The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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The power of the arts in primary schools

The arts are essential in life. They can shape and define who we are and how we understand ourselves and our possible selves.  It is a travesty that in some quarters the arts in schools are increasingly regarded as unnecessary.  We see dance, drama, music and visual arts as fundamental to cultural engagement and personal development.  Artistic experience fuels imagination and in turn imagination fuels creativity. Within CPR’s curriculum framework, the arts are linked to creativity as one of eight essential curriculum domains – although CPR emphasises that creativity is not regarded as exclusive to the arts.

The instrumental argument for the inclusion of the arts in education is that they foster transferable skills and boost overall academic achievement, leading to better future work opportunities, enhanced well-being and self-esteem.  In contrast, the essentialist view, underlined in an earlier blog from Robin Alexander, is that the arts are valuable for their own sake and should not just be seen merely as tools for other kinds of learning. Elliot Eisner’s ten lessons the arts teach resonate beautifully with CPR’s aims.  They propose that the arts provide space for personal judgement; help problem-posing and thinking outside the box; promote diversity, respect and intercultural understanding; show that making mistakes can be liberating and open up new opportunities; encourage looking at details and thinking in depth; allow the creation of a personal reality; provide therapeutic benefits and support emotional literacy and make us feel alive.

Children don’t experience learning as separate parcels of knowledge to be opened. They flow from one form, with different ways of exploring and expressing, to another.  They use what Loris Malaguzzi calls ‘100 languages’.  In relation to CPRT’s values and vision, we suggest that positive connections between the arts, as well as non-arts subjects, can maximise creative learning.  Although we may more commonly talk about learning in and through different art forms, the work of Lars Lindström usefully draws attention to also learning about and with the art form.  These distinctions emphasise a wonderful world of possibilities for both teaching and learning.

However, promoted by the DfE, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) Teaching and Learning Toolkit  tells us that arts participation has low impact on ‘academic learning’.  This worries us on two counts: firstly, the type of research approaches used to gather this evidence can never fully capture the subtle qualities of learning in the arts; secondly, it is grossly inaccurate to imply that the arts are non-academic.  Also, we are deeply troubled when it is seen as perfectly acceptable to relegate the arts to extra-curricular activity, seemingly the view taken in the DfE White Paper Educational Excellence Everywhere. In any event, evidence from a much larger body of research  than the single project cited by EEF shows that arts education does indeed have a positive and significant ‘academic’ impact.

Our work with the South West Research Schools connects closely to four of CPRT’s priorities: community, curriculum, voice and pedagogy.  These schools are fully committed to providing rich and stimulating learning experiences and recognise that the arts have much to offer in contributing to this aspiration.

In the Power of the Arts event recently held at Bath’s Royal Literary and Scientific Institute, six of CPRT’s South West Research Schools shared their research findings to date, which led to wider discussions about teaching and learning in the arts and, more generally, a creative school ethos.  Significant messages arising from the discussions underlined the importance of both teachers and children learning as researchers, and the potential of working with the ‘habits of mind’ of artists and creative professionals to develop creative learning skills.

David Allinson, Head Teacher of St Vigor and St John Primary School, Chilcompton, Somerset talked about:

… believing in children’s ideas, with research as a habit of mind – catching learning. We became fascinated in how children’s drawings help them to put ideas together and grow – in how can ideas be revealed, connected and grow through drawing. Some important things came out from what we saw.  The children’s language was more developed, their imagination had grown into a fantastical language, children were catching ideas from each other. The ideas changed because we gave children time, we gave them space to do it in, and gave them attention from a teacher who was very interested in what they were doing, showed attention by writing things down, taking photos. As teachers we need to step back and ask questions about the things that fascinate us. We saw the story unravelling – we were then interested in how we could give children the time space and attention they needed.

Professor Nick Sorensen, Associate Dean, Institute for Education, Bath Spa University closed the day:

Thank you to the primary head teachers who have generously shared their innovative approaches to learning, teaching and professional development, showing how artists and teachers work together to increase children’s self-esteem, self-confidence and independence with the vision to expand the imaginative potential of children and supporting them to become independent learners.

Post Brexit, here is much healing that has to be done and what you’re doing is really important work.  Artists and teachers are united by the fact that they are social beings; their actions have an impact on what happens in society and they reflect what is going on in society. The work that you, and others, are doing takes on a much broader significance and importance given that the context we are working in has changed radically.

What I am interested in is practice, in what great artists and teachers do.  Practice doesn’t exist in isolation but comes out of a culture.  We need to engage in a process of analysis not just to document that what we do which is of value, but to collectively legitimise those practices that may appear to be marginal in order to resolve the tensions between policy expectations and practical realities, between a restricted and restrictive National Curriculum and the stuff that children immediately recognise as ‘real learning’. We need to be able to provide evidence for those practices that foster understanding, cooperation, cross-cultural perspectives and cross-disciplinary learning.

5x5x5=creativity aspires to research and support creativity in children’s learning to increase their aspirations and life skills.  Partnerships between schools and cultural organisations are essential at this time, as we need to draw on our collective imagination to make a real difference to children’s lives.  With determination and a growing sense of community and shared endeavour, we can together ensure that children’s experiences of primary school are enlivened and enriched by the arts.

We agree with artist Bob and Roberta Smith, that ‘art makes children powerful’ and would add that it can also make teachers, as learning and research partners, powerful too.

Emese Hall (University of Exeter) and Penny Hay (Bath Spa University) jointly co-ordinate CPRT’s South West regional network, which includes the South West Research Schools Network and its current focus on the arts and creativity in primary schools. Contact them here for more information.

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Teaching: am I in or out?

In two previous blogs Sadie charted her progress through her PGCE year and into her first teaching post. Here she is again, one year on.

What a year! I’m sure there are other people out there who’ve had a terrible NQT year, but this one has got to be up there with one of the worst.

It started to go downhill from the beginning. September was a blur. There were no lesson plans, no medium term plans, no effective behaviour management system and very low expectations from staff and children alike. Within three days my parallel teacher had literally fled the country, deciding to return to her home country, and I was left to face the music alone.

I worked every waking hour to prepare lessons and resources from scratch, briefing supply teachers daily. I had somehow slipped under management’s radar. Unaware that I was an NQT, support and observations were virtually non-existent. I could have been teaching science and literacy or snakes and ladders for all anyone knew. There were no subject leaders or Key Stage heads that I could recognise. I was a rabbit caught in the headlights, with nowhere to turn.

