CPRT Blog

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January 29, 2016 by Mel Ainscow

Learning from difference

Based on a review of research evidence, our forthcoming report, commissioned by the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, concludes that current national policy is limiting the capacity of the English primary education system to respond to pupil diversity. In so doing, it is failing to build on many promising practices that exist in schools. As also shown in CPRT’s recent report on educational inequality from Kate Pickett and Laura Vanderbloemen, all of this is tending to create further levels of segregation within the system, to the particular disadvantage of learners from minority and economically poorer backgrounds. The report provides an analysis of the factors that are creating these difficulties, taking into account underlying population diversity and the impact of recent changes.

The primary school system has, of course, long had to respond to demographic change – not just inward migration, but within-country migration and population growth. Likewise, schools themselves have had to find ways of educating children from very different backgrounds within the same institution and in the same classroom. Indeed, the most apparently homogeneous classroom is in fact diverse simply because no two children are identical in educational terms.

The most overt markers of difference, such as ethnicity or social class, are simply indicators of the underlying diversity that characterises schools and classrooms. Rapid changes in patterns of diversity, whether they are attributable to migration, population growth, gentrification or any other cause, are important because they present immediate challenges – and opportunities – to the school system. However, the presence or absence of such changes does not alter the fundamental task of schools to educate children who are different one from another.

We believe that it is encouraging that schools now enjoy an enhanced level of autonomy that provides space for them to determine their own responses. They are less beholden to central initiatives, less constrained by detailed curriculum and pedagogical guidance, and more likely to be operating independently of local authority oversight. There are, therefore, undoubtedly opportunities for schools to respond to the diversity of their populations in creative ways. However, our concern is that national accountability requirements are as powerful as ever, limiting creativity and risk-taking by their focus on a narrow conceptualisation of the purposes of education.

We are also concerned that alongside the reduction of external constraints there is far less of the support to schools that went with them. Schools are more likely to be working in isolation, or as part of academy chains, federations and other networks that may or may not provide effective support. Moreover, whilst school budgets have been protected, they have failed to keep pace with rising costs, and the distribution of ‘additional’ funding does not match the educational challenges facing schools as their profile of pupil diversity expands. In this context, much depends on what individual head teachers choose to do – and what the accountability systems will allow them to do. As a result, the school system is a more fragmented one, in which substantial social segregation is reflected and reproduced.

In the report we go on to explain that despite the barriers created by national policy there are primary schools that find creative ways of responding to diversity. In order to build on these promising developments, there is a need for radical new thinking that will encourage greater collaboration and experimentation across the education service. This requires a recognition that differences can act as a catalyst for innovation in ways that have the potential to benefit all pupils, whatever their personal characteristics and home circumstances. In terms of national policy, this requires a move way from narrow definitions of the purposes of education as criticised by the Cambridge Primary Review, CPRT and, most recently, in Robin Alexander’s submission to the current House of Commons Education Committee enquiry into the purposes and quality of education in England. There is also a need to create a system in which schools are no longer divided one from another, and from their local communities.

With this in mind, we propose a different way of responding to learner diversity, one that is viewed in relation to what we describe as an ‘ecology of equity’. By this we mean that the extent to which pupils’ experiences and outcomes are equitable is not dependent only on the educational practices of their schools. Instead, it depends on a whole range of interacting processes that reach into the school from outside. These include both the ways in which the local school system operates to support or undermine individual schools, and the underlying social and economic processes that shape the experiences of children and their families.

This suggests that in responding to pupil diversity it is necessary to address three interlinked sets of factors that bear on the learning of children. These relate to: within-school factors to do with existing policies and practices; between-school factors that arise from the characteristics of local school systems; and beyond-school factors, including the demographics, economics, cultures and histories of local areas. In the report we consider each of these in turn in order to develop our argument as to what needs to happen in order to strengthen primary schools’ capacity for responding to pupil diversity.

The introduction of this new thinking has major implications for national policy. In particular, it means that those who are closest to children and their communities must have the space and encouragement to make decisions about how all their pupils can be best educated. Crucially, it must allow practitioners to explore new ways of working without fear of the consequences if outcomes are not immediately improved. It should also encourage greater collaboration between schools in order to make the best practices available to a wider number of pupils. This, in turn, requires the development of an intermediary layer capable of interpreting national purposes at the local level; of promoting the networking of schools with each other and with other agencies; and able to learn from creative developments at the local level and feed them back into national policy.

