The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

by Robin Alexander

Campaign for sustainability

Sustainability and Environmental Education (SEEd) is currently campaigning to have the 2002 Education Act amended to make education for sustainability an obligation on all schools, notwithstanding the fact that it has been excluded from the new National Curriculum. The Secretary of State has said that while she accepts the importance of sustainability it’s up to schools to decide what to do about it, if anything. This seems a somewhat feeble response from a government that in 2010 proudly billed itself ‘the greenest government ever’ .

In this matter DfE appears to be out of step not just with its own rhetoric and groups like SEEd and the Cambridge Primary Review Trust – which lists sustainability and global citizenship among its eight educational priorities – but also the UN and OECD. UNESCO’s agenda for global education after 2015 will link education to sustainability, global citizenship and equity, while OECD is likely to include ‘global competence’ in the next international PISA tests. Since so much educational policy these days, including the new national curriculum, is PISA-driven, we wonder why this should be an exception.

This autumn, as noted in an earlier blog, CPRT will be joining forces with other organisations to raise the educational profile of sustainable development and global understanding. Meanwhile, SEEd is seeking support for its own campaign.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

by Robin Alexander

Does education pass the family test?

In 2010, Michael Gove renamed Labour’s Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) the Department for Education (DfE), at a stroke ejecting Ed Balls’s tiresomely winsome munchkins from the Sanctuary Buildings atrium, ending baffled discussion about whether DCSF stood for comedy and science fiction or curtains and soft furnishings, and heralding a gimmick-free return to core business.

Then last week, with the Gove supremacy a receding memory but with Govine policies firmly in place for the duration, the PM announced that from November 2014 every new government policy ‘will be assessed for its impact on the family.’  The PM’s admission that too many existing policies have failed his ‘family test’ must prompt us to ask whether he had in mind the doings of the demoted Gove.  After all, who needs munchkins to tell them that children’s needs and family circumstances are as inextricably the business of schools and hence DfE as are curriculum, tests and standards?

Labour appeared to understand this relationship, up to a point. So the Cambridge Primary Review found widespread support for Sure Start, EYFS, Every Child Matters, the Children’s Act, the Childcare Act, Every Parent Matters, the Children’s Plan and Narrowing the Gap, an impressive procession of ‘joined-up’ initiatives through which the Labour government sought to reduce childhood risk, increase childhood protection, support families and maximise educational opportunities. But CPR also reported growing and often intense opposition to the same government’s apparatus of high stakes testing, higher stakes inspection, performance tables, naming, shaming and closely prescribed pedagogy, all of which also impacted on children and families, with outcomes that remain hotly contested.

In any event, this so-called standards agenda was widely thought to exacerbate what, in her important research survey for CPR, Berry Mayall called the ‘scholarisation’ of childhood: the incursion of schooling and its demands ever more deeply into children’s lives at an ever younger age, leaving little room for a childhood unimpeded by pressures which in many other education systems, including some that perform better than the UK in the international PISA tests, start a year or even two years later than in England. When Britain came bottom of a rather different performance table, UNICEF’s comparative rating of childhood well-being in rich countries, opponents of these tendencies drew the obvious conclusion.

Hence the reaction: Sue Palmer’s best-selling ‘Toxic Childhood’, the Children’s Society Good Childhood Enquiry, and latterly the Save Childhood Movement. And hence, true to the laws of policy physics, the ministerial counter-reaction, from Labour’s ‘these people are peddling out-of-date research’ – a lamely unoriginal and transparently defensive response to unpalatable evidence – to the Coalition’s earthier recourse to personal abuse: ‘Marxists intent on destroying our schools … enemies of promise … bleating bogus pop-psychology’.

Meanwhile, the rich became richer and the poor poorer.

In relation to children and families, then, there is all too often a pretty fundamental policy disconnect. Education policy may give with one hand but take with another; and education policy strives to narrow the gap that economic policy no less assiduously maintains and even widens, not pausing to ask why the gap is there in the first place.  For surely Treasury ministers know as well as their DfE colleagues how closely the maps of income, health, wellbeing and educational achievement coincide; that unequal societies have unequal education systems and unequal educational outcomes; and that equity is a significant factor in other nations’ PISA success – though in all this we need to avoid facile cause-effect claims and we know that fine schools can and do break the mould.  Yet will the ‘family test’ be applied as stringently to the policies of Chancellor Osborne, I wonder, as to those of Education ex-Secretary Gove? Or will the social and educational fallout of austerity be written off as unavoidable collateral damage?