Thankfully, one of the supply teachers agreed to stay on. This was my saving grace. We became each other’s support network, encouraging each other to keep going, taking it one day at a time. If we didn’t laugh, we’d cry, and so we did both. Eventually, the latter began to happen far too often.

In October, quite unexpectedly, the head resigned and had left by Christmas. A week later, the school’s deputy head had followed suit. I felt utterly at sea, crushed and hopeless, watching idly as staff abandoned the sinking ship in droves – a combination of redundancies, retirements and escapees fleeing to greener pastures.

So desperate was our situation that two ‘super heads’ were deployed and a seismic shift in stress levels began. The academy regime had arrived.

Perhaps naively, I was momentarily motivated by the fresh faces, corporate blue trouser suits and no-nonsense attitudes. They signalled hope, an era of change. Sadly, this was the biggest let-down of all. During one of the new regime’s very first speeches, the word ‘HELL’ was actually emblazoned on a fiery 5m x 3m projection wall in the school hall. An unsustainable work-life balance was regarded as normal and accepted as part of the job. We were run ragged, whilst the running commentary from senior leadership left us feeling worthless and undervalued. Morale in the school had hit an all-time low and I was desperately unhappy. I was constantly stressed, tired and emotionally drained. It was as if we’d made a pact with the devil. Yes, we’ll work from home. Yes, we’ll do so until the job’s done – even if that means working into the early hours. Yes, we’ll work on weekends. Yes, we’ll read your emails and respond to them on Sundays. When I did eventually climb into bed my head was fuzzy, fraught with frantic deadlines and data, scrutinies and stress.

By Christmas, I’d decided that enough was enough. I had been working 14-16 hour days and felt under unbelievable pressure to reach unachievable results. In my PGCE year I was graded ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted. I have an incredible passion for teaching and working with children. I am creative, positive and excited to be part of an invaluable education system. But when I looked in the mirror at the end of autumn term, I saw a panic-stricken shadow of my former NQT self. I applied for a job in the holidays and gave my notice in the new year.

But the pupils aren’t responsible for those two traumatic terms. They (along with my team) were the only reason I stayed as long as I did. It broke my heart to leave them. They made me smile, filled me with pride and, on occasion, flashes of brilliance filled the classroom. They achieved against all odds. They were a pleasure to teach, in spite of the surrounding nonsense. In such a short space of time they had come so far, but they were fragile. A fraying rope that I couldn’t let go, for fear it would unravel completely. All the good work with their behaviour and attitudes, undone in a single moment. Another teacher is leaving us. I couldn’t hold back the tears when I bid my farewells, but I’m glad to say I’ve not shed a single tear since.

By Summer term, Ofsted had put the school into special measures, but I didn’t need that result to know I’d made the right choice. Once I moved to another school, my life improved ten-fold. I’m no longer taking work home in the evenings and I’ve gained my precious weekends back. The biggest highlight has to be the positive working environment, the inspirational leadership and constant support from colleagues. There has been plenty of encouraging feedback throughout the term – from peers, pupils and parents alike – always unexpected, but it’s made me realise that I might actually be good at my job after all. My confidence is slowly returning.

I’ve finally struck a balance that I feared I’d never see again. I used to wonder how teachers managed to get all of their work done by 5pm and spend every weekend and holiday blissfully divorced from school life. I couldn’t quite comprehend how they managed it, assuming it involved some form of time travelling Tardis!

Every now and then, I still feel a pang of guilt about the class I left behind. I will always wonder how my class (the brightest, the keenest and the most apathetic) is getting on. I will always look back fondly on the enthusiasm of that first class and I will always be proud of my most creative lessons but I can’t pretend that those magical moments weren’t outweighed by everything else that we were contending with. The environment had become toxic and we shouldn’t feel like that about a job that is so vitally important for the future of our society. I don’t think I realised the full impact on my mental health at the time, but I can understand now why so many NQTs decide to leave the profession. If only they’d found the right school, I wonder.

As I mentioned in my previous post, sometimes it’s easy to forget what’s important and to become railroaded by politics. Thankfully, the CPRT aims are there to remind us what’s really important – over and above government priorities. My NQT year has been a baptism of fire, but somehow I survived. I’ve learnt more over the past year than I have in any other. I’m certainly not the same teacher I was at the start of the year and I hope I can continue to grow and say the same again next year.

I’ve gained so much from this experience and despite such a challenging and chaotic NQT year, I’m sticking with it.

I’m in.

Is Sadie’s experience of becoming a primary teacher in these difficult times unusual, or is it more common than it should be? What of the extremes of chaos and ruthless corporatism, and of stress and damaged self-esteem, that she suffered before at last encountering the positive and supportive working environment that as an NQT she needed and deserved? We would like to hear from other recently qualified primary teachers, and from school leaders who can reassure those following Sadie into the classroom that she was just exceptionally unlucky in where she landed.

by Robin Alexander

Politics at its worst and best

The politics of fear versus the politics of hate. That is how the protagonists themselves have portrayed the EU referendum campaign, and they are right. As for the politics of truth, they’ve been all but silenced by the shameful alliance of bloated ego and rabble-rousing tabloid. The impressionable were impressed, the thoughtful were frustrated, and on that fragile, divisive and dangerous basis the nation has been asked to vote.

And then MP Jo Cox was murdered, and out of that unspeakable act of physical violence – which some have gone as far as attributing directly to the verbal violence of the referendum campaign – came a reminder of another kind of politics: of reason, hope, compassion, inclusivity, selflessness, courage, inspiration and love. The extraordinary and heartfelt public response to Jo Cox’s death bore witness not only to her truly exceptional qualities and achievements but also to how deeply people yearned for a political discourse that appealed to humanity’s best rather than its worst.

What has this to do with primary education? Everything. Most schools espouse a vision of human relations which is diametrically opposed to the divisive and inflammatory rhetoric to which we’ve been treated during the past few months. Somehow they must hold the line against that rhetoric’s malign pervasiveness and champion with children the possibility of a more generous and inclusive world.  Most schools – at least we hope this is so – make the quest for truth and understanding paramount in their shaping of children’s curriculum experiences, yet myths, lies and obfuscation have been rather more prominent of late in the public sphere.  Where teachers consciously strive to foster and enact something different they confirm the finding of the Cambridge Primary Review (final report, p 488) that ‘primary schools may be the one point of stability and positive values in a world where everything else is changing and uncertain. For many, schools are the centre that holds when things fall apart.’

