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Supporting new teachers: snake oil, evidence or what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Time to stand up, speak out and ask our own questions

As the year rushes to a close and we add Yuletide shopping to our busy lives (alongside school carol concerts and plays perhaps), there are two significant policy initiatives which deserve our time and attention. Both have December deadlines. One might be forgiven for thinking the timing was well judged, that is if policy makers don’t want to hear from the profession…

The House of Commons Education Committee recently launched an online enquiry into the way the DfE uses evidence, with a deadline of December 12th (just before you order that turkey), and the deadline for the DfE consultation into the new performance descriptors is just six days later, on December 18th (just before you wrap those presents).

Both of these initiatives have been the subject of previous CPRT blogs, with Robin Alexander raising pertinent questions about the breadth of the enquiry on evidence and Warwick Mansell observing that the performance descriptors are simply another way of labelling learners, under a different name (this time with the contentious notion of being judged ‘below’ or ‘above’ national standards at aged seven). It is surely time to voice our views. We cannot afford to stand back.

Based on government responses to previous ‘consultations’, there is scant evidence that the perspectives of academics, researchers or teachers will be heard, attended to or indeed in any way influence the outcome. Commas change, but rarely content.

Nonetheless, in gathering with others to talk and listen, whether in school or consortia meetings, in externally organised PD or in university-based groups (such as the CPRT London Teachers Reading Group), we have the chance to revisit our principles and remind each other of the need to consider research evidence and explore its application when back in the classroom.

However, it is not enough to read and debate research – though it is essential. Nor is it enough to respond to such enquiries and consultations – though again this is important. Surely we must also engage as researchers ourselves?  As a profession we must avoid standing back and waiting for others to define the questions for us to answer (as is the case with the performance descriptors consultation, where delimited questions afford little scope for commenting upon wider issues of relevance).

Historically, teachers have been positioned as the objects of research, but in recent decades the involvement of the primary profession in research related practices has diversified, with many studies demonstrating the value of school-university research partnerships. Additionally, practitioners have undertaken their own classroom-based research, framed around self-identified questions, both individually and collectively, as part of teacher action-research networks.

In the South West of England, an arts and creativity focused CPRT action-research project is being run as part of our national research programme. Coordinated by Penny Hay at Bath Spa University and Emese Hall at Exeter University, it involves ten schools and reflects three of the CPRT’s eight priorities: children’s voice and rights; fostering a rich, relevant and broad curriculum and developing a pedagogy of repertoire, rigour, evidence and principle.

Another such CPRT action-research project is developing at Roger Ascham Primary School in Walthamstow, co-ordinated by Robin Desoer from the school and Amelia Hempel Jorgensen and Gill Goodliff from the Open University. It is focused on learner identity, autonomy and self-regulation.  As a Trust we are seeking to evolve a model of school-led CPRT action research which addresses the overall research concern:  how is primary education in England providing education relevant to children’s lives and worlds and how is this improving their life chances?

Whilst Kemmis (2006) suggests that harnessing teacher action research to the school improvement agenda has diluted its critical transformative potential, both projects are seeking to ensure attention is paid to the wider social, cultural and discursive consequences of any new practices developed, and are working to enhance the teachers’ sense of their professional roles and identities. In the midst of the midwinter mayhem, with personal and professional deadlines looming and not enough time in the day, standing up, speaking out and making time to ask our own questions remain important.

Professor Teresa Cremin is a co-director of Cambridge Primary Review Trust.

by Robin Alexander

Ministers, evidence and inconvenient truths

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.robinalexander.org.uk

 

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From levels to performance descriptors: labelling by another name?

Tim Oates, who led the ‘expert panel’ that initiated the government’s review of England’s national curriculum, was very clear as to why the old levels system had to go.

Speaking in a video which was uploaded by the Department for Education to YouTube in May, he offered a set of reasons explaining why the 25-year-old levels structure was being ditched.

Top of the list was what seemed a powerful thought: that summing up children’s performance numerically ran the risk of labelling them, and that this could end up harming their education.

Oates said: “Kids are labelling themselves as being a particular level: ‘I’m a level 3 and all my friends are level 4’. That’s very dysfunctional in terms of learning. That’s the first compelling reason [for scrapping levels]: this idea of kids labelling themselves and that being inappropriate in learning. It can actually hold back their learning rather than encourage it.”

This chimed with a finding in the Cambridge Primary Review’s final report, which concluded (on page 316) that reducing children’s learning to a single level “serves to label children rather than to enlighten parents and other children about the range of their achievements”.

Yet labelling children is exactly what the new national curriculum and its associated assessment, the final details of which now have emerged from the DfE, still seems likely to encourage.

If anything, the new version stands to be worse than the old. And this is just one of several of Oates’s reasons for removing levels which seems not to have been addressed in the DfE’s new curriculum, assessment and accountability regime for primary schools.

