The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

CPRT Blog

Below are the latest blog posts from the CPR Trust. Please read our Terms of Use and join in the conversation.

by Robin Alexander

Onwards and upwards

In my blog on 3 March I confirmed what we intimated at CPRT’s national conference in November: the Trust is closing but we have negotiated arrangements for securing its legacy and enabling interested groups and individuals to continue the CPR/CPRT-inspired work they have started. I can now provide further details.

Winding up

CPRT has ceased trading as a not-for-profit company and during the next two months will wind up its affairs.

  • Some CPRT regional networks may wish to continue their good work, and we hope they will, though they won’t be doing so under the banner of CPRT.
  • The CPRT Schools Alliance is disbanded as a CPRT entity, but some Alliance schools will wish, under different auspices, to maintain the regional and national links they have forged and the activities they have initiated. Again, we encourage them to do so.
  • There is one more CPRT publication in the pipeline and we’ll tell you about this when it appears.
  • The CPRT website will remain live for at least the next two years in order that its resources continue to be universally available. There may even be the occasional post and update.
  • The combined physical and electronic archive of the Cambridge Primary Review and the Cambridge Primary Review Trust has been lodged permanently in the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York, with access for bona fide researchers. The collection includes CPR/CPRT publications, committee papers, media coverage and official correspondence and much else, and is a rich – and vast – research resource. Find out more here.

Carrying on

The agreement between CPRT and the Chartered College of Teaching (CCoT) has now been ratified.

  •  A smaller but still substantial archive, containing electronic copies of all CPR and CPRT reports and briefings and many other publications, is in the process of being copied to CCoT where it will have inaugural pride of place on the ‘knowledge platform’ through which CCoT aims to support evidence-informed practice. CCoT will curate the CPR/CPRT publications bank; that is to say, they will sort, index and link our material to other evidence on the knowledge platform, and they will actively promote it as a key resource for thinking primary teachers and their schools.
  • Those who are not teachers or CCoT members will still be able to access CPR/CPRT publications via either the CPRT website or the Borthwick Institute.
  • Teachers on CPRT’s mailing list, who work in CPRT Schools Alliance schools, or are associated with CPRT regional networks, may apply to become Founding Members of the College at a preferential rate. Find out about CCoT membership here.
  • In addition to the advertised benefits of membership of England’s new national professional body, including of course access to the knowledge platform, members will be offered generous discounts on the two CPR publications that are not available electronically – Children, their World, their Education and The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys . They will also be able freely to download Primary Curriculum 2014 , which hitherto has been available only as a hard copy purchase. We are grateful to Routledge and Pearson for these offers.
  • A group drawn from three of CPRT’s regional networks has been exploring possibilities for a new network, possibly under the auspices of CCoT, which itself will be encouraging and supporting such ventures. Anyone interested in joining this group should contact Julia Flutter.
  • Julia – formerly of CPR and CPRT and now on the staff of CCoT – has also offered to handle any questions about the CCoT membership offer and opportunities for post-CPRT networking.

by Robin Alexander

Over but not out

We mentioned at our highly successful national conference last November that the future of Cambridge Primary Review Trust (CPRT) has been under discussion.

During the past ten years CPRT and its predecessor the Cambridge Primary Review have established an unrivalled foundation of educational evidence, vision and principle for those to whom such things matter (which, dispiritingly, excludes many of our political leaders), and the 2016 conference reminded us of what can be achieved if we are prepared to transcend institutional and professional boundaries and act together.

CPRT was always expected to be time-limited rather than a permanent fixture, a way of giving the spirit and messages of the Review a final push before releasing them to find their own place in the landscape of primary education.  The national map is patchy, but there’s no doubt that in many quarters that place is secure, so the Review’s tenth anniversary was a time not just to celebrate, as we did last November, but also to take stock.

The stock-taking is now complete. Rather than run the risk of fading away through over-familiarity, and mindful of our increasing reliance on voluntary effort, we have decided that the time to stop is now, and that we’ll go out on a high.

Better still, we have been able to secure a deal which will maintain the Trust’s voice, presence and resources for the foreseeable future, albeit in another guise.

Here’s how it will work. CPRT will shortly cease to operate as a company. Its remaining financial assets will be transferred to a holding account to cover outstanding bills and keep its website alive and fully accessible for the next two years.  Meanwhile, the new Chartered College of Teaching (CCoT) has agreed to take over curation of the combined online resource bank of Cambridge Primary Review and Cambridge Primary Review Trust – over 100 publications plus a host of official submissions and other material – and ensure that as a mainstay of CCoT’s ‘knowledge platform’ it continues as an exemplary source of ideas, information and evidence relating to the development and education of young children, and a standard-bearer for what matters as well as what works.

