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After Trump, what next?

President Donald J. Trump!

My mind reels, stomach churns and spirit despairs.  I’m disoriented and confused, as are about half the country.  I’ve only met one Trump supporter in the three months I’ve been in the United States; who are the other 59 million people who cast their ballots for him?  What just happened?  What comes next?  And what does it mean for us educators?

It’s hard to see this election outcome as anything but a systemic failure of the democratic process.  Hillary Clinton was not an ideal candidate, but Trump?  Here’s part of the editors of non-partisan The Atlantic summary of his candidacy:

 …has no record of public service and no qualifications for public office. His affect is that of an infomercial huckster; he traffics in conspiracy theories and racist invective; he is appallingly sexist; he is erratic, secretive, and xenophobic; he expresses admiration for authoritarian rulers, and evinces authoritarian tendencies himself. He is easily goaded, a poor quality for someone seeking control of America’s nuclear arsenal. He is an enemy of fact-based discourse…

I’d add to that list Trump’s fundamental lack of respect for democratic norms, perhaps best captured by the chilling exchange in the second presidential debate in which Trump threatened Clinton with ‘if I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation’.

In response, Clinton noted that ‘it’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country’.

‘Because you’d be in jail’, Trump quipped, to audience applause.

Similarly, he’s encouraged violence at his rallies, questioned the integrity of a federal judge on account of his ethnic ancestry, advocated barring Muslims from entering the U.S., sought to undermine the legitimacy of the elections (when it appeared he was losing), and embraced torture ‘even if it doesn’t work’.  There’s plenty more – see for example Andrew Sullivan’s essay on the dangers to democracy of Trump’s authoritarian tendencies.

So what happened?  Recalling the Brexit vote, it appears that a combination of identity politics, economic insecurity, fear of foreigners, patriotic nostalgia, and a loss of faith in government led white working class voters to overwhelmingly support Trump.  Voters wanted an ‘outsider’ who would ‘shake things up’; Hillary Clinton appeared as the ultimate insider and continuation of Obama. Trump’s name-calling and lies undoubtedly contributed to Clinton’s troubles.  Also, I fear, sexism and racism.

But understanding the Trump phenomenon requires that we go beyond the specific demographics, attitudes, issues and campaign strategies to consider the root conditions that enabled such a fundamentally flawed candidacy to develop and thrive.  I have in mind, first and foremost, the media environment that legitimated and even rewarded political behaviors that the pundits considered to be candidacy-destroying.

To help think about this media environment, and its educational implications, I recommend Neil Postman’s extraordinarily prescient book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, about how television shapes our political culture.  Though published over thirty years ago – before cable, reality television, social media, or smartphones – the book’s relevance has only grown with age. Postman argues that television is better suited to entertain than inform, better at communicating images than arguments, and better at spectacle than deliberation. Moreover, since its (economic) success is measured in viewer ratings rather than their enlightenment, spectacle, images and entertainment dominate our television culture. Postman argues that one consequence of this cultural change is a change in our relationship to the truth:

If on television, credibility replaces reality as the decisive test of truth-telling, political leaders need not trouble themselves very much with reality provided that their performances consistently generate a sense of verisimilitude. I suspect, for example, that the dishonor that now shrouds Richard Nixon results not from the fact that he lied but that on television he looked like a liar. Which, if true, should bring no comfort to anyone, not even veteran Nixon-haters. For the alternative possibilities are that one may look like a liar but be telling the truth; or even worse, look like a truth-teller but in fact be lying.

No matter that Trump out-lied Clinton at a rate of 67 to 9 in the first two debates; he lied confidently and unapologetically, all the while dragging ‘Crooked Hillary’ through the mud of outlandish, false accusations.

Trump, the veteran reality television star grasped that image is more important than ideas, and that drama sells.  Consider, for example, the ‘you’d be in jail’ incident: as democratic politics, it was an appalling threat to abuse presidential powers; as dramatic spectacle, it was riveting.  Moreover, it further cemented Trump’s image as the straight-talking, no-holds-barred boss from the boardroom of The Apprentice.

When Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, U.S. television was controlled by the three networks.  Now it is fragmented into hundreds of cable channels, which are amplified and echoed by innumerable social media accounts.  One consequence of this fragmentation is that Democrats and Republicans are getting their news, ideas and images from different sources, further eroding the possibility of achieving a common truth, a common good, or a public conversation.  I’m crushed today by the outcome of the election, terrified by the prospect of the Trump presidency, but I’m also aware that had Clinton performed two percentage points better in a handful of states the other half of the electorate would have been equally crushed and terrified. American democracy cannot survive that divide.

The quality of public discourse is a democratic problem, of course, but it is also an educational problem. Who we are and what we think is to a large extent shaped by the discourses we participate in and are exposed to – on the television no less than in the classroom. Our sense of what is true and right, and conversely what is crazy and outrageous, is at least partially affected by the combative and ugly discourse that pervades the televised public sphere.

Six weeks before the U.S. election I joined over 250 teachers at the Teaching About the 2016 Elections conference at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Many participants were concerned about how to respond to the hateful rhetoric to which their students were exposed while also maintaining a neutral, non-partisan stance. Moreover, they were particularly worried about the ‘Trump Effect‘: ‘an alarming level of fear and anxiety among children of color… [and] an increase in bullying, harassment and intimidation of students whose races, religions or nationalities have been the verbal targets of candidates on the campaign trail’.

At the opening panel at the conference, Professor Gloria Ladson-Billings advised teachers to fill the void created by popular culture: to shift the focus from the cult of personality to deliberating the issues, from the presidential race to local and congressional elections, and from the here and now to international and historical understanding of the elections.

Ladson-Billings’ advice makes sense as a way of teaching in the heat of the elections, constructively and in a non-partisan manner.  But addressing the radical problems of a dysfunctional public sphere and a deeply divided electorate requires more fundamental rethinking of the form and aims of education for democratic participation.  Learning how to live democratically is facilitated by, in the words of the Cambridge Primary Review, helping ‘children to become active citizens by encouraging their full participation in decision-making within the classroom and school’. This includes bringing into the classroom controversial issues, in order to learn how to discuss them democratically: that is, respectfully, with people we disagree with, based on evidence and argument, and with a genuine openness to hear, consider, and try to address the others’ concerns.  Furthermore, if Postman’s analysis is on target, pupils also need to learn to look critically at the media environment: to become accustomed to assessing the quality of claims, to develop awareness of how they’re influenced, and to go beyond the identification of the features of different genres (as is currently popular) to assess their advantages and limitations.  I suggest these practices not as another supplement to an already crowded curriculum, but as principles for the teaching and learning of existing texts and topics.