With the details so fundamental to school life, and therefore vital to get right, I am left marvelling again at the ability of our ultra-politicised, short-termist policy-making structure to produce something so incoherent: so demonstrably at odds even with its own stated aims.

So, to expand on the point about labelling, last month the DfE set out its plans for a new system of “performance descriptors” for primary pupils.

At the end of key stages 1 and 2 in reading, writing, mathematics and science, teacher assessment will see professionals giving their charges what sounds suspiciously like a level, but is not being called one.

At key stage 1, in reading, writing and maths, children will be assessed as either at “mastery standard” or at “national standard”; “working towards national standard”; or “below national standard”.

For key stage 2 writing, an extra performance descriptor is added to the above: “above national standard”.

For the subjects of key stage 2 maths, science and reading – where, presumably, national curriculum tests will provide greater differentiation of pupil performance – and key stage 1 science, there is only one performance standard: “working at the national standard”.

Surveying the above, it seems impossible to comprehend how it gets away from any problem of labelling. Indeed, in replacing, say, a child achieving level two or three in key stage 2 writing with the judgement of “below national standard”, it probably exacerbates the problem as described by Oates, in the linguistic bluntness of the description if nothing else.

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

There will be arguments about the defensibility of that, but above all it is hard to see how it can be squared with the stated aim of reducing labelling.

The labelling issue is probably the most glaringly contradictory output of this process, when set against the original rationale for removing levels. But other aspects of the vision, as set out by Oates, seem also to bump up against reality.

So Oates describes another problem of the old levels system: that it encouraged a sense that pupils had to be rushed from one level to the next. “The whole of the system has been focused on getting kids to move quickly through the levels,” he says in the video.

However, again, pushing children on to “tougher” material earlier seems to have been exactly ministers’ thinking in introducing the new national curriculum. And that thinking is reflected in what the new curriculum says.

For example, in maths, pupils are supposed to be progressing through the manipulation of fractions at a younger age than they used to, are to be taught their 12x tables in year four as opposed to knowing up to 10x tables by year six in the old system, and now to be using square and cube numbers during year five.

As teacher Karen Mills told me last year in relation to the latter: “Year 5 children are supposed to be using square and cube numbers. The assumption in the new curriculum is that they are ready for this, but many of them do not really understand the number system. If we try to force them forward on to new material, we are going to lose half of the class.”

And yet here we are, with the new curriculum and assessment regime seemingly being billed enthusiastically by the politicians overseeing the system as pushing children on to more challenging material earlier (as shown here and here).

Finally, Oates talked about the new national curriculum building deep conceptual understanding and focusing on “fewer things in greater depth”. The notion of stripped-down content seems largely true in subjects other than English, maths and science. But the new performance descriptors hardly suggest subjects concentrating on a few essentials.

Indeed, the question as to whether this new curriculum really moves away from the tick-box approach which is widely thought to have troubled its predecessor and its associated assessment seems very real, when one considers the new performance descriptors.

Prompted by the advice of a very experienced assessment expert, I noted that, for a KS1 teacher assessing whether or not a pupil is at national standard level across reading, writing, maths and science, there are 129 assessment bullet points to work through. At KS2, the equivalent figure is 144 bullet points.

There is one final point to make about the performance descriptors: we still seem in the dark about who exactly wrote the consultation document. So, if people are unhappy with this outcome, who can we hold to account for it, or at least explain it?

Criticism of the lack of transparency around the development of this new curriculum has dogged it throughout. Sadly, that is just one aspect of the dysfunctionality around policy-making that this national curriculum review, 2010-14, has exposed so vividly.

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

DfE’s consultation on its proposed performance descriptors ends on 18 December. For the descriptors and how to comment on them, click here.

by Robin Alexander

Do we care for our young carers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.robinalexander.org.uk

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

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

 

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Is there time for reading and research?

At CPRT’s London Teachers Reading Group recently, we debated one of the original CPR research reviews, Children and their Primary Schools: pupils’ voices (Robinson and Fielding, 2010). Shortly to be published in updated form (see below), this reviewed published research on what pupils and former pupils think of their experiences of primary schooling.

A mixture of teachers, academics and local authority colleagues, we brought different perspectives to bear on the challenge of listening to and respecting children’s voices. We discussed the potential of involving children as co-participant researchers and almost immediately the teachers amongst us were keen to take action. Some considered inviting their classes to take photographs and devise captions to present views on the school environment, or to make collages to represent their experiences of literacy in school or at home. The range of evidence the young people collect could then be used to prompt reflection and dialogue about their experiences and feelings and how to respond to these.

We also found ourselves reconsidering the current role of published research in primary education. Tim, who had been teaching for just two years, voiced the view that keeping up to date in this manner was a professional responsibility, and commented that he’d ‘found it fascinating and invigorating’ to read research reports during his PGCE, ‘not only for the essays as it were, but for teaching’.