Further, those teachers who have been engaged with CPRT – whether as recipients of our e-mailings or as members of CPRT regional networks and Schools Alliance – will be able to join CCoT at the College’s founding rate. At the same time we are hoping that at least some of our regional networks and alliance schools will take up the opportunity to transform themselves into CCoT regional communities.

Though the timing looks perfect, it isn’t as serendipitous as it may seem. Robin Alexander (CPR Director and CPRT Chair) and Alison Peacock (CCoT’s first Chief Executive) not only worked together during 2010-12 to disseminate CPR’s messages but were also party to the initial discussions in 2013-14 about what is now CCoT, while during 2016 Robin was a member of CCoT’s Research and Evidence Advisory Group. Common to both CPRT and CCoT is the re-empowerment of teachers after two decades of enforced dependency and compliance. The desired shift is encapsulated in that familiar quote from the CPR final report (p 496) that ‘children will not learn to think for themselves if their teachers are merely expected to do as they are told’ and its less familiar exegesis (also p 496):

We need to move to a position where research-grounded teaching repertoires and principles are introduced through initial training and refined and extended through experience and CPD, and teachers acquire as much command of the evidence and principles which underpin the repertoires as they do of the skills needed in their use. The test of this alternative view of professionalism is that teachers should be able to give a coherent justification for their practices citing (i) evidence, (ii) pedagogical principle and (iii) educational aim, rather than offering the unsafe defence of compliance with what others expect. Anything less is educationally unsound.

At the time there were those who found CPR’s definition of professionalism somewhat daunting, though it made perfect sense to professions such as medicine, law and engineering with which teaching claimed parity. In any event, the belief that true professional empowerment and school improvement are conditional on evidence and teachers’ willingness to seek, create and apply it became an increasingly mainstream aspiration. It was incorporated into government rhetoric (though with one recent Secretary of State expressing open contempt for expertise I daren’t rate official endorsement higher than that) and the mission statements of CCoT.  So with CPR/CPRT approaching its tenth anniversary and the professional context of primary teaching looking rather different now than in 2006, joining forces in this way seemed wholly appropriate. We are particularly pleased that it is with the CPR/CPRT evidence bank that the knowledge platform of the Chartered College of Teaching will be launched.

This blog will be one of CPRT’s last. Our next one, we hope, will formally confirm the new arrangements and no doubt offer some valedictory comments.

For now, stay with us and watch this space.

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Education after Brexit

Amanda Spielman, the new Chief Inspector of Schools, has recently suggested, with exquisite understatement, that the next few years are ‘not going to be easy’ for schools as political focus is likely ‘to shift away from education as the government’s time and attention (is) consumed by the process of Britain leaving the EU.’ While a period of calm and consolidation after the hyper-reform of the Gove years might be welcome, it is hard to see the economic uncertainty of Brexit doing anything but exacerbating current pressures in the system, particularly the looming crisis in school funding.

More immediate fears were in evidence at the recent ‘Cradle to Grave’ Conference held by the University and College Union. Speaker after speaker addressed the post-Brexit rise in hate crime, the insecurity of  EU nationals working and studying in Britain, the enduring anxiety of refugees already settled here and the sheer meanness of the government’s decision to rescind its commitment, under the Dubs amendment, to take in three thousand child refugees.

One questioner from the floor crystallised the anxiety felt by many when she asked the hall: ‘Is this fascism?’  Others highlighted the newly important role that educators, from the primary phase through to postgraduate studies, will play in the coming years, not just in helping vulnerable students but in promoting deeper understanding of current developments and more tolerant debate.

Of course Brexit has already had a huge impact on the education landscape, with the government’s decision to lift the ban on expanding selective education, rejecting the consensus of the Coalition years that the way forward was to support non-selective free schools and academies.  In September, the government published its Green Paper consultation on the question – the rather inappropriately titled, ’Schools that Work for Everyone’.

As Comprehensive Future pointed out in its official response to the document, every question was framed around the assumption that more selection is the right way forward, with respondents asked only to offer suggestions as to how this might work best.

What’s clear is that the Brexit vote has emboldened, and promoted, a cohort of politicians sidelined during the Gove/Morgan years, all of whom believe passionately in grammars. Several of them, David Davis, Michael Fallon and Boris Johnson, have key roles on the front bench. Those with long memories will recall that Fallon has form. As an education minister in 1991 he attacked primary schools for promoting ‘much happiness but little learning,’ as if the two are mutually exclusive. Other leading Eurosceptics and pro-grammar supporters, like Graham Brady MP,  Chair of the powerful backbench 1922 Committee, now have more influence on education policy than they have done for years.

In short, a very different kind of Tory is currently in charge. Out with the golden public school boys of the Cameron era who fell in love with the proto-traditional Gove-ian vision of comprehensive education: in with the striving less well-off Conservatives who put their own rise up the ranks down to the miracles of the post-war selective system, itself largely swept away by comprehensive reform.

