The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Rigor spagis

Amid the gloom of unsavoury Sats and enforced academisation, comes one delicious moment of joy. Schools minister Nick Gibb doesn’t know his subordinating conjunctions from his prepositions. He can’t answer one of the questions he has set children. Despite this woeful (in his eyes) ignorance – though, tellingly, when his mistake is pointed out he says ‘This isn’t about me’ – he has managed to become and to remain a government minister. Need one say any more about the pointlessness of the Spag test?

At least by this time next week it will all be over. The country’s 10 and 11-year-olds will be free to enjoy their final few weeks at primary school, liberated from the government’s oh so very rigorous key stage 2 tests. Like them, I am tired of fractions, tired of conjunctions, tired, in fact, of being told of the need for ‘rigour’. The Education Secretary and the Chief Inspector need to wake up to the fact that rigour is a nasty little word, suggestive of starch and thin lips. Its lack of humour and humanity makes parents and teachers recoil. Check out its origins in one of those dictionaries you recommend children use.

Hopefully the weight of protest here, echoing many in America, will force some meaningful concessions from the ‘rigour revolutionaries’ in time for next year’s tests. Either that, or everyone with a genuine interest in helping young children learn will stand up and say No.  In the words of CPRT Priority 8, Assessment must ‘enhance learning as well as test it’, ‘support rather than distort the curriculum’ and ‘pursue standards and quality in all areas of learning, not just the core subjects’. The opposite is happening at the moment in the name of rigour. It’s not rigour – but it is deadly.

Of course, the memory of subordinating conjunctions and five-digit subtraction by decomposition will fade for the current Year 6s – and for Nick Gibb – unless they turn out to have failed the tests. Mrs Morgan will decide just how rigorous she wants to be in the summer. Politics will determine where she draws the line between happy and sad children. Politics will decide the proportion she brands as failures at age 11, forced to do the tests again at secondary school.

But still the children have these few carefree weeks where primary school can go back to doing what primary school does best – encouraging enquiry into and enjoyment of the world around us. Well, no. Teachers still have to assess writing. And if my classroom is anything to go by, writing has been sidelined over the past few weeks in the effort to cram a few more scraps of worthless knowledge into young brains yearning to rule the country.

So how do we teachers judge good writing? Sadly, that’s an irrelevant question. Don’t bother drawing up a mental list of, for example, exciting plot, imaginative setting, inventive language, mastery of different genres. No, teachers must assess using Mrs Morgan’s leaden criteria, criteria that would never cross the mind of a Man Booker prize judge. Marlon James, last year’s Booker winner and a teacher of creative writing, was praised for a story that ‘traverses strange landscapes and shady characters, as motivations are examined – and questions asked’. No one commented on James’s ability to ‘use a range of cohesive devices, including adverbials, within and across sentences and paragraphs’.

The dead hand of rigour decrees that we judge children’s ability to employ ‘passive and modal verbs mostly appropriately’. We have to check that they use ‘adverbs, preposition phrases and expanded noun phrases effectively to add detail, qualification and precision’. (Never mind thrilling, moving or frightening, I do love a story to be detailed, precise and qualified.) We forget to read what the children have actually written in the hunt for ‘inverted commas, commas for clarity, and punctuation for parenthesis [used] mostly correctly, and some correct use of semi-colons, dashes, colons and hyphens’. Finally, it goes without saying that young children must ‘spell most words correctly’.

There are eight criteria in the Government’s interim framework for writing at the ‘expected standard’ – expected by whom, one is tempted to ask. Only one of the eight relates to the point of putting pen to paper in the first place. Aside from ‘the pupil can create atmosphere, and integrate dialogue to convey character and advance the action’, the writing criteria spring entirely from the Government’s obsession with grammar, punctuation and spelling. I fear it is only too easy to meet the ‘expected standard’ with writing that is as lifeless, uninspiring and rigorous as the criteria themselves.

If writing is not to entertain and inform, then why bother? In the old days of levels, teachers had to tussle with Assessment of Pupil Performance Grids – a similar attempt to standardise the marking of a creative activity. But at least the APP grids acknowledged that good writing should make an impact. Texts should be ‘imaginative, interesting and thoughtful’. Sentence clauses and vocabulary should be varied not to tick a grammar checklist box but to have an ‘effect’ on the reader.

So now we have to knuckle down and make sure children’s writing satisfies the small-minded rigour revolutionaries. Can we slip in a semi-colon and a couple of brackets without spoiling the flow of a youthful reworking of an Arthurian legend? How many times can we persuade our young authors to write out their stories in order to ensure ‘most’ words are spelt correctly. And what to do about those blank looks when we suggest that they repeat a phrase from one paragraph to the next to ensure they have achieved ‘cohesion’?

Mrs Morgan claims the ‘tough’ new curriculum will foster a love of literature. This is a mad, topsy-turvy world that includes too many ‘strange landscapes and shady characters’. It is good, at last, that ‘motivations are examined – and questions asked’. Keep up the good work, everyone. We can stop the rigour revolutionaries.

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

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Boycott the Sats

Schools are scrambling to prepare children for the new Sats tests to be taken in May. Teachers who have never before ‘taught to the test’ are gloomily conceding that the Government has left them no other option. Children are being drilled in the mechanics of adverbial clauses and long division, forced to spell vital words such as ‘pronunciation’ and ‘hindrance’, and helped to write stories showing their mastery of the passive voice and modal verbs. Headteachers shake their heads sorrowfully. Advisers grimace and say ‘nothing to do with us’. None of this should be happening – and finally there is just a possibility that the madness will stop.

