The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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Free schools and free markets

Why isn’t policy done better in this country? We have some of the world’s best-known and most prestigious universities, churning out hundreds if not thousands of social science graduates every year, each of them educated to understand their subjects to a decent level of depth, sophistication and nuance.

And yet policymaking in England so often comes via papers which are so full of holes that I can only imagine they would be covered in the red ink of a lecturer’s corrections if produced, for example, by an undergraduate student as part of a research project. How must it feel for individuals to give up what they have learned as they progress towards influence at the heart of government?

Those were my thoughts a few months ago on surveying the atrocious white paper ‘Education Excellence Everywhere’. They surfaced again on coming across a report of a recent speech on free schools which may also have formed the basis for the government’s current super-controversial move to allow more grammar schools.

This latest document was a report of a speech in May by Nick Timothy, who at the time was the director of the free schools support group the New Schools Network but who is now Theresa May’s joint chief of staff and is widely credited with having had heavy influence over the formulation of the grammar school policy. I wrote about it in the Guardian last month.

In the speech, as reported by the Centre for the Study of Market Reform of Education (CMRE), the organisation to which it was given, Mr Timothy sets out a vision whereby free schools – the government’s name for new schools, overseen by the Department for Education – would return to their original mission.

This, the speech suggests, was not simply to provide new classroom places where demographics meant they were desperately needed. This has become the role of many recent free schools in the face of England’s surging pupil numbers. But no, the distinctive original rationale of the policy, Mr Timothy argued, was to open frees where there were sufficient places, but where the schools on offer to parents were not good enough. Mr Timothy reportedly told his invited audience:

The original logic of the free schools policy was that new schools should be set up in the communities served by failing schools: this would improve standards, give parents more choice, and allow new schools to innovate,

According to the CMRE report of his speech, he added:

The government is trying to create a market in the education system. This … is the right track for reform, but at the moment there’s a risk that we’re building in the potential for market failures too. A functioning market needs enough genuinely new entrants to challenge existing providers, enough capacity for competition to be meaningful, enough information for providers and users alike, ways of breaking up failing or monopolistic providers, and exit points for providers that aren’t doing a good enough job. The direction of travel is the right one, but there’s a lot that still needs to be done.

Underlying this talk, then, is a view of the free schools policy being used to set off market mechanisms which, it is envisaged, both help parents by responding to a demand for high quality education in the free schools which are created and spur other schools to improve for fear of failing to compete effectively for parental ‘custom’, and perhaps then having to close.

To be fair, it is an interesting model. If free schools were to work as described above, it sounds as if they would be a positive influence on the quality of English education. Wouldn’t it be great if there were this unending supply of ‘good schools’, funded by the government and set up where any group of parents wanted them? More seriously, the notion of teachers and possibly parents throwing themselves into free school projects to put their own stamp on innovative education provision also seems to me to have some face-value merit. And Mr Timothy has clearly thought through a few possible problems in the detail of how such market mechanisms need to work if they are to function effectively.

Yet the speech as reported was undermined by a basic failure to consider some of the more fundamental difficulties facing any avowedly free market approach to schools reform such as this.

The first problem is affordability. The premise of the talk was to create more school places, with the speech raising the possibility that this could include grammar schools.

Mr Timothy said:

If you can prove parental demand for your proposed school, then subject to all the other quality checks, you should be able to open it.

In the logic of this system, without this creation of new institutions, instigating surplus places in the system as a whole, the market mechanism he envisages would not work properly, since schools need to face a genuine risk of closure through failing to recruit enough pupils. And that is only possible when there are not enough pupils for the classroom spaces available in local schools.

But providing this surplus capacity – opening up more classrooms than is strictly necessary to ensure every local pupil has a classroom seat – is expensive. Keeping places empty is, rightly, a tough sell to taxpayers. Why not simply concentrate on making sure that the limited number of places available to parents are all good, it could be argued.

The extra day-to-day cost of providing unfilled places is not the only financial issue. The capital costs of opening new institutions and closing those which fail to attract pupils also seem likely to be very expensive, as experience is increasingly telling us.

A second, practical, problem is the availability of sites to allow new schools to be built. A string of investigations I have done on the proposed siting of frees in a variety of strange and often expensive locations mainly in and around London suggest this a serious issue, as is the general environmental impact of a choice policy which presumably assumes pupils are able to travel to a range of potential institutions competing for their ‘custom’.

A third problem may be the experience of pupils being taught in schools which either are on the verge of closure having been forced into a fight for scarce resources, or in new schools which are similarly faced with a struggle with their rolls. In an article last year, Fiona Millar gave a vivid example of two schools in Suffolk which were competing in what one commentator described as a ‘race to die’ and which reportedly led to a reduced curriculum and staff redundancies in one of the schools.

The experience of school closure itself can be traumatic and disruptive for the young people who must go through it. Yet these are the very ‘consumers’ which free market education reform advocates presumably want to help. The system advocated here seems to embrace school failures as part of its model with Mr Timothy’s detached insistence that ‘exit points for providers which aren’t doing a good enough job,’ are vital.

The sense of imposed market reform trampling over the history of a school and pupils’ experiences was one I felt profoundly after interviewing a group of parents and students for a feature on the closure of Woodlands comprehensive in Coventry in July.

A fourth consideration should be the likely effect on the teaching force of creating, as seems the aim, a system built on perpetual fear that institutions must improve or close.

The fifth question for all of this is what the alternatives are. To read a speech such as this is to get the sense that this rather complicated market apparatus is the only way that institutions might improve. Yet consideration of alternatives surely might prompt a different view. Given the costs of oversupply and the creation and abolition of schools, and the risk of a bad experience for pupils as some schools are deliberately rendered unviable, simply providing more government support, including leadership resources, to struggling existing institutions will strike many as a better approach. Put another way, is it better to put possibly hundreds of millions of pounds into creating more empty school places through free schools, in the hope that the market mechanisms in which Mr Timothy seems to have so much unquestioning faith might kick in, or simply to invest the cash directly in improving existing provision?

None of these issues seemed to be considered in this speech, leaving it vulnerable to accusations of a naïve pro-market fundamentalism. This is staggering given that thinking through the possible downsides as well as the potential of market mechanisms in various policy areas, including impacts on users of services and the public purse, would surely feature in any respectable undergraduate economics course.

Thinking this over took me back to a talk I gave to a group of public policy economists, many of them not working in education, earlier this year.

One offered this insight:

I’ve always been puzzled by this drive to try to impose market principles on education. There are surely some basic problems, such as the fact that competition effects don’t seem to work unproblematically, and closing schools will be difficult for pupils. Yet it seems to persist. †

Yes, indeed it does.

† – This quote is paraphrased from memory; I wasn’t taking notes.

Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist and author of ‘Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing’ (Methuen, 2007). Read more CPRT blogs by Warwick here.

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We need to talk about structures

It has been a seductive slogan, for several reasons. But ‘standards, not structures,’ the oft-invoked rallying cry of those who want to cast themselves as fair-minded pragmatists in the now-very-inflamed academies debate, has been an error, I think. For, as has been becoming clearer in recent days, last week’s white paper spelling out the policy of forcing schools towards academy status has at last pushed serious questions about the detail of the academies policy to the fore, and we do need to talk about structures.