May’s arguments for the expansion of grammars have deliberate echoes of this earlier period when selection was seen as the means by which the less privileged could make it up the class ladder.  The trouble is, there is no tangible evidence for this claim and in a clear echo of the Brexit debate itself,  all evidence that contradicts it, then and now, is simply disregarded.

Such evidence points unequivocally in one direction: selection divides communities, profoundly harms the education and life chances of poorer children, and hands superior state resources, at a time of scarcity, to the already affluent, with a catastrophic impact on primary aged education. Nor will the government ever find the ‘holy grail’ of a class-blind 11-plus test that it seeks. The plan currently being mooted –  to admit more poorer pupils by lowering the pass mark –  will surely founder on the anger of those middle-class families that treat grammars, and other forms of socially biased admissions arrangements, as their right.

Leading academics, numerous school heads, Chief Inspectors past and present, have spoken out against the plan to such an extent that even media and public opinion has now shifted on the issue. Only this week the Education Select Committee declared the policy ‘deficient in evidence’ and a distraction from the clear tasks facing our cash-strapped school system.

For all this the government ploughs on, having allocated £50 million a year to the scheme, with officials and ministers consulting existing grammar school heads on further expansion of selection throughout the country.

For now, then, our main hope must lie in resistance in Parliament if and when a new Education Bill, overturning the decades-long consensus on selective education, is introduced. We know the Labour Party, and other opposition groups, are fiercely opposed and that a significant group of Tory MPs are deeply uneasy at the proposals. Many in the Lords are also plainly unhappy at the plan.

In the coming months, therefore, it is vital that we all put pressure on MPs and Lords to counter this move in any way possible. We have won the public argument. That government is not listening makes it all the more vital that we win the vote.

Melissa Benn is a writer and campaigner and current Chair of Comprehensive Future, a cross-party campaign to end selective education. She was a keynote speaker at CPRT’s 2016 national conference. 

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SEAs4ALL – equity, voice, community and pedagogy

What is SEAs4ALL?

SEAs4ALL is an Erasmus+ project promoting ‘Successful Educational Actions for Inclusion and Social Cohesion’ (SEAs) in England, Cyprus, Italy and Catalonia. SEAs are innovative pedagogical strategies that have been shown to improve social cohesion, inclusion and attainment, and to reduce early school leaving. Based on Flecha’s principles of dialogic learning, SEAs are in use in over 600 schools in Europe and Latin America and have proved successful in a wide variety of contexts, with all age groups and in challenging social and economic circumstances.

We suggest that SEAs, and the opportunity to participate in ‘egalitarian dialogue’ in the classroom, could pre-empt the disillusion and mistrust allegedly underlying the widespread, anti-establishment votes of recent months. We suggest also that such disillusion may be a consequence of the unintended exclusion many children experience in the classroom, given decades of evidence of teacher-dominated classroom interaction in which only a small proportion of those present actually speak. Teaching that requires learners to be passive, to speak in chorus or to answer actual questions in short, memory –based utterances can build resentment that lingers into adulthood, potentially damaging lives and communities.

SEAs4ALL offers solutions through dialogic approaches that value everyone’s contributions and encourage community participation. SEAs4ALL responds to four CPRT priorities – equity, voice, community and pedagogy – and has obvious parallels with the joint CPRT/University of York project on  dialogic teaching and social disadvantage. Our arguments are not new, but one strength of dialogic learning, is its affordances for what Louis Moll calls ‘funds of knowledge’ from family and community to penetrate the exclusive epistemic climate created by the bank of knowledge known as the national curriculum.

The SEAs4ALL project

SEAs4ALL is an extension of the  EC-funded INCLUD-ED: Strategies for inclusion and social cohesion from education research, directed by Professor Ramón Flecha at the Community of Research on Excellence for All (CREA, University of Barcelona), between 2006 – 2011. INCLUD-ED worked in 14 European countries to find and trial educational actions that succeeded in improving social and academic factors, with emphasis on the inclusion of vulnerable groups such as migrants, cultural minorities, women, youth and people with disabilities.  The research demonstrated that SEAs work with children and adults, in mono- or multi-ethnic, urban or rural, rich or poor settings – unlike context–specific ‘best practices’.

Two SEAs, ‘Dialogic Literary Gatherings’ (DLG) and ‘Interactive groups’ (IG), were adopted by six primary schools in Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Peterborough in the ChiPE project  (2013-15) led by Dra. Rocío García Carrión. The positive outcomes resulted in three schools extending their SEAs to more classes in 2016. In SEAs4ALL, two lead schools, The Spinney Primary School, Cambridge, and West Earlham Junior School, Norwich, are using SEAs, supported by Cambridgeshire Race, Equality and Diversity Service (CREDS).

What does SEAs4ALL involve?