Unfortunately, the urgent need for this democratic and critical educational agenda will likely grow under the Trump administration.

Adam Lefstein is Associate Professor of Education at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. He is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Find out more about his book Better than Best Practice at www.dialogicpedagogy.com

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North and South

This blog takes us to two beautiful corners of the UK, one to the north and one in the far south. We begin with the south, on England’s largest and second most populous island, the Isle of Wight. As the controversy surrounding former Ofsted Chair David Hoare’s recent comments about the Island vividly demonstrates, raising matters like educational disadvantage can be dangerous ground. Whilst Mr Hoare was right to draw attention to the serious problems in coastal England which have continuously slipped under the radar when it comes to funding and interventions, solutions are not to be found in public speeches shaming or blaming those unfortunate enough to be at the sharp end of disadvantage. Labelling children and families as products of inbreeding and their homes as ghettoes was not only scurrilous but neatly diverted attention away from an educational system that seems to have failed them. Whilst Ofsted data suggests the Island’s schools are steadily improving, only 64% of its primary children attend schools categorised as good or outstanding, placing the local authority fourth from the lowest rung on the national ‘league table’.

Yet for many who visit Tennyson’s ‘Enchanted Isle’, Mr Hoare’s description may well have come as a shock. Holidaymakers go there to enjoy the Island’s natural beauty and architectural heritage, testimony to its fashionable heyday when Queen Victoria commissioned Osborne House. Official statistics, however, paint a rather different, sombre view of the Island, with high unemployment and poverty, low aspirations and educational underachievement afflicting many Islanders’ lives. The Island’s fall from prosperity is sadly mirrored in many other coastal areas around the UK. Cheap air travel tempted tourists to resorts overseas decades ago and recession in other maritime industries has left many seaside resorts struggling to survive. Finding ways to address such complex, pervasive problems is not easy and quick-fix solutions have proved to be illusive but clearly education must lie at the heart of community regeneration efforts if they are to succeed in the long term.

Turning our attention northwards, an interesting success story can be found in the Scottish Lowlands, 45 miles south of Glasgow, and it may offer inspiration to other areas battling against the economic tide. CPRT was recently invited to attend an Education Day at Dumfries House in Ayrshire, where we heard about a heritage-led regeneration project instigated by His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales. This innovative project is reinvigorating its local community through a cohesive strategy involving the conservation and reuse of Dumfries House, an 18th century mansion and its estate, to provide employment and educational opportunities, and to rekindle local pride and aspirations. Heritage-led regeneration initiatives like this one can serve as catalysts for economic and social improvement: although the link between heritage-led regeneration and education may not seem immediately apparent, educators know that what happens in schools and classrooms is inseparably interwoven with the culture and conditions of the communities they serve.  Aware of this crucial link, the Dumfries House project is focusing its attention on education and is working closely with schools from across the region and beyond to effect positive change.

Linked to the objectives of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, the Dumfries House Education programme has six centres providing opportunities for children and adults to engage with a wide range of hands-on learning experiences and training for employability. The Pierburg Building and Kaufmann Gardens have been designed for children to experience the delights of planting, harvesting and eating their own vegetables, a learning opportunity that keys into the Curriculum for Excellence sustainability requirements. For many of the primary school children who come here this will be the first time they have dug the soil, picked sugar-snap peas fresh from the plant or tasted soup made with vegetables they have grown themselves. The Morphy Richards Engineering Centre has an imaginatively-designed Harmony playpark and well-equipped teaching area where children explore topics relating to science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Activities are designed to challenge children, ‘…to imagine, design, build and test solutions to real world problems’.

However, it is perhaps the House and its estate which are likely to inspire children’s curiosity and imagination most. Just as the 5th Earl of Dumfries intended, the beautiful 18th century house and its landscaped grounds leave an indelible impression. The House breathes life into history, introducing children to a fascinating collection of artefacts and furnishings (including The Grand Orrery which is spellbinding to visitors of any age!); the landscaped gardens and the arboretum encourage children to explore and discover the extraordinary diversity of the natural world. Without the regeneration project all this would have been lost and future Ayrshire generations would have been denied these precious opportunities to wander and wonder, and to engage with their community’s heritage.

The Dumfries House Education programme reminds us that inspiring curiosity and imagination is one of the aims for primary education proposed in the Cambridge Primary Review final report, Children, Their World, Their Education. In England, the current primary curriculum has placed greater emphasis on narrowly-defined ‘core skills’, reducing opportunities for giving attention to broader aspects of knowledge, and to developing capacities for creativity, imagination and understanding. Schools should be places that allow space and time for wandering and wondering. There must be sufficient time allowed for children to imagine and to ask questions because solutions to problems and new knowledge are created through divergent thought, curious questions and imaginatively-inspired action. More urgently than ever, we need these qualities to enable us to find solutions to the dilemmas we face, whether in our own, local communities or on a global plane.

The heritage-led regeneration work at Dumfries House is just one, small example of an imaginative starting point but it offers a positive model for areas facing similar challenges and one which accepts the unique qualities of a place and its people as valuable assets. Working in tandem with Scotland’s curriculum based on clearly-articulated aims ‘to develop successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors’, Dumfries House and its Education programme are becoming part of a coherent approach seeking to establish a brighter, more sustainable future for the region.

Returning to the south, the problems identified in the Isle of Wight and other disadvantaged areas need a similarly holistic approach and their problems highlight the importance of tackling the CPRT’s priorities, particularly those regarding:

We’ve seen that it’s possible to start addressing these priorities if joined-up thinking, determination and imagination are used to kickstart change, and if we use the positive attributes of a locality and its people as starting points. It’s also worth reminding ourselves that the CPR’s curriculum model calls for around 30 per cent of teaching time to be devoted to locally proposed, non-statutory programmes of study (‘the Community Curriculum’) to respond to local interests. The CPR Final Report argued that a Community Curriculum could be:

…planned locally by community curriculum partnerships (CCPs) convened by each local authority, or where this is desirable and appropriate by local authorities acting together; each panel includes school representatives, community representatives and experts in the contributory disciplines, and its work must involve consultation with children (CPR Final Report, p. 276).

The Report goes on to say:

…by building on children’s knowledge and experience, by engaging children educationally with the local culture and environment in a variety of ways, and by involving children in discussion of the local component through school councils and the world of the CCPs, the community curriculum would both give real meaning to children’s voices and begin the process of community enrichment and regeneration where it matters (CPR Final Report, p. 275).

Wherever their home is within the UK – north, south, east or west – children have a right to succeed and fulfil their potential. We urgently need to increase our efforts to ensure that these rights are achieved for every child.

Details of the year-round educational programme can be found on the Dumfries House Education website. The programme offers an extensive range of educational opportunities for schools and organisations, including residential courses.