Mel Ainscow wrote this blog in collaboration with Alan Dyson and Lise Hopwood. All three work at The University of Manchester Institute of Education. Their jointly-authored CPRT research report ‘Primary schools responding to diversity: barriers and possibilities’ will be published early in 2016. It complements the CPRT report from Kate Pickett and Laura Vanderbloemen ‘Mind the Gap: tackling social and educational inequality’ which we published last September.

January 22, 2016 by Lise Hopwood

Education is safe in their hands

Last Wednesday, one of the main lecture theatres at The University of Manchester resounded to loud cheers, a standing ovation and the rapturous applause of over 400 trainee teachers and NQTs.

Was this an enthusiastic response to the thought-provoking keynote speeches in which experienced headteachers shared their words of wisdom, or to the dextrous ad-libbing of wordsmith Lemm Sissay? No, it was an unprompted outburst of delight for the two songs performed by the Makaton choir of the Bridge College, Manchester, a college which supports young people with a range of learning disabilities and communication disorders. For the gathered audience of emerging teachers, it was the exuberance of the life, the personalities and the music of the Bridge Makaton choir that gave meaning to the conference theme of ‘Inclusion and Inspiration: education for social justice’.

Education, the media, politicians and Joe-public alike prefer to work with neatly identified categories of groups of people and, indeed, invitations for this conference were sent out according to the university’s labelled groups of trainees: the primary PGCE trainees; the secondary PGCE trainees; School Direct trainees; Teach First trainees; and our last year’s trainees who are now NQTs.

However, the message of the keynotes and the twenty-four seminars on offer was incontestably that behind all the educational labels that trip off the tongue so easily are individuals with individual gifts and individual challenges. Gathering our trainees together in mixed phase seminars provided an opportunity for each trainee to step out beyond their designated peer group and to learn how trainees in other classrooms, other key stages and other contexts might address the practical classroom challenge of responding to the diversity of learners in our schools.

Last week’s CPRT blog by Branwen Bingle focussed on the need to recognise and support the gendered individuality of children and families so that they may be enabled to‘celebrate who they and their families really are’. The Manchester ‘Inclusion and inspiration’ conference had a similar goal of understanding and celebrating the educational and social diversity of individual children in our classrooms. Some of the seminars aimed to extend trainee understanding of the needs that might lie behind such labels as autism, children’s mental health, pupils with EAL, dyslexia and dyscalculia. Other seminars presented classroom-based approaches such as de-escalation strategies, growth mindsets, philosophy for children, and the UNICEF rights respecting framework, all of which can be used to support access to learning for as wide a group of children as possible. The choice of seminars served to emphasise the range of diverse needs that pupils bring with them to school and the immense task each teacher faces as they construct appropriate learning opportunities for all.

One trainee emailed me after the conference to say, ‘II just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed the session at the conference last week on working with EAL pupils. It really got me to think more about the pupils behind the “language barrier”, rather than just strategies for helping them.’

We noticed that some trainees started the day with specific questions about practical strategies for ‘dealing with’ children’s educational, emotional and social needs as this can be the immediate, albeit short-term, response to a specific individual in a placement class. However, many more trainees ended the day expressing the realisation that the starting point for any teacher is actually the professional need to ensure that each pupil feels ‘valued, cared for, respected and listened to’; precisely those values highlighted by Carol Robinson’s 2014 CPRT report on Children’s Voice.

As earlier CPRT blogs from Stephanie Northen and Sadie Phillips have reminded us, time to learn how to value and listen to each child as an individual is all too often squeezed out by the intensity of the PGCE course and the daily practical demands laid on trainee and NQT alike. Delivering high quality and effective teaching in lesson after lesson requires a stock-exchange trader’s sharpness of focus and a portfolio of finely honed time management skills. But – and there’s always a but when working with young people – for a new teacher to learn how to take each individual child beyond the labels that are assigned to them takes time. It takes time to talk to individuals; it takes time to think about individuals; it takes time to talk to colleagues and parents and siblings about individuals; it takes time to read about the experiences of others working with the individual diversity of our pupil populations. A quick glance through the CPRT priorities shows how the impact of individual diversity in our schools lies at the heart of so much in education. Systematic advances in equality and access, in pupil achievement and enrichment rely on teachers gaining and applying increasing professional insight into the reality of the individual diversity of their pupils.