The phrase ‘standards, not structures’ – first made popular during Tony Blair’s first term in office – is an attempt to take what is seen as ideology out of the debate as to how state-funded schools should be run. Instead of viewing one type of organisational arrangement – local authority versus academy – as superior and then defending it to the end, the argument goes that we should be agnostic on that. Instead, we should worry only about the quality of education provided to pupils; acknowledge the obvious truth that good practice, or not, exists on either side of this ideological debate; and then move on. In terms of what kind of organisational structure we have in English education, basically we should join the majority of the public and not care: what happens in the classroom is all that matters.

As I say, this argument, set out in those terms, is very powerful. My perception is that ‘standards, not structures’ is used principally, and to a certain extent very effectively, as a weapon against ministers who have been seen to favour academies as an end in themselves. It is very difficult to argue that this is not their position, when a white paper has been published which says all schools are to be turned into academies, but when there is no clear research evidence in favour of the policy. (My last blog discussed this, and it will be set out in detail in my forthcoming research review for the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, especially in relation to primary schools.)

‘Standards, not structures’, was deployed again in Sunday’s Observer newspaper by David Blunkett, who introduced the original academies policy back in 2000. Here, in a well-argued analysis of many of the central problems of this extraordinary white paper, Blunkett said it was part of an ‘ideological agenda that put the structure of our school system before classroom standards’.

He’s right, of course. A government which really cared above all about the quality of what went on in schools, took seriously all the evidence it had and genuinely put children rather than politics first, as the white paper claims to do, would not be proceeding in this manner. Before pushing thousands of schools through a costly and energy-diverting change such as this, it would want to know for sure that improvement would follow. If you want a further insight into the fragility of the evidence base, by the way, just consider Nicky Morgan’s first response when asked about it on last Thursday’s BBC Question Time. The main piece of evidence she could muster on academy quality was a set of statistics embracing changing Ofsted grades for all schools, academies or not.

So the implementation of this policy is, of course, ideological. But that does not mean that arguments about it should stop at a consideration of supposedly ideology-neutral statistics. In fact, we do need to consider arguments away from pure ‘standards’ questions, too.

A personal view is that the obsession over, say, whether school test and exam results are better on the academy or non-academy side, or whether either is improving Ofsted results faster, though important, has obscured real debate about the detail of the really quite fundamental structural changes schools go through in moving to academy status.

And I find myself increasingly thinking about structures – is this the best way of setting up our schools system, irrespective of often small movements in data? – when fielding calls from whistleblowers as I do when writing news stories about the academies system. I would highlight a few structural issues now.

Structure of control

The academies policy, of course, originated under Labour as the suggested answer to usually long-standing problems in inner-city secondary schools. Where institutions had struggled for many years, if not decades, the thinking was that something bold and new had to be tried. The answer was to give great influence to an outside sponsor who, initially usually in response to a promise to donate £2 million, would be given effective control over the school, with only the Secretary of State, overseeing matters from Whitehall, as a democratic backstop.

This was controversial, as it took schools away from local democratic influence and gave great power to sometimes controversial individuals who might have been seen by the ministers backing the scheme to be dynamic. However, if there were worries about an over-concentration of power, they might have been viewed by ministers as a price worth paying in the hope of finally bringing about improvement.

Fast forward to 2016, though, and this, effectively, is the model being proposed for every state-funded school in England by 2022. Academy trusts can be set up with a very small number of ‘members’ – sometimes, only three – at the apex of their governance structures. They can appoint and dismiss the other governors.

It is true that academy trusts can be set up in a much more democratic manner. Yet some of the larger current multi-academy trusts clearly are run as described above, with a small number of individuals having great power. This is made possible because the essential overarching philosophy of the way they are set up has not changed from the original scheme under Labour.

This is not just an abstract debate, either, in my experience. In recent years, as a journalist contacted by people raising concerns, I’ve heard about: a prominent couple running an academy chain, who have particular views as to what should be in the curriculum, imposing that curriculum on schools despite opposition from professionally-trained teachers; an American firm which is influential in running a school ensuring that ‘its’ curriculum is taught in that school; and high remuneration packages finding their way to two individuals who are both among only three or four controlling ‘members’ of the academy chain paying their salaries. This looks to me to suggest an over-concentration of power with regard to taxpayer-funded bodies, serving many pupils.

A key structural question might, then, be: is the original architecture of academy governance, set up for the very particular circumstances of a small number of secondary schools which had struggled, now right for all English  primary and secondary schools?

Autonomy for individual schools

This is probably a key one for school governing bodies considering how to react. The white paper effectively spells the end of the settlement between local authorities and individual institutions, ironically  set up by the Conservatives in 1988, whereby autonomy was given to headteachers and governing bodies, but with the local authority influencing in the background.

Now, the favoured multi-academy trusts can run a whole chain of schools in a top-down manner if they choose. Schools contemplating joining one would be well advised to try to pin down MATs on precisely what freedoms they might be allowed if they join them.

Complaints when things go wrong

It’s a fast-solidifying view of mine that worrying about ‘standards, not structures’, is fine so long as all is well in an institution. It is when things start to go wrong that there are problems. For, over the past four years I’ve been contacted by many people concerned about various goings-on within academies. These include staff bullying, inappropriate spending, the ‘gaming’ of Ofsted inspections, pupils going missing from the system and institutionalised exam cheating.

A refrain of many of these whistleblowers has been concern as to who academies are accountable to. In theory, central government, through the Education Funding Agency and Department for Education, investigates. But we have often found that these remote Whitehall agencies, who, after all, now have thousands of institutions to oversee, are not interested. Nor, by the way, generally is the new intermediate tier of academy oversight, the Regional Schools Commissioner.  To be sure, local authorities, a natural first port of call for a whistleblower in the past, are far from perfect. Yet the ability of an individual to complain, for example, to their local councillor about a particular issue with a local authority school, will be lost in a move to an all-academy system. The general concept of an appeal to a truly local body outside of the instititution itself has fallen by the wayside. The white paper promises that local authorities will focus on protecting, for example, the needs of ‘vulnerable’ children. But without real power, how are they to do this?

These are just a few structural issues. I could mention more, such as questions about the merits of teacher pay and conditions deregulation – is it really best for the taxpayer to have a kind of ‘race to the top’ going on in terms of academy chief executive pay, with salaries in the range of £200-£400,000 now not unheard-of? – the now-well-discussed removal of parents from academy governance structures or the fact that much education law can now be formulated privately, away from the Parliamentary gaze, in the form of academy funding agreements with the Secretary of State.

The bigger issue is that all of these structural changes, which may centre on the de-democratisation and deregulation of state schooling, are important. They should not be seen as subservient to questions about often small changes in test and exam results, for example, or Ofsted outcomes. The country needs to ask itself whether these structural reforms are really in the best interest of pupils. In making this whole issue much more contentious, by proclaiming that all schools are to be forced into the status, ministers  may actually have done this debate a favour. At least now these questions might get more attention.

Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist and author of ‘Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing’ (Methuen, 2007). His CPRT research report on recent systemic reforms in the primary sector will be published next term. This blog, a sequel to the one posted on 4 March, was prompted by the publication on 17 March of the White Paper ‘Educational Excellence Everywhere’.

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The end of primary education as we know it?

The government seems seriously to be considering requiring all schools – and yes, that includes all primary schools – to become academies. A white paper setting out such a change may come later this month while, as Robin Alexander pointed out last month, the government has been arguing that ‘all schools should become academies or free schools’ for more than a year.