Julia Flutter is a Co-Director of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust.

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Assessment, testing and accountability: a suggestion for an alternative framework

The data from the new 2016 tests for 11 year olds in England is gradually trickling out. We have been informed that 48 percent of the children did not reach the new expected standards in reading, writing and mathematics combined (compared to 35 percent in 2015 under the old system) and are at risk of being labelled ‘failures’. In addition, the calculations have been done to identify each Y6 child’s scaled score and progress measure. Parents have been told something like ‘In reading your child got 99 on the scaled score against the expected standard and 1.6 progress score’. Not terrifically helpful, particularly if the parent has become familiar with Levels over the last 28 years.

Combined with the anecdotal evidence about the problems children had with the reading test, and the abandonment of the grammar test for seven year olds after it was inadvertently leaked, it is no surprise that more and more educationists, parents and organisations are calling for a fundamental review.

I have written in previous blogs about the current system and its shortcomings, now exacerbated by the 2016 experience, drawing on Wynne Harlen’s 2014 research report for CPRT Assessment, Standards and Quality of Leaning In Primary Education which outlines the evidence concerning the impact of high stakes testing and compares England’s system with those of a number of other countries. Harlen’s key point that ‘the system …. for primary schools in England still suffers from over-dependence on testing and the use of end of Key Stage 2 tests for too many purposes’ (p. 32) indicates that we must consider a fundamentally different approach .

In this blog I outline the key strands which I think would need to be considered  under any review, with some suggestions concerning what should be incorporated, based on the available evidence.

The three strands for a comprehensive system of assessment and accountability are at individual child level, school level and national level.

At individual child level the focus must be assessment for learning and assessment of learning (i.e. formative and summative assessment). Assessment must be used to help children while they are learning and to find out what they have learned at a particular point in time.  Testing can be a part of this as it can inform overall teacher assessment and help to identify any potential gaps in learning.  However tests cannot give all the information needed to take a rounded view of what children need to learn and what they know and can do. As Harlen states: ‘the evidence shows that when teachers draw on a range of sources of evidence, then discuss and moderate with other teachers, assessment is more accurate’. Depending on the score from an externally marked, single test of reading at 11, for example, to identify reading ability is simply not enough evidence to make a reliable judgement.

As a first move in this direction, the system currently used for seven year olds should be adopted at the end of KS2; teacher assessment based on a range of evidence, including but not determined by a formal test.

In addition the plethora of evidence-based assessment resources available should be utilised to underpin an approach that is qualitative as well as quantitative. For example there are the CLPE/UKLA et al Reading and Writing Scales which can be used for identifying children’s progress as well as indicating next steps for learning. It is also worth looking at the end of each of these scales where there is an extensive bibliography showing how they are firmly based in research evidence. Something DfE might consider doing.

In summary, the principle that assessment of any kind should ultimately improve learning for children is central and should be the criterion against which all assessment practices in and beyond school should be judged.

At school level the focus must be on partnership in assessment as well as accountability. Firstly, that means not only being accountable to parents and the local community the school serves, but also working systematically with them as partners.

Parents have a key role to play in assessment which goes beyond being regularly reported to and includes the sharing of information about the progress of their children both within and beyond school to obtain a fully informed picture. This would be followed by discussions concerning what the school is doing more generally to promote learning across all aspects of learning.

Schools should hold themselves to account through systematic self evaluation. This self evaluation should be externally moderated by local partners, crucially through strengthened local authorities, and nationally through a properly independent HMI. However the system should not feel, as it does to many schools under the current arrangements, as punitive, but developmental and supportive, including when a school is not doing as well as it should.  Any moderated self evaluation should be formative for the school as well as demonstrating accountability.

CPRT responded by making assessment reform one of its eight priorities, aiming to

Encourage approaches to assessment that enhance learning as well as test it, that support rather than distort the curriculum and that pursue standards and quality in all areas of learning, not just the core subjects.

CPRT’s Priorities in Action assessment webpage lists our multifaceted response to this priority including reports, briefings, blogs, parliamentary and government submissions and purpose-designed CPD for schools.

The final report of the Cambridge Primary Review was also clear that inspection needed to change (p. 500) and recommended that a new model be explored which focussed much more on classroom practice, pupil learning and the curriculum as a whole.

In any review of assessment, the accountability system must be reviewed at the same time. That goes for accountability at national level too.

Current arrangements at primary level are both narrow, only focusing on some aspects of core subjects, and useless for making comparisons across time as the criteria and tests keep changing. A system of sample surveys should be formulated to monitor national standards. These would be based on a large number of components and be able to extend well beyond the core subjects if a rolling programme was organised. England would then be able to judge whether primary education as a whole, in all its aspects, based on a comprehensive set of aims, was being successful and was improving over time. Currently this is impossible to do.

Thus is not surprising that more and more people and organisations are, alongside CPRT, calling for a fundamental review of assessment, testing and accountability and that a major campaign is about to get underway. This campaign is to be called ‘More than A Score’ and a major conference has been announced for December 3rd. CPRT fully supports this campaign.

This move to a more effective approach would not be a simple process. As CPR’s final report stated in 2010 ‘Moving to a valid, reliable and properly moderated procedures for a broader approach to assessment will require careful research and deliberation’ (p. 498)

It will take some time, but I believe, for all involved, it will be well worth the effort.

Just as this blog was being prepared, Justine Greening, Secretary of State for Education, made an announcement about primary school assessment. This included a commitment to ‘ setting out steps to improve and simplify assessment arrangements’, the abandonment of Y7 resits, and no new tests to be introduced before the 2018/19 academic year. There is a welcome acknowledgement in the tone of the statement that current arrangements are not working, although the last point has alarming implications about the introduction of further, unnecessary, high stakes tests.

The Secretary of State also announced another consultation, to take place next year, on assessment, testing and accountability. We have seen many of these so called ‘consultations’ before where the views of educationalists and the evidence from research and experience have been completely ignored.

Another ‘consultation’ is not needed, What is needed is a thorough, independent, review where all stakeholders are represented and a government that is prepared to listen and respond positively.

David Reedy is a co-Director of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, and General Secretary of the United Kingdom Literacy Association.

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Free schools and free markets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr Timothy said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One offered this insight:

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

Yes, indeed it does.

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

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

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The times they are a-changin’

Several years ago, in a life before teaching, a colleague of mine, who had drunk thirstily at the wellspring of self-improvement books, declared herself to be ‘made positively kryptonite’ by the language of paradigm shifts, synergisation and pro-activity. I have thought subsequently what an asset she might have been to the world of education. Being forged of the stuff that would bring Superman to his knees would be a very handy teacher attribute to possess; especially at this time of settling into a new school year.