First, came the suggestion of a boycott of baseline testing. Now, at last, there is a call to cancel the KS2 Sats. I watch the signatures grow daily (hourly) hoping they represent the moment when the classroom worms such as myself finally turned and said no.

The only word on the spelling list that Year 6s should learn is ‘sacrifice’ as this will enable them to write to the Education Secretary pointing out that their learning is being sacrificed to a mean-spirited and regressive assessment system.

The new tests and assessments have been designed, not to discover and celebrate what children can do, but to catch them out. Here are just a few examples. It is essential, says the Government, that KS1 children are taught maths using concrete and visual aids such as Numicon and number squares.  So which callous wretch decreed that the same children must be deprived of these props when taking their Sats? In my school, children wept because they could see the number squares but were not allowed to use them.

I’d also like to meet the sour-faced creators of the sample grammar test who asked Year 6 children to add suffixes to nouns to create adjectives (clearly a life skill) and then decided that getting five out of six right merited no marks. Likewise I’d love to shake hands with the generous soul who recently decreed nul points for any child misplacing a comma when separating numbers in the thousands in their KS2 maths Sats. Similarly, there’s no mercy for the left-handed child who struggles to join up his handwriting or for the fast-thinking kid who writes brilliantly but forgets her full stops.

Assessment should, as CPRT recommends, ‘enhance learning as well as test it’ and ‘support rather than distort the curriculum.’

Assessment in the CPRT spirit ensures that the children in my class are set a range of appropriate challenges every day. As a consequence, they are all generally making cheerful progress, though some more rapidly than others and some have greater strengths in one area of learning than another. Yes, I’m sorry to say, they are inconsistent: they have been known to go backwards and they even make mistakes. In other words, they are human beings.

The new tests have not been designed with humans in mind, let alone small humans. Rather they have been created by cyborgs for baby cyborgs. If you don’t believe me, watch the bizarre 2016 KS2 assessment webinar from the Standards and Testing Agency.

The STA cyborgs explain why it was necessary to ditch the ‘best fit’ model of levels where teachers, heaven forbid, used their professional judgement to decide if a child had ticked enough boxes to be awarded a level 3c. According to the cyborgs, parents were confused by their 3c kid being able to do, or not do, things that their mate’s 3c kid could or couldn’t do. Clearly in cyborg land, parents had nothing better to do than check that all children assessed at the same level had exactly the same set of skills and knowledge. This is just so ridiculous as to be laughable were it not for what is currently happening in the nation’s classrooms.

In terms of teacher assessment, best fit has been replaced by perfect fit. Now we have to tick all the boxes in order to judge children to be working at the ‘expected standard’. If just one box cannot be ticked, children are classified as ‘working towards’. However, it doesn’t end there. If a child doesn’t tick all those boxes, they will cascade back down the (not) levels potentially all the way to Year 1. Take writing as an example. One of the best young writers I have taught would not qualify even as ‘working towards’ because she didn’t join up her handwriting. Likewise imaginative but dyslexic 10-year-olds will slip down and down because they can’t spell words supposedly appropriate for eight-year-olds such as ‘occasionally’, ‘reign’ or ‘possession’. And, according to the STA cyborgian webinar, there is ‘no flexibility’ on this.

Yet not only is it inflexible, mean spirited and regressive, it is also just not fair. The current Year 6 has only had two years at most to prepare for this newly punitive world of harder work and pitiless mark schemes. And make that only three months in terms of writing where standards have been wrenched up from a level 4b to a 5c. Parents do not know what harsh judgements await their children this summer. If they did, chances are they would support a boycott. As Warwick Mansell, writing in a CPRT blog back in 2014, wisely commented:

The single ‘working at national standard’ – or not – verdict, where it is to be offered, also seems to invite a simple ‘pass/fail’ judgement. This, it is hard to avoid thinking, will set up the view among many children that they are failures at an early age.

And not only the children. Teachers are under tremendous pressure to ensure their pupils reach the new standards in reading, maths, grammar and writing – irrespective of individual strengths or weaknesses. Yet we are supposed to achieve this without allowing these standards ‘to guide individual programmes of study, classroom practice or methodology’ as the STA disingenuously insists. Sometimes I wonder if I’m stupid or perhaps was asleep when a new era of Orwellian doublethink dawned. How on earth do children learn to ‘use passive and modal verbs mostly appropriately’ if I don’t explicitly teach them? How do they learn to add, subtract or multiply fractions without that being a programme of study? Perhaps in some Utopian classroom there is a lesson plan – presumably in something tasteful like quilting – that miraculously transfers this knowledge to children in such a form that they can pass their Sats and meet the ‘expected standard’.

But until someone lends me that plan, I’d rather we all just said no.

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

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Squirrel on acid

A confession. I made a mistake teaching long division to my class this week. It had something to do with zeroes and, while I realised my error straight away, putting it right wasn’t so easy. Children, who I assume only half listen to 30 per cent of what I say, were conscientiously putting in my superfluous zeroes.

Perhaps I should be sacked. After all, the ability to do long division at primary school was important enough to the Tories to be written into their manifesto. Being ‘let go’ would, in many ways, be a blessed relief. Aside from a desire to live just a tiny portion of my own life, I am torn, like 53 per cent of teachers,  between my belief in the value of the job and the frustrations involved in actually doing it.