This would be the biggest change to institutional oversight in the primary sector since the 1988 Education Reform Act, at least. It would enable the Conservative party at long last to achieve what it set out to do less successfully 25 years ago through grant maintained schools: the bypassing of local authorities.

But is it going to herald change for the better, or is it a risky break with what has been a reasonably successful post-war primary education framework in favour of something much less democratic, potentially much more commercialised, arguably much more at risk of capture by vested interests, and certainly much less stable?

A research report I have written for the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, to be published this spring, considers the academies policy in detail. Here is what I found:

Evidence that academy status has improved primary schools since the first primary academies came into existence in 2010 is patchy-going-on-non-existent.

This is perhaps the most obvious finding. The headline is that there is little firm evidence that academy status in itself has improved primary schools. This doubt about evidence perhaps unsurprisingly includes that provided by the Department for Education, which last year was taken to task by the UK Statistics Authority for presenting official test data on sponsored academies without context and was asked by the cross-party Commons Education Select Committee to stop ‘exaggerating’ academy success.

The committee itself said that, as of January 2015:

We have sought but not found convincing evidence of the impact of academy status on attainment in primary schools.

Meanwhile, eight of the nine larger academy chains which have been inspected by Ofsted have come in for criticism.

It is true that the academies policy has been credited by the Commons Education Select Committee with injecting extra dynamism into state education. But the evidence for this seems very indirect.

There is little evidence that academies have used the autonomy which the government says is the centrepiece of the policy on the things that the government usually talks about in relation to it.

Although ministers have tended to argue that academies have greater freedoms over the curriculum, teachers’ pay and conditions and the length of the school day and term, independent studies have tended to find that such theoretical liberties are often not taken up.

For example, although academies can depart from national curriculum arrangements, the existence of an assessment regime which focuses on the national curriculum and against which schools’ futures are decided severely limits their scope for manoeuvre.  Indeed, professionals surveying the current highly prescriptive stipulations of primary English assessments might greet suggestions of professional teaching freedom anywhere within the state-funded sector with a hollow laugh.

The academies policy, with the freedom it gives to multi-academy trusts to control what goes on within a chain of schools, provides no guarantee of meaningful autonomy of any kind for individual schools run by an overarching trust.

At the level of the individual school operating as one of several within a multi-academy trust (MAT), the very concept of school-centred autonomy may not exist as currently understood. Decision-making can be controlled by the MAT board, with the governors of each school having little or no power. If this as a trend continues and many or all schools enter into multi-academy trusts run in such a centralised way – and several leaders of large MATS have confirmed this is what happens in their organisations in the past year– it will be highly significant. Effectively it will bring to an end nearly 30 years of local management of schools, which, ironically, the Conservatives introduced in 1988.

To put it another way, we will have replaced a system whereby heads and governing bodies were given some freedom to manage their own affairs, but subject to oversight and influence by a locally democratic body, with one where a central body which is not subject to local democracy can run a group of schools in a top-down manner.

The academies policy does give meaningful autonomy to academy trusts, at the level of the trust, rather than to single schools within a MAT, in relation to some aspects of what they do. But the question then becomes whether such freedoms are appropriate. Such freedoms come in several categories.

Admissions. For example, the movement of many institutions from ‘community school’ status, run under the auspices of local authorities, to semi-independent academies makes each such academy trust its own admissions authority, rather than having admissions controlled by its local authority.

Yet why would a non-selective school need to control its own admissions? It seems difficult to identify any benefits, from the perspective of a system which sought to treat all local children fairly. However, the potential downsides have been powerfully voiced by, for example, the independent Pearson/RSA Academies Commission. It found that

Academies’ autonomy over admissions has attracted controversy and fuelled concerns that the growth of academies may entrench rather than mitigate social inequalities.

Governance. The academies scheme genuinely gives trusts great freedom in terms of how they set themselves up. At the top of academies’ governance structure sit ‘members’. Members have the ability to appoint and dismiss the other powerful figures within the trust’s governance structure, the trustees. Yet there can be as few as three members controlling multi-academy trusts, which in turn can run large numbers of schools. In some cases, these members seem to know each other well, sometimes as husband and wife. In others, a major figure involved in the day-to-day running of the MAT – say, the chief executive – is also a member sitting at the top of its governance structure.

This seems at odds with established good corporate governance practice and appears to create the clear risk that only a small number of people can be in effective control of large sums of public money and of important public institutions.

Finance. The large sums of taxpayers’ money now finding their way to some senior academy executives – and thus away from the classroom – combined with the payment of public funds to companies in which those governing academy trusts sometimes have an interest, raise additional concerns. Specifically, they highlight the clearly debatable freedoms which have been given to academy trusts over financial affairs.

As DfE’s Academies Financial Handbook puts it, the academies system hands trusts ‘wide discretion’ over the spending of public money, with auditors and the government then checking afterwards that this has been done correctly. In the non-academy sector, the local authority retains ultimate responsibility for spending. Readers will no doubt have views on which procedure is better, but financial goings-on in the academies sector at the very least give rise to concerns.

The system for deciding who runs academies is lacking in transparency and democracy

Decisions such as which organisation gets to take over a school under the new Regional Schools Commissioner (RSC) system are not taken in public; no detailed decision-making documents are available to taxpayers, parents, pupils or staff; there is no detail even on the rules by which such decisions are made, if they exist. Virtually no education stakeholders have any role in the decision-making process. The system is effectively controlled from Whitehall, as RSCs report ultimately to ministers. Though taking decisions with big implications for local communities, they are not subject to any local accountability.

The academies system has also introduced a controversial new feature on education’s landscape: the school takeover. This is when an outside academy trust can be brought in to take over the running of an institution, sometimes whether or not the school community – the parents, staff and pupils – want it.

Conclusion

Moving all schools to primary academy status would seem to herald a major increase in bureaucracy – and a field day for lawyers and auditors – as for thousands of institutions the legal structures on which schools are based are changed. This stands to take resources and the energy of school leaderships away from the core business of what goes on in classrooms.

It also stands to move England towards a system where the claimed greater autonomy of academies over, for example, the curriculum – on which the teaching profession has real expertise –  often seems more rhetorical than real. But it would hand great power to academy trusts over areas such as admissions, where gameplaying in search of a ‘better’ intake seems a clear risk, and finance, where the misuse of public funds is an obvious worry.

It would move the management oversight of schools from governing bodies and local authorities  rooted in their local communities to potentially very small groups of individuals, sometimes friends of each other, supervised essentially from Whitehall. It would allow the writing-out of most parents and taxpayers from meaningful influence and information in relation to major decisions on the future of state-funded schools, including a potential takeover by an outside organisation.

Faced with all of these considerations, one more is worth bearing in mind. As shown by the extensive evidence presented in the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review, considering as it did the system before primary academies:

Primary schools appear to be under intense pressure but are in good heart. They are highly valued by children and parents and in general are doing a good job … [They] may be the one point of stability and positive values in a world where everything else is changing and uncertain. (p 488)

That being so, and taking into account the less attractive aspects of what is being proposed, one question begs itself in relation to this possible change.

It consists of five words: why would you do it?

Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist and author of ‘Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing’ (Methuen, 2007). His CPRT research report on recent systemic reforms in the primary sector will be published in the spring.

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Test of truth

Are ministers continuing to misuse data in promoting their favoured policies?

Nick Gibb, the schools minister, seems not to have taken on board the implications of a recent letter from the statistics watchdog, stemming from one of my previous CPRT blogs, about how primary schools’ test results should be interpreted and presented.