The response of Manchester’s bright-eyed and bushy-tailed trainee teachers to the Bridge choir showed in no uncertain terms that those choosing to embark on the professional pathway of a teacher are doing so because they already value what children and young people can offer. We don’t need to convince new or not-so–new teachers that children have the potential to amaze and delight. Rather what we do need to do is to enable our newest recruits to hold on to their enthusiasm by giving them the time, the support and the opportunities to build their professional insight.

This does not happen overnight nor does it happen in the odd few moments snatched between lesson preparation and assessment record keeping. The ‘inclusion and inspiration’ of children depend on teachers having time to learn to listen to them as individuals with unique needs not merely as representatives of labelled groups. All that then remains is to persuade educational policymakers that the future of education really is safe in the hands of those who by inclination and by training seek to put the needs of children first.

Lise Hopwood leads the English primary PGCE at The University of Manchester and is the new co-ordinator of CPRT’s Great Manchester network. If you would like to join Lise in developing the network’s regional activities, contact her here.

January 15, 2016 by Branwen Bingle

Equality: do we really mean it?

The start of a new calendar year is a time traditionally given over to resolutions and promises to change. Good intentions often falter because we fail to identify or address the root causes of our existing patterns of behaviour. We wouldn’t need that diet if we really understood and applied the principles of healthy eating, for example. Nothing magical happens on January 1st that will enable us to adopt a way of life we have studiously avoided for the previous 365 days. It takes effort to establish new patterns and habits.

I think this resistance to change might offer a possible explanation as to why, as 2016 starts, we as a society are still fighting for an equality which has been enshrined in law since 2010. I am referring to the right not to be discriminated against as a result of gender reassignment or sexual orientation, protected characteristics under UK law.

Now, there will be some who are uncomfortable with these being part of a blog about primary education, and to them I say: that is exactly my point. After 5 years it should not be the case that so many educators have failed to consider their public duty in relation to the Equalities Act. After five years, one could expect a profession guided by an underpinning set of values that are meant to include tolerance, democracy and mutual respect to have addressed these issues sensitively. So why will Christmas 2015 be remembered by one child as the one where the gendered gift given by the school reminded them they are expected to identify and conform to conventional expectations relating to the gender assigned at their birth? Why was 2015 the year where the child in reception was told to put both of her mothers on one Mother’s Day card rather than make them one each to show the uniqueness of her relationship with them? Why in 2015 were LGBT teachers still questioning whether they should come out at work for fear of the response from their colleagues, senior management and parents, despite the fact that the law is on their side?

Those who want easy answers will dismiss these instances with either a comment about political correctness gone mad or, worse, a blanket ban on all gendered events or language to do with LGBT issues. This is ironic, as CPRT has actually given us the simplest answer of all: listen to the children’s voices and work with them to develop an inclusive classroom that celebrates the diversity of their families. Recognise their rights and the rights of their families.

Carol Robinson’s 2014 CPRT report on Children’s Voice details how a Rights-Respecting School can enhance children’s learning through making them feel ‘valued, cared for, respected and listened to’ (p.5). It acknowledges the positive effect developing such a classroom culture has on staff collegiality and the relationship between teachers and pupils. It seems bizarre then that any primary school leadership team would be complicit in discrimination based on LGBT rights, and yet I hear regularly of incidents such as those above. The reason I am an advocate for CPRT is because as CPR’s evidence and CPRT’s aims and priorities make clear, it advocates a more equal society; reports like Carol’s demonstrate how important it is to keep reviewing and refining the response to CPRT aims until we no longer hear these anecdotes because they no longer happen.

CPRT Priority 2 is to advance children’s voice. It is possible to teach about the meaning behind Mother’s Day and to ask the children about all of their mother-figures, allowing them to make cards for all. The same will work on Father’s Day. If a child does not have a mother or father figure, we can discuss what qualities we think these people should have and pick the person we feel demonstrates them. It may be a fictional character or a famous person. It is not up to us to reassign the card to someone who makes us feel more comfortable: let the children write their card for whomsoever they choose.