Let me explain. Under my calm teacher exterior seethes the interior turmoil of a squirrel on acid. The crazed rodent is tasked with ensuring that every child makes steady progress across the board of an ever harder curriculum – and that there is evidence to prove it. Each day passes in a whirlwind of lesson planning, preparation and panic. Resources must be found or created to cater for four ability levels. They must be photocopied, sorted, stapled and guillotined to fit into books nicely. Assessment methods – self, peer or squirrel – must be decided and organised. Each lesson’s ‘learning objective’ needs to be printed onto individual sticky labels. This is degree-level photocopying and has taken me months to perfect – but I was driven to it by the fact that some children spend an astonishingly high percentage of their learning time just writing out what they are supposed to be learning.

Usually I mislay one vital ingredient somewhere along the line, entailing squirrel-like scrabbling on my desk and frantic repeat photocopying. The children warm their hands on freshly printed worksheets while I try not to worry about the planet. In between all this, there are ‘working wall’ displays to sort out, interventions to discuss, assemblies to give, hurt feelings and cut knees to tend. Then, of course, there is the marking … marking … marking. Teachers go on alarming about marking so I will spare you – anyway it largely happens at night.

It rarely runs like clockwork, but usually we get by. Sometimes, however, things go awry. The day of the long division error is a case in point. After lunch, I had intended to teach science – a lesson on light and pinhole cameras. Sadly, the three test cameras I made the night before failed to turn a mug of coffee, let alone the world, upside down. Never mind, I mused as I shovelled some lunch into my mouth, perhaps we can move straight onto reflection and refraction, Quickly, I grab torches and mirrors from the new £100 science light kit and peer hopefully into a pale pool of light. No joy. The beams are too diffuse to refract or reflect anything save my despair.

With 15 minutes left of the lunch break, I decide to teach a history lesson planned for the following week. It requires watching a short video clip on the Stone Age settlement of Skara Brae in the Orkneys. What a shame, then, that the local authority regards online videos as the devil’s work and blocks 90 per cent of them including, of course, Skara Brae. Ten minutes to go, I leap into the car and head for home. No, I’m not running away – not yet. I’m in search of my Simon Schama History of Britain DVD.

Phew. Made it. We sit engrossed as Schama takes us back to prehistoric Scotland. Reluctantly, as he moves to the conclusion of his thoughts on Skara Brae, my finger moves towards the off button. ‘Please, just one more minute!’ beg the children. Given that they are genuinely interested in the thoughts of a serious historian, I happily give in. Sadly, the serious historian chooses that moment to discuss some Viking graffiti. Gravitas thrown to the wind, he translates the Norseman’s runes. ‘Horny bitch,’ he announces.

‘Oh Miss!’ the children chorus in delighted shock. ‘Oh Miss, should we be watching this?’”

Comedy aside, such days persuade me not of my own disorganisation and incompetence, but of the validity of the case for more specialist teaching in primary schools. It is a case well made by Children, their World, their Education, the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review. 

The real breakthrough will come when schools accept that the argument made by the Williams report for using specialists to enhance the teaching of mathematics could be made for all curriculum domains …
Until there is acceptance that domain expertise is so crucial to educational quality that it directly challenges the historical basis of primary teachers’ professional identity as generalists, this Review’s definition of curriculum entitlement as the highest possible standards of teaching in all domains, regardless of how much or little time each is allocated, will remain a pipe dream. (p 434)

Most teachers, in fact most humans, would struggle to become expert enough to teach English, maths and science – never mind French, computing, history, geography, art, music, RE, PE… This is especially so given that good teaching requires so much more than knowledge. It requires a cupboard full of engaging lessons backed up with tested resources coupled with an awareness of what children need to know and how they best learn it. It would be truly delightful to be able to develop such an expertise in a few subjects or domains. They wouldn’t be the same subjects as my colleagues’ so between us we could cover the curriculum. The children would thrive – most actually enjoy seeing the occasional different face in front of the whiteboard – and so would we.

Perhaps then the crazed squirrel could take the occasional nap.

Stephanie Northen is a teacher and journalist. She contributed to the Cambridge Primary Review final report and is a member of the Board of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust.  For other blogs by Stephanie download CPRT’s recent collection Primary Colours.

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Divide and Rule

A mark of a successful primary school career is, according to the Conservatives, the ability to do long division. As our privately-educated Education Secretary Nicky Morgan explained, long division is at the heart of giving ‘every child the chance to master the basics and succeed in life,’ something that is a ‘fundamental duty’ of government.

This is interesting for many reasons. Here’s one. Finland, long-time star of the education world, has clearly decided it wants its children to fail. Shockingly, it is deleting long division from its national curriculum and replacing it with coding.  The change is part of a drive, says Liisa Pohjolainen, head of education in Helsinki, to provide ‘a different kind of education’. Long division is being cast into the long grass because ‘young people now use quite advanced computers. In the past the banks had lots of clerks totting up figures but now that has totally changed’.

British technologist Conrad Wolfram makes the same point more bluntly. Long division, he says, is being used ‘as a badge of honour of what the government calls rigour when in fact it’s a prime example of mindless manual processing’. Marcus de Sautoy, professor for the public understanding of science, agrees: ‘Most people think that maths is about long division to lots of decimal places. Really, though, a mathematician is someone who looks at structure and pattern – and in a sense that’s how everyone reads the world: we’re all mathematicians at heart.’