Both DLG and IG exemplify Ramón Flecha’s principles of dialogic learning. The first principle is of Egalitarian Dialogue which ‘…takes different contributions into consideration according to the validity of their reasoning, instead of according to the positions of power held by those who make the contributions’. Giving children the same right to speak as the teacher – who chairs the DLG to ensure order and fair turns – removes the ubiquitous ‘follow-up’ or ‘feedback’ move from IRF, thus allowing the dialogue to develop.  Secondly, the principle of ‘cultural intelligence’ accepts that every person has intelligence to share, whether abstract, practical, homegrown, certificated or book-based.

In DLGs, each child takes home an age-appropriate edition of a classic text (such as The Odyssey, Great Expectations, Don Quixote), reads an agreed section that everyone can read with help if necessary. While reading, participants choose an idea from the text and note the reason for their choice. In the ‘Gathering’, the teacher, children, TAs and parents (if participating), sit in a large circle. The teacher (usually) chairs the session.  Participants offer to share their choice, and when invited, read their chosen excerpt (phrase, sentence or paragraph) and explain their choice. Other participants comment on the choice and reason, agreeing/disagreeing (surprisingly politely), presenting new arguments and extending the original idea with their own ‘funds of knowledge’.  Difficult topics such as honesty, love, death, friendships, racism are common, and last 5 – 10 minutes. The children express moral and ethical arguments, in long utterances – 40 words or more. Some children change their thinking during the dialogue.  Critically, the children choose the topics, control the content of discussion, and have their ideas respected. Our observations show consistently that children do over 80 percent of the talking, with over 75 percent contributing.  Most surprising is that the teachers say little and listen.

IGs can be used in any curriculum area, and frequently in mathematics and language learning. The class is divided into four or five mixed ability groups. The teacher prepares a 15-20 minute task for each group on the relevant theme. An adult volunteer (e.g. parent, grandparent, community member, support staff, trainee teacher) sits with each group to introduce the task and then ensure that the children help and explain the work to each other. The volunteer does not teach, but facilitates the children’s supporting each other. After about 15 minutes the children move on to the next task with another volunteer, such that they have done all the tasks by the end of the session. The teacher observes, monitors, ensures smooth circulation, and might ask the class to analyse their learning before each change.  Children’s evaluative comments reveal their view that, often, other children explain the task better than the teacher.

IG and DLG allow Flecha’s ‘dialogic learning’ to flourish. Both demonstrate ‘egalitarian dialogue’ and capitalise on each child’s ‘cultural intelligence’. Both are completely inclusive. They transform children’s and teachers’ opinions about each other and about knowledge. They improve literacy, numeracy and oracy skills. They offer solutions to the problems posed in two Cambridge Primary Review research surveys

In relation to CPRT’s priorities, these SEAs:

  • help to close educational and social gaps (equity),
  • give children the floor (voice)
  • involve parents and community at home and in the classroom (community)
  • develop teachers’ listening abilities and foster high quality talk (pedagogy)

For more information about SEAS4ALL

Linda Hargreaves is Reader Emerita in classroom learning and pedagogy, University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education.

Rachel Snape is Headteacher of The Spinney Primary School, Cambridge, a national leader of education, head of the KITE Teaching School Alliance, Cambridgeshire, and a member of the CPRT Schools Alliance.

To learn more about SEAs4ALL contact coordinator Maria Vieites Casado mariavc@seas4all.co.uk

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Bumps, birth and beyond

‘Good news; bad news’ on the educational front this term. Good news: extra funding to ensure that more 3 and 4 year olds can access 30 hours of provision a week. Bad news: the pot of £50m will create only 9,000 places across a possible 200 settings, initially in just six areas of ‘social mobility’. Even worse news: in my humble opinion, it’s all too little and too late.  By which I do not mean that the government’s response is untimely: I mean that additional educational provision for children at the age of 4 or even 3 is rather too late for those most at risk from the impact of poverty.

It’s simple. For children to do well at school, to gain good qualifications and to succeed as socially and economically competent adults, we need to support them before they arrive at school. One of the most predictive factors in a child’s likelihood of educational success is the quality of their first 1001 days of life: from bump to birth to beyond. Skills development during the first three years of a child’s life happen at an accelerated rate – lots going on, lots to learn.

Children who routinely share books at home are far more likely to come to school with ‘age-related’ reading behaviours; children who don’t, quite obviously, won’t. Nor will they come with all the other skills supported by simple, book-sharing routines: a range of vocabulary; social and emotional skills developed by empathising with characters in a book; the ability to listen and respond, to consider and articulate their own opinions (‘How do you think Max felt when he saw his supper was still hot?’ ‘Which one of the wild things did you like the look of most?’). All of this undercover learning, from the rich brain-growing loam of a simple 15 minute story, gives our toddlers the best chance to succeed once they arrive at ‘big’ school. Imagine the even greater benefits if said child toddles off with their grown-up to the local library once a week and chooses some of these books for him/herself: independence of choice; articulation of selection; physical development in negotiating the different textures of pavement/path/library steps; chances to interact with other children. So much learning from a simple library visit with the benefits of a book to share too.