As for gendered gifts, either make the effort to find out which they would prefer (regardless of their assigned gender) or give all children the same. Next December, a simple communication from Father Christmas asking them to tick a box next to the options will allow us to find out the children’s preference. We are not asking the children if they feel they are transgender: we are simply acknowledging their diversity and not expecting them to conform to gender stereotypes.

If none of this convinces, then maybe an argument that will persuade us to address such inequity is the link between equity, educational achievement and bullying as recorded in the evidence attached to CPRT Priority 1. In their 2015 CPRT research report Mind the Gap, Kate Pickett and Laura Vanderbloemen point out that ‘inequalities in educational outcomes are more profound in more unequal countries’ and that ‘average levels of educational attainment and children’s engagement in education are better in more equal societies’; and the 2014 Teachers’ Report produced by Stonewall states that ‘Almost half of primary school teachers (45 per cent) say that pupils at their school have experienced homophobic bullying or name-calling.’

It would not be unreasonable to look beyond socio-economic issues to include wider inequalities; to link the number of teachers citing homophobic incidents in primary settings with an inequality in recognising the diversity of our school population. Bullying and discrimination affect attainment; they affect children’s engagement in school and they are something we should be addressing until no child is a victim. The CPRT Children’s Voice report highlighted UNICEF UK’s finding that staff and pupils in rights-respecting environments often commented on the low incidents of bullying. It would seem to suggest that the best way of tackling issues of bullying and discrimination is to develop an ethos that respects people’s rights according to the laws of our society.

As part of the teacher training we offer at the University of Worcester there is explicit provision relating to equality and diversity, including tackling homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying on all postgraduate and undergraduate primary teaching courses. As a student-led project the university has set up a series of webpages, and other help is available.

So no more excuses: this is something we can resolve to address this year in order to give children the opportunity to express their true voice and celebrate who they and their families really are in all our schools. It is time to respect their rights.

Branwen Bingle of the University of Worcester co-ordinates CPRT’s new West Midlands network. If you would like to join Branwen in developing the network’s school-related activities please contact her here.

January 8, 2016 by Sadie Phillips

Reflections from an NQT: surviving or thriving?

Last June, Sadie posted about training for primary teaching and looked forward to becoming an NQT. Here’s the sequel.

Rewind to Sunday 31^st August and you would have found me sitting on my sofa staring down the barrel of my first year as a teacher, wondering what the new academic term would bring. My classroom was beautifully decorated, I had planned my first few weeks of teaching and I was armed with plenty of ‘back to school’ activities to get to know my new class. Adrenaline had kicked in and I was looking forward to making a difference to the children of the inner-city academy I had chosen for my first teaching role. I felt well-rested, eager and raring to go.

Flash forward to present day: I’ve survived my first term as an NQT and the metaphorical onion has revealed its layers, the reality of teaching has become apparent and during the past four months I have experienced a rollercoaster of emotions. It has been exhilarating, exhausting and at times overwhelming.

Initially, I felt as though I was treading water, simply keeping afloat. For the first time in a long time I felt insecure and out of my depth, I continually questioned everything I was doing. It quickly became clear that teacher training does not fully prepare you for the challenges encountered during your first post as a fully-fledged teacher. It is an immense learning curve. I learnt more in those first few weeks than I had in my entire training year. Move over PGCE, welcome to the world of full-time teaching.

The deprived school in East London was a stark contrast to the primaries in Cornwall and Devon where I had completed my training. I was dealing with a high proportion of children with English as an Additional Language (EAL) and over half of my class were considered to have Special Educational Needs (SEN). The high volume of SEN and EAL pupils forced me to adapt my teaching and think outside the box. Thankfully, this is where pedagogy came into play and all those research papers I scrutinised during my PGCE began to form the basis of my teaching across this diverse range of pupils.

To make matters worse, I was also tackling extreme behaviour issues and became aware early on that embedding consistent behaviour strategies in the day-to-day routine was key to ensuring Sarah wouldn’t run out of the classroom when she was feeling frustrated or that Fred wouldn’t lash out at other children when he couldn’t keep his temper under control.

Combine all this with the announcement that two executive heads were parachuting in due to the secondary’s ‘catastrophic GCSE results’, the ensuing resignation of the primary head teacher, and you’ve got all the ingredients for a pretty tough start to an NQT year, but I’ve not let it put me off… yet.

