. This term we have published Wynne Harlen’s report on assessment and Carol Robinson’s on children’s voices. Next term we’ll be presenting reports from Usha Goswami, David Hogan, Dennis Kwek and Peter Renshaw on learning and teaching. In parallel, we are working with Pearson to develop jointly-branded CPD programmes in these areas. All these initiatives are united by the imperatives of childhood.

It is classroom pedagogy that most tellingly liberates children’s voices; but in the wrong hands it is pedagogy that most decisively suppresses them.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

View/download Carol Robinson’s CPRT research report Children, their voices and their experiences of school: what does the evidence tell us?

View/download a four-page briefing on Carol Robinson’s report.

View/download Wynne Harlen’s CPRT research report Assessment, standards and quality of learning in primary education and/or the accompanying four-page briefing.

Find out more about these and CPRT’s other research initiatives.

Find out more about the joint CPRT/Pearson CPD programmes on children’s voice, assessment and other topics.

Read the DfE guidance ‘Promoting fundamental British values as part of SMSC in schools’ (November 2014).

by

Consultation Reminders

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

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

by Robin Alexander

Ministers, evidence and inconvenient truths

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.robinalexander.org.uk

 

by Robin Alexander

Do we care for our young carers?

Carers Trust Swansea Bay has devised a board game to raise awareness of the plight of young carers. These are the UK’s 178,000 children and young people who according to the 2001 census look after a parent or other family member who is chronically sick, disabled or for other reasons needs the kind of help that would normally be provided by adults.

Young carers shop, cook, clean, provide nursing and personal care, get siblings off to school, give emotional support and much, much more. Their average age is 12, over half of them are younger than 14, and according to Barnado’s the number of young carers of primary school age is increasing, with some as young as five. Small wonder that many of them display levels of poise, modesty and maturity that would shame many adults.

The word ‘plight’ is used by the Carers Trust, and in obvious respects it is apposite. Given widespread and growing unease, chronicled and endorsed by the Cambridge Primary Review, about the extreme educational, commercial and social pressures to which young children today are subject, the situation of young carers is particularly acute. For if, as Berry Mayall put it in her evidence to CPR, children’s lives are increasingly ‘scholarised’, what price childhood for those who, in addition to schoolwork, homework and home work (note the distinction) have the added responsibility of providing daily care for others?

Organisations like Carers Trust, the Children’s Society and Barnado’s do a great deal to support young carers and their families, while initiatives like the Carers Trust board game and ‘buddying’ scheme, the Barnado’s counselling and drop-in sessions, and Young Carers in Focus help these children share and put in perspective what otherwise they would experience in vulnerable isolation: the unremitting round of predictable tasks and unpredictable crises; and the way their lives compare not just with those of fellow-carers but also those of children who receive care rather than give it.

Yet it’s also clear that all this can take its toll. According to Carers Trust, ‘Children who provide more than 50 hours of care a week are five times more likely than their peers to report poor physical or emotional health. Child and teenage carers are also more at risk of missing out on schooling, socialising and other life chances in order to provide round the clock care for a loved one.’

We would expect young carers to struggle to keep up at school, but the bullying suffered by many of them may not be so widely known and is therefore doubly reprehensible. Researchers at Nottingham University report that a quarter of young carers have been bullied at school as a direct consequence of the way their caring role marks them out as different, while nearly half of the child respondents to the Nottingham survey did not have a teacher to confide in about their situation.

These additional burdens on young carers are of a kind that schools can and should prevent.

There are three reasons why it is especially important to draw attention to young carers at this time. First, from 17th to 21st November it will be Anti-Bullying Week, and this year a number of charities, including Carers Trust, are combining to draw attention to the extent of bullying suffered by already vulnerable groups such as young carers.

Second, 2014 is the 25th anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, a declaration that commits signatories – including the UK – to do everything in their power to protect and promote children’s rights ‘to survive and thrive, to learn and grow, to make their voices heard and reach their full potential’ and ‘to rest and leisure, to play and recreational activities’. That includes young carers.

The third reason is that on 30 October a group of them, supported by Carers Trust and the Children’s Society, met ministers and health officials to urge them to do more to identify and support what the Royal College of General Practitioners called this ‘hidden healthcare army’. Let us, as their teachers, endorse and publicise their campaign.

Young carers are among the UK’s unsung heroes. Do we give them the care which they in their turn so richly deserve?

www.robinalexander.org.uk

Read the Children’s Society Report Hidden from View: the experiences of young carers in England (2013).

Find out about the Young Carers in Focus programme to network, support and empower young carers.

 

by Robin Alexander

2015 election countdown: what do we want for primary education?

It’s party conference time again. Season of grandiose claims, hollow promises, choreographed ovations, and now – a conference first – chunks of speech that are too important to be delivered.