But there’s another educational resonance, with education policy rather than practice. For the divisive and mendacious rhetoric of some prominent figures in the referendum campaign is very much of a piece with what they or their colleagues have used in relation to education. The Michael Gove who compared experts warning against Brexit to the Nazis who organised a smear campaign against Albert Einstein is the same Michael Gove who as England’s Secretary of State for Education called those who dared to disagree with him ‘Enemies of promise … Marxists hell-bent on destroying our schools’.

Nazis? Marxists? This ideological promiscuity is less significant than the calculated attempt to isolate and divide that such name-calling betokens, and in these two instances, which are by no means unique, accusations of smear might more properly be levelled at Gove himself. Indeed, this ploy, which – in case Labour are inclined to be sanctimonious we might recall was regularly used by them to undermine the Cambridge Primary Review – is seen by some politicians as a legitimate weapon for deployment in relation to the EU, education, migration, or any other policy issue on which they set their sights. Its true enemy, of course, is not ‘promise’ but truth.

While Gove’s successor uses less colourful language, she has shown a similar preference for ideology over truth, most notably perhaps in her airy insistence that every school must be an academy regardless of the absence of convincing and replicable evidence to support her claim that this will deliver school and system improvement. Beyond this case are numerous others where if research delivers inconvenient truths it is ignored or rubbished and its purveyors are abused.

Indeed so pervasive and corrosive were these tendencies during the last decade that the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review opened with a chapter entitled ‘The Review and other discourses’ which contrasted the serious search for evidence with the discourses of dichotomy, derision and myth by which education administrations too frequently advance their preferred causes, and then  warned readers of the probability that what they were about to read would itself be a target of these tendencies (it was). Then, 500 pages later and after presenting its main evidence and findings, the report linked the questionable government handling of many key education issues that its evidence had exposed to the much wider democratic deficit chronicled in the Rowntree Trust’s 2004-6 Power enquiry into the condition of British democracy. The Cambridge report said (pp 481-2):

The prosecution of policy relating to primary education does not stand apart from the trends characterised by … the Power enquiry. Indeed, it convincingly exemplifies many of them: centralisation, secrecy and the ‘quiet authoritarianism’ of the new centres of power; the disenfranchising of local voice; the rise of unelected and unaccountable groups and individuals taking key decisions behind closed doors; the ‘empty rituals’ of consultation; the replacement of professional dialogue by the monologic discourse of power; the politicisation of the entire educational enterprise so that it becomes impossible to debate ideas or evidence which are not deemed to be ‘on message’, or which are ‘not invented here’; and,  latterly coming to light, financial corruption.

The Review and its witnesses have highlighted variations on this larger theme of democratic deficit, many of them centering on the nature and quality of the information on which both sound decision-making and effective education depend: the less than complete reliability of official information, particularly in the crucial domain of standards; its lack of independence; the creation and/or dogged perpetuation of educational myths in order to underwrite an exaggerated account of political progress; the key role of the media in shaping the information that reaches government as well as the information that flows from it; the reluctance of decision-makers to countenance or come to grips with alternative information on which better policies could be founded; the use of misinformation to marginalise or discredit ideas running on other than approved lines, and evidence from other than approved sources.

In light of this catalogue of embedded and wilful failure to do what democracy, evidence and good sense demand (and little has changed since these words were written), there is something almost ludicrously disingenuous about the pleas we have heard during the past week for people to stop demonising politicians, as if this is merely an unfortunate but curable habit the public has carelessly slipped into.  If politicians believe they should be trusted and respected they should first ask what has caused trust and respect to be so seriously eroded. Expenses claims for moats and duck houses are the more entertaining end of a continuum whose darker reaches include, sadly, some aspects of education policy, notably in the areas of curriculum, assessment, inspection and systemic school reform.

Which brings us back to Jo Cox. Her husband Brendan told reporters that

She feared for our political culture, not just here in the UK but around the world, detailing her belief that the tone of the debate has echoes of the 1930s, with the public feeling insecure, and politicians willing to exploit that sense. He added: ‘I think she was very worried that the language was coarsening, that people were being driven to take more extreme positions, that people didn’t work with each other as individuals and on issues, it was all much too tribal and unthinking.’

Just so: Gove, Johnson, Farage, Sun and Daily Mail take note. But in yesterday’s Guardian Gaby Hinsliff wrote:

She wasn’t just admirable, she was formidable … Cox knew it wasn’t enough just to wring your hands, it’s what you do that counts. When the shock of her death wears off, Westminster will have to remember that. It’s not enough just to talk about standing up for something better, resisting cheap shots, draining the hatred from politics. It’s what you do about it that counts.

The days of automatic respect for the political class are long gone. Respect now must be earned, and by deeds rather than words. Jo Cox’s remarkable example, whether in Batley, Westminster, Darfur or Syria, is the best possible place to start.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

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We’re all global citizens now

Migrants are rarely out of the news – mostly with negative words attached: ‘threat’, ‘invaders’,  ‘illegal’, ‘flood’, ‘swarm’, ‘crisis’,  ‘chaos’ ‘influx’, ‘sham’, ‘terrorist’ ‘suspected’. This is particularly so at present, with immigration a key issue in the EU debate. Voters have been exhorted to consider the security threat posed by migrants. Spreading fear of migrants, as human rights campaigners point out in a recent letter to the Guardian, ‘ is an age-old racist tool designed to stoke division’.

What effect does this kind of inflammatory scare-mongering have on children?  And how as educators should we respond? At a basic level, there are direct implications for schools arising from population growth: migration puts pressure on school places. But it isn’t just a question of numbers. In their recent CPRT research review on diversity, Ainscow and his colleagues report that during the last decade the percentage of the primary cohort who were from minority ethnic groups (that is, not classified as white British) rose from 19.3 to 30.4 percent.  Schools are in the frontline of response to these demographic changes, dealing, for example, with children who are non-English speakers or who have been traumatised by their earlier experiences.

Arguably however, the most difficult challenge ensuing from anti-migrant propaganda is its insidious effect on the attitudes of children themselves. This permeates all schools, not just those directly involved in receiving migrants. The controversial DfE policy which requires schools to reinforce British identity through fundamental British values, which in its turn was triggered by the ‘Trojan Horse’ affair involving Birmingham schools, is unlikely to help in this regard.

Our first concern might be to consider how to protect children from any propaganda they are exposed to. But we need to go further. Negative stereotypes need to be countered with approaches that not only redress untruths and misrepresentations, but also shift children’s gaze to the common values of humanity, generating compassion, empathy and understanding. Schools are uniquely positioned to provide such positive influences on children and their communities.