Over the last five weeks, I have come to the conclusion that the grown-ups who work in education probably do require a dash of the superhero in their DNA, to be able to deal with the vicissitudes that all throng together at the starting gate of an Autumn Term. It is self-evident that the core business of education is transacted in the territory of change and challenge (the two things that human beings find the most difficult to deal with), the beginning of a new school year makes this even clearer. Every day brings some element of change to a school and the people within it: new teachers; new children; new uniforms; new classrooms; the first-time-ever drama of the lost lunch box or the missing PE kit; the first wet play; the first windy play; anxious mummies and daddies: ‘someone’s “stolen” his jumper and I can’t find it in lost property – they all look the same’ (the first lesson in the power of labelling); more anxious mummies and daddies pleading that their little ones should not have to suffer the life-threatening risk of playing with paint/water/sand/bikes as they will most likely come home a bit messy and liable to catch any number of a range of unspecified (but potentially pretty fatal) diseases carried by paint/water/sand/bikes. These episodes of tiny turbulence ripple through the daily current of school life, until things have settled down, a bit, by half term; children have survived the onslaught of learning through play in early years; routines have been carefully established; teachers and children have lost the, sometimes distracting, patina of novelty.

So here we are, at this stage in the term, looking forward to the calmer waters ahead of us; confident of bringing our children to the safe haven of the National Curriculum’s statutory end of year expectations. A place where all children over the age of six know that exclamations must begin with the word ‘what’ or ‘how’; where children over the age of ten ought, should, must and could use modal verbs to illuminate their writing and where pretty much everyone writes with a neat cursive hand – and so our course is set fair at Bankside. Teachers are now fully in command of change and challenge, having moved beyond its mere management at the start of the year. For learning is indeed about the process of creating transformational change in our children’s understanding, responses or knowledge. And the most powerful way to do this is through challenging their current ideas and moving them onwards and upwards in the process of their self-actualisation.

Except those unforeseen pesky changes just keep coming back to haunt us, on a local level: Dad’s left; Uncle’s come back; the police came round last night; Mummy’s had a baby; Nana died at the weekend; my new stepbrother has been unkind to me; we didn’t have any dinner last night (or the night before); you’ve inadvertently put the book back in the library box that I have loved reading for the last week and now it isn’t here and I am going to let you and everyone else that I am not happy about this. Massive changes; tiny changes, our children’s lives are constructed and framed entirely by these: it is the very nature of being a child and ‘growing up’. And teachers are employed not only to deal with the daily ramifications of all this but also to add to it, through the careful preparation and delivery of life-changing and challenging learning. Life in school is often defined by the ever-present ‘fine line’ between coping with turbulent change and promoting transformational change. And making this the engine of our professional moral purpose.

And more change at a national level presents further challenge to these adults tasked with creating happy, resilient, adaptive and successful schools.  Imagine my surprise when, preparing for the predictable unpredictability of a new school year, I learnt that we can now look forward to all secondary schools being able to become selective grammar schools – and all in the name of social mobility.  I applaud, of course, the aim of any educational policy that intends to address the growing social divide between rich and poor. I am slightly surprised that no headteacher I know seems to have been consulted about this lofty decision; perhaps there was a kindly assumption that we would not want to be troubled by such high-minded stuff – best left to the experts no doubt.

The ambition to close the gaps in educational – and social – outcomes for all our children is a key driver for Bankside and the reason that we are a proud member of CPRT’s Schools Alliance. We want our children to be the best learners that they can be; we use the themes and principles of CPRT as guiding lights to achieve this.  I do wonder how the changes involved in the grammar school proposition (which seems based on a belief that, because of uniform selection at eleven, all children may be better equipped to throw off the shackles of poverty) sit with the carefully researched and pedagogically considered findings of the Cambridge Primary Review’s final report. This is a document designed to support transformational educational practice, to ensure equality for all. The introduction of an 11+ exam, with a pass/fail matrix may transform the lives of those who pass, but, for those who do not, the more predictable outcome of the turbulence associated with failure is a very real prospect,  for all children – even the middle class ones – who underperform on the day of the test.

I would look to a truly transformational educational system, such as that in Finland, to be a model to create more socially equal learners.  A country where there is no selection until 16 and where children run the gamut of the dangers of paint/water/sand/bike play-based learning until the age of seven. Perhaps we might ask the headteachers there, rather than the politicians, how this has been achieved amidst the quotidian hurly burly of the change and challenge of the ‘day job’ – with all the pesky predictable unpredictabilities, and not a grammar school in sight.

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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The call of the wild

So at last what many of us have instinctively understood is backed by evidence from England’s largest outdoor learning project. The weight of evidence is compelling. A hefty 95 percent of children surveyed said outdoor learning makes lessons more enjoyable, 90 percent said they felt happier and 72 percent said that they got on better with others.

These findings are from the four year Natural Connections Demonstration project to help over 40,000 primary and secondary school children – particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds – from 125 urban and rural schools to experience the benefits of the natural environment by empowering teachers, who often lack confidence in teaching outside, to use the outdoors to support everyday learning.

93 percent of schools said outdoor learning improves pupils’ social skills, 92 percent said it improves pupils’ health and wellbeing and engages them with learning, and 82 percent saw a positive impact on behaviour.

The evidence for teachers is impressive too. 79 percent of teachers surveyed said outdoor learning had a positive impact on their teaching practice, 69 percent said it had a positive impact on their professional development, 72 percent said outdoor learning improved their health and wellbeing and 69 percent said it had a positive impact on their job satisfaction.

But with evidence from the Monitoring of Engagement with Natural Environment (MENE) survey that only 8 percent of children (aged 6-15) in England visited the natural environment with their schools in an average month during 2013-2015, there is a real need to change perceptions about the value of outdoor learning. A blog from Natural England’s Principal Adviser for Outdoor Learning, Jim Burt, on Busting the myths on outdoor learning in schools goes a long way towards removing the barriers. For me, it’s the final myth ‘unless we can show outdoor learning has an impact on exam results we won’t be able to convince schools’ that will have the most traction with school leaders. Jim Burt writes

Obviously attainment is critical. Even in the relatively short time frame of the project, nearly 57 per cent of schools reported a positive impact on attainment that they felt was attributable to outdoor learning. Much higher percentages of teachers reported positive impacts on the other areas such as a child’s engagement and their motivation to learn, commenting that these underpinned academic performance. This reflects a growing body of evidence highlighting the important contribution that personal attributes such as resilience, self-esteem and self-efficacy make to a child’s overall performance.