But it is not all about books: physical development is also key to life-long learning. Toddlers who are physically active have brains far better developed for learning than those who have been kept inert but safe, inside, coddled in a world of iPads and Kiddie-vision.  Brains that have enjoyed a visit to the park and had to work out how to climb the steps of the slide without falling off; how to use arms/legs as props/stabilisers to ensure that rolling down a grassy bank is a brilliant, rather than bruising, experience; how to jump safely across the gap in the little park wall, where the bin used to be, to demonstrate super-heroic powers worthy of Spiderman – all these brains will be ready to access more structured learning required when they arrive at school at 3 or 4. If their early experiences, both inside and outside, have not helped the synaptic development of their neural pathways then they will be playing catch-up to close the gaps from the minute they put on their first school jumper.

I am much exercised by this topic of pre-school-school this week, as we celebrate the first anniversary of the Children’s Centre at school, working with parents in our neighbourhood to support their children’s learning from bump to birth. We also welcomed our second cohort of two year olds into the nursery. There we read books together, we went to the library, and came back via the park – parents, toddlers, babies and all.  For more than half of the group this was the first time they had undertaken such an epic outing (the library is an eight-minute walk away; the park a scant five-minute stroll).  Our families are not neglectful, but they are cautious; they are not forgetful about reading, but need to know that sharing a book with a child who cannot yet read is not a ‘silly thing to do’; they are not anti-open air activities but they need to understand that rolling down a grassy slope is not necessarily dangerous and dirty but actually fodder for the brain.

The sort of ordinary activities that many children and families consider to be part of family life are, quite simply, extraordinary for others. These are the families with gaps to be closed from the outset and who require more than the option (where it exists) of extra hours of provision at the age of 3.   As a headteacher who is passionate about the underlying principles of CPRT, I believe it is our moral and educational duty to support these children before school, if we are to avoid handing out a multiplicity of labels stating ‘well below age-related’ when they arrive in nursery.  As a Leeds headteacher, I am fortunate to work for a local authority which actively promotes the importance of ‘babies, brains and bonding’ as part of a city-wide Best Start plan for our families. A core part of the training for practitioners from a range of sectors is research around infant brain development, with the stark reminder that we must create opportunities for our babies and toddlers to learn.

N.B. If somebody at the back just muttered ‘Surestart’ please could they come and wait outside my office at lunchtime? ‘Use it or lose it’ indeed…

Sarah Rutty is Head Teacher of Bankside Primary School in Leeds, part-time Adviser for Leeds City Council Children’s Services, a member of CPRT’s Schools Alliance, and Co-ordinator of CPRT’s Leeds/West Yorkshire network. Read her previous blogs here.

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Evidence-informed practice: the affirming power of research

Life in a busy school can sometimes make us feel like a startled herd of gazelles, darting every which way as the educational landscape changes; swiftly changing direction as the needs of children change, as the leadership of the school evolves, as each framework from Ofsted is introduced, as each new curriculum test forms new challenges for our most vulnerable pupils, as the government introduce another White Paper… As professionals, we need time to stop for a moment, to look around at the landscape, to learn from each other and to deepen our understanding of what truly works in education and why. Is it possible at a time of such educational flux that some kind of research-informed practice can give teachers and schools a renewed authority to create their own destiny and to provide an environment in which teachers and pupils thrive?

What does it mean for practice to be research-informed? Gary Jones argues that it is not about trying to create generalisable findings like large-scale, academic research projects but it is concerned with making decisions informed by rigorous, relevant research evidence in order to improve pupil outcomes. A better way of thinking about it might be what Phil Taylor calls ‘practice-based enquiry’. This kind of enquiry, Taylor suggests, is a form of ‘situated learning’ that is firmly rooted in the school context. The process not only draws upon published research findings, but also re-contextualises them, making research ‘useable’ within the school’s community of learners. This not only acknowledges that ‘what works best’ will not be exactly the same in every situation, but also suggests that we should be asking why something works or not.

Creating space for research

As a school leader I have found that the key to engaging school staff in this kind of enquiry is to create a time where the noise of every day life in school is stilled.  While we continue with our myriad of roles and responsibilities in school our minds are filled with ‘stuff to do’.  A more reflective and enquiring approach is only possible when we still this noise; when we spend time reading and researching; take time to deeply reflect on our own practice; ask challenging questions and engage in highly focused observations.

How was I to provide the time for my staff to engage in evidence-informed practice?  In order to create space for my staff, I had to take something away. Evaluating the impact of the training days, I concluded that although they provided valuable time for staff to be together to discuss practice and learn key skills, days like this appeared more beneficial for specific groups rather than the whole staff. As a result, I decided to translate the three training days into fifteen hours of research time for each teacher across the school. The teachers were charged with accruing these hours of research across the year.  In order to ensure teachers had a clear goal for their enquiry, I asked each teacher to publish or present their findings formally through: a research paper; leading a staff meeting; writing a blog; or presenting at a Teach Meet.