In their CPRT research review on diversity Ainscow et al makes the same point, reminding us of the opportunities for schools offered by rapid demographic change. Migrant Help aims to address the moral panic and embrace such opportunities. It argues that historically the UK has welcomed economic migrants and those fleeing war or persecution and it seeks to promote a culture of tolerance and acceptance, and the kind of community which aspires to the Bantu notion of ‘ubuntu’. Ubuntu is a central African word that means human kindness; it includes the understanding that every human action has implications for all around us and that our identities are shaped by the past and present lives of others. This concept, and the values that underpin it, resonates with no fewer than three of CPRT’s priorities: equity, community and Sustainability.

Under the ‘ubuntu’ umbrella, Jonathan Barnes and Alex Ntung of Migrant Help Education are involved in projects that directly address these values and priorities.  One of them draws on the work of Bern O’Donoghue, an artist who addresses perceptions of migrants through her art, challenging myths and prejudice about immigration. Bern places fact-filled paper boats in public places for people to find.  So far 7000 tiny origami paper boats inscribed with little known facts about migrants have been placed around Europe and the USA (translated into 6 languages) in nooks and crannies, bus shelters, on fence posts, wall cracks and signboards in the hope that passers-by will pick them up and read them.

Bern has been working with 9 – 11 years old in Hastings primary schools associated with the Education Futures Trust. When introducing the subject of refugee boats in the Mediterranean, Bern asked children to consider parallel situations in their own lives – being in a new place, moving house, changing schools – and what might help them settle in. This drew them into conversations about what ‘our’ (European), response should/could be to migrants fleeing war and persecution.  Children too made origami boats to carry messages, and were then involved in the analysis and discussion of the messages they and others had created. Common themes emerged including friendship, kindness, fairness, home and safety – all suggestive of understanding and clarity about humanitarian values.

This small research project seemed highly meaningful to the participants, perhaps because it involved a current emotive issue that had already engaged the children at a profound emotional level and involved the application of values to an authentic context.

For the education team at Migrant Help UK there was more learning. They were reminded that youngsters are often much more generous in their responses than adults. The threat-laden language of the tabloids and ultra-nationalists was entirely missing from the children’s responses. The team reflected on how much adults have learned to live with values-compromises, values-inconsistencies, values-conflicts and values-suspension on a daily basis. Perhaps we should listen to the moral guidance of 9 year olds more often.    

Another CPRT research report, on global learning and sustainability from Doug Bourn and his IoE colleagues, reminds us of the capacities that young children have for reasoning and discussion of complex or controversial topics. They say (p23): ‘With regard to cultural diversity, research indicates that while children begin to develop prejudices at an early age, they also start to understand concepts of fairness, empathy and justice early too.’  However, the report observes that schools tend to prioritise global and sustainability themes in order to foster empathy, rather than taking a more critical approach to controversial issues such as injustice and inequality. Early intervention, the CPRT Bourn report suggests, ‘can challenge negative stereotypes before they become entrenched, and provide a scaffold into which more complex themes can be added at a later age or stage of schooling’.

While evidence from the Cambridge Primary Review Community Soundings suggested that primary aged children are generally aware of and concerned about these issues, Bourn et al note that a good deal of research shows that teachers feel less comfortable with tackling controversial issues in the classroom, perhaps fearing backlash from parents or – given recent events – government. At the NUT conference in April 2015, executive member Alex Kenny commented:  ‘The government’s promotion of “British values”, the Prevent agenda and the use of Ofsted to monitor these is having the effect of closing down spaces for such discussion and many school staff are now unwilling to allow discussions in their classroom for fear of the consequences.’

School leaders need to take their courage in their hands and counteract this prevailing culture of fear, especially with the prospect of Brexit triumphing on 23rd June.

Vanessa Young and Jonathan Barnes lecture at Canterbury Christ Church University and Vanessa is Regional Co-ordinator for CPRT South East. Find out more about the activities of this very active network and its member primary schools, and how you can join in.

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Much ado about drama

The words ‘new’ and ‘national’ in relation to the primary national curriculum are misnomers. Much is similar to my primary school education in the 1950s, when there was a relentless focus on passing the 11+. Academies, free and independent schools don’t have to follow the ‘national’ curriculum anyway, so it is not national. With a rapidly increasing number of schools jumping (before being pushed) into academy status, soon most schools won’t have to follow it. Their curriculum ‘freedom’ could enable academy chains and individual schools to create something better than the retro, imbalanced national curriculum. A balanced arts curriculum would be an improvement but currently the increasingly high stakes national assessments in maths and English are what are actually shaping what is being taught for most of each day. What children learn, and the ways they learn it, influence the development of their brains, minds and attitudes. Education with insufficient arts is a form of deprivation.

I talk with teachers from many schools. I have been told, ‘We used to do drama but there just isn’t time now,’ and ‘We have been told that if we don’t have to teach something, then we mustn’t waste time on it.’ The curriculum is being shaped by fear of poor test results, with young children being overdosed on spelling, punctuation, grammar, phonics and maths. Art and design and music are at least in the national curriculum, so these subjects get some attention but drama is increasingly pushed to the wings.

Drama has always been a national curriculum casualty in England, locked safely and inappropriately inside English. Even when it was slightly more prominent in the last English national curriculum, the national strategies and Ofsted ignored it. Drama is now reduced to the odd bullet-point in the programme of study for English and defined mainly by its usefulness to reading comprehension and writing.

Drama has an extensive toolbox of interactive strategies and techniques that can be used to scaffold different types of thought and talk in any curriculum area. Many teachers know just two or three drama strategies and use them repeatedly, (e.g. hot-seating, freeze-frame, conscience alley). This is often a legacy from national strategies training. However, more recently trained teachers may not know any drama strategies at all and may not have had any drama training.

Drama is a main artform, not just a toolbox. The Cambridge Primary Review report positioned ‘Arts and Creativity’ (including drama), at the top of its list of eight curriculum domains. Jim Rose’s ill-fated curriculum also placed drama appropriately, within ‘Understanding the Arts’, where it had equal subject status alongside art, music and dance.

England used to lead the way internationally for drama in schools but no longer. Australia has its first national curriculum and dance, drama, media arts, music and visual arts have equal curriculum subject status within it. Ontario has had a statutory arts curriculum in its primary schools for almost a decade. Indeed, the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau was once a drama teacher.