But I suspect that linking the policy dots is not what the new family test is about and each policy will be assessed in isolation. In any case, how many new education policies, if any, will the government introduce in the eight months before the 2015 general election? And at a time when the demography of childhood and parenting is more diverse than ever, how exactly is ‘family’ defined? Isn’t the family test both too muddled and too late?

For its part, CPRT, like CPR before it, is operating more holistically, and we have invited leading researchers to help us. Kate Pickett, co-author of The Spirit Level – that groundbreaking epidemiological study of the causes, manifestations and consequences of inequality – to help us. In one of five new CPRT research surveys, Kate is revisiting her own and CPR’s evidence on equality, equity and disadvantage and examining more recent data in order to re-assess causes, consequences and solutions. Her report will be published early in 2015. In parallel, we have commissioned research updates on children’s voice, development and learning from Carol Robinson and Usha Goswami; and on assessment and teaching from Wynne Harlen and David Hogan. Squaring the schooling/family circle we have embarked, in collaboration with the University of York, on an Educational Endowment Foundation-supported project to develop and test the power of high quality classroom talk to increase engagement and raise learning standards among those of our children who are growing up in the most challenging circumstances.

You’ll find information about all these projects on the CPRT website. We hope and believe they will pass the family test.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

by Robin Alexander

The parts the National Curriculum doesn’t reach

Numbed by the unrelenting horror of this summer’s news from Gaza, Israel, Syria, Iraq and South Sudan, and the heartrending images of children slaughtered, families shattered and ancient communities uprooted, we ask what on earth we in the West can do.

With our historical awareness heightened by the current centenary of the 1914-18 war and what, in terms of the redrawing of national boundaries, it led to, we also recognise that the fate of countries such as these reaches back in part to political decisions taken, like it or not, in our name and as recently as 2003. So collectively we are implicated if not complicit. If, as H.G. Wells warned soon after the 1918 armistice, history is a race between education and catastrophe, we must surely ask at this time why, for so many, that race has been lost; and whether and how education can do better. If ever we needed a reminder that true education must pursue goals and standards that go well beyond the narrow confines of what is tested, here it is.

We know that England’s new national curriculum mandates what DfE deems ‘essential knowledge’ in the ‘core subjects’ (the quotes remind us that these are political formulations rather than moral absolutes) plus, in the interests of ‘breadth and balance’ (ditto) a few other subjects of which much less is said and demanded. But we’ve also been told that the school curriculum is more than the national curriculum. We should therefore take this opportunity to think no less seriously about what is not required than about what is.

One of my keenest memories of the period 2006-9 when the Cambridge Primary Review was collecting and analysing evidence on the condition and future of English primary education is of visiting an urban Lancashire primary school that exemplified England’s ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity. We were there as part of a journey crisscrossing the country to take ‘community soundings‘ – a few days earlier we had been with Roma and Travellers in Cornwall – and having heard from children, teachers, heads, parents and local officials we found ourselves in a small room discussing faith, education and social cohesion with an imam, a rabbi and a priest.

What was illuminating about this encounter, apart from the manifest respect each religious representative had for the other, was the extent of common ground between them. Predating by several years the current DfE consultation on ‘British values‘, our three faith leaders readily identified a moral core for education to which they and we could all subscribe. Significantly, this did not merely look inwards at Britain and to cosy clichés like fair play but unflinchingly outwards to the fractured and despairing world we see daily on our television screens.

Partly in response to soundings such as this, the twelve educational aims proposed by the Cambridge Primary Review included the promotion of respect and reciprocity, interdependence and sustainability, culture and community and local, national and global citizenship; while the Review’s curriculum framework sought to advance the knowledge and understanding with which values in action must always be tempered through domains such as place and time, citizenship and ethics and faith and belief. The last of these was deemed integral to the curriculum because, as our community soundings confirmed, ‘religion is fundamental to this country’s history, culture and language, as well as to the daily lives of many of its inhabitants.’

Yet where is any of this reflected in the national curriculum that England’s schools are about to implement? The exploration of faith and belief (which is not necessarily the same as compulsory RE) remains anomalously outside the walls, even as religion is invoked to justify unspeakable atrocities. World history receives scant treatment, the ethical dimension of science has been removed, culture – however one defines it – gets short shrift and in the primary phase citizenship has disappeared completely.