All these comments echo the the Cambridge Primary Review final report which argued that ‘primary mathematics escapes the critical scrutiny to which other domains are subject’, and urged teachers and curriculum planners to ‘address with some rigour the question of what aspects of mathematics are truly essential and foundational in the primary phase’ (p271).  Long division is neither. It’s not what maths is about. It’s what Tory politicians believe their voters believe maths is about.  Hyping up the importance of long division in primary schools is yet another example of playing politics with education – as is labelling schools ‘coasting’ in order to create more academies. Statements of the bleeding obvious, maybe, but bleeding obvious statements clearly aren’t being made often or forcefully enough. If they were, changes that are bad for children and ultimately for all of us would not keep happening.

But back to the question of long division and the ethical issues it raises. Do I teach it knowing that I should not? Answer: a woeful yes. My profession is not trusted to decide what maths is best for young children. In that case, how do I teach it? My one year of training did not actually cover long division – or coding for that matter. My Finnish colleagues can, of course, teach both simultaneously while standing on their woolly-hatted heads. I calculate, using my mathematical skills, that this is because that they had five times more training than I did.

So, guiltily, I am relieved to discover that the way I was taught in (secondary) school is back in vogue.  However, as we know, being able to do something is a far cry from being able to teach it. The CPR final report’s chapter on pedagogy (pp 279-310) makes excellent reading on this topic – as well as underlining the need for ‘teaching to be removed from political control’. But I am under political control so I dutifully draw my bus stop and pop the numbers in. For example, 7,236 divided by 36. I start the mantra: ‘First you divide 36 into 7. Won’t go. So next try 36 into 72.’ Half the class stare at me blankly. ‘They don’t know what you mean, by “into”,’ the TA whispers helpfully.

Oh, ok. ‘Let’s try how many 36s are there in 72?’ Still blank. Hmm. ‘If I had 72 sweets to share between 36 children, how many sweets would they have each?’ Hands wave excitedly. I get excited too. ‘Write your answers on your whiteboards, please, and hold them up.’ Oops. The mathematically able children are fine, but the rest hold up a random display of answers: 3, 4 and, bizarrely, 7.6.

I catch my TA’s eye. We are thinking the same thing. Back to basics once more for those who are struggling. But I am also aware that Asian maths teaching methods, most definitely approved of by the current administration, expect all children to progress at roughly the same pace. Lessons are repetitive, short and thorough. So do I force my able mathematicians to do what they can already do, over and over again, or do I differentiate by stretching them with more interesting challenges? If only Nicky Morgan would tell me. Interestingly, if you ask Google to search ‘differentiation and Nicky Morgan’ the top hit is a reference to a 2 per cent pay rise for the ‘best’ teachers. Guess that’s not me!

Similar questions cloud times tables teaching – another ‘basic’ that holds the key to a successful life, according to Mrs (don’t ask me 7×8) Morgan. Half my class know them inside out and back to front. Another quarter know them if they are given time to think. And another quarter is as doubtful as Mrs Morgan herself. Sometimes I yearn for the hot-house pressure of Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea where parents drill their children in their times tables and demand homework. Children in my class tell me in all seriousness that they have been too busy to do one piece of homework in a week. Perhaps they are right. Hopefully they have been too busy being children to bother learning that the internal angles of every triangle in the universe add up to 180, or that 7×8 is and always will be 56, or that 7,236 divided by 36 equals 201.

Conservative politicians also complain that too many children don’t understand fractions. I have a feeling that there might be a reason for this. It goes like this. 1⁄10 of population of the UK controls 1⁄2 of the wealth. Globally 1⁄100 controls 1⁄2 of world’s wealth. Try this one, 1⁄3 of children in the UK live in poverty. Yes, I agree with the government. Fractions are important when it comes to succeeding in life.

Stephanie Northen is a teacher and journalist. She contributed to the Cambridge Primary Review final report and is a member of the Board of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust.  Read other blogs by Stephanie in CPRT’s recent downloadable collection Primary Colours .

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And the octopus won

I held an election at the school recently. It happened just the day before a similar event took place nationally. The two candidates were an octopus (plastic) and a clown (wooden). This was not intended as a reflection on national politics, they were simply the toys that came to hand as I raced out of the classroom and down to the hall for assembly.

This term the theme for assemblies has been fairness. As I lined the pupils up with their voting slips in front of a cardboard ballot box, I explained that we had gone back in time 200 years. Lord Sam (Year 6) and Duke Timothy (Year 5) were to be in charge of this election and would decide who was to vote. The young aristos very much enjoyed turning away all the pupils, except their two wealthy land-owning mates (Cameron, Year 5, and Freddie, Year 4). And so we carried on, conducting elections right through till 1969 when finally everyone was allowed to vote.

The children, particularly the girls, were refreshingly indignant about the denial of their democratic rights. But what was more interesting was the way they became embroiled in the contest. Who was going to win? Was it going to be the octopus or the clown? Factions quickly developed. Arguments erupted in the corners of the hall. Some were passionate in their advocacy of a particular toy. Some came close to tears when a friend rebelled and voted for the opposition. Yet no policies had been discussed. No one knew what the octopus or the clown stood for despite this being an election to decide the leadership of the school.

You get my point, I’m sure. It was reinforced after the general election when the children told me gleefully that Sats were to be abolished. Yes, I said, but did they know that they were to be replaced with more and harder ‘exams’? They didn’t know and they were, for once, silent. I suspect they would also be silent if they read the Conservative manifesto. In a few bleak words the government outlines its priorities for primary education: ‘Every 11-year-old to know their times tables off by heart and be able to perform long division and complex multiplication. They should be able to read a book and write a short story with accurate punctuation, spelling and grammar.’ That the potential achievements of an 11-year-old should be so stale, flat and unprofitable is heart breaking.