Ironically, Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary coincides with drama in schools being diminished. England’s national curriculum has no programme of study or even appendix for drama, yet former Education Secretary Michael Gove agreed that all schools should receive a free copy of the Royal Shakespeare Company Toolkit for primary teachers. The press heralded his support for annual ‘Shakespeare Week’, but schools need a drama curriculum that has been fully consulted on, not just a free handbook about teaching Shakespeare and a ‘bolt-on’ Shakespeare Week.

For not a single question about drama was included in the national curriculum consultation. No DfE official was given responsibility for drama.  Subject expert groups were set up, but none for drama, and the subject expert group for English invited a National Theatre representative to join but no representative from the professional drama teachers’ associations. Creative and cultural industry representatives were given prominence in the developing educational landscape, and DfE consulted the relatively new Cultural Learning Alliance (CLA) rather than arts teachers’ professional organisations such as National Drama.

Through Creative Partnerships (2002-2011) and also through Arts Council England initiatives such as Artsmark and Arts Awards, a large national database of artists and arts organisations has been compiled.  It continues to grow and is not openly available to schools. The education work of artists and arts organisations is being channelled by ACE through their Regional Bridge organisations (jointly funded by the DfE). This infrastructure and database will be useful if and when the ‘Cultural Citizens’ initiative gets underway (proposed in ‘The Culture White Paper’ – March 2016). In this publication, the Education Secretary Nicky Morgan says that she wants ‘every single young person to have the opportunity to discover how the arts can enrich their lives.  Access to cultural education is a matter of social justice.’

Schools certainly should provide opportunities for children to work with artists and visit galleries, museums and theatres as part of their planned curriculum but these experiences and opportunities are no substitute for regular curriculum arts teaching in schools by qualified teachers with arts training.  Meanwhile, in some academies there are teachers without qualified teacher status (QTS). At least this development benefits artists as contributors to the teaching workforce.

Ofsted expectations, too, reflect the changing landscape within which arts education could too easily become confused with and subsumed by ‘cultural education’. The 2015 school inspection handbook says (my italics):

Ofsted inspectors take account of pupils’ cultural development, including their willingness to participate in artistic, musical, sporting and other cultural opportunities. Inspectors expect schools to provide a broad and balanced curriculum and extra-curricular opportunities that extend pupils’ knowledge, understanding and skills in a range of artistic, creative and sporting activities.

The arts must not be become an out-of-school-hours activity. Children need arts as part of a broad and balanced curriculum in school time and that should include art, music, dance and drama.

Patrice Baldwin is a drama for learning specialist, past Chair of National Drama and past President of the International Theatre, Drama and Education Association. www.patricebaldwin.com

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A bridge over troubled waters?

In a recent post on this blog, After primary, the ‘wasted years’?, Robin Alexander questioned some of the assumptions behind Ofsted’s recent tendency to compare secondary schools unfavourably with primary. Citing the different educational and professional cultures of the two phases, the challenges of adolescence and the narrow focus of inspections in primary schools, Robin questioned the bluntness of the instrument with which Ofsted is trying to beat secondary schools.

Whether or not we accept the picture of Key Stage 3 painted by Ofsted, however, genuine continuity of learning between primary and secondary schools is, as Robin put it, ‘a historic problem’. The Cambridge Primary Review found that ‘curriculum discontinuity and variations in teaching practice tripped pupils up while they were adjusting to the new social environment of secondary school’, recommending that ‘The sudden curricular and pedagogical changes that mark [pupils’] moves between schools and between key stage “compartments” need to be eased. Transition must become a process, rather than an event.’ (Children, their World, their Education, pp 371-2)

Historic problems are rarely solved overnight, particularly through structural changes, and we should beware politicians who claim otherwise. But might the changes to our school system heralded by the recent education White Paper, concerning though they are to many primary teachers and leaders, provide new opportunities to bridge the primary-secondary divide, and new incentives and mechanisms for schools to work together?

It’s much too soon to make any grand claims about the benefits of academisation, particularly in the primary sector (a point robustly argued by Warwick Mansell in his recent CPRT research report, Academies: autonomy, accountability, quality and evidence). Where things get more interesting, in my view, is in the emerging evidence behind the benefits of formal school partnerships (including multi-academy trusts, but also hard federations of maintained schools), and in the ways in which school leaders and teachers are working within such partnerships.

Two recent reports by the House of Commons Education Committee (a cross-party group of 11 MPs) examined in some detail the impact of strong school-to-school collaboration. The first report, School Partnerships and Cooperation, found that ‘school partnerships and cooperation have become an increasingly important part of a self-improving or school-led system’, and that ‘such collaboration has great potential to continue driving improvement to the English education system’. The report cited substantial evidence for this claim, including a report by the National College of Teaching and Leadership which found that schools in federations appeared to perform better than schools with apparently similar characteristics that had not federated. Digging into the reasons behind the apparent success of such partnerships, the report identified shared accountability as a crucial factor, concluding that ‘school partnerships with clear lines of accountability and some element of obligation are more likely to be successful in achieving gains from collaboration.’

The second report, Academies and Free Schools, set out to explore the impact of these new types of school. In common with other research in this area, it found no evidence so far that academisation in itself raises standards. What it strongly identified, though, was a relationship between school-to-school collaboration and improved outcomes, quoting evidence from the Sutton Trust on the stronger performance of academies in multi-academy trusts over standalone academies, and from Ofsted on the higher likelihood of academies in multi-academy trusts maintaining good or outstanding judgements, compared to standalone academies.

This report found that the benefits of being part of a formal group were particularly strong for primary schools, whose smaller size and greater reliance on local authority support often made standalone academy status more problematic. Again, these benefits were down to the impact of working together, rather than the effect of academisation. For primary schools, the report concluded, ‘the model of partnership … is less important than the level of commitment of the heads and teachers involved’. As one primary head quoted in the report put it, ‘We are accountable for each other, and therefore it is imperative we support each other to improve.’

Simply being part of a group, of course, makes little difference in itself. What matters is what school leaders and teachers do with that partnership. And that’s where the benefits of primary and secondary schools being part of the same structure, accountable for each other, can start to pay off. I’ve spent a lot of time recently talking to, and working with, school leaders and teachers in cross-phase multi-academy trusts and federations, and have seen some interesting practices start to develop.