My first term was a blur of planning, marking, getting to grips with behaviour management strategies, learning about my pupils, getting to know colleagues and spending more time than expected within the four walls of the classroom. My partner forgot what I looked like and when I did surface at home late into the evening I spent a lot of time drinking coffee, marking, planning, completing paperwork and preparing resources, not to mention compiling evidence towards to the teaching standards for my NQT file and striving to meet weekly targets set by my NQT mentor.

As a full time primary teacher, I expected to teach 80 percent of my 30-hour timetabled week, with only 10 percent of time allocated to completing NQT tasks, observations, reflections and training, and a further 10 percent allocated to the two remaining, yet fundamental, aspects of the role: marking and planning. An incredible burden is placed on this 10 percent and, no matter how hard I tried, I found it impossible to keep up – leaving all outstanding tasks to be completed in my own time.

Those who know me well would describe me as incredibly organised and highly efficient, qualities I pride myself on. Yet I found myself struggling to get everything done – there simply wasn’t enough time in the day. I led a miserable existence for those first seven weeks. I was working 14-16 hour days on a regular basis, which was completely unsustainable of course. Inevitably, I became ill and despite the fear of falling even further behind I took a sick day. Physically and mentally exhausted, I began to question whether I had made the right decision by pursuing a career in teaching. I hate to admit it, but for the first time I had serious doubts about my future within this new profession.

Thankfully after half term something clicked. I realised that I was trying to be a perfectionist – working too hard, ticking every box, exceeding expectations and trying to make every lesson amazing. I took some time to reflect on my teaching and acknowledged that, in education, resilience is a daily necessity. I wanted to be the perfect teacher, but teaching is a lifetime’s craft. I will never perfect it, nor will I ever complete my ‘to do’ list. Once I accepted this, I began to master the art of resilience. Although I still work on Sundays and am yet to fully establish the elusive work-life balance, I’m working on it. I’ve begun to know when to stop, when to let go and when to switch off, I’ve started to look after myself and feel less guilty about meeting friends, pursuing hobbies or having an evening off.

My teaching philosophies and principles are steeped in the work of the Cambridge Primary Review and the Cambridge Primary Review Trust and I have always endeavored to demonstrate these in my day-to-day practice, but when you’re bogged down by bureaucracy it’s easy to forget about the great intentions and aspirations you had at the start of the year.

My first term of teaching has provided so many challenges that I’ve inadvertently discovered so much more about myself. I have become less self-critical, more forgiving of my own mistakes. Whereas I was once left feeling battered and bruised by observation pressures, scrutiny and the persistent need to develop subject knowledge across the curriculum, I now focus on the positives; recognising my own successes, reflecting on mistakes, identifying areas for improvement and developing a reassuring support network. My colleagues and fellow NQTs have been an invaluable source of support through the highs and lows, both in school and online.

Recently, when re-reading the CPR final report, I had my own light-bulb moment (the kind that I love seeing in the children so much). I remembered precisely why I became a teacher in the first place: to make a difference. The key aims and priorities outlined by CPR and CPRT reminded me that being a teacher isn’t simply about teaching the curriculum; it really is about so much more.

I strive for this kind of principled approach not only to the curriculum, but also the whole experience that I offer children in my care. At times I have been a therapist, a mediator, a comedian, a disciplinarian, a motivator, a guardian and a source of comfort. I use the CPRT aims as aspirational tools to remind me what’s important – over and above government priorities. The CPR final report provides the evidence to remind us that we can (and must!) trust ourselves as professionals to provide for pupils’ development and learning. Great teaching doesn’t have to be complicated, it’s about getting the simple things right.

Despite all its trials and tribulations, teaching truly is one of the most rewarding and fulfilling careers there are and at the beginning of the year I promised myself I would remember this. It’s not always easy to cultivate a positive outlook, especially in the depths of a dark and gloomy January, but it really does make a difference and I feel so much better for it. It reflects in my teaching too. If I’m tired the kids won’t get the best from me. I need to look after myself. We all do. So, once I’ve finished this blog you’ll find me on my sofa relaxing and enjoying the last few moments of the Christmas break, before the New Year – and the new term – begins.

Having completed her PGCE, Sadie Phillips is teaching at a primary school in London. Read her previous CPRT blog and follow her at @SadiePhillips.

January 4, 2016 by Robin Alexander

What’s the point?