When the provisional 2015 Key Stage 2 results for England were published last week, Mr Gibb was quoted in the DfE’s press release celebrating big gains overall in average results since Labour left office in 2010. The minister also highlighted, again, the performance of academies, and in particular that of sponsored academies – typically struggling schools whose management is transferred to an outside body which signs a contract with the Secretary of State – as improving faster than the national average.

However, in doing so he ignored a warning from the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) about over-interpretation of data. The DfE release also seemed to be heavily skewed in favour of a particular narrative, when, as I suggest below, other interpretations are available. And the national data themselves seem to beg questions about what, in reality, has driven the big recent jumps in pupil performance.

That UKSA intervention was prompted after I wrote my CPRT blog in February and followed this up with one for NAHT which argued that seemingly big improvements in sponsored academy KS2 results last year may have been nothing to do with academy status. Rather, I argued, they seemed to follow a national trend, whereby schools of all types with low statistical starting points had improved faster than the national average.

I wrote to the UKSA citing the two blogs and arguing that a DfE statistical release published in December 2014, on which ministers had relied to support their academies policy, should have investigated whether improvements in sponsored academy results came not as a result of the schools’ governance structures, but simply reflected a broader statistical trend for all types of schools.

Ed Humpherson, UKSA director general for regulation, wrote to DfE in July to suggest that while ministers were entitled to use the contents of DfE’s December 2014 statistical release when they commented on the academies policy, the paper itself should have made clear that ‘the differences in the rates of improvement [of academies versus other schools] were not necessarily caused by school type.’ He also recommended that future statistical publications should see DfE ‘commenting on limitations’ when interpreting these statistics, in order to ‘make it clearer to Ministers and to other users that the statistics could not be used to infer a causal link between school type and either attainment or rates of improvement.’

Last week came the first test of how DfE and ministers would react to this advice, with the first statistical publication revealing this year’s KS2 results, and the accompanying press release. Mr Humpherson’s warning seems to have been taken on board to some extent in the DfE statistical release, but – perhaps unsurprisingly – not at all by the minister.

The new DfE statistical release  has a section on academy performance, as was the case last year. Again, it notes how sponsored academies improved faster than the average for all schools. This time, though, it says  that when interpreting differential rates of improvement between types of school ‘it should be noted that the extent to which a school improves is related to a range of factors. Schools with the lowest previous outcomes tend to see the largest improvements…’

For me, this does not go far enough in stating clearly, in line with UKSA, that differences in improvement rates between schools of different types may be nothing to do with whether the institution is an academy or not.

Yes, this extra line of interpretation is an improvement on last year, and in that sense should be welcomed. However, it appears not to have been clear enough for Mr Gibb, whose press release claims: ‘The results…show that sponsored primary academies…are improving more quickly than those run by local authorities.’ Most controversially, Mr Gibb is also quoted as saying: ‘These results vindicate our decision to expand the valuable academies programme into primary schools.’

So, Mr Gibb is inferring a causal link between school type and results, seemingly against the advice of the UKSA.

As mentioned in previous blogs, this is not a purely political or statistical debate with only abstract implications. No, this possibly erroneous and misleading interpretation is likely to have profound implications on the ground, as struggling primary schools are pushed, often controversially, towards sponsored academy status on evidential grounds which still seem dubious.

Of course it may be that this year’s sponsored academy results do not fit the statistical pattern of previous years. It may be that they have improved substantially, while other previously low-performing local authority schools have not. We will not know for sure if that is the case until all school-by-school results are published towards Christmas. But such a phenomenon seems unlikely, based on what has happened in the recent past.

We do also already have further data for 2015 which cast Mr Gibb’s pronouncements in the press release in a somewhat different light from that intended. In the DfE release, Mr Gibb talks not only of major improvements since 2010, with 90,000 more pupils achieving the expected levels in maths and literacy, but of the results in different local authority areas. The narrative with regard to the latter is almost entirely negative. In fact, throughout this release, the only messages to come through are that ministers and their policies are proving successful; that the types of schools favoured by ministers in their reforms are proving successful; and that particular local authorities – yes, that’s government, but not the national government presided over by ministers  – are underperforming and so are facing a ‘crackdown’.

Remarkably, there is no mention at all that other actors in this annual statistical drama – children, their schools and teachers, and their parents – may have played a part in improving results.

In relation to local authorities, the release features a table of ‘best performing local authority areas’ and ‘worst performing local authority areas’, but the text focuses only on the latter, with Mr Gibb promising to write to directors of LAs at the bottom of the rankings to get them to ‘explain how they intend to improve the teaching of reading and arithmetic in the primary schools under their control’.

There are several ways to unpick that last phrase, by the way. For example, do local authority directors really have much influence over teaching content? Is ‘arithmetic’ all that mathematics amounts to now? Have local authorities really ‘controlled’ schools since the 1988 Education Reform Act, introduced by the Conservatives supposedly to stop LA control happening? But we must move on.

The interesting thing is that, within these latest statistics, DfE did publish LA-by-LA figures which point to some large improvements in recent years. So, two authorities have improved their headline percentage of pupils achieving level four in reading, writing and mathematics by 12 points since 2012. In Hull, the figure rose from well below the national average, at 67 per cent, in 2012, to 79 per cent, just below the national figure. In Portsmouth, the gain was also by 12 points, from 65 to 77 per cent. Another five authorities – Redcar, Herefordshire, Suffolk, East Sussex and Hounslow – improved by at least nine percentage points across the three years. Overall, five of the top seven fastest rising authorities, on this measure, had below-average results in 2012 so have either closed the gap with the national average or have surpassed it.

Some of them, including Hull, it is true, do have a higher than average numbers of academies. Yet outside one very small authority – Rutland, where performance tends to jump around every year – the fastest-rising LA from 2014 to 2015 on this headline measure was South Tyneside, where results surged by seven percentage points. DfE data reveals that South Tyneside has only one sponsored primary academy. Meanwhile, the academy chain widely seen as the most successful in England – Ark Schools – posted average headline results which, at 72 per cent, were a point lower than the lowest-performing local authorities nationally. Will Mr Gibb now be writing to Ark?

It is possible, then, to see from the above statistics how an alternative narrative could have been crafted, perhaps based on ministerial praise for local authority areas which have risen on the Government’s chosen measures. As ever, interpretation of statistics can depend on what the interpreter chooses not to highlight.

One final set of questions present themselves from the press release’s statistics. What do the last few years of generally improving national data actually mean?

Of course, the implications of the press release, as voiced by Mr Gibb, are clear. Results have improved strongly since 2010. This shows, said Mr Gibb, that ‘the government is delivering on its one nation vision for education’ and that ministerial policies are paying off. The national data behind this claim show that the proportion of pupils achieving the expected level 4 in all of reading, writing and maths rose from 62 per cent in 2009 to 80 per cent this year.

But to repeat: why has this happened? I’m not convinced that any of the three policies listed in the DfE press release – introducing higher floor targets, banning calculators from maths tests and introducing a spelling, punctuation and grammar test – have been entirely behind it.

And perhaps the most obvious change that a government can make to teaching and learning – the introduction of a new national curriculum – cannot have contributed here as none of the pupils taking the 2015 tests have experienced the national curriculum introduced by the previous government.