One multi-academy trust, for example, is restructuring its curriculum to bring together Years 5 to 8 into a single phase. Children still move from primary to secondary school halfway through, but their learning continues seamlessly. In another group, teachers have come together to design a common approach to assessment, which throws into sharp relief any instances of Year 7 dip. In another group, Year 7 teachers ask departing Year 6s to bring their best pieces of work with them when they start secondary school, stick them in their shiny new exercise books, and look back at them to remind themselves of the standard of work of which they were capable last year. In yet another group, Year 6s all take with them to secondary school a ‘pupil passport’, designed to showcase their academic achievements, but also the broader knowledge, skills and dispositions they’ve developed during their seven years at primary school, alongside their sporting and artistic achievements. How much more helpful is that to their Year 7 teachers than simply being told they scored 98 on their SATs, and so haven’t met the expected standard?

None of these ways of working is impossible when schools are separate institutions, of course, and many primary and secondary schools already work effectively together. But a school in a multi-academy trust or federation not only has an added incentive to work more closely with its partners; it also, crucially, can use the structure of the formal partnership to develop new approaches that can genuinely transform children’s experiences, beyond its own four walls.

Primary schools are right to approach the proposals in the White Paper with caution, and not to rush into any decisions. Advice against marrying in haste is as wise as it ever was. But the opportunity for schools to harness the policy agenda to develop collaborative ways of working that could significantly benefit children is, in my view, real and exciting. It won’t close the primary-secondary divide overnight, but it might just build some bridges.

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

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Time for radical change: grammar testing in England’s primary schools  

It has not been a good couple of weeks for testing in England’s primary schools.

There have been leaks of both the KS1 and KS2 spelling, grammar and punctuation tests, leading to the KS1 test being scrapped for this year and accusations by ministers that malign forces are at work to undermine the government’s education reform process.

Baseline assessment for four year olds has also gone, as its unreliability for accountability purposes became so obvious that continuation became untenable. (Not that the problems with testing and accountability are unfamiliar to teachers or parents, as Stephanie Northen and Sarah Rutty reminded us in their powerful recent blogs).

Even before his problem with subordinating conjunctions, Nick Gibb was complaining about the current situation in a speech at the ASCL curriculum summit on 27 April:

You do not need me to tell you that the implementation of the new key stage one and key stage two tests has been bumpy, and I and the department are more than willing to accept that some things could have been smoother. The current frameworks for teacher assessment, for example, are interim, precisely because we know that teething problems that exist in this phase of reform need to leave room for revision.

‘Teething problems’ is a bit of an understatement.

The Cambridge Primary Review Trust is committed to looking at what the widest range of available evidence tells us about assessment and assessment reform, including from experience such as Stephanie’s and Sarah’s as well as formal research, and it argues that decisions should be made at both policy and classroom level based upon that evidence.

I want to briefly look at the research evidence on the grammar tests for seven and eleven year olds and the government’s claims for them, to complement and add to the blogs of the last fortnight.

Nick Gibb argued in his ASCL speech, as well as on earlier occasions, that testing is a way of raising standards in the core areas of reading, writing and mathematics. He said:

Against those who attack the underlying principle of these reforms, I stand firm in my belief that they are right and necessary. Our new tests in grammar, punctuation and spelling have been accused by many in the media of teaching pupils redundant or irrelevant information. One fundamental outcome of a good education system must be that all children, not just the offspring of the wealthy and privileged, are able to write fluent, cogent and grammatically correct English.

He thus conflates performance in these tests with writing fluently and cogently. But the evidence that a test will help the children to get better at writing when it asks six and seven year olds to identify an adverb in ‘Jamie knocked softly on his brother’s bedroom door’ or to decide whether ‘One day, Ali decided to make a toy robot’ is a question, statement, command or an exclamation, simply doesn’t exist. The experience of this year’s Y2 and Y6 children, before the requirement to do the Y2 test was dropped, was in many cases, that of separate grammar lessons where they were trained for the test, making sure they could identify word classes and sentence types through decontextualised exercises, so that they would be able to answer questions like these. If the test is reintroduced in 2017 this will happen again, distorting the curriculum with little or no benefit to pupils.

I make this claim because the research evidence over many years is unequivocal. Debra Myhill, who with her colleagues at Exeter University has extensively investigated the teaching of grammar and has shown that explicit attention to grammar in the context of ongoing teaching can help pupils to improve their writing, summarised that evidence in an April 2013 TES article. She wrote:

I did a very detailed analysis of the test and I had major reservations about it. I think it’s a really flawed test. The grammar test is totally decontextualised. It just asks children to do particular things, such as identifying a noun. But 50 years of research has consistently shown that there is no relationship between doing that kind of work and what pupils do in their writing. I think children will do better in the test than they are able to in their writing because it isolates the skills so that children only have to think about one thing at a time.

Myhill adds that the test will tend to overestimate children’s ability to manipulate grammar and make appropriate choices in their writing.  It would be much more valid to assess children’s ability to manipulate grammar by looking at how they do so in the context of the pieces of writing they do in the broad curriculum they experience. This test is therefore unreliable. It is also invalid.

In her CPRT research report on assessment and standards Wynne Harlen defines consequential validity as ‘how appropriate the assessment results are for the uses to which they are put’. A test which focuses on labelling grammatical features may be valid in testing whether children know the grammatical terms, but it is not valid for making judgements about writing ability more generally. The evidence emphatically does not support Nick Gibb’s claim that the test will lead to ‘fluent, cogent and grammatically correct English’. These grammar tests will not and cannot do what the government’s rhetoric claims.

The Cambridge Primary Review Trust, like the Cambridge Primary Review, supports the use of formal assessments, in which tests have a role, as part of a broader approach to identifying how well children are learning in school and how well each school is doing, though like many others it warns against overloading such assessments with tasks like system monitoring. Wynne Harlen’s reports for CPR and CPRT, and the assessment chapters (16 and 17) in the CPR final report, remain excellent places to examine the evidence for a thoroughgoing review of the current assessment and accountability arrangements, including the place of testing within them, in England’s primary schools.

As I reminded readers in a previous blog the Cambridge Primary Review in 2010 cited assessment reform as one of eleven post-election priorities for the incoming government. Six years and a new government later,  a fundamental review of assessment and testing is still urgently needed.

Assessment reform remains a key CPRT priority. For a round-up of CPR and CPRT evidence on assessment see our Priorities in Action page. This contains links to Wynne Harlen’s CPR and CPRT research reports mentioned above, relevant blogs, CPRT regional activities, CPR and CPRT evidence to government consultations on assessment, and the many CPR publications on this topic

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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Joyless, inaccurate, inequitable?