I assume no child was involved in drawing up these priorities. What self-respecting young person would sign up to such dreary targets? A very different set of aims emerges when young people are consulted. The Cambridge Primary Review listened carefully to its many ‘prominent and thoughtful’ child witnesses. Its final report (p 489) recommended that in line with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child ‘children should be actively engaged in decisions which affect their education’ and that schools should increasingly work to ensure pupils’ opinions are listened to in a meaningful way. Children told CPR researchers (final report, p 148) that they ‘relish a challenge,’ that they ‘enjoy succeeding’ and that they like ‘hands-on active learning’ in lessons that are full of variety. They dislike ‘mundane and repetitive’ learning, copying and ‘drill and practice’ exercises.

Children are begging for a broad, balanced and rich curriculum, as sought by CPR and CPRT. They may not express it in those words, but they do express in their actions. They triumphantly find fossils in the school garden. They catch bugs, beetles and dead butterflies and bring them in to show and discuss. They make up great stories while stirring a magic mud potion. They adore playing with electrical circuits and making bits of paper fly off motor spindles. They copy a Turner painting and say ‘Wow, Miss, I didn’t know I was good at art’. They wonder why bruises happen and why we shiver or say things like ‘I know it’s a silly question, Miss, but why did lions evolve?’ They love acting, will volunteer for anything, relish funny books (I wonder if ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ is the kind of book the Tories have in mind) and, of course, some go wild for long division and complex multiplication. ‘Please can I stay in at break and do more maths, Miss?’

So once more, as Warwick Mansell pointed out last week in his CPRT blog, we are back to the ‘basics versus breadth’ debate. Except that there is no debate at government level. The only debate is at school level as heads and teachers struggle to square the circle and reinforce the basics while not losing the breadth. Despite their efforts, largely via intervention programmes run by dedicated TAs and squeezed into every nook and cranny of a school day, some children will not meet those manifesto targets. They will not pass the new Year 6 ‘exams’. Their fate is to have to retake them in Year 7 – how humiliating is that for poor souls struggling to find their feet in their first year at secondary school?

Primary schools will be blamed for failing these children, but the truth is that they have a special need. It will not gain them exemption from the exams, though it ought to. These children are victims of a disadvantaged background where for myriad reasons there is no one at home prepared to listen to times tables or to buy a book, let alone to read it. Primary schools do an awful lot for these children – not least making them feel safe and valued for 30 hours a week. But they cannot and should not run them ragged to meet flawed targets set by a government that doesn’t listen to children and doesn’t have their best interests at heart.

If children had the vote I wonder if the Tory manifesto would have been different.

By the way, the octopus (plastic) won the school election. Make of that what you will.

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

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None of the above?

There’s an election looming. Hopefully, teachers will take the opportunity to revenge themselves just a little on the government that gave us Gove and hollow promises of workload reform. Hopefully, they will manage to make it to the polling station and put a lovely big black cross next to any party that appears vaguely aware of the very real pain they are enduring.

Of course, funding is a crucial issue. There’s talk of strikes and the NAHT warns of ‘harsh, austere’ times ahead – particularly troubling for those in sixth-form or FE colleges. But the seemingly inevitable funding cuts would be better borne if accompanied by a change in the political zeitgeist. The hectoring ‘must-do-better’ tone that trickles down to the classroom from the two main parties is an outrage. Currently 40 per cent of NQTs bail out after their first year, but it’s not just the naïve newbies who are finding it hard. It’s also the experienced ones who finally just can’t take it any more – 68 per cent considered chucking it in last year. This is not surprising given that the job routinely demands a 70-hour working week from people it equally routinely smears as inadequate.

Sadly, though, both Labour and Conservatives are persisting with the tough talk though there may be a glimmer of hope in Tristram Hunt’s recent speech to the NASUWT. That aside, both parties still tediously insist on the importance of raising standards. Labour’s Changing Britain Together – a product of Agenda 2015 – takes the banal rhetoric further, demanding that standards are ‘driven up’. When I go into my classroom in the morning and look at the children sitting there, I wonder how precisely should I achieve this driving up? Hell, yes, it sounds tough, but these are small children not US Navy Seals.

There is little discussion about how standards are to rise as funding falls. Nor is there much sign of sensible political debate as to what these raised standards look like. Teaching children to recognise a fronted adverbial or to do subtraction by decomposition at ever younger ages does not appear to me – nor to the CPR Trust with its support for a broad, balanced and rich curriculum – to be valid aims. As we are poised once again to embark on the enervating ‘run up’ to Sats, the ideal of a system that – in the words of the CPR final report – ‘assesses and reports on children’s achievements in all areas of their learning, with the minimum of disruption,’ seems more remote than ever.

True, Ed Miliband has promised to strengthen ‘creative education,’ but this welcome move away from the Gradgrindian Gove isn’t actually in Changing Britain Together. Instead there is the pledge ‘to bring a relentless focus on the quality of teaching’. Now that sounds jolly. I shall look forward to the spotlight shining in the eyes. And we have the promise ‘to require all teachers to continue building their skills and subject knowledge on the job’. It’s that tone again. The choice of verb tells us much about the party’s attitude to the profession. Doesn’t it understand that most teachers are gagging for training, desperate for any help they can get in the face of a largely hostile Ofsted, beleaguered local authorities and bullying politicians – never mind a new curriculum and the constant reinvention of the assessment wheel?