Formal Research Networks

In order to lend rigour to our evidence-informed practice, we joined the CPRT Schools Network South East Region led by Vanessa Young from Canterbury Christ Church University.  The CPRT, gathers together research-active schools in the region to share practice and link with other schools and research bodies nationally. This group has provided our school with powerful models of research and case study examples focusing on key priorities of the CPRT. A key CPRT priority area for us was one of pedagogy and quality and effectiveness in teaching and learning, including of course, teachers’ learning.

Using Appraisal to Develop a Culture of Evidence-informed Practice

Appraisal offers a powerful tool with which to target evidence-informed practice.  We trained senior staff as mentor-coaches and used the principles of ‘mentor-coaching’ and ‘appreciative enquiry’ to allow the teachers to devise an enquiry target that would develop their practice and enhance pupil learning. These enquiry targets were varied and included: looking into the impact of parental involvement with early reading; use of Google Docs to enhance learning; the impact of Twitter on professional development. We adopted a digital appraisal and CPD tracking system called Blue Sky. This allowed appraisal targets and related training activity to be linked to the school’s key priorities, and tracked. The programme also allowed staff to track their own research time and upload any evidence, while their reviewer was able to give a gentle nudge to staff who had been less than active over a period of time. The enquiry targets proved challenging: some teachers found it hard to grapple with the rigour of research approaches whilst others were trepidatious about presenting their findings. The engagement of teachers in their enquiry was tracked through the year by their mentors to ensure there was a systematic approach to the research and outcomes were disseminated across the school community.  The process saw staff grow in confidence and we noted how teaching practices were enriched by the insights gleaned from these enquiries.

The Learning Ticket

Each teacher was given a ‘Learning Ticket’ with a cash value of £150 which was to be spent on their appraisal enquiry target. In addition to the Learning Ticket, three ‘research bursaries’ were made available for teachers to bid for.  Each had a cash value of £500 and teachers could bid collectively for these.  One teacher bid for a research bursary to investigate ‘The Impact of Lego in story writing’ while another undertook an international research project into ‘The Teaching of Phonics in the USA, Japan and Finland’.

Teach Meets

With an enquiry appraisal target in place for each teacher and mentors tracking progress towards the targets, teachers developed a variety of new practices based on the research undertaken.  We needed a forum to share this practice and celebrate the success across the school and beyond school.  We therefore used the ‘teach meet’ model to provide a platform for the research outcomes for staff.  Teachers met to share their practice in short ‘micro-presentations’.  Our first teach meet focused on Irresistible Writing and the second on Irresistible Learning and shared a range of practices across the school arising from the teachers’ enquiries. The teach meet has been an exciting and engaging way of celebrating the success of research-informed practice and sharing practice within our school, across schools locally, and beyond.

Where to now?

Working in a school where enquiry-based practice is becoming embedded is a real privilege. Engaging with CPRT has allowed our staff to deepen the rigour and effectiveness of their research and has led us, as a school, to develop a culture of evidence-informed practice that helps engage our staff, raise standards for our pupils and draw high quality staff to our appointments.  The process is not easy for staff, their research often challenges their practice and the practice of colleagues. The process is, however, deeply rewarding and affirming.

As a school leader, it’s not enough just to lead and manage such an approach. I was acutely aware that I also needed to engage in the same way.  It was important to make time to be reflective myself as well as my staff. Being disciplined to find this time was a real challenge for me as principal.  I initially felt it took me away from the management roles across the school but I have grown to see the rich importance this. Finding and making time is not a luxury, it is essential.

We now intend to continue to work with the CPRT to grow the number of research-active schools in the South East. We will work with Canterbury Christ Church University to develop our research practice and Kent College to develop research with our non-teaching staff. As Julie McCulloch (at the Association of School and College Leaders – ASCL) pointed out in her recent CPRT blog there is an increasing body of evidence that genuine improvement, whether at an individual school or a system level, happens when schools work together to plan learning, solve problems and create the right solutions to local needs. We will continue to support schools in our locality as a National Support School and share our evidence-informed outcomes through publications and teach meets. We will also publish our most significant research outcomes in our own research journal this summer.

If we are to create an exciting, engaging and engaged education system, we must continue to ask questions that encourage us gently to push boundaries and give us the conviction to create our own path towards the horizon.  By providing our staff with the space to engage in evidence-informed research in our exponentially busy life within school, the benefits to our school, our staff and our children are palpable.  It has allowed us to stop for a moment, look around and breathe before creating our path ahead. Enjoy the journey!

Graham Chisnell is principal of Warden House Primary School in Kent. He was one of two recipients of the CPRT ASCL Award for Evidence-Informed Leadership awarded at CPRT’s National Conference in November 2016.