I recently enjoyed the opportunities provided by some longer than average train journeys and the al fresco possibilities of a sunny garden to catch up on my reading. Indeed, I diligently increased my familiarity with a wide range of books; asked questions to improve my understanding of text; summarised the main ideas drawn from more than one paragraph, and worked out the meaning of new words from context.  In short, I demonstrated the skills in reading required of upper KS2 readers.

Which has left me with rather a bee in my bonnet about last week’s KS2 SATs reading paper and its usefulness as an assessment of these skills.

My first buzzing bee in response to the paper: the quality and range of the texts provided to assess our children’s abilities as confident readers. Rather than a range of engaging writing, offering opportunities to demonstrate skills as joyful interrogators of literature and authorial craft, the test offered three rather leaden texts: two fictional and one non-fiction.  We had Maria and Oliver running off from a garden party at the big house to explore an island, which might hold the clue to the secret of a long-standing upper-class family feud. We had Maxine riding her pet giraffe, Jemmy, in South Africa, having an unfortunate encounter with some warthogs (some ferocious, others bewildered) but fortunately learning a lesson about the consequences of not listening to adults. We finished with the non-fiction text about the demise of the Dodo, a text so oddly structured that it appeared to have, rather like another curious creature, been thrown together by committee. The sun-soaked stillness of our inner-city school hall, last Monday morning, was ruffled by the occasional gentle gusting sighs of 76 children trying hard to engage with such dull texts and do so with purposeful determination ‘because I love books and I love reading and I want to do well, but it wasn’t like proper reading.’

Which brings me on to my second buzzing bee: it was most definitely not, to quote (year 6 standard pupil Shueli), anything like ‘proper reading’ nor, I would suggest, a meaningful way to assess whether our children themselves are ‘proper’ readers, using the DfE’s own interim assessment criteria.

The first four questions of the test focussed solely on vocabulary and words in context. For example, Question 1: ‘Find and copy one word meaning relatives from long ago’. If, like many of our children, you did not know the word ‘ancestor’, the answer for this question was almost impossible to work out from context.  A first mark lost and a tiny dent in the self-esteem of pupils who were hoping for a test of their ability to filter and finesse a text for nuance and meaning rather find ‘words I should have in my head, but didn’t’ (Sayma B). More gusty sighing.

Question 2 continued to dig deeper into the realm of internal word-lists: ‘the struggle had been between two rival families… which word most closely matches the meaning of the word rival? Tick one: equal, neighbouring, important, competing.  If you were not familiar with the word ‘rival’ then the choice of either ‘important’ or ‘neighbouring’ are plausible choices in context. I give you some higher order reading reasoning:  the children were at a party in a big house, clearly from ‘posh’ families – hence ‘important’ was a perfectly sensible choice; rival football teams play in the same league, so are in some way ‘neighbours’.  Both demonstrate a key year 6 reading skill: ‘working out the meaning of new words from context’, a skill our children use routinely but, in this case, cost them a mark and one more cross gained on the examiner’s recording sheet.

Bringing me onto bee no. 3: the test appeared to be designed for ease of marking. Only 2/33 questions on the test required extended ‘3 mark’ answers – allowing extended inferential or evaluative thinking – a mere 6 percent of the paper. The rest were questions requiring – much easier to mark – word or fact retrieval answers.  Our children’s reading SATs scores will reflect this unbalanced diet of question types; resulting in assessments neither accurate nor equitable. Not accurate, because teachers, using the national curriculum and 2015-16  interim assessment framework, assess year 6 readers using a much wider set of criteria – including, for example reading aloud with intonation, confidence and fluency, as well as contributions to discussions around book-talk, none of which can be assessed  by a simple test. And not equitable, because research indicates that the children most likely to under-perform in language/vocabulary biased reading tests are those from the most deprived backgrounds.

The reason for this is that children from lower income, or more socially deprived backgrounds, often come to school with a more limited vocabulary because they begin life being exposed to fewer words than children from more affluent backgrounds.  The gap this discrepancy presents is not insurmountable; the CPRT/IEE dialogic teaching project is one clear example of how putting talk at the heart of our children’s learning can help close such gaps.  However, a national testing system that skews the reading results by which children and schools are judged – and categorised – in favour of such a vocabulary-heavy bias, is simply not fair. Or purposeful.

I urge you, experienced reader, to stand for a moment in the shoes of Sheuli and Sayma B. I give you a sentence to consider, one which incorporates a word that I learnt from my own recent reading.  ‘A gust of wind rippled through the exam hall, it made me pandiculate and look hopefully at the clock. Q1: In this sentence which word most closely matches the meaning of the word pandiculate? Tick one: ponder, panic, stretch, laugh out loud.

All might seem plausible choices. The experience of the reading SATs last week may have caused our children indeed to ponder, to panic or to laugh out loud in test conditions.  It might even have made them pandiculate in earnest, for the correct answer is, of course, c) to stretch – and typically to yawn when awakening from a dull or sleepy interlude. But surely you knew that? It must be fair to assume that we all share the same internal word list. And if this is not the case (shame on you) could you not demonstrate your ability to work out the meaning of a word from the context?  No?  It cannot be that my test is flawed; it must be you who are a poor reader.  My internal bee is susurrating indeed about the value of a national test that reinforces gaps, rather than one which assesses how well we are closing them.

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. 

 If you work in or near Leeds and wish to become involved in its CPRT network, contact administrator@cprtrust.org.uk.

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Rigor spagis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Learning global

Before you’ve finished your breakfast this morning, you’ll have relied on half the world. (Martin Luther-King)

The Cambridge Primary Review Trust prioritises a rounded primary education that does not shirk the ‘everyday complexity’ of the contemporary world. In February 2016, it published the report Primary Education for Global Learning and Sustainability, which called for further work on ‘the development of a pedagogy of global and environmental social justice.’

The following are some thoughts about what ‘learning global’ looks like. It draws on insights from a project at Tide~ global learning which involves teachers from the UK, Spain, Kenya and The Gambia.

What are we trying to do?

CPRT’s February 2016 report points out that ‘learning about global and sustainability themes raises wider points regarding the purpose of education.’

Our aims will dictate the approaches that we take. Most serious commentators on the purpose of education go beyond test results to consider both individual and societal purposes. CPRT aims for ‘Self, others and the wider world’ are particularly (but not exclusively) relevant here. The following two aims deserve a careful reading:

Promoting interdependence and sustainability. To develop children’s understanding of humanity’s dependence for well-being and survival on equitable relationships between individuals, groups, communities and nations, and on a sustainable relationship with the natural world, and help children to move from understanding to positive action in order that they can make a difference and know that they have the power to do so.