When Ed Miliband confessed to forgetting those vital paragraphs on migration and the financial deficit at this week’s Labour Party Conference, I found myself hoping the other party leaders would follow suit by forgetting to talk about education. Forlorn hope. In the countdown to the 2015 UK general election we can reliably predict that the Govine legacy will be lauded as the most radical and successful programme of educational reform ever, at a stroke hauling a failing education system back from the brink and making our schools truly ‘world class.’ World class: among crowning political fatuities only ‘the best ever’ comes close. Best ever since when? 2010? 1066? The big bang? And who was around to collect the evidence?

Leaving such rhetorical games to those who choose to play them, but reminding ourselves that the evidence assessed in the Cambridge Primary Review final report provided a more measured account of ministerial achievements, the final party conferences before the 2015 election trigger something closer to home: our quest to identify what we believe should be the next government’s policy priorities for primary education. As in 2010, we shall present the resulting statement to party leaders, ministers and their opposition shadows, and we’ll give it the widest possible publicity.

In 2010, drawing on the Cambridge Primary Review final report and reactions to that report voiced at the ensuing dissemination conferences, we nominated 11 policy priorities.  These recommended specific action on children’s voice and rights, the early years, aims, curriculum, assessment, pedagogy, professional development, school staffing and educational partnership. These nine were topped and tailed by two imperatives which remain as urgent now as they were then: ‘Accelerate the drive to reduce England’s gross and overlapping gaps in wealth, wellbeing and attainment’, and ‘Rebalance the relationship between government, national agencies, local authorities and schools.’ By many accounts the wealth and attainment gaps have widened while the removal of the remaining checks and balances between Westminster and England’s schools have made our education system more centralised than ever.

Although, a year on from CPR’s final report, I was able in the Brian Simon Memorial Lecture to record modest progress in relation to some of our 2010 priorities, and although it’s clear that CPR and CPRT have played their part in securing this, most of them required and require continuing vigilance and effort. That’s why the eight priorities with which CPRT was launched in 2013 echo some of those from 2010; and it’s why CPRT’s new research projects  and professional development programmes focus on voice, learning, teaching, curriculum, assessment and tackling disadvantage.

Here’s the invitation then. Please tell us what the next government should do – or not do – in order to help schools provide the best possible primary education for all the nation’s children.

You may wish to voice your views by adding comments to this blog. Or you may prefer to email us. If you are involved with one of CPRT’s regional networks you may want to encourage discussion locally or within your own school. In any event, please tell us what you propose. We’d also encourage you to look again at the CPR and CPRT priorities referred to above. Are these still as pressing as they were? Do some override others? Once we’ve heard from you – preferably by the end of this term – we shall combine your proposals with our own to produce a draft set of primary education priorities for the next government. We’ll then consult further on these before firming them up and publishing them.

Of course, you may feel this exercise has little point on the grounds that governments are influenced more by ministerial prejudice and tabloid headlines than by evidence or reason. Despair at Westminster’s impervious arrogance has been prominent lately in Scotland, but south of the border it’s pretty widespread too. You may also have registered the CPR/CPRT leitmotif that policymakers have less influence than they believe and teachers have more, while what counts for children is not the latest DfE initiative but what happens in classrooms. That’s true, too. Yet policy undoubtedly frames and constrains our professional actions, especially in a regime as centralised and ideologically-driven as England’s, and to that extent we should do our utmost to influence it.

So please accept this invitation. Let us know what you want the makers of education policy to do for our children’s primary education after the 2015 general election.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

by Robin Alexander

In praise of… Fred Jarvis and Michael Armstrong

Saturday 13 September: up betimes to celebrate not one birthday but two.  To Southampton first for Michael Armstrong’s 80th.  Then on to London for Fred Jarvis’s 90th.

Over many decades these two exceptional educators have trodden very different paths to the same elusive destination: an education that is in the best sense comprehensive. Comprehensive in the access it offers all children, regardless of birth, income or circumstance, to learning that engages, inspires and empowers; comprehensive in its quest for human betterment, equity and social justice. Both of them have also been good friends to the Cambridge Primary Review.         Michael contributed to its final report.  Fred repeatedly excoriated ministers for playing fast and loose with its evidence.

Their birthday parties offered glimpses of the richness of their hinterlands. Michael, steeped in literature and music, chose to mark the occasion with a concert at which his son gave barnstorming accounts of two of the most taxing pieces in the piano repertoire. Fred’s guests were surrounded by his photographs of some of the many political leaders he has worked with and against, his sobering images of postwar Europe and Russia, views of himself in full flow at National Union of Teachers (NUT) conferences, and of course his trademark close-ups of floral perfection.