For the society and world in which our children are growing up is this an adequate preparation? Some of us think not, and this autumn CPRT hopes to join with other organisations to explore curriculum futures which engage more directly and meaningfully with that world, believing that citizenship education is not only more urgent now than ever but that it must be local and global as well as national.

So when schools consider how they should fill the gap between the new national curriculum and the school curriculum they may care to start by reflecting on another gap: between the curriculum as officially prescribed and the condition and needs of the community, society and world in which our children are growing up.

Of course, we speak here of the task for education as a whole, not primary education alone, and we must be mindful of what is appropriate for children at different phases of their development. The vision of a childhood untroubled by adult fears and responsibilities cannot be lightly dismissed, though such a childhood is beyond the reach of millions of the world’s children. Yet consider this, from CPR’s community soundings report: ‘The soundings were pervaded by a sense of deep pessimism about the future, to which children themselves were not immune … Yet where schools engaged children with global and local realities as aspects of their education they were noticeably more upbeat … Pessimism turned to hope when witnesses felt they had the power to act.’

So in the global race between education and catastrophe what exactly should England’s primary teachers do and what should England’s primary children learn? The question is entirely open: please respond.

  • A detailed discussion, informed by extensive evidence, of the wider purposes of primary education and what these imply for the curriculum appears in ‘Children, their World, their Education: final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review‘, chapters 12 and 14.
  • To contribute to the DfE consultation on promoting British values in independent schools, academies and free schools, which closes on the 18 August, click here.
  • Information about CPRT’s coming global citizenship work with other organisations will be posted shortly.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

 

by Robin Alexander

Two worlds of education: lessons from America

‘Education in two worlds’ is the blog of Gene Glass, a leading commentator on American education in the era of marketisation, charter schools, common core standards, high stakes testing and teacher employment practices redolent of 1860s England and ‘payment by results’.

Far from being remote from the situation here in the UK, what Glass, Berliner, Ravitch and others portray as a politically and commercially orchestrated assault on American public schooling in the name of parental choice and improved standards uses strategies that the UK government has consciously imported, adapted or endorsed. This policy cloning is most conspicuous in the treatment of international evidence, the national curriculum, academies, teacher education and testing. For in campaigns educational as well as military, where America goes Britain tends to follow, in the process transferring the language of the battlefield to the classroom.

In their brilliant book 50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools, Berliner and Glass muster research evidence that deconstructs the ‘myths, hoaxes and outright lies’ through which, in their view, US policymakers and their multinational and fundamentalist backers have sought to discredit mainstream schooling and turn public service into private profit. With many of these – especially the ‘grand myth’ of a state schooling system which in comparison with its PISA competitors is in terminal decline – England is only too familiar.

The trouble is, each incoming UK government uses the same terminal decline claim to dismiss the sweeping and often disruptive ‘reforms’ of its predecessor and impose its own, which is tantamount to an admission either that the reforms don’t work or that the system isn’t broken after all and the exercise has more to do with vanity and machismo than progress. Remember Michael Gove, hard on the heels of Labour’s ‘highest standards ever’ national strategies: ‘literacy, down; numeracy, down; science, down; fail, fail, fail!’

1992, 1997, 2010 … We’ve been there so many times that as we approach the 2015 general election party leaders may well find themselves rubbishing their own policies. Let’s hope so.

Hence ‘two worlds’: the world of carefully assembled evidence and educated deliberation, of schooling as it is and could be, and the shallow, hectic and self-regarding world of political rhetoric, spin, myth and scapegoating; a world in which evidence is treated not even-handedly but opportunistically and selectively, and on that basis serves not to shape, test and improve policy but post hoc to validate it; a world in which myths and policies are endlessly recycled and in which, consequently, there’s much change but little real progress. It matters not that in opposition our leaders promise, as they invariably do, a more principled approach. Once in power, just as invariably, they revert.

One strand of the Cambridge Primary Review’s final report that gained less attention than it deserved was its exposure of these tendencies in English primary education. In the course of a wider analysis of the educational policy process the report contrasted the necessary discourse of evidence and deliberation with the actual discourses of dichotomy, derision and myth, and its penultimate chapter demolished no fewer than 14 claims about educational standards that were central to government policy between 1997 and 2010.

So if you fancy a break from the usual holiday reading, try the books below and the blogs of Glass or Ravitch – or indeed Children, their World, their Education, chapters 2, 3 and 23.