Also in Labour’s Changing Britain Together is the charge that, under the Tories, ‘underperformance in schools has been allowed to go unchallenged’. Er, sorry, but what planet is Dr Hunt on? How can the shadow education secretary have sanctioned that statement? Teachers and heads are worn out responding to a multiplicity of challenges. Days and nights have been sacrificed to organising mock Ofsteds, to reviewing marking policies, to feeding the Raise Online machine and to crunching statistics until they reveal that every pupil’s performance is improving, steadily and evenly. There is no place for footnotes to explain that this child was ill, or this child’s father ran off with another woman, or this child’s mother lost her job or this child’s dog died or this child, dare I say it, is just not very good at literacy…

What a shame Labour has been so slow to challenge the madness of the current assessment culture. It distracts from the true work of teachers who need, as the CPRT puts it, assessment that ‘enhances and supports learning’ rather than distorting it.

But no, we don’t have assessment that enhances and supports. We just get the tough talk. It’s a little like being bullied. Everyone thinks it’s ok to join in. Take, for example, the person who arrived at our school recently. He was a critical friend ­– with the emphasis on the critical – who spent a lot of time ‘interrogating’ the online performance statistics. Along the way, he announced that pupil background was no excuse for poor performance.

There it is again; that patronising ‘you-must-do-better’ tone. Actually, we do not spend our time making excuses. We spend it patiently teaching and nurturing children, some of whom have extremely challenging home lives and consequently struggle to progress as fast as others. This is a fact and not an excuse. These children fall behind as a result of family disadvantage and poverty. They are the losers in our unequal society. CPR, in its final report, urged the government to give the highest priority to eliminating child poverty. CPRT reinforced the importance of this goal by making its own priority ‘tackling the continuing challenge of social and educational disadvantage and finding practical ways to help schools close the overlapping gaps in social equity and educational achievement’.

Schools deal with the consequences of disadvantage every day. When they succeed in closing the gap just a little, they are picking up the pieces of political failure and should be thanked not rebuked. Every time a minister agrees to a policy that will exacerbate rather than reduce inequality, he or she needs to visit a classroom and see the consequences for children who have, for many reasons, no one to help them practise their times tables, learn their spellings or to read them a bedtime story.

Labour, like the Lib Dems, the Green Party, Plaid Cymru and the SNP, appears committed to investment in the vital early years as a means of redressing the balance slightly. Its manifesto highlights the fact that poverty and inequality are increasing. Teachers, with support, can do much to help create a more equal society. Overworked and rebuked, they can’t. They will just leave. It’s time for Labour to wake up and smell the cheap staffroom coffee.

Stephanie Northen is a teacher and journalist. She was one of the authors of the Cambridge Primary Review final report and is a member of the Board of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust.

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Supporting new teachers: snake oil, evidence or what?

Everyone knows that feelings of inadequacy are not helpful in the classroom. As soon as the tears start to roll, the learning stops. And the teaching too, because feeling inadequate is just as destructive of teachers’ ability to perform as it is of children’s.

It is depressingly easy to make a new teacher feel inadequate: one reason surely that around 40 per cent of us leave within the first five years of qualifying, according to Ofsted. Workload is the major issue of course, but combine a huge burden of work with the feeling that you don’t know how to do it properly and the result is … nail-biting anxiety, sleepless nights and finally, for many, departures for pastures less demoralising.

Here is just one example of the ease with which a new teacher can be forced to reach for the tissues. Recently I went on a reading course linked to the new curriculum. All was going swimmingly until, towards the end of the day, the trainer mentioned spelling – an area given a starring role in the new English curriculum. Now I had been feeling confident about spelling, courtesy of a respected website that has created weekly word lists, including rules, for each year group. It’s true that some of its choices are a little eccentric – ‘nondescript’ and ‘cohabit’ are not the words I would pick to teach eight-year-olds about prefixes – but never mind. At least I had one area of the curriculum sorted.

Foolish thought! Suddenly, I hear the reading course trainer say ‘spelling lists’ and realise that he’s laughing. ‘You see,’ he says, chortling away, ‘spelling lists really don’t work. The children learn those 10 or 12 words but then they never use them again and so they’re forgotten. It just isn’t a good way to teach spelling. A much better way is to teach them is …’

Well, that was it. Feelings of inadequacy again. I’ve been teaching spelling badly; the children will fail their Sats spelling test and we will all sit in the classroom with the tears rolling.

On this occasion though, feelings of inadequacy were overtaken by ones of annoyance. If there is a magic recipe for spelling success, why is it a secret? Surely acquiring this knowledge shouldn’t depend on the random choice of a CPD course?

This doesn’t just apply to spelling of course, but to all areas of the curriculum. Why am I endlessly reinventing the wheel, clumsily and misshapenly, when out there somewhere is someone who knows how it ought to be done?

Finding that mystery expert should not have to rely on anxious trawls of the internet late at night while the bags grow long under the eyes. The web is an invaluable tool and the teachers who donate their lessons for free are generous, public-spirited people. But is downloading Ms Who-ever-you-are’s second-hand lessons really the way to ensure the best possible learning experience for children? After all, while much online content is excellent, quite a lot is shoddy, ill-thought-out and, occasionally, just plain wrong.