Digital literacy is more than coding

It is just over a year since the introduction of computing as a named subject within England’s National Curriculum. While research exploring schools’ experience of this change will no doubt be forthcoming, it seems timely to reflect on opportunities that may be missed through this re-working of technology in the curriculum.

Like others I was frustrated by the idea of children in Key Stage 2 being taught to create PowerPoints (an example often used to deride the old ICT curriculum) when many were already using digital technology in far more sophisticated ways outside school. Like others I’m excited by the work being done to support children to code, demystifying skills that had seemed the preserve of the few and equipping them to engage in all kinds of creative and exploratory activities. What concerns me though is that the enthusiasm for programming – and the training, expenditure and resources associated with it – may detract from issues and questions that are equally or perhaps even more important in a digital age.

I take a broad look at such issues and questions in a report commissioned by the Cambridge Primary Review Trust which will be published in the new year: The Digital Age and its Implications for Learning and Teaching in the Primary School. Part 1 of the report summarises research related to how we use digital technology in everyday life, including how it is used by children, and identifies challenges and opportunities facing primary education. Recognising that children’s experiences are often uneven, it proposes that we need to do far more than equip children with skills or knowledge, whether these are the ‘matters, skills and processes’ associated with the computing curriculum or with frameworks such as Go On UK’s Basic Digital Skills Framework. The report proposes that we need to consider cultural, social, creative, ethical, and civic questions and explore technology use in relation to fundamental debates about how we see education and the role of schools. This involves thinking about technology in relation to things that have long been priorities in many primary schools and indeed the Cambridge Primary Review Trust: pedagogy, social justice, relationships, creativity, community.

Part 2 explores how research is shaping ideas about how schools respond to these challenges and opportunities, while Part 3 proposes implications for policy-makers and education leaders, and recommendations for schools and teachers. Research is considered in terms of five broad ‘traditions’ representing different perspectives on how schools might take account of the digital age. These traditions include: technology across the curriculum; 21^st century skills; computer science; participation, learning and digital media; and new literacies. The point here is that different kinds of research (often involving different communities of educationalists and researchers) are generating different kinds of insights and there is a need to explore how these different traditions, whose aims are sometimes complementary and sometimes not, intersect.

There isn’t space here to explore all five traditions discussed in my review. However, considering the contribution of one of these – new literacies – illustrates some ways in which our response to the digital age needs to go beyond the computing curriculum as specifed by DfE.

Literacy in everyday life is commonly understood to be changing rapidly and researchers in the field of new literacies are helping to describe these changes and explore implications for literacy in schools. More than ever, people produce as well as access texts, negotiating their lives online. These literacies are multimodal, incorporating images, moving images and hyperlinks, for example, and increasingly mobile as people keep in touch with others and search for information on the move. And then of course there are all the associated concerns about personal and financial security, state supervision and use of social media by sexual predators and terrorist groups. Thinking about how technology intersects with social, cultural, political and economic activity has never been more pressing. And in the light of this, never has it been more important for children to be able to navigate digital resources creatively and critically, to consider how to put them to use, and review what others’ uses mean for what they might or are able to do.

Creative, cultural, critical dimensions are also relevant to lots of the activities taking place during computing lessons. In many schools children are using programs like Scratch and Kodu to create animations and games. This process involves thinking about aesthetics, coherence and how players or viewers will interact with what they produce. These are things that researchers and practitioners in the field of new literacies have long argued should be part of literacy provision. An expanded literacy curriculum would recognise the wide range of media that children use and encounter, and the diverse literacy practices in which they do and could engage in their current and future lives.

And yet English in the national curriculum includes no explicit references to digital media at all. Schools are of course free to interpret programmes of study as they choose and many integrate film, computer games, social media and so on in innovative ways, and of course the ‘digital literacy’ element of computing goes some way to addressing these issues. However, as I explore with Becky Parry and Guy Merchant in a new book Literacy, Media, Technology: past, present, future (Bloomsbury, forthcoming) much of this is hindered by a curriculum, accountability framework and testing arrangements that do not appear to value the mobile, multimodal literacies that are so common in everyday life.