Yet since then, in the busy maelstrom of school life, he had received scant encouragement to read and debate his understanding, nor to explore the relationship between theory and practice in his classroom. Although he recognised research can help us as educators to re-examine the implicit theories that undergird everyday practice, he felt pressured ‘to deliver, to assess and to raise standards’. He also reflected a sense of professional isolation, since there were few with whom he could debate his reading.

Many in the group felt the emphasis on the ‘what works’ agenda, which they perceived was almost exclusively focused on raising attainment, sidelines the importance of teachers (and children) being involved in research themselves.  There was also agreement that learning is highly contextualised and thus what ‘works’ in one context may not in others.

The conversation was rather generous and gentle on this first occasion but I am sure over time more robust and critically reflective discussions will emerge as we explore our different perspectives, gain critical distance and interrogate the assumptions, values and beliefs that underpin policy and practice.

What might the consequences be if right across the country such teachers’ reading groups developed? Professional space is surely needed to consider quality research evidence, to read new empirical studies and well-established texts, and to debate the methods used and insights claimed.

Teachers, whilst respecting children’s voices, need to be careful not to dismiss their own views, their own potential as researchers, and the value of connecting to the work of others.

The next meeting of CPRT’s London Teachers Reading Group is on November 13th when Carol Robinson’s report on her updated research review will be discussed. Please contact Greg Frame if you would like to attend. All are welcome.

Carol Robinson’s report is one of five mini-projects in which CPRT has commissioned researchers to revisit and re-assess published research relating to CPRT’s eight priorities. The original 28 CPR research surveys were published in 2007-8. They were then revised for publication in The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys (2010).

For information about the Trust’s current research, click here.

 

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Teaching or testing: which matters more?

On 26th September the Schools Minister, Nick Gibb, was extremely pleased to announce that the results of the phonics check for 6 year olds in England had improved considerably: 18 per cent more children had reached the ‘expected standard’ in 2014 than in 2012 when the test was introduced. A government spokesman stated that ‘100,000 more children than in 2012 are on track to become excellent readers’.

As primary teachers are aware, the phonics check has become a high stakes test. School results are collated and analysed in depth through RAISEOnline and made available to Ofsted inspectors, who are explicitly told to consider these results as evidence of the effective teaching of early reading in the current framework for Ofsted inspections.

The CPR final report in 2010 pointed out that primary children in England were tested more frequently than in many other countries, including some that rank higher in the international performance league tables. Since then the difference has become even more marked. Further tests have been introduced – the phonics check and the introduction of a grammar strand in the tests for 11 year olds – with the intention of introducing a similar grammar strand for 7 year olds in 2016.

Politicians like Nick Gibb like to claim that tests like these raise standards, yet CPR found that the evidence of a causal relationship between tests and raised standards was at best oblique. It continues to be unconvincing. Scores in the tests rise, certainly. But what high stakes tests do is ‘force teachers, pupils and parents to concentrate their attention on those areas of learning to be tested, too often to the exclusion of much activity of considerable educational importance'(CPR final report, page 325).

This is particularly true of the phonics check with its 20 phonically-regular real words and 20 non- words to be decoded, with 80 per cent accuracy required if it is to be passed. Indeed, as Alice Bradbury points out, there is considerable disquiet that the check was introduced by politicians as a means of forcing teachers to change the way they teach early reading.

In his rather approving analysis of the test results David Waugh said, ‘I know many teachers who now concentrate a lot of time on teaching children how to read invented words to help them pass the test.’ This has been my experience too.

Thus the test promotes a distortion of reading development. Teachers in primary classrooms spend extra time on teaching children how to read made-up words, diminishing the time for reading real words and teaching the other strategies needed for accurate word reading (whole word recognition of irregular words, the use of context for words such as read, for example), let alone comprehension and the wider experience of different kinds of text.

Increased test scores do not infallibly demonstrate improved standards. Wynne Harlen confirms this in the forthcoming review of research on assessment and testing which CPRT has commissioned as one of its 2014 research updates of evidence cited by CPR (to be published shortly: watch this space). It is therefore hardly surprising that results of the phonics check have improved as teachers become familiar with the demands of the test and adapt their teaching in line with them. Yet here we have a test that undermines the curriculum and is unlikely to give any useful information about children’s reading development; a government which is committed to increasing the number of tests young children are subject to despite evidence of their negative effects; and an opposition that has given no indication that it will change this situation if elected in 2015.

In 2010 the Cambridge Primary Review cited assessment reform as one of its eleven post-election policy priorities for the incoming government. As we approach the 2015 election assessment reform remains, in my view, as urgent a priority as it was in 2010.

David Reedy, formerly Principal Primary Adviser in Barking and Dagenham LA, is a CPRT co-director and General Secretary of UKLA.

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Teachers, doctors and woolly tights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Robin Alexander

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.robinalexander.org.uk

by Robin Alexander

In praise of… Fred Jarvis and Michael Armstrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.robinalexander.org.uk

Contact

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