These findings chime well with the CPRT aims relating to those individual qualities and capacities which schools should foster and build upon in every child, and which infuse the work of some of CPRT’s alliance schools. Making the most of outdoor learning opportunities, children from The Spinney Primary School, Cambridge, regularly enjoy play based learning in their little Wild Wood whilst children from Shrubland Street Primary School, Leamington Spa make the most of their playground whilst also regularly visiting their local green spaces.

The Natural Connections Demonstration Project enabled the participating teachers and their schools to make the most of their local outdoors. Environment Minister Rory Stewart said

What’s clever about this project is it listens to teachers, it works with the grain of an individual school, and it works out how to get children into the outdoors while improving their curriculum experience.

All teachers and school leaders can benefit from the project’s learning. Published this week, a teacher’s guide Transforming Outdoor Learning in Schools-Lessons from the Natural Connections Demonstration Project features teachers and pupils across the project talking about the benefits the project brought to their school, alongside practical advice on how teachers can successfully embed outdoor learning in their school.

Speaking at Wallscourt Farm Academy, Bristol, at the launch of the project’s findings, Natural England’s Chairman, Andrew Sells said

The Natural Connections project has empowered teachers to make the most of what’s right on their doorstep and helped children experience the joy of the natural environment. It’s brought a real culture change into schools, making learning in the outdoors a regular part of school life – and it’s inspiring to see children more engaged with learning and happier and healthier as a result.

With such a mandate as educators, and particularly at this time when primary schools in England are spending increasing time and energy on preparing their children to meet the new standards in reading, writing and mathematics, let’s consider the importance with which some countries with high ranking education systems treat outdoor learning. See Jim Burt’s blog yesterday Are we at the turning point for outdoor learning? With such a groundswell of evidence, how can one afford to resist the call of the wild?

For other CPRT blogs by Marianne Cutler click here.

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Reading for pleasure: just window dressing?

Since reading for pleasure was mandated in the national curriculum, its profile has risen exponentially. This is assuredly good news, and many schools are seeking ways to demonstrate their commitment to this agenda. But as the pressure to raise reading scores persists, there is surely a danger that schools will only find the time to pay lip service to reading for pleasure, constructing it as little more than an act of institutional window dressing in our highly performative culture.

The requirement that children should be ‘taught to find pleasure in reading’ appears to have prompted many schools to refurbish/reclaim their libraries and buy new books. Some have even purchased double decker buses, tents, tree houses and caravans to deck out as school libraries, as well as garden sheds, boats, baths and sofas to enrich classroom reading areas. These physical spaces overtly indicate to parents, governors, Ofsted inspectors and the children that the school values reading, but is this institutional demonstration enough?

In other ways too, with the best of intentions, schools can be sucked into performing reading for pleasure. Institution-wide competitions exist aplenty, including for example: extravagant dressing-up competitions on World Book Day, and competitions to read books for the school. There are also class awards (for example Reader of the Week), and inter-class competitions such as the number of books reviewed each month. In one school I know the children’s home-reading records are turned into class percentages each week and the winning class, announced in assembly, is rewarded with extra break time. Such competitions act as extrinsic motivators – encouraging children to read for recognition, for reward, for their parents, their teachers and/or the school, but not perhaps for themselves. Yet we know that reading for pleasure is more closely associated with intrinsic motivation and some research suggests extrinsic motivation has a detrimental effect on children’s comprehension.

Physically attractive reading environments can be enticing to children and are part of the reading for pleasure pedagogy described by the UKLA Teachers as Readers study, alongside reading aloud, own reading time, and informal book talk. However their ability to influence the dispositions and engagement of young readers cannot be guaranteed. Much will depend on the quality and diversity of the texts available, the degree of choice and agency offered, and the time set aside for informal talk and interaction. Many classrooms, responding to children’s 21st century reading preferences and practices, now have comics, magazines, newspapers and digital books readily available. Some schools also annually order the children’s literature shortlisted for the UKLA Children’s Book Awards or the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Awards to ensure new books are encountered by staff and children. Such texts can unquestionably make a difference, as can the nature of the physical space, but if the reading environment is not inherently social, reciprocal and interactive, then the cost and labour involved in showcasing the school’s commitment to reading surely has to be questioned.

How reading spaces are used, who owns them, who made them and who has access to them, (when and how frequently), are all questions worth asking and monitoring over time. The kinds of opportunities these spaces afford for conversations and book recommendations are also worth documenting. It is all too easy to assume reading environments represent an institutional ‘good’ and are being fully used, but the intense pressure of the standards agenda tends to reduce the time teachers feel they can set aside for children’s volitional reading practices.

In recent research undertaken in areas of social and economic disadvantage, in schools renowned locally for their work on reading for pleasure, the OU team found that the class reading areas and the sometimes fabulous school libraries were, in all but one of the four schools, simply used as text repositories. While children did borrow books from their class reading areas, predominantly they were used for ‘time out’ and as additional work spaces. No text related talk was heard in them. No browsing or relaxed reading was observed within them. Furthermore, the displays in these areas tended to represent reading as a technical skill; showcasing comprehension strategies and reading domains, and displaying proficiency ladders denoting the children’s ‘abilities’ as readers.

In other classrooms and schools, reading displays may be interactive, profiling particular texts, authors, genres, questions, artefacts and children’s work, all of which can serve to trigger text talk.  Displays that feature personal, home and community aspects of reading (e.g. through photos of ‘who reads at home, where and what we read at home’) can also enrich reading areas and libraries. These carry significant messages about actual readers, not reading, and position children, teachers, teaching assistants and parents as members of the community of readers.

To be effective, reading environments need to be much more than physically appealing. Critically they need to be socially inviting, foregrounding the role of dialogue, and offering a myriad of opportunities to talk about texts, to hear books read aloud, to develop class ‘texts in common’ and to read alone and with others. As the Cambridge Primary Review final report highlighted six years ago, ‘talking must be part of reading and writing rather than an optional extra’ (p. 269). Indeed reading, like learning, is a social and collaborative act of participation, as well as an individual one, a point which Goswami also underscores in the CPRT research review into Children’s Cognitive Development and Learning.

In order to avoid reading for pleasure becoming little more than a colourful visual laid across the landscape of schools, we must ensure the social environment receives more attention, but not through more high profile competitions. Talking about texts, their possible meanings and interpretations, and informal conversations about reading and oneself as a reader deserve to be placed at the very heart of the reading curriculum. Such talk brings the landscape to life and helps to build communities of engaged readers.

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

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Re-thinking professionalism in teaching

Professions have standards for entry, early career formation and on-going practice that are set by members and leaders of that profession rather than through legislation or government policy. These standards are set drawing on an agreed body of knowledge and/or principles, again agreed and maintained by members of the profession. They are framed with reference to a code of conduct which will include ethical considerations. The whole is overseen by a professional body formed of members of the profession and governed by experienced and expert members, elected by and answerable to the membership.  In the UK these bodies usually have a legal status conferred by grant of a Royal Charter.