Vanessa Young is the South East Regional Coordinator of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust and a senior lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University.

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Compliant, collegial or Clint? What type of school leaders do we need?

In its chapter on professional leadership and workforce reform, the Cambridge Primary Review final report described a working environment in which ‘head teachers, once the undisputed and independent leaders of their schools, now operate in a culture of compliance and one that, borrowing the language of business, exhorts them by turns to be “visionary”, “invitational”, “democratic”, “strategic”, “instructional” or “transformational”’. Reflecting on the conceptual shift in primary school leadership over the last 50 years, the report highlighted the move from an absolutist, paternalistic (or even grand-paternalistic, with the head teacher leading a ‘three-generation family’) model of headship to the more collegial professional relations of recent times (Children, their World, their Education, pp 437-9).

The six years since the final report was published have seen both a continuation of these trends and the introduction of new dimensions into the school leadership landscape. The pressure on head teachers to be all things to all people has certainly not gone away – and to the list above we can now add, courtesy of Sir Michael Wilshaw, the suggestion that head teachers should be ‘bruisers’, ‘battleaxes’ and, as if that weren’t enough, ‘more like Clint Eastwood’.

The concept of compliance, though, is an interesting one. The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) is unequivocal in its belief that, if we are to create a truly self-improving school system, we must move away from a model based on compliance with central direction to one in which schools work together to build capacity and drive continuing improvement.

In many ways, we have made important strides over the last six years away from a compliance-based model of school leadership. The hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute direction of the school day through the primary national strategies is no more. National Curriculum levels have gone, with schools now able to assess attainment and track progress between key stages as they see fit. Ofsted is at pains to point out that its inspectors do not expect teachers to plan or mark in a particular way, or school leaders to evaluate their schools using a specific format. And schools that convert to academy status can choose to reject central prescription in more radical ways, such as moving away from the National Curriculum or adopting different term times.

Increased autonomy (along with its joined-at-the-hip bedfellow, accountability) is, we are constantly reminded, the holy grail of current education policy. Nick Gibb, minister of state for school standards, rarely misses an opportunity to extol the benefits of autonomy. He spoke at a conference earlier this year of the emergence of a system of education in England in which ‘autonomous schools are able to break free from the intellectual and bureaucratic constraints of the past, allowing school leaders to beat a new path of previously unimaginable success’. The government has, apparently, taken ‘clear and purposeful action to free heads from … meddling’, liberating them to ‘focus on what is best for raising pupil outcomes’.

The lived experience of teachers and school leaders, of course, doesn’t always match high-flown political rhetoric. Levels and the primary strategy ‘lunchboxes’ may have gone, but in their place are detailed ‘interim’ assessment frameworks, and statutory national assessments in three out of the six years of primary education.

The dangled carrot of autonomy through embracing academy status may also be something of a mirage. The National Curriculum may not be compulsory for the 20 per cent of primary schools that are now academies, but it’s a brave head teacher who strays too far from the ‘expected standards’ against which both children and schools are held to account. And some head teachers are finding they are actually more closely managed in a multi-academy trust than they ever were by their shrinking local authority. There are many good reasons to consider joining a MAT, but increased autonomy is not one of them. (See Warwick Mansell’s CPRT report, Academies: autonomy, accountability, quality and evidence, for more in-depth analysis of the dimensions and realities of academy autonomy.)

Compliance is clearly not what we should be aiming for. As one of the most often quoted phrases from the Cambridge Primary Review puts it, how can we expect children to think for themselves if their teachers simply do what they are told? And, by extension, how can we expect teachers to think for themselves if school leaders simply do what they are told?

But neither, perhaps, is autonomy all it’s cracked up to be. There is an increasing body of evidence that genuine improvement, whether at an individual school or a system level, happens when schools work together to plan learning, solve problems and create the right solutions to local needs.

In our increasingly fragmented system, the answer to tackling the culture of compliance is not a proliferation of ‘hero heads’, but school leaders coming together to shape not only their own schools, but the education system as a whole. Lone warriors need not apply.

Julie McCulloch is Primary and Governance Specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL). She is also a member of the Board of CPRT.

Embodying the ‘collegial’ leader are the two winners of the CPRT ASCL award for evidence-informed leadership, presented at CPRT’s national conference. Find out more about Graham Chisnell and Iain Erskine here.

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Getting to know the world

In April I wrote for CPRT about the sort of aims and approaches needed for ‘learning global.’  Since then, the world has moved on dramatically, and the question of what it means to ‘know’ the world has become more acute.

The world’s most pressing questions now find themselves in a ‘post-truth’ environment.  How can we best ‘deliberate the issues’ with primary children? I think this goes far beyond ‘core knowledge.’