So it is a bit of a mystery. Perhaps readers of this blog can explain why the figures have jumped. I am certainly curious about them, and would like to investigate further. For if anything is to be underlined from recent ministerial interpretations of figures, it is the need continually to ask questions.

Warwick Mansell, one of CPRT’s regular bloggers, is a freelance journalist and author of ‘Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing’ (Methuen, 2007).

This is not the first time that our bloggers have had cause to challenge the government’s use of evidence. Click here for further comment.

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

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Can data really define ‘coasting’?

For me, this is the question of the moment, with the Education and Adoption Bill, whose first section is on the charmingly-worded but as-yet-undefined term ‘coasting schools’, having started its passage through Parliament.

The bill promises to sweep a new category of these schools into the reach of the ‘intervention’ powers of the Secretary of State, which include issuing academy orders forcing schools into the arms of new sponsors.

In a blunt exchange at Education Questions in the House of Commons this week, Nicky Morgan, the Education Secretary, reminded her Labour shadow, Tristram Hunt, that the definition of coasting schools would not come until part-way through the passage of the bill, at its committee stage. But I’ve already had a steer on its likely content. The Department for Education’s press office has told me that the ‘coasting’ definition will focus on data, and specifically the school’s performance over time. The idea, I was told – these are not my words – was to home in on schools which have failed to fulfil their pupils’ potential.

If ‘coasting schools’ are to be defined entirely in terms of results data, I think this will be the first time that formal intervention powers by central government will have been triggered completely by assessment statistics. This already appears to be a departure both from a promise reportedly made by David Cameron before the election and from the contents of the Conservatives’ election manifesto.

In March, the Daily Mail warned that ‘coasting schools’ would be targeted under a new Conservative government, with the Prime Minister quoted – depressingly, though predictably given our experience of the past 20 years of education policy-making – as ‘waging all-out war on mediocrity’.

However, the definition of ‘coasting’ suggested in that piece was an Ofsted judgement. Schools falling in the inspectorate’s ‘requires improvement’ category would ‘automatically be considered’ for turning into academies. Only if they could demonstrate clear plans for improvement, as judged by the Regional Schools Commissioners – England’s new cadre of officials appointed by the Secretary of State, taking decisions in private – would they avoid a change of leadership. The manifesto backed this up, saying: ‘Any school judged by Ofsted to be requiring improvement will be taken over…unless it can demonstrate that it has a plan to improve rapidly.’

But there were indications post-election that the definition was changing. Now it appears that results statistics are going to be the key driver. And that, of course, has big implications.

First, I think it has repercussions for the very controversial language used. A little diversion might be in order here, into the perhaps simpler realm of football.

Imagine, say, a football team, without any great history of success, which gets promoted to the Premier League one season. In its first year in the top tier, it finishes, say, 12th. This is seen as a big achievement, as the club beats many longer-established, richer outfits and comfortably avoids the relegation that comes with finishing 18th or lower. The following season, results are even better, with a 10th place finish the reward. The next two seasons, consistency seems to have been achieved, with 11th and 13th places secured.

However, any outsider looking only at the club’s end of season position over the years might conclude that it has been drifting. Someone could almost call it a ‘coasting’ club in its last two seasons, based on data alone. But while the possible reaction to the club’s statistical direction of travel – sack the manager – may or may not be right, any implication that it was ‘coasting’ and therefore not trying, would be to over-interpret the results. For faced with that ‘coasting’ slur, the club’s manager and any of his coaching staff or players would be incensed. The manager arrives at his desk at 6.30 every morning, hardly has a holiday in the summer and the attention to detail on the training ground is phenomenal.

But the manager does not have total control over the performances of his players and is up against other teams who may be trying similarly hard. He argues that, in a league where he will never have the budgets of the big clubs, survival in the Premier League is success. While results, then, might suggest non-progress, this is based on anything but a sense that the manager is just taking things easy: it is a real triumph.

In contrast, there was the case of a real Premier League football club recently, again having established itself comfortably in mid-table following promotion, where the manager was said by the club’s board to be too laid-back about training. He was replaced by a former player, who has marginally improved its overall position. ‘Coasting’ might have been a more appropriate word in that case, if the characterisation of the former manager’s attitude was right.

My point is that data alone will never tell you whether a football club, or indeed a school, is ‘coasting’ or not. ‘Coasting’ suggests a lack of effort but all we have, with results data, is a statistical end product: the output numbers. Teachers could be working phenomenally hard, and yet failing to improve results as much as outsiders might wish, because schools, in reality, do not have full control over results. These are, inevitably, subject to unpredictability, from the motivation and ability of pupils to ‘perform’ on the big day to the vagaries of marking. And there may be a sense of a zero-sum game: ‘below-average’ schools will always be penalised, even if all schools are working very hard, if the indicators used are based on comparing one school’s results to others’.

Are we really happy, I wonder, to bandy around a word, with all its dismissive implications for the professionals whom our system has spent years training and paying, and with whom we entrust our children, when we are unsure of its accuracy in individual cases?

So to use the results as indicators of underlying effort is as lazy – is this ‘coasting’ policy merely following the assumptions of its accustomed comfort-zone? – as it is potentially misleading. And, in implicitly being brazenly unconcerned about who gets labelled in this way, policy-makers seem to compound the insult that the word ‘coasting’ undoubtedly provokes in many in the profession.

I have to say, surveying the school accountability regime as I do, that I find it very hard to believe that many, if any, schools can truly be said to be ‘coasting’. There are, surely, already too many penalties for those schools which fail to improve their pupils’ results, starting with the head losing his or her job following a failing Ofsted, for any of them to take it easy, I reason. And surveys of teacher workload surely make unarguable the case that most professionals are putting in very long hours in term-time – and often adding to them in the holidays – often under considerable pressure.

And yet here have we have the phrase ‘coasting schools’ backed not only by the Prime Minister and his Education Secretary, but written on the face of an education bill, in its first clause.

Individuals whom I respect, working more closely with schools than I am, have countered that there are some institutions which are not working as hard as they could to provide the best possible education for their pupils. Fair enough. But my point remains: data alone will not tell us which ones they are, because there is no straight read-across from outcome data to teacher commitment and motivation. This seems to me be to be another example of policy-makers making heroic assumptions of what can be read into results statistics alone.

We will have to wait until we have a definition in full – if, indeed during this bill’s passage, we get all the details which will be used in reality by those taking decisions on schools – in order to judge the technical reliability of the datasets being used. But with the futures of more schools poised to hinge on results statistics, this is likely to place even greater weight on, for example, marking reliability. Can it withstand the pressures being placed upon it? Again, the assumption is always that it can. But national curriculum tests and GCSEs, for example, have not been designed with the intention that institutions’ existence could rest on them.

A final implication should be obvious to anyone who is interested in the unintended consequences of assessment-driven accountability. Allowing schools to be placed as, in the language of the bill, ‘eligible for intervention’ – in other words, available for a management takeover – on the basis of results data alone will, surely, accentuate teaching to the test. With so much riding on performance on a particular set of indicators, the incentive for schools to concentrate even more narrowly on doing whatever it takes to maximise performance on those particular indicators will be underlined. If, on the other hand, the statistical definition of ‘coasting’ is not precise, teaching to particular indicators may be more tricky but then Regional Schools Commissioners stand to be accused of arbitrariness in selecting which schools count as ‘coasting’.