The teaching profession first set up a chartered professional body to oversee teaching in the 1840s. Unlike many other professions, where membership of such bodies is an unquestioned and valued part of professional identity, The College of Preceptors (later Teachers) never quite achieved that central status. It had some success over the centuries in fostering innovation and raising standards; it established one of the first training colleges for teachers at a time when the value or need for such training was in doubt. However its charter fell short of the authority of those in other professions and the power to set vital standards for entry or progression stayed firmly in the hands of policy makers, not expert practitioners.  After nearly 200 years, all this may be about to change.

On the 8th June 2016  the Privy Council granted a supplemental charter to the College of Teachers. This marks a major milestone in the professionalisation of teaching as it grants the power to create a true Chartered Status for teachers. Chartered status is a mark of excellence in a profession, granted to practitioners who have achieved a recognised level of expertise and who continue to practise at that level. Perhaps the most important aspect of this change is that the decisions on how that level is set and how fellow professionals are deemed to have reached it, will be made by the members of that profession. Not by politicians, or civil servants or by other experts who take a view on what the profession should or could do, but by working professionals who are trusted to determine what true expertise looks like in their sphere of activity.  Moreover, the benchmark for excellence is set with reference to the best possible outcomes for those the profession serves.  So Chartered Teacher status will be set and awarded by fellow teachers, through the powers granted to their own professional College, owned and governed by its members.  It will recognise those who make a difference.

So given the huge potential this creates for teachers and teaching, how to proceed in a practice as varied and complex as teaching? Clearly there is no singular ‘right way’ to teach.  Teaching is a complex and nuanced activity, constantly influenced by context and content, moderated through the thousands of interactions between teacher and taught.  Against this backdrop, can there be a meaningful professional status that carries weight and recognises genuine expertise?  Moreover, how can working towards such a status support teacher development and offer practical support in the classroom, and yet avoid becoming another unwelcome administrative burden?

Clearly if the Chartered College of Teaching is to add power to the teaching profession it must rise to the challenge of creating a professional community of teachers that supports and develops its members, offering real benefits and professional recognition. After many years of consultation, a model is emerging based on the appetite for a knowledge-sharing professional community, and the development of shared professional principles.

Developing professional knowledge

Teaching is a complex practice, involving as Ted Wragg observed, as many as 1000 individual interactions by the teacher over a typical school day.  If there was one, reliable, repeatable, universal method guaranteed to produce effective learning then it would have been defined and replicated by now.  In place of the one size fits all model, there is a nuanced web of practices that vary depending on the context.  Teaching and learning are social and cultural practices which are shaped by who is learning, what, where and when.  That said, this does not justify an entirely organic approach where the decisions made on curriculum, pedagogy, behaviour and all the other elements of practice are entirely based on opinion and anecdote. Instead, as CPRT argues, there is a need for teachers to develop a command of a repertoire of knowledge, skills and strategies.

What might a body of shared professional knowledge look like? One option could be to follow a highly diversified approach, similar to that taken by the National Board for Professional Standards in Teaching in the US.  Over a six year period they developed highly specific standards for a range of subjects in different phases. This raises issues of practicality as well as value – the process of developing and maintaining such standards is complex, time-consuming and costly.  Setting up a similar model in the UK was estimated by McKinsey to need £30 million of funding. Moreover the adoption remains far from universal, even after 27 years, the number of teachers taking up the US NBPST standards and seeking accreditation against them is a small percentage of the profession.

Another option is to seek to distil the essence of sound and effective practice in teaching.  This model, premised loosely on the Australian teaching standards, focuses on the kind of teacher you are and the culture in which you work. This model is potentially more powerful and more sustainable. Building on this it is possible to codify a common epistemology for teaching – how you know being as important as what you know.  Is teaching practice sufficiently analytical? When an intervention or innovation is planned, is there engagement with a relevant evidence base (gathered within and beyond the school) to inform the design? Are the results monitored and evaluated through meaningful collection and examination of the evidence of development of learning? These ideas are encapsulated in the CPR Final Report’s recommendations on pedagogy which propose that:

We need now 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 transformed College offers an opportunity for the teaching profession to come together and answer these questions for itself, to take ownership of the professional principles that should guide practice and push back against fads and fashions that wash over schools in a constant stream.  The College offers a rallying point, under the auspices of a Royal Charter, for teachers to found a new bastion of professionalism.

Angela McFarlane is former Professor of Education at Bristol University, and former Chief Executive and Registrar of the College of Teachers.

 www.collegeofteaching.ac.uk

 For further discussion about the College of Teaching read this article published in Education Today (June 2016)

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Teacher training, supply and retention: trends, policies and challenges

There has been no shortage of worthy advice of late, from the great and the good to the National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL) and Department for Education (DfE), on the subject of teacher supply, recruitment, training and retention. This year alone the National Audit Office (February) and the Public Accounts Committee (June) have issued reports on training new teachers and the Education Select Committee inquiry into teacher supply rumbles along attempting to unearth whether there is a crisis, a challenge, or just a chronic shortage in some subjects; and if so why, and what is to be done?

Professor John Howson, an expert on teacher supply, going to the nub of the semantic debate in his written evidence to the Select Committee, said that ‘there are no current descriptors for how to measure either a challenge or a crisis in recruitment’, and that in any case it was more helpful to consider the matter at a more granular level, citing overall numbers, geographic location and quality of teacher supply. In any event,  the debate about where the responsibility for this lies is likely to get much more heated: Schools Week reported that in making judgements about schools under the new Ofsted framework ‘one of the key questions inspectors might ask headteachers is about teacher supply’.

Meanwhile, according to the State of Education Survey 2016 from The Key, over the past year 35 percent of primary schools have faced a shortage of teachers and nearly 60 percent of primary heads reported finding teacher recruitment and retention challenging. In the secondary sector the respective figures are 49 percent and 76 percent. All in all, this makes grim reading.

Within these figures there are, of course, marked regional differences, both in the supply of teachers and distribution of training places. Worryingly, the National Audit Office found that DfE had ‘a weak understanding of the extent of local teacher supply shortages and whether they were being resolved locally’. Attempting to reassure, DfE officials explained that they sharpened their understanding of recruitment ‘by talking to the schools involved in School Direct’,  the new(ish) school-led teacher training route which ‘allows school leaders to react much more effectively to local circumstances’.