Nor should finding the mystery expert depend on dawn raids on school cupboards sifting through piles of commercial schemes in search of whatever is that day’s holy grail. Be it a guide to teaching division using a number line or how to take those first steps in programming, it must deliver its message in an engaging, efficient and easy-for-Miss-to-understand way. Many commercial schemes do just that, but quite a few are ill-conceived, out-of-date and, occasionally, just plain wrong. Hence the warning about snake oil vendors in CPR’s evidence to the Gove national curriculum review.

Of course, not so long ago, new teachers did not have to search for the needle in the curriculum haystack.  They were given sewing machines in the form of the primary national strategies.  As the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review points out (p 417), this suited us newbies because the strategies were ‘all about rules and this is precisely what novice professionals are more likely to need’.  But the Review went on to say (p 307) that the strategies’ bid for total control of what and how teachers taught may have helped those who were newly-qualified or insecure but it wasn’t right for mature professionals with the knowledge and experience to make their own decisions, especially as government prescription was not necessarily better founded than what was available commercially. Hence CPRT’s insistence on the need for ‘a pedagogy of repertoire, rigour, evidence and principle, rather than mere compliance’.

Yet is it outrageous or unprofessional to suggest that new teachers would benefit from a reliable source of expert guidance on what to teach and how best to teach it? Just because the national strategies fell into disrepute, becoming inflexible and monolithic monsters, does that mean we abandon all idea of helping our floundering novices, most of whom have had a mere year’s training?

With standards to be ratcheted up, the pressures on teachers can only increase – as, I fear, will the proportion that leaves within five years of qualifying. One way to tempt them to stay would be to ease the daily burden of having to invent oddly shaped wheels to bump around their classrooms. 

Stephanie Northen is a teacher and journalist. She was one of the authors of the Cambridge Primary Review final report.

In pursuit of CPRT Priority 7, quoted above by Stephanie (‘Develop a pedagogy of repertoire, rigour, evidence and principle, rather than mere compliance’), CPRT has commissioned two new research reviews  to extend and update the evidence on pedagogy provided by CPR. One is on children’s learning, the other on teaching. It is hoped that both will be published next term. CPRT has also embarked on a major project, supported by the Educational Endowment Foundation, on using dialogic teaching to increase engagement and improve educational outcomes among disadvantaged children. More generally, CPRT is working with Pearson, its lead sponsor, to develop CPD programmes which are professionally helpful and based on secure evidence. 

CALLING ALL NQTs. We would like to hear from other recently-qualified primary teachers about the kind of support they need in their first year or two of teaching and the extent to which their needs are met. Please let us know, either publicly by commenting on Stephanie’s blog below, or in confidence by emailing us. This information will help us to take forward CPRT’s professional development programme with Pearson and will also be valuable to those planning the activities of our regional networks. 

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Teachers, doctors and woolly tights

A friend of mine has just qualified as a GP. Her salary is £80K. I have just qualified as a teacher. My salary is £23K. Fair? Right? I don’t think so.

My friend drives a BMW generously coated with special glittery paint and with heated seats for those chilly winter mornings. I drive a rusting Ford Focus and wear woolly tights. So much for John Major and his 1990 promise that the ‘man in the woolly jumper and battered Sedan’ would no longer be the local teacher.

If I sound a trifle peeved, that’s because I am. It is a small consolation that my fellow citizens judge teachers’ wages too low, but there’s no way the profession is going to get the 15 per cent rise they consider fair.

Of course, I realise that my GP friend makes the occasional life-and-death decision – and everyone wants her to get it right. But bear in mind that ‘teachers hold in their hands the success of our country and the wellbeing of its citizens’. Quite a tall order.

Teachers are also ‘the most important fighters in the battle to make opportunity more equal’. In addition, we are ‘the critical guardians of the intellectual life of the nation’. Furthermore, we ‘give children the tools by which they can become authors of their own life story and builders of a better world’. And finally, as if we didn’t have enough to do, we are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of mankind’.

Mr Gove, whose words I have just quoted, expected an awful lot for his £23K.

There are other parallels between teachers and medics. Workload is one. Both professions are overburdened, but it is possible to work extremely part-time on a GP’s ample salary. It isn’t on mine. This is a controversial point because it is seen as being anti all the GPs who combine raising a family with having a career. Let me just say that I support part-time working for all: men, women – and teachers.

Nevertheless I was peeved (again) by a recent encounter with a local GP. I was suffering from a bad hip; she was young, glowing, Superhero fit and ever so slightly smug. It became apparent that she earned twice my wage for two days a week work. She enquired if my hip pain was enough to stop me jogging. No, I shouted to myself. I hate jogging. I can’t work out how to carry and mark all those books at the same time.

Ah but remember, I hear you cry, those poor medical students. Look how hard they work and how long their training is – so much longer than that of would-be teachers. But surely having to do a responsible job with insufficient training is a reason for paying teachers more not less? GPs have had eight years to prepare themselves for the routine maladies presented by Mr and Mrs Jones for seven minutes at a time on average. Most teachers have had one year to prepare themselves for routine challenges presented simultaneously by 25 or more young people for several hours a day.

It just can’t be done, however good the training – and mine was very good. There is no way the most committed trainers, the best mentors and the most excellent teaching schools can possibly impart everything a teacher needs to know in a single year. Every day, I discover, stumble over and fall into the inevitable crevasses that await a teacher doing everything for the first time.