The following news stories will help explain some of the difficulties involved in getting to know the world.  I would not use them with children, but what makes them difficult for us as adults also helps clarify our own understanding.

On 12th September 2011, a fire ripped through the settlement of Sinai, in Nairobi, Kenya.  It was caused by an oil pipeline leak, and many people were killed. On the same day, a British couple were attacked while on holiday on the Northern Kenyan coast. The husband was shot dead; his wife was kidnapped.

The story about the British couple was widely reported in the UK and remained in the news for many days. After a few reports on the day itself, the story about the Nairobi fire dropped out of the UK news. The amount of information that people received about these two events was quite different. What could be known or valued was determined by what seemed ‘newsworthy.’

What we get from the media (or a national curriculum) can only ever be a selection from the world: a selection usually made by others on our behalf.  That is one problem about knowing, and especially about what gets counted as ‘core’.

Initial news reports from the Kenyan fire talked of ‘dozens killed’, and later ‘at least 75’.  Because Sinai is an informal settlement, the real figure may well be unknowable.  It is hard too to know the consequences of all this for an already marginal community, in terms of the loss of homes and livelihoods, let alone at a psychological and emotional level.

It is hard to know these things, but as I write this I can start to imagine – and that is another sort of knowing.  It has to be handled with care (there is a risk of projecting our own assumptions onto this situation), but it has its place.

After the fire, people began to look at where the responsibility lay (or, as Voice of America reported, ‘Blame-Game Follows Nairobi Pipeline Blast’).

The newspaper and chat rooms were full of differing accounts: warnings about too many people living near the pipeline; government officials’ failure to relocate families; some blamed the residents for staying there; others pointed out that many had been displaced from elsewhere; many expressed fury at the Kenya Pipeline Company; at least one commentator talked of the murky politics behind the situation. BBC Nairobi correspondent, Caroline Karobia, said: ‘For the slum-dwellers, though, the reason is obvious: Poverty.’

How do we know which of these accounts to believe, many of them conflicting, some simplistic, some teetering on the edge of conspiracy theories? Can we know what really happened, and why?

I think that is possible to know: to seek truth, to find out, and come up with answers – often provisional, often contestable, but answers nonetheless.

What it means to know when we are dealing with contested knowledge, something so emotive, requires critical interrogation, exploration, debate, investigation and enquiry.  It may well also require an element of ‘facts’ (where these places are, key statistics), but we need far more.

It also requires the sort of knowing that comes from the imagination: to not lose sight of the central injustices in this story, of the reasons why people might say what they say, do what they do.  This story matters because it speaks to our humanity: it is not, cannot, merely become a case study.  We need both ‘felt understandings’ and cool analysis.

There is a further risk when we are dealing with a story like this one: it becomes part of what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has called a ‘single story’: a narrative where the UK is ‘developed’ but Africa is ‘undeveloped’, full of poverty and indecipherable otherness.

The information we get is often distorted, unsubstantiated … and always partial.  We think we know things, but our sources are sometimes unreliable, restricted, biased.  We – and children – need spaces where we can critically explore crucial questions of reliability, accuracy and motive.

Here are some pointers to consider as part of a repertoire for helping children know the world.

Above all, we need narrative modes of understanding. Drama and story can help us see patterns, look for what is said and unsaid, explore different perspectives, detect bias and engage with the issues in an empathetic manner.  We can deliberately seek out alternative texts and counter-narratives (‘different stories’), first-hand accounts, or news reports from around the world.

We need to be careful about ‘balance,’ as not every voice is equally authentic or evidenced (for example, the very small proportion of scientists arguing against man-made climate change).  Children need to interrogate historical and contemporary texts (including visual and web media) – what is evidenced? what is opinion? why was it written?

Stories like Anthony Browne’s ‘Voices in the Park’ offer excellent opportunities for exploring events from different viewpoints, as do ‘flipped’ stories like ‘Maleficent,’ ‘The True Story of the Three Little Pigs’ and some of Roald Dahl’s ‘Revolting Rhymes.’

Drama, especially, gets under the skin of a story, exploring how people think and feel in demanding situations.  Role-play techniques like ‘freeze framing’ offer children opportunities to explore people’s viewpoints and feelings.  Debating-in-role gives them the opportunity to create an argument from a perspective other than their own, as can writing a persuasive text in role.

Even very young children can interrogate visual images: creating thought or word bubbles for a picture (are the thoughts and words always the same?); extending a photograph beyond its frame; considering where the photographer is in every image.  They can create their own images for different purposes: to show a friend their home area, attract tourists or encourage the council to spend more.  How do these images differ and why?

Such opportunities for questioning, dialogue and enquiry can bring light, as well as heat, to the difficult business of getting to know the world … and ultimately, enable resilience in the face of demagoguery.

Ben Ballin is a consultant to Tide~ global learning, and the Geographical Association. These ideas were initially developed for Big Brum TIE.

 

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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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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.

Contact

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