There’ll be more on these matters in the autumn and in the run-up to the 2015 election, starting with two abiding ‘grand myths’ about English primary education.

Four for the bookshelf of seekers after educational truth:

  • Berliner, D.C., Glass, G.V. and associates (2014) 50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America’s Schools: the real crisis in education, Teachers College Press.
  • Ravitch, D. (2013) Reign of Error: the hoax of the privatisation movement and the danger to America’s public schools, Knopf.
  • Sahlberg, P. (2010) Finnish Lessons: what can the world learn from educational change in Finland? Teachers College Press.

plus, of course –

  • Alexander, R.J. (ed) (2010) Children, their World, their Education: final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review, Routledge.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

 

by Robin Alexander

From the playing fields of Eton

Tony Little, head of Eton, has intervened in the education debate with claims that are more frequently heard in maintained schools and CPR reports: the exam system is no longer fit for purpose; copying Singapore and Shanghai is not the way to raise standards; there’s more to education than league tables; children need a broad rich curriculum as well as the basics …

No less interesting is DfE’s dismissive response: ‘We make no apology for holding schools to account for the results their pupils achieve in national tests and public examinations. Parents deserve to know that their children are receiving the very best possible teaching.’

Sounds familiar? Yes indeed: here’s DfE’s predecessor, DCSF, responding to one of CPR’s interim reports in 2008: ‘We make no apology for our focus on school standards. We want every child to achieve to the best of their abilities, succeed and be happy, and we know that parents and teachers want that too. The idea that children are over tested is not a view that the government accepts.’

Different government, same script, same scriptwriter, same populist ploy of pitting professionals against parents, same refusal to debate the issues that matter. See ‘Two worlds of education’. QED.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

by Robin Alexander

What has CPRT been up to?

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

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

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

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

www.robinalexander.org.uk

 

by Robin Alexander

Farewell Gove: the best that has been thought and said, or merely toxic?

The Guardian claims that Michael Gove has been demoted from Education Secretary to Chief Whip because with the general election less than a year away he has become a ‘toxic liability’.

Whatever the reason, this self-appointed arbiter of ‘the best that has been thought and said’ (see the published aims of England’s new national curriculum) has been nothing if not colourful in his insults, including during periods of statutory consultation when the right to disagree with ministers and their ideas is supposedly what such exercises are about. (Remember ‘enemies of promise … bleating bogus pop psychology … Marxists hell bent on destroying our schools …’ and of course ‘The Blob’?)

But hold on: with the more emollient face of DfE represented by Secretary of State Nicky Morgan be clouded by the scowl of Nick Gibb, removed from DfE in 2012 and now back as Minister of State?

Let us know what you think about Gove’s legacy for our children’s primary education, and about prospects for 2014/15 under DfE’s new/old team. For there’s no doubt that under Gove a great deal changed, and his tenure deserves proper assessment.

Read ‘The best that has been thought and said?’, Robin Alexander’s keynote at the launch of the CPR Trust.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

by Robin Alexander

PISA 2012: Time to Grow Up?

On December 3rd 2013 – PISA Day – OECD published its 2012 test results in maths, reading and science for a sample of 15 year olds in 65 countries, together with attendant league tables and analysis. Except that politicians and media mostly targeted the league tables and ignored OECD’s analysis, preferring to substitute their own. As with PISA 2009, 2006 and 2003, this was heavy on blame and naive attributions of educational cause and economic effect, and light on acknowledgement of PISA’s limitations and the contextual, cultural and demographic factors that OECD itself is careful to emphasise. There was also much talk of the need to recover lost educational rigour, which one commentator tellingly spelled ‘rigor’.

These tests are undeniably important in the snapshots they provide of selected aspects of the UK’s educational performance in relation to that of other OECD member and partner countries. If there’s evidence that standards are stagnating or falling then we must act. And because primary schools lay the foundations for later attainment we hope that CPRT associates and followers will be as keen as their secondary colleagues to inform themselves about PISA’s outcomes and implications. The links below provide both findings and comment. Here’s one finding to take us beyond the league tables: in maths, differences in performance at age 15 within countries are often greater – the equivalent of over seven years of schooling – than differences between them. Sounds familiar? Those with long memories will recall that Cockcroft diagnosed the seven-year maths gap in England and Wales back in 1982, and among 11 year olds, not 15. Successful countries may not close the gap but they reduce the variation and increase the proportion of high attainers.