To ministers and those defending these plans, this is all to the good. The ‘war on mediocrity’ really will force institutions and those working in them to raise their game, with the implication that countless previous reforms in the same vein have not fully succeeded in doing so. Labelling schools, then, as ‘coasting’ – even if the label is in some cases inaccurate – is not a problem and will just reinvigorate professionals who need a bit of a push. And focusing on particular indicators is fine, as these centrally-defined metrics will just spur teachers to prioritise aspects of education which are important.

To this observer, who sees teachers for the hard-working, often stressed individuals they are, and wonders about the message being sent to this and the next generation of professionals about their efforts and about the alienation of policy-making from its implications on the ground, there is a sense of despair.

As ever, and as evidenced and articulated by the Cambridge Primary Review, the hope is that professionals can still educate pupils well in spite of policy-making, rather than because of it.

Warwick Mansell, one of CPRT’s regular bloggers, is a freelance journalist and author of ‘Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing’ (Methuen, 2007).

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

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Basics versus breadth, yet again

It was a moment when, listening in the audience, I found myself saying internally: ‘Hold on a minute: that’s not right.’ Or, at least: ‘Hold on a minute: that is debatable, at best’.

The event was a conference this week in central London at which a well-known figure from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development was making claims about the links between pupils’ scores in international tests and their countries’ future economic growth rates.

But the statement at which my ears particularly pricked up did not come from Andreas Schleicher of the OECD. Nor was it on the conference’s main subject matter: the widely-reported if fishy-sounding claim that the UK ‘would gain £2 trillion’ by raising test scores by a few points.

No, it came from another high-profile education figure, on the issue of breadth versus ‘basics’ in the curriculum.

Amanda Spielman, one of the founders of the 31-school Ark chain of academies who is also the chair of England’s exams regulator, Ofqual, said that it was nice to see the OECD acknowledging that schools sometimes needed to focus on the ‘basics’ of English and maths, even if, she implied, this had to be at the expense of other subjects.

Ms Spielman said: ‘There is a trade-off between breadth of curriculum and a focus on the achievement of these basic skills.’

Reiterating, she said: ‘Here is one of those areas of policy where there are trade-offs, and being explicit that there are trade-offs helps the discussion.’

Here, I thought, was a startling repudiation of the view of the Cambridge Primary Review, among other evidence sources.

And, sure enough, here, on page 493 of the Review’s final report, is its warning of a mistaken ‘policy-led belief that curriculum breadth is incompatible with the pursuit of standards in “the basics”, and that if anything gives way it must be breadth … Evidence going back many decades, including reports from HMI and Ofsted, consistently shows this belief to be unfounded. Standards and breadth are often positively related, and high-performing schools achieve both,’ says the report.

So I pressed Ms Spielman on this. Alongside questioning whether her comments were in line with what research said, I put it to her that while I, personally, had enjoyed both English and maths all the way until the age of 18 at school, the thought of having to take time out of my other subjects for extra lessons in these ‘basics’ would not have been attractive.

She then qualified her position, in two ways. First, she said it wasn’t a case of removing any subjects other than English and maths completely, but of merely sometimes needing extra lessons in those subjects. This was particularly the case when working, as Ark in many cases does, with children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

That sounded fair enough, but the question (or non-question) as to whether children need to do well in literacy and numeracy – they do – has always seemed to me to be different from the one of exactly how this is to be achieved. Is the answer more lessons in these particular subjects? Or is it using the rest of the curriculum creatively to ensure that those basics are mastered, while children’s interests are nurtured and these other subjects are pursued as ends in themselves?

I have never seen that answering ‘yes’ to the first question means the answer to the second has to be ‘yes’, but this seemed to be the implication of the comments.

Ms Spielman’s second way of expanding on what she said was to argue that she was speaking specifically about secondary education, rather than primary. I emailed her for extra information after the talk, and she told me:

‘I was not saying that the primary curriculum should be more limited than it is now…what I was saying is that there are times when there is a clear risk that a child will not reach a satisfactory level of basic education, however that is defined. For example, a child coming into secondary school working three years below expectations might typically fall into that category. The secondary school has to decide how to educate that child to the best of their abilities, using all the information at their disposal.

‘One option is to stick with a “standard” Key Stage 3 curriculum, in which the child’s achievement in all subjects is likely to be constrained by their relatively weak literacy and maths, even with ameliorating “interventions”. A second option is to adopt the “depth before breadth” model used by Ark, which prioritises basic education (and prioritising here does not mean abandoning the rest of the curriculum) … A third option is to set an “alternative” curriculum that aims to develop the student in areas that do not require high levels of literacy/maths.’ The implication was that Ms Spielman and Ark favoured the second option. She said this was in line with the OECD’s stress that all children should achieve at least ‘basic education’.

Expanding still further to stress that she was talking about secondary and not primary, Ms Spielman said: ‘I completely agree with Cambridge Primary Review in principle: when the school is doing a proper job, there should be no need for trade-offs: the problems arise when the preceding phases of education have not been good enough. Primaries have the opportunity to get it right from the beginning; secondaries don’t.’

All this is very interesting, I thought. Many, I guess, might commend the Ark approach as reported here. I am not a teacher, so I do not have first-hand experience of any of these approaches.

But two things are, perhaps, worth saying. First, it does seem true that Ark is prepared to devote more time to literacy and numeracy, at least for some pupils.  Curious to find out more about Ark’s ‘depth before breadth’ stipulation, I looked it up on Ark’s website and found the following: ‘When pupils secure firm foundations in English and mathematics, they find the rest of the curriculum far easier to access. That’s why we prioritise depth in these subjects, giving pupils the best chance of academic success.’

The site adds: ‘We also dedicate more time to literacy and English than other schools to encourage a love of reading and develop fluent communication skills. We have two programmes that focus specifically on phonics teaching and early spoken language skills.’ There is no mention of this applying only to secondary schools.

This suggests to me that the issue of whether some or all pupils need more time to be spent on literacy and numeracy is very much a live one, and is therefore worth debating. Does the amount of time spent on the subjects matter, I wonder, or is it better to concentrate on teaching quality in existing timeframes for these subjects, while maximising curriculum breadth? I’m not sure, but the Cambridge Primary Review evidence suggests this would be worth debating.

Indeed, evidence is relevant both from the United States – where in 2011, as CPRT’s Robin Alexander reported during the UK government’s national curriculum review, a commission advising  the White House showed that many studies found links between pupils’ greater involvement in the arts and higher reading and numeracy test scores and increased engagement with school, with pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds seemingly benefiting especially – and from the UK, where a report published last month by the National Union of Teachers said that England’s accountability regime was pushing schools to ‘offer a narrow education at the expense of a broad and balanced curriculum’. Both of these reports, in common with the Cambridge Primary Review, would seem to raise questions about the ‘trade-off’ thesis.

Second, and coincidentally, over the weekend a friend from an arts background told me that she recently visited an Ark primary, which educates many disadvantaged pupils, and had been put off by a ‘literacy and numeracy above all else’ approach. My friend worried about creative subjects losing out as a result. The idea that this might be the case would, no doubt, be denied strongly by Ark. But her child will nevertheless not be attending the school.

As I put it to Amanda Spielman at the conference, is there a danger of setting up a divide between schools using perhaps narrower curricular methods in disadvantaged communities, and more rounded offerings from schools with a more middle-class intake? After all, do not leading schools in the independent sector pride themselves on their rounded curricula?