Michael has always stayed close to the classroom. He taught in Leicestershire and London before serving for 19 years as head of Harwell Primary School in Oxfordshire. In 1980 he published Closely Observed Children, the first of two books which chronicle children’s outer behaviours and inner lives and demonstrate their immense capacities for learning and imagining. Compulsory reading for those – and sadly there still are some – who hold to the view that chronological age imposes arbitrary limits on those capacities, this book is also a fine example of ethnographic research. A quarter of a century later came the sequel, Children Writing Stories (2006) in which Michael couples examples of children’s writing with his own persuasive accounts of the imaginative power and narrative skill that the stories reveal. Intense and illuminating, the book impelled former Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo to exclaim, ‘Unlock the chains, let the light in, and this is the kind of writing that will flow.’ He was referring of course to the children, but the accolade applies equally to the writing that flows from Michael’s acute and revelatory intelligence.

This is the world Michael has revealed in both his highly-regarded summer schools in Vermont and his articles and editorial work for Forum, that fine and still flourishing campaigning journal founded in 1958 by Brian Simon, Robin Pedley and Jack Walton. And educational campaigning is the link between Michael and Fred Jarvis, whose autobiography appeared a few weeks ago with the sub-title Reflections of a cockney campaigner for education.

Fred’s career has been nothing short of remarkable: from London’s East End and wartime evacuation to Wallasey, to the D-day landings, Liverpool and Oxford universities and a lifelong dedication to politics, education and West Ham. His was a career sandwiched by union presidencies – the National Union of Students and the Trades Union Congress – and amply and courageously filled with his work for the NUT, of which he was General Secretary from 1975-89, a role which put him on a collision course with more than one secretary of state.

That would have been enough for most of us. But it didn’t stop there and hasn’t stopped since. Since his ‘retirement’ Fred has fought the educational fight with undimmed vigour, meanwhile assembling numerous photographic exhibitions and commuting between London and his beloved Provence. He has set up and for many years chaired what is now the New Visions for Education Group, an organisation of over 100 members which champions an inclusive and well-founded public education service providing a high quality education for all, with the advancement of children’s rights and a properly-functioning democracy as both precondition and consequence. While NVG is politically unaffiliated, its aims have inevitably set it against government attempts to weaken education as a public service through marketisation, the impoverished educational vision that has characterised recent political interventions in curriculum and assessment, and the contempt for evidence that education ministers habitually display.

Throughout, while some of us despaired at these tendencies, Fred maintained his belief in the importance of political engagement and his optimism that good sense would prevail, though his autobiography names one or two recent Secretaries of State who were beyond redemption.

Both Fred Jarvis and Michael Armstrong combine in their distinctive ways principled commitment, lively intelligence, deep understanding, unshakeable integrity and a keen awareness of history and its lessons, all basic qualifications for educational leadership. Signalling the gulf sartorially, Fred’s lustrous silk ties and immaculate suits are a league apart from the grey suits and greyer minds of those educational leaders whose checklist – it can hardly be called a vision – starts and stops with whatever DfE mandates and Ofsted inspects, who jump on whichever policy bandwagon offers the best prospects for patronage, promotion and preferment, and who preach the importance of enlarging the child’s experience while doing nothing to enlarge their own.

Happy birthday, Fred.   Happy birthday Michael.  We need you more than ever.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

by Robin Alexander

What you may have missed during August

Forthcoming events, hard lessons from the United States, Eton speaks, sustainability, global citizenship, Cameron’s ‘family test’, and tributes to Anna Craft … What you may have missed during August.

CPRT’s new website went live just before the end of the summer term. Among its innovations is a more or less weekly blog to which you are invited to respond and which many are now regularly circulating via Twitter and email. The blog continued throughout August, for not everyone was on holiday and neither education nor the wider world took a break.

If you’ve just returned from holiday, or if with impressive self-discipline you switched off your computer, smartphone or tablet for the duration, here’s what we have discussed.

I’ve held the fort during August but you’ll be relieved to hear that during the coming weeks others will be joining me on CPRT’s blog roster. Apart from commentary on current educational developments, we’ll be sharing findings from CPRT’s eight new research projects and consulting about the messages we should give to the parties contesting the 2015 general election.  CPR conducted a similar exercise before the 2010 election. Have the resulting 11 policy priorities been addressed? What has the Coalition done right and wrong? What hopes should we voice for 2015?

Events

Also on the home page is an expanding list of events for teachers organised by CPRT and others. Contact links are provided. If your own organisation wishes to advertise a forthcoming event, please contact CPRT’s administrator, Greg Frame.

Join us

Information about CPRT’s news, events and blogs is sent to all those on our mailing list. If you do not yet receive these alerts and would like to do so, please subscribe here. If you know of others who may be interested or in your view ought to know about the legacy of CPR and the work of CPRT – especially serving teachers, trainee teachers, teacher educators and professional consultants – please forward the form to them. Our mailing list is treated in strictest confidence and you are free to unsubscribe at any time.

Equally, if you wish to work with others in your region, contact your nearest CPRT Regional Network Co-ordinator.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

Contact

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