So it’s time for Westminster to grow up and give us something more enlightened than Punch and Judy exchanges and exhortations to copy whichever country or jurisdiction, regardless of its politics and culture, happens for now to head the PISA league table. If Westminster continues to prefer its own myths, nostrums and playground taunts to proper analysis, including that provided by OECD itself, we might well ask ‘What’s the point of PISA?’

But ‘time to grow up’ has a deeper resonance, for each successive wave of PISA panic produces a reflex tightening of the screws on children’s time for the rich, balanced and no less rigorous education which not only serves them best but also, as it happens, supports the drive to raise standards; their time, indeed, for childhood.

We hope that primary professionals and school leaders, who lay the foundations for what PISA tests and, crucially, for what it does not test, will study the evidence and reclaim the debate. Start with the links below…

www.robinalexander.org.uk

by Robin Alexander

Nearly There (but is it the right destination?)

We are now at the final stage of England’s latest National Curriculum review. On 8 July, the UK government published the draft legislative Order with a consultation closing date of 8 August. The next version, in October, will be the real thing. The Cambridge Primary Review and the CPR Trust have responded to the proposals at every stage since the current national curriculum review was launched in 2011. However, unless there’s a dramatic parliamentary intervention all the changes that the government is prepared to concede have now been made, so we shall not be submitting further comments at this stage. You will find the draft legislative order and consultation form atwww.education.gov.uk/nationalcurriculum.

On the matter of consultation, it is instructive to view DfE’s analysis of responses to the previous stage and assess their impact on the latest proposals. DfE consultations provoke a great deal of routine cynicism and DfE itself has now provided the data to enable us to assess how far this is justified. You will find DfE’s analysis and the government’s reaction at www.education.gov.uk/consultations.

Here’s a positive example. CPRT has exerted considerable pressure, both through the formal consultations and directly with ministers and officials, to raise the curriculum profile of spoken language in accordance with its crucially important role in education, employment and life. Hitherto, the proposals have been, in our view, woefully inadequate and ill-conceived (see ‘The power of talk’ in the News column). The 8 July version doesn’t go as far as we would like in this regard, but is a considerable improvement on its predecessors, and we recognise the source of much of the programme of study for spoken language that DfE has belatedly inserted.

DfE has also confirmed that most of the existing national curriculum will be ‘disapplied’ for the year 2013-14 in order to help schools make the transition. CPRT is aware that for wholly understandable reasons there is some professional support for this decision, though from DfE’s response figures not enough to justify ploughing ahead regardless. We remind DfE that the last time this device was deployed (in 1998, to get schools to concentrate on the previous government’s flagship national literacy and numeracy strategies), Ofsted reported that in many primary schools it inflicted serious damage on the quality of the non-core curriculum experienced by a generation of the nation’s children. During 2013-14 we might keep this episode, and its warnings, in mind.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

by Robin Alexander

Are we nearly there yet?

First there was the ‘Expert Panel’, rising and sinking without trace save for a few disgruntled bubbles. Then, in June 2012, we had the first draft of the proposals for English, maths and science, though silence on the rest of the curriculum (which conveyed a pretty clear message about what matters politically and what does not).

Now, on 7 February 2013, we have the draft of the entire curriculum, core and non-core, secondary as well as primary. DfE invites us to submit comments by 16 April 2013. We hope readers will suspend their understandable cynicism about curriculum consultations, study the proposals and tell DfE what they think. Saying nothing will be construed as approval.

The consultation form lists the questions the DfE would like us to answer. You may feel that there are other questions to be asked. For example, why no citizenship at Key Stages 1 and 2? Are drama and dance adequately handled? Does that overused phrase ‘breadth and balance’ have any meaning in this case? Have CPR’s criticisms of the previous draft relating to aims, spoken language and a host of other matters – see this page – been addressed? The questions posed by DfE are certainly pertinent, but don’t be restricted by them.

The Cambridge Primary Review offers no other comment at this stage. We shall do so later. For now we believe that it is more important to encourage the entire professional community to get involved. We owe our children nothing less.

On the other hand, if you want to test the DfE proposals against a genuinely visionary and evidence-based approach to educational aims and the primary curriculum, read Children, their World, their Education: final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review, chapters 12, 13 and 14.

Further information about the government’s national curriculum consultation can be found here.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

Contact

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