Whatever the answer to these questions, with Ark arguably the most successful of England’s major academy chains, and its methods therefore perhaps likely to be influential in the future, it seems now might be a good time to revisit this debate.

Warwick Mansell, now one of CPRT’s regular bloggers, is a freelance journalist and author of ‘Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing’ (Methuen, 2007).

Warwick Mansell is right. The argument that standards in ‘the basics’ are incompatible with a broad and rich curriculum was rejected in the Cambridge Primary Review final report on the basis of both children’s educational needs and evidence from inspection and research. This is why CPRT’s eight priorities include this: ‘Develop a broad, balanced and rich entitlement curriculum which responds to both national and local need, eliminates the damaging division of status and quality between core and non-core, and teaches every subject, domain or aspect to the highest possible standard.’

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Education reform: Jekyll or Hyde?

Education policy-making is two-faced, and perhaps never more so – surprise, surprise – than during the run-up to a general election.

It has a kindly aspect, which talks soothingly about helping teachers to make this the best country in the world in which to educate children. And – as Stephanie Northen illustrated in last week’s CPRT blog – it has a tougher side, or what could be called a Robocop ‘20 seconds to comply’ mode for fans of late 1980s sci-fi, in which politicians boast of having ‘zero tolerance of failure.’

This contrast was illustrated for me perhaps more vividly than ever in this week’s launch of the Conservative Party manifesto. But it also sits underneath what seems a different vision being put forward by the other party that may be in position to lead a government from May: Labour.

So, to the Tory manifesto first. And I must avoid getting sidetracked here by its highly questionable claims about recent governments’ education records, such as on the performance of UK pupils in international tests; on the record of sponsored academies; and on the management of free schools.

But what struck me first about this document was the juxtaposition, in the bullet points with which the education section starts, of the manifesto’s plan to ‘help teachers’ with its insistence that there would be ‘zero tolerance of failure’ in primary schools. Meanwhile, there would be takeovers of ‘failing and coasting’ secondaries, which would automatically be turned into academies.

This latter move, by the way, is what is needed as the evidence shows overwhelmingly that academy status is the only way of improving schools. (Not really. See here and here).

The question is whether it is possible to talk meaningfully about supporting teachers to do their jobs well while at the same time espousing ‘zero tolerance of failure’ when the schools in which they work underperform.

I think this is a very difficult circle to square, in the reality of how schools operate: the hunch must be that if you use ‘zero tolerance’, so making schools extremely fearful as to their next bad set of results, you probably will make them unattractive workplaces for many teachers or would-be teachers.

In fact, the Conservatives’ tough talk seems to crowd out more narrowly-framed statements which might be seen as more supportive, from a teacher’s viewpoint, in this document.

Its promise about ‘helping teachers’ is followed by the words ‘to make Britain the best country in the world for developing maths, engineering, science and computing skills’. This strangely implies that these named subjects are to be privileged: is world class status for the others not something at which to aim?

And while the manifesto pledges to cut the time teachers spend on paperwork and to reduce the burden of Ofsted, no further details are provided.

Instead, under ‘zero tolerance of failure”, there is talk of “ensuring our best headteachers take control of failing primary schools’, and a factually dubious statement that ‘nearly 800 of the worst-performing primary schools have been taken over by experienced academy sponsors with a proven track record of success’.

Any school judged to require improvement by Ofsted would be ‘taken over by the best headteachers’ , with ‘coasting schools’ ‘forced’ to accept new leadership. This last promise, by the way, comes despite the current Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, telling the House of Commons Education Select Committee in October that she was ‘not really a forcing type of person’.

That other f-word – ‘failure’ – stalks this document, with promises that pupils unable to meet ‘required standards’ in primary school will re-sit tests at the start of secondary, ‘to make sure [a heroic assumption, on which books could be written] that no pupil is left behind’.

The document adds: ‘We will expect every 11-year-old to know their times tables off by heart and be able to perform long division and complex multiplication,’ without admitting that one of those implied stipulations – the teaching of long division in primary – was opposed by virtually every maths educator I know as counterproductive.

Readers can make their own judgement on whether what seems to me to be the stress-infusing atmosphere which this continuation of our present policy regime implies in schools will help create the right kind of learning environment for our children. As suggested above, I am sceptical, to say the least. I think this document is certainly out of line with the more thoughtful, much less top-down vision of the Cambridge Primary Review, which talks – particularly in chapter 23 of its final report –  about bullying policy centralisation.

This document reminds me again that the tough, posturing, unilaterally-decided and shallow incentives of ultra-politicised policy-making in England are in collision with what might be seen as some of education’s more nurturing, positive and consensual ideals. Yet, tragically perhaps, politicised policy-making usually wins.

A contrast with Labour’s recent policy pronouncements is revealing. Labour’s manifesto itself is striking in its brevity – only two pages on the detail of schools policy – though its statements that ‘children develop and learn best when they are secure and happy’ and that ‘education is vital to achieving personal fulfilment [as well as] economic prosperity’ are  worth noting.

I found the speech of Tristram Hunt, shadow education secretary, to the annual conference of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers last month more interesting.

Mr Hunt pledged that the negativity of recent policy-making, which he attributed in particular to Michael Gove through the latter’s attacks on educationists as ‘enemies of promise’, would end. Mr Hunt said: ‘I promise you today: this deplorable, hostile, almost militaristic rhetoric towards the profession dies alongside this Tory government’.

He added: ‘The idea that our children’s potential can be fulfilled if we just raise the targets, stamp our feet and demand one more heave is now, surely, approaching its end stages.’ The days of education by diktat were over, he vowed, with Labour moving schools away from the ‘narrow, “exam factory” vision of recent years’.

Mr Hunt concluded that he wanted to ‘remove this centrally-controlling, profession-bating, target-obsessed government from inflicting five more years of evidence-free market mania on our children’s future’.

Cynics – and readers of Cambridge Primary Review reports from 2007-9 and ministers’ responses to them – might wonder if the last quotation could apply almost equally to the last Labour government. But the real question for Labour, should it lead the next administration, is whether its warmer words about standing back and supporting teachers will withstand alternative policy-making pressures.

Specifically, will central government be able to back off even slightly from tough-sounding interventions in schools, predicated as they always are on being intolerant of failure?

Even in Mr Hunt’s speech there was a glimpse of that tension, as he talked of a reformed Ofsted but which needed to be ‘an interventionist inspectorate tasked with rooting out underperformance wherever it lies’.

So, is it possible to preside over a national government pledging to raise standards without resorting to macho – and shallow – ‘zero tolerance’ in its rhetoric and in the detail of its policy-making? I think so, and that an alternative vision is possible for our schools, which moves away from policy-making’s notorious ‘discourse of derision’ towards something more supportive. But it will need some courage from the politicians.

Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist and author of  Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing (Methuen, 2007).

 

 

We have indeed been there before. Read chapters 2 and 23 of ‘Children, their World, their Education: final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review’, for an analysis of educational policy and the language of educational policy under Labour between 1997 and 2010. Similar threats and promises, almost identical rhetoric. Indeed, the CPR final report noted (pages 21-25) not just the ‘discourse of derision’ referred to by Warwick, but also the discourse of dichotomy (education’s complexities reduced to a starkly polarised choice between just two alternatives, good and bad, us and them), and the discourses of myth and meaninglessness.

Regular readers will by now have noticed that recent CPRT blogs have concentrated, in these last few weeks before the 2015 UK general election, on the politics of primary education; and they have done so by reference to England rather than Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales because it is in England that heavy-handed government intervention and tough or vapid ministerial rhetoric seem to take their most extreme forms.