Empowering local, national and global citizenship. To help children to become active citizens by encouraging their full participation in decision-making within the classroom and school, especially where their own learning is concerned, and to advance their understanding of human rights, democratic engagement, diversity, conflict resolution and social justice. To develop a sense that human interdependence and the fragility of the world order require a concept of citizenship which is global is well as local and national.

It is also worth noting that a set of outward-looking aims are also now enshrined within the globally-agreed UN Sustainable Development Goals as SDG 4.7.

What are our theories of knowledge and learning?

The next step on our pedagogical journey is to consider knowledge itself. How do we know the world?

Let’s take the issue of climate change as an example. Knowledge about it is contentious. Scientific predictions and solutions vary. We are dealing with change itself, so new knowledge is coming into being all the time. Our response therefore needs to be flexible, rather than fixed.

With an issue like this (or conflict, the refugee crisis etc) Mr Gradgrind’s ‘facts’ are only going to get us so far. If we think that human suffering, injustice and environmental devastation actually matter, we need something more.

Since climate change is already a pressing reality for millions of human beings, meaningful knowledge about it is not just a moral imperative but a growing necessity. It is not accidental that countries like Bangladesh have made it a compulsory element in their National Curriculum.

It is that wider narrative that makes all the messy information meaningful. However, a nine year old child may need specific stories to access that big picture: the polar bear stranded on an ice floe; the teenager generating renewable energy from a hamster wheel; the Maldives’ president holding an underwater press conference to draw attention to his islands’ plight; a demonstration or a summit that brings people together around a call for change. Some of those stories will want to counter potential pessimism with tales of hopeful action.

If we are to make sense of big, messy issues, then we are most likely to do so as active makers of meaning. We can start to make sense of the stories and information we encounter through investigation, comparison, experimentation, experience, dialogue, drama, debate, critical reflection, synthesis and application. To borrow from Jerome Bruner, we will mostly be using ‘narrative’ ways of understanding the world.

Learning may ultimately happen in each individual brain, but the business of effective global learning is a social activity. As CPRT’s final aim and seventh priority remind us, dialogue is paramount. Our ideas – and the values that inform them – are in play with those of other people. We make meaning together.

Rather than imagining a helpful and omniscient answer-book for big global issues, I like Edward Said’s idea of thinking ‘contrapuntally.’ He takes his metaphor from an orchestra, and how its individual instruments play distinctive lines that together make a greater whole.

In the example of climate change, these instrumental lines can be played by different subjects (Science, Geography, Citizenship etc), by accounts from contrasting parts of the world (big carbon emitters like the USA, vulnerable countries like The Gambia, rapidly-industrialising countries like India), or by the stories of people with different roles and viewpoints (the climate scientist, the fuel company employee, the Alaskan villager needing to move her home). When we put them together, we make a bigger whole, and in so doing we avoid the trap of ‘the single story.’

How do we connect action to learning?

If we are talking about global learning, challenging pessimism and fostering hope, then we are not only talking about understanding but about positive action.

I think that it is best to imagine action and learning in a dialectical relationship, where one constantly leads on to the other. Positive action, as part of a learning process, is not only informed by new knowledge, but leads on to further knowledge.

Seen this way, positive action can serve as a way into deeper learning. For example, a Year 4 class adopts a simple energy-saving measure, switching lights off in empty classrooms. This only makes sense if pupils locate what they are doing within the bigger picture of climate change and energy use. (‘We are doing this because …’)

Pupils can then subject their idea to scrutiny. Is this the best course of action, given the big picture? How much energy does it save? Where does the electricity come from? (e.g. if it is all generated from renewable sources, is it having any effect on climate change?)  Are there safety or security benefits to sometimes leaving lights on? If so, is there a way around this (e.g. installing movement sensors)? And so forth …

In this instance, positive action leads to legitimate learning, and thus to further action. All-knowing adults are not grooming children into predetermined forms of ‘behaviour change’ (where switching off the lights is always an unquestionable good), but empowering them to arrive at their own ideas about what is responsible and effective. Children are acting as agents both of their own learning and of social and environmental change.

Moreover, 2016’s solutions are unlikely to be those of 2056, so children’s growing ability to criticise, analyse and imagine plausible courses of action is not only educationally richer, but more likely to be useful and sustainable. Professor Bill Scott describes this as ‘learning as sustainability.’

Global learning lenses – a useful scaffold?

The following offers some useful pedagogical scaffolding. It comes courtesy of Tide~’s Spanish project partners at FERE-CECA in Madrid, and takes the form of four ‘global learning lenses.’ These can help us look into any global issue, for example the international food trade.

The Magnifying Glass opens up the issues, including becoming aware of hidden questions about values and the way we use language. We might start by looking at food labels, identifying where things have come from, and finding the places on the map.  Using a questioning framework like the Development Compass Rose we can investigate images of growers and producers in some of these places. We could give them thought or speech bubbles, freeze frame the images, and discuss why they are thinking or saying those things.

The 3D Glasses offer diverse perspectives. These could be subject or place perspectives, the viewpoints of different people in the production cycle. Who earns what from growing a banana?  We could debate-in-role as a banana grower, an importer and a supermarket manager. Are the processes just? Older pupils could look at an international news website and consider what people in different countries are saying about the latest trade talks.

The Microscope looks deeper and more critically into the issues. What would happen if we were to fill a lunchbox using different criteria, such as trading fairly, being environmentally friendly, healthy eating, living on a budget, tastiness?  What would go into only one box? Into all? Which would we opt for and why?  Older children might look at the way a big supermarket chain or a leading brand works. Who is involved and what are the processes?

The Telescope envisions solutions and engages us in ‘utopian thinking’. We might write or draw an imaginary classroom, school or community of the near future where all its food is provided fairly and with the environment in mind. From this, we might decide to set up a food growing project at the school, or to support a particular producer, and present our work to peers and parents. Outputs of this kind not only concentrate and focus learning, but lend it real purpose.

Like any pedagogical journey, we need to consider our aims, the kind of approaches that best suit the content (and the children) and to have some useful tools at our disposal. I look forward to hearing how readers’ global learning journeys go.

Ben Ballin works for the educational charity Tide~ global learning. He is also a consultant to the Geographical Association and Big Brum Theatre in Education.

Contact

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