The Public Accounts Committee was not slow to see the flaw in this strategy, given that the 57 percent of schools not involved in School Direct were ‘disproportionately primary schools in rural areas and secondary schools in disadvantaged areas’, which were the very schools ‘that struggled to recruit good teachers’. Add to the mix the well-aired difficulties experienced in London and the southeast, where The Key reported that 56 percent and 50 percent of all schools, respectively, were facing staffing difficulties. Particularly worrying in this survey was that primary heads reported that, of the top three reasons for teachers resigning, equal first by a good margin with ‘job offer elsewhere’ was ‘unable to cope with the workload’.

The National Audit Office report also concluded that ‘retention may be becoming an increasing problem’ based on numbers leaving the profession between 2011 and 2014, which rose by 11 percent overall (to around 42,000 annually) and was matched exactly by the increase in the proportion leaving for ‘reasons other than retirement’.

So, given that over 50 percent of the around 45,000 teachers currently entering or re-entering the profession every year are newly qualified, how is the government’s teacher supply model bearing up? Not well, it would seem. A number of factors, including sustained economic growth bringing with it a competitive labour market, mean that DfE has missed its 2015/16 targets in 14 out of 17 secondary subjects, and the cumulative effect of having missed overall targets for every one if the last four years has begun to bite. This is far from reassuring, since according to the DfE school workforce data released in June 2016 primary pupil numbers have been rising steadily since 2010, and between 2015 and 2024 primary/nursery pupil numbers are projected to increase by eight percent and secondary pupil numbers by 20 percent.

Meanwhile, during the past four years NCTL has presided over the most radical reform of routes into teaching and made annual changes in the allocation strategy and the applications process. From the point of view of marketing and recruitment, the overall effect, claims the Public Accounts Committee, has left potential applicants to the five main training routes bewildered and ill-informed about the availability, quality and cost of training locally. This conclusion is supported by the recent NCTL report The customer journey to initial teacher training .

So how is the teacher education sector dealing with the crises and challenges it faces?

The first challenge is the recruitment and ongoing retention of high quality entrants to the profession. In 2015-16, school-led routes together accounted for 50 percent of all (primary and secondary) training allocations and 55 percent of primary (post graduate) places (30 percent of primary trainees still follow the undergraduate route).

Yet evidence presented to the National Audit Office indicated that the increasing proportion of places allocated to school-led routes might be accentuating the teacher supply problem. In 2015/16, for example, university-led routes filled 85 percent of their overall training allocations while school-led routes filled less than 60 percent. Following on from this, NCTL’s recent report Linking ITT and workforce data has attempted to unpick the variations across routes in drop-out during training, before entering the profession and after three years of teaching. When the datasets are more established and robust this line of analysis will make interesting reading, but currently the clearest message is of regional variation in percentages entering the profession (lowest in northwest, northeast and southwest), which links back to the point made above about the regional variations in training places.

The second challenge is managing the repercussions of the inexorable, and recently exponential, move to school-led training. As our forthcoming CPRT research report on initial teacher education will show, the political drivers for establishing ITE partnerships, and through that for increasing schools’ involvement in the management of training, can be traced back well over 25 years. What is new is the sheer scale and speed of the transition. School-centred initial teacher training (SCITT) was introduced in 1993. By 2011-12, nearly 20 years later, there were just 56 SCITT consortia. By 2015 there were 155. The school direct route, in which (groups of) schools recruit trainee teachers directly and pay a university to train them, was established in 2012/13 and now 43 percent of all state schools in England are involved.

Shifting the power dynamic in roles and responsibilities in order to strengthen the ITE partnership model, already considered effective by Ofsted, can only be for the good, and the best managed school-led partnerships are undoubtedly excellent. However, the pace of expansion has jeopardised quality assurance of the sector overall, and left university education departments with little time to adapt. It has also raised some serious questions:

  • Are individual trainees fully aware of the differences between routes? Do they know, for example, that QTS (Qualified Teacher Status), although it certificates them to teach in England, is not accepted internationally, or even in Scotland? The split between academic (PGCE) and professional (QTS) qualifications was introduced nearly 20 years ago but the stand-alone QTS qualification is becoming increasingly popular as a cheaper, less demanding option, particularly for school-led routes, than the (generally) master’s level PGCE with QTS. We believe that a QTS-only model of training, based on a ‘what works here’ craft apprenticeship approach, privileges performativity and local practical knowledge over critical reflection and theoretical, pedagogical and subject knowledge. This is currently a moot point, for over half of England’s schools – the academies and free schools – are not required to employ trained teachers.
  • Does time spent in school (in excess of the two-thirds of training already school–based) inevitably and unproblematically lead to better and more relevant professional learning? The main focus of many schools is about acquiring ‘local’ curriculum knowledge and pedagogical skills and in some cases may lead to a ‘branded professionalism’ which we believe is less effective in preparing teachers for a lifelong career in which they are adaptable to future changes and other contexts. Additionally, staffing levels and restricted non-contact time limit many individual primary schools’ capability to support extended learning within a critical community in which, at times isolated, trainees can reflect on practice.
  • Will the changes prove mission-critical to the university-led training sector? The effects of training numbers and funding being reduced and unpredictable from year to year have already included loss of strategic capacity, increased casualisation of staffing, and the vulnerability of programmes and, ultimately, of university education departments. This, together with the attendant impact on the education infrastructure, including the loss of research, specialist expertise and published evidence, may be extremely damaging for education as a whole in the long term. Training allocations in 2016-17 may be critical in deciding the future of some university providers. Current plans, yet to be fully revealed, to establish a number of university ‘centres of excellence’ with greater security of training numbers, may be little compensation for the loss of local, long established training partnerships, knowledge and expertise built up over decades. The National Teaching Service, when launched, is also unlikely to be able to compensate for the shortfall of teachers, and the fall-back position of a workforce largely QTS-only qualified, or unqualified, is yet another way in which England is out of step with the rest of Europe.

Olwen McNamara and Rebecca Phillips are at the University of Manchester; Jean Murray is at the University of East London. With Rosemary Webb and Mark Brundrett, Olwen produced a research report on primary teacher education, training and development for the Cambridge Primary Review, which was published in 2008 and revised for The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys in 2010.  The present authors’ CPRT follow-up report will be published in autumn 2016.

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Academies: statisticians need to raise their game

Two major reports on the effectiveness of the government’s central education policy – turning schools into academies, preferably in chains – have been published in the past two weeks. But do they get to the truth of the policy? Not remotely, I think. I say that even though the reports serve a useful public interest function in holding ministers to account.

The central problem with these reports is that they see the success or not of the academies scheme entirely through the lens of the test and exam results either of individual institutions, or of institutions grouped together in chains or, more loosely, in local authorities. Although this approach purports to offer an ‘objective’ insight into the quality of academies, and by extension the success of the policy itself, in fact it has some serious problems.