In the week before the election we shall pull all these blogs together into a special CPRT policy supplement which will include a re-assessment, with the next government in mind, of the policy priorities proposed by CPR and CPRT. After the election we’ll try to restrict this depressing talk about policy and return to children and their education.

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How well are primary academies doing? And how well is DfE doing with the evidence?

Has DfE, including its supposedly public-minded official statisticians, been misusing data in its drive to force on primary schools its favoured policy of academy status?

The question arises since I performed an analysis that seems to raise serious difficulties about a key statistic used by a minister to defend the academies scheme.

On February 2nd, education minister Nick Gibb was confronted on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme with the findings of a report by the cross-party House of Commons Education Select Committee. The committee, following an inquiry on academies and free schools, had concluded the previous week: ‘We have sought but not found convincing evidence of the impact of academy status on attainment in primary schools.’

The minister responded that sponsored academies – generally previously struggling schools which are taken over by a ‘sponsor’ entering into a contract with the Secretary of State to run the school – were improving faster than the national average.

He said: ‘We do know sponsored academies do improve standards of education in our schools. If you look at the primary sponsored academies, they’ve seen their reading, writing and maths results improve at double the rate seen across all schools.’ He added: ‘Primary [sponsored academies]…have seen their reading, writing and maths results improve at double the rate of local authority schools.’

This seemed to mark a change of position for the DfE, which less than a year ago concluded, in its publication Academies: research priorities and questions that ‘The research evidence [is] primarily based on secondary schools and with more and more primary schools becoming academies, further evidence is needed on what drives those schools to become academies and what makes them viable and sustainable.’

So was Mr Gibb’s statement accurate? Investigating, it became clear that the source was DfE’s Statistical First Release which accompanied the publication of primary league tables on December 12th, 2014. The document is headed with the reassuring logo ‘National Statistics’. It says: ‘Attainment in sponsored academies increased by 7 percentage points between 2013 and 2014, compared to 3 percentage points in converter academies and LA maintained schools.’

This statement seemed factual enough. But doubts began to surface in my mind after digging a tiny bit further into the data.

So, the 420 sponsored academies included in the statistic did indeed improve at faster than the national rate for other schools between 2013 and 2014, rising seven percentage points in the proportion of their pupils achieving level 4 in all of reading, writing and maths, from 61 to 68 per cent. By contrast, the 13,396 non-academy (local authority) schools rose three points, from 77 to 80 per cent, while, among 1,006 converter academies – generally previously successful schools choosing to take on the status – the rise was from 80 to 83 per cent.

The immediate question, though, was whether like was really being compared with like. With both types of school, other than sponsored academies, starting with higher average scores in 2013, sponsored academies would appear to have had more room for improvement.

Another way of looking at that is to say that, clearly, the closer a school gets to 100 per cent of its children achieving level 4s in all three subjects, the less scope it has to improve on this measure; at 100 per cent, it has no scope at all.

This would seem to be a basic statistical point. Yet it was not acknowledged anywhere in this statistical release that the higher rate of progress might be at least in part a product of sponsored academies starting from a lower base. The comparison used in the release, then, might be deemed invalid. Without further information it certainly looked potentially misleading.

The fairer comparison, then, would be to look at schools with the same statistical starting points. In other words, among schools averaging 61 per cent in 2013, did sponsored academies or non-sponsored academies improve faster?

Again, there is no mention of this potential statistical comparison in the release. So I have now performed this data analysis myself, based on the DfE’s official underlying school-by-school assessment data.

Staggeringly, this seems to show that, when schools with the same starting points in 2013 are compared, sponsored academies fared worse than a comparison group of primaries in 2014.

I am not a professional statistician, and the analysis below is rudimentary. But I did it in two ways. First, I decided to look at all schools which, in 2013, had exactly 61 per cent of their pupils achieving at least level four in reading, writing and maths. Remember, this was the average figure for 2013 sponsored academies.

This yielded 113 primaries: six sponsored academies, two converter academies and 105 non-academy state schools. Among the 107 that were not sponsored academies, results improved to 70.7 per cent in 2014, a rise of 10 percentage points.

Second, I widened the comparison group to include a much larger number of primaries: those which had results, in 2013, ranging from 56 to 66 per cent. Again, I made sure that this sample, of 1,650 schools, had an average result of 61 per cent in 2013.

What was the outcome? Well, the schools which were not sponsored academies improved on average to 72 per cent. So that’s an 11 point improvement, compared to a seven point gain in sponsored academies. (The 11 point gain included figures for academy converters; removing them from the sample, non-academy maintained schools – ‘local authority schools’ in Mr Gibb’s phrase – went up 10 percentage points, which again is higher than the seven points of sponsored academies).

So my research seems to point to an opposite conclusion – sponsored academy results rising less quickly than those of a comparison group – to that of the DfE’s official statistical publication.

It would have been easy for the DfE’s professional statisticians to have published a similar assessment. But they did not. Nor did they publish any statistical caveats about the sponsored academy-to-national-average improvement comparison they chose to use.

Why does this matter? It seems to me to be very important on the ground, where I hear regularly of communities struggling with campaigns against academy status being forced on them by DfE, in the face of claims by ministers that this should be the only option for school improvement.

Indeed, DfE guidance says that, in schools deemed inadequate, ministers’ ‘expectation’ is always that they should become sponsored academies.

Last month, David Cameron went further, proposing that thousands of schools deemed by Ofsted not to be inadequate but merely to ‘require improvement’ should become sponsored academies in the event of a new Conservative government.

But if statistical evidence on an area absolutely central to the current political debate about education is being made to say the opposite of what a reasonable person might think the data actually tell us, acknowledging the need to compare like with like, we have serious problems. Is evidence being made to fit policy, rather than vice-versa?

I’d make one final point.  In a recent article, Cambridge Primary Review Trust chair Robin Alexander, wrote: ‘Deep and lasting improvements in England’s education system will be secured only when, in their discourse and their handling of evidence, policymakers practise the best that has been thought and said rather than preach it, exemplify the educated mind rather than demean it.’

It is staggering that the DfE’s statistical publication was first released without the basic caveats and checks which would be expected of statistics students completing their assignments, and was then endorsed by a minister of education. And a minister of education with an enthusiasm for mathematics, at that. What kind of an example does this set for pupils? We all deserve better.

I invited DfE to comment on the content of this blog but it did not respond. 

Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist and author of Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing (Methuen, 2007).

The stance of ministers and DfE towards evidence has been a constant concern of CPRT and CPR, as it must be for any organisation that cares about the probity and efficacy of education policy and seeks to generate the kind of evidence that a well-founded education system requires.  CPRT’s concern is shared by the House of Commons Education Select Committee, which in 2014 launched an online enquiry into DfE’s use of evidence. Robin Alexander’s submission to this enquiry was published as the CPRT blog on 19 December.

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DfE performance descriptors for KS1/2: CPRT’s response

DfE’s consultation on the proposed performance descriptors for KS1 and KS2 closed on 18 December.

Read CPRT’s response

Also:

Read CPRT news item launching discussion of the proposals

Read Warwick Mansell’s CPRT blog critiquing the proposals

Read David Reedy’s CPRT blog on testing and teaching

Read Wynne Harlen’s major new CPRT research review and briefing on assessment

Contact

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