I am supposed to be a member of Mr Gove’s ‘best generation of teachers ever’, so why do I feel as if I have been thrown in the deep end of a murky pool with a very small and punctured lilo for support. I do sometimes reach for my passport and check out the price of flights to Helsinki. Teachers in Finland are the most respected and trusted professionals in a country remarkable for its ‘paramount commitment to social and educational equity through a genuinely comprehensive school system of consistently high quality,’ as the Cambridge Primary Review pointed out. Their training is lengthy, rigorous and thorough. No sinking feelings for them.

But no glittering BMWs either. Perhaps surprisingly, Finnish teachers’ pay also lags behind that of GPs – though the gap is not as wide as it is in the UK. I put my passport back in the drawer. Of course, it isn’t all about money, but my woolly tights would have to be a lot woollier to see me through a bitter Finnish winter.

Stephanie Northen is a teacher and journalist. She was one of the authors of the Cambridge Primary Review final report.

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Time for some insubordination

Before July 14, I was happy. OK, I’m lying, but who cares about the feelings of someone barely out of NQT nappies? Certainly not the education politicians who can break teachers with a brisk sweep of a policy brush – ‘Heh, let’s abolish levels!’ ‘Tell you what, let’s assess all subjects … all the time!’ (Pause for righteous fear and loathing.) Yet, though the powers-that-be are not remotely interested in the content of my opening sentence, they are interested in its grammar. They care about my use of the word ‘before’.

How do I know? Well, back in July, I read these three sentences on the Department for Education website:

‘We left the cinema before the end of the film.’

‘The train ticket is cheaper before 9:00 in the morning.’

‘I brush my teeth before I have breakfast.’

I then read the accompanying question: which of the sentences uses the word ‘before’ as a preposition and which as a subordinating conjunction? Hmm. Tricky. First, I had to put aside any normal thoughts such as train tickets are actually more expensive before 9am. And isn’t it better to brush your teeth after breakfast? Never mind the human drama that lurked behind the decision to leave the cinema early. Spilled popcorn? Spilled tears? The sight of a lover with a rival… Stop!

Yes, I admit it. I didn’t know the answer. As a child of the 1960s, I was not taught grammar any more than I was taught the scientific composition of the paint we used in art. ‘Today, children, we will be learning how to collect and dry the corpses of female cochineal beetles. Artists can use the resulting red colour to paint fabulous sunsets…’

In that BG (Before Gove) era, the explicit teaching of grammar was regarded as harmful. Young imaginations risked being cabined, cribbed, confined. Young minds would be pained by concepts too abstruse for them to grasp. No longer.  The question on the use of the word ‘before’ appears in the sample Grammar, Spelling and Punctuation test, published on July 14, and intended to be taken by Year 6s in 2016. Hedged about by caveats and disclaimers, this test is nevertheless the only concrete example of the ordeal that awaits the current Year 5s – and their teachers. Remember, the 2016 test is going to be Much Harder (ungrammatical use of capital letters for emphasis) than its three predecessors as it is the first to be based on Mr Gove’s new primary English curriculum – the one which devotes 15 more pages to spelling and grammar appendices than it does to actual aims and content.

The sample test does include a little story, no doubt a sop for those who pleaded for grammar to be taught in context. What a shame it is a pitiful non-story about a squirrel in a park notable only for an unnaturally large number of semi-colons and colons. Helpful hints for teachers also appear. One reads ‘this question assesses the ability to transform given verb stems into the past progressive form, and understanding of the term.’ Clear as mud is the simile that springs to mind. Don’t the powers-that-be realise that some children in Year 6 struggle to remember their full stops and capital letters? Shocking maybe, but true.

Gove’s decision, back in 2012, to impose a formal grammar test on Year 6 children was hotly debated at the time. The NUT and the NAHT talked of a boycott. Michael Rosen argued powerfully that this pernickety, ‘there-is-a-right-answer’ approach to grammar was wrong-headed in linguistic terms. He also warned that it was yet another mechanism to control schools and would add to the ‘army of passive, failed people’ needed to keep wages down. Even the government’s own advisers warned against it.

So of course in 2013 the Spag test, based on the old curriculum, went ahead. Now the protests have faded – or at least so it seems to me. Occasionally last year, I would look up from my marking/assessment/lesson planning/resource hunting/display mounting/behaviour managing/weeping to wonder why no one was shouting any more that teaching young children about fronted adverbials was not going to help them read, write or function as human beings FULL STOP.

Instead, there are now numerous education resources and organisations promising to help teachers with their modal verbs and relative clauses. The message seems to be, ‘No one really believes in teaching this stuff, but here’s a way to do it.’ But if no one believes in teaching it, perhaps – radical thought here – it shouldn’t be taught. What a shame teachers are not permitted, in accordance with CPRT principles, ‘to exercise the responsible and informed autonomy that is the mark of a mature profession’.

After all, as the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review pointed out, ‘the goal of literacy must be more than just functional’. Literacy should confer the skill ‘not just to read and write but to make these processes genuinely transformative, exciting children’s imagination, extending their boundaries and enabling them to contemplate lives and worlds possible as well as actual’.

I did extend some boundaries this summer. Sadly I was not planning literacy lessons rich with talk of how to write wondrous stories, whimsical poems and powerful letters to politicians. Instead, I was shamefully and secretly working on my grammar. My time could have been so much better spent – and so could the children’s. Let’s ditch the grammar test before* it is too late.

* subordinating conjunction or preposition? You decide.

Stephanie Northen is a teacher and journalist. She was one of the authors of the Cambridge Primary Review final report.

Contact

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