The methodology

The two studies I highlight here are, first, one for the Sutton Trust charity, called Chain Effects: the impact of academy chains on low-income students. This is the third in a series which seeks to gauge the success of multi-academy trusts (MATs) by the exam results of disadvantaged pupils on their books. The second, School Performance in multi-academy trusts and local authorities – 2015, is an analysis of results in academy and local authority schools published by a newly-named think tank, the Education Policy Institute (EPI).

The Sutton Trust study produces five exam result measures for 39 MATs, all using the results of each of ‘their’ disadvantaged pupils to pronounce on how well each chain does for these pupils. The EPI paper offers a verdict on the overall performance of academy chains, this one using two exam result measures for pupils which count in official DfE statistics as being educated in these chains.

Both studies, which are statistically much more impressive, say, than a DfE press release – though that may be setting the bar very low indeed – found that the chains varied considerably in terms of their ‘performance’. They therefore garnered media attention for some findings which will not have been welcomed by ministers.

The reports may also be invaluable in another sense. Ministers – and this seems likely to remain the case even with Justine Greening replacing Nicky Morgan as Secretary of State – tend to justify their academies programme largely in terms of institutional exam results. If research considers the academies project on ministers’ own terms and raises serious questions, then that is an important finding.

Problems: teaching to test and inclusion

However, there are two main problems. The first is well-known. It is simply that focusing on exam results as the sole arbiter of success may tell us how effective the institution is at concentrating on performance metrics, but not much about other aspects of education. It may encourage narrow teaching to tests.

Despite the multiple measures used, both of these reports seem to encourage one-dimensional verdicts on which are the ‘best’ academy trusts: the ones which manage to see the pupils who are included in the indicators which the research uses – in the case of the Sutton Trust research, disadvantaged pupils, and in the EPI study, pupils as a whole – achieving the best results.

Yet the reality, it seems to me, is much more complex. A prominent academy chain, which runs schools near where I live, has been known to do well in statistical assessments of its results. Yet some parents I speak to seem not to want to go near it, because of a hard-line approach to pupil discipline and a reportedly test-obsessed outlook. This may generate the results prized in studies such as these, but are these schools unequivocally better than others? I think researchers should at least acknowledge that their results may not be the final word on what counts as quality. My hunch is that these studies may be picking up on academy trusts which are more successful in managing the process of getting good results for their institutions. But is that the same as providing a generally good, all-round education for all those they might educate? The reports offer no answers because they are purely statistical exercises which do not investigate what might be driving changes in results. So we need at least to be cautious with interpretation.

This is especially the case when we move on to perhaps the less obvious concern about these studies. It is that both investigations focus entirely on results at institutional level, counting the success of schools in getting good results out of those pupils who are on their books at the time the statistical indicators are compiled. However, this ignores a potentially serious perverse incentive of England’s results-based, increasingly deregulated education system.

The studies seem entirely uncurious about what is often put to me, by observers of its effects on the ground, as a very serious risk inherent in the academies scheme as currently understood. This is that in deregulating such that each academy trust is given a degree of autonomy, coupled with the pressure on each trust to improve its results, a perverse incentive is created for trusts to become less inclusive.

In other words, they either use admissions to take on more pupils who are likely to help their results, or they try to push out students who are already on their books but less likely to help their results. This concern is referenced in the research review I carried out for CPRT. This quotes a finding from the Pearson/RSA 2013 review of academies which said: ‘Numerous submissions to the Commission suggest some academies are finding methods to select covertly’. The commission’s director was Professor Becky Francis, who is a co-author of the Sutton Trust study, so it is surprising that the latter paper did not look at changing student composition in MATs.

A statistical approach summing up the effectiveness of individual academy chains entirely through the results of individual chains without any way of checking whether they are becoming more selective does not address this issue.

I admit, here, that I have more reasons to be concerned at the secondary, rather than at the primary, level. Since 2014, I have carried out simple statistical research showing how a small minority of secondary schools have seen the number of pupils in particular year groups dropping sharply between the time they arrive in year seven and when they complete their GCSEs, in year 11.

Indeed, one of the top-performing chains in both these reports – the Harris Federation – has recently seen secondary cohort numbers dropping markedly. Harris’s 2013 GCSE year group was 12 per cent smaller than the same cohort in year 8. The 2015 Harris GCSE cohort was 8 per cent smaller than when the same cohort was in year 7. This data is publicly available yet neither report investigates shrinking cohort size. That is not to say anything untoward has gone on – Harris is also very successful in Ofsted inspections, and has said in the past that pupils have left to go to new schools, to leave the UK or to be home-educated – but it certainly would seem worth looking into.

When the Sutton Trust study mentions ‘[academy] chains that are providing transformational outcomes to their disadvantaged pupils’, its figures are based only on those actually in the chains in the immediate run-up to taking exams. Would the analysis change if it included all those who started out at the schools? We don’t know. The fact that DfE data is available suggesting major changes in pupil cohorts but it seems not to have been looked at is remarkable.

In addition, the fact that high-profile research studies purporting to show the success of organisations are not considering alternative readings of their statistics may incentivise organisations not to think about students which they may consider to be harder to educate. Results measures currently provide an incentive to push such students out.

The lack of curiosity is extra surprising, given that the issue of ‘attrition rates’ – schools losing students – has been live in the debate over the success of one of the largest charter school operators in the US, KIPP schools.

As I’ve said: I don’t think this is just a secondary school issue. It is also a potential problem for any research which seeks to judge the success of primary academies solely with reference to the test results of pupils who remain in schools at the time of calculation of ‘performance’ indicators.

For, with reference to the academies scheme in general, as a journalist delving into goings-on at ground level, I frequently come across claims of schools, for example, not being keen to portray themselves as focusing on special needs pupils – and therefore not to attract such youngsters in the first place – or even trying to ease out children who might present behavioural challenges.

These two reports paint a simple picture of ‘more effective’ and ‘less effective’ academy chains. But the reality I see, based on both published evidence and many conversations on the ground, is rather different. I see a system which incentivises leaders to focus on the need to generate results that are good for the school. But is that always in the best interests of pupils? Should a school which sees rising results, but which also seems to be trying to make itself less attractive to what might be termed harder-to-educate pupils, be seen as a success?

These are very important questions. Sadly, the reports provide no answers.

This is the latest in a series of CPRT blogs in which Warwick Mansell, Henry Stewart and others have tested the government’s academies policy, and the claims by which it is so vigorously pursued, against the evidence. Read them here, and download Warwick’s more detailed CPRT research report Academies: autonomy, accountability, quality and evidence.

Warwick has also written extensively about the side-effects of results pressures in schools, most notably in his book ‘Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing’ (Methuen, 2007).

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