So I applaud the new emphasis on programming but also argue that, in ensuring that all can draw on digital technologies in ways that are personally fulfilling and economically, socially and politically empowering, we need to consider how provision for digital technologies relates to the values and aspirations that underpin our wider vision for children’s learning across and beyond the curriculum. As Neil Selwyn and Kerry Facer argued in The Politics of Education and Technology technology – like everything else in education – is never neutral.

Professor Cathy Burnett leads the Language and Literacy Education Research Group at Sheffield Hallam University. Her CPRT research report The Digital Age and its Implications for Learning and Teaching in the Primary School will be published early next term.

December 4, 2015 by Matt Coward

Rubbish RE?

Under the heading of ‘Rubbish RE’, the National Association of Teachers of Religious Education (NATRE) has listed ten pitfalls of RE teaching:

Repetition; boredom; stereotypes flourishing; no time, no reflection; dissipating RE in cross-curricular work; all religions presented as the same; covert indoctrination; misinformation; information to the point of invisibility; specialism (don’t make me laugh).

The final comment is NATRE’s, not mine. A lot of the ‘rubbish RE’ characterised above illustrates the ‘muddled discourse about subjects, knowledge and skills’ described in the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review (pp 245-9), and other Review concerns are carried forward into recent research reports from the Cambridge Primary Review Trust. Prejudice and inequality leading to stereotyping are discussed in Kate Pickett and Laura Vanderbloemen’s Mind the Gap; this topic will also be picked up by Michael Jopling and Sharon Vincent in their report on vulnerable children, which will be published in the New Year.

Teachers’ curriculum knowledge is the final item in the NATRE list. This too is a recurrent CPR/CPRT preoccupation (CPR final report, pp 431-4), while in her recent CPRT blog Squirrel on acid Stephanie Northen commented:

Most teachers, in fact most humans, would struggle to become expert enough to teach English, maths and science – never mind French, computing, history, geography, art, music, RE, PE … This is especially so given that good teaching requires so much more than knowledge.

A recent report by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Religious Education entitled RE: The Truth Unmasked presents some striking figures about RE in the primary classroom. For instance: only 44 per cent of pupils are taught RE by their class teacher and 25 per cent are taught RE by a teaching assistant during their class teacher’s PPA time. Although, as the report notes, RE being taught by an HLTA does not generally affect the performance of pupils, it does underline the perceived low status of RE within schools. In as far as too often it impacts on the quality of teaching, this over-sharp status differentiation was something that the CPR final report argued against (p 505):

Children have a right to a curriculum which is consistently well taught regardless of the perceived significance of its various elements or the amount of time devoted to them.

This is echoed in the fourth of CPRT’s eight priorities:

Develop a broad, balanced and rich entitlement curriculum which responds to both national and local need, eliminates the damaging division of status and quality between core and non-core, and teaches every subject, domain or aspect to the highest possible standard.

An initial teacher educator who provided evidence to the All Party RE Group noted that a ‘lack of confidence in RE was the main reason why so many teachers avoided teaching it’. This lack of confidence first took root during teacher training’ (para. 2.8). Linda Whitworth of Middlesex University is reported (p 10) as noting that approximately 50 per cent of her students had concerns about teaching RE. These concerns included fear of causing offence, not being accurate about religions, and the difficulty of managing their own beliefs and attitudes in a multicultural classroom.

Whitword’s comments are paralleled by NATRE’s 2013 report which found that 24.4 per cent of trainee teachers had no training to deliver RE and 48.5 per cent received less than three hours across their programme. RE: The Truth Unmasked went further, finding that even RE leaders in primary schools lacked training in the discipline with 67 per cent of them lacking degree qualifications including religious studies or theology and 37 per cent holding no RE qualification at all. As CPR’s final report noted:

For as long as initial teacher training is directed [solely] at the role of the generalist class teacher, it will be hard pressed to provide what is required, especially on the one-year PGCE route.

Like any other subject, RE requires appropriate professional knowledge. Within this subject, as NATRE notes, there is no room for misinformation. RE gives rise to questions requiring accurate answers, and a lack of appropriate education may warp pupils’ perceptions of other faiths, beliefs and religious practices.

The place of RE in the curriculum was discussed at length in CPR’s final report. Evidence was provided by, among many others, John Hall, Dean of Westminister and former Chief Education Officer of the Church of England Education Division. He said (p233):

Religious Education in any faith-based school is not simply a subject making up a proportion of the taught curriculum. It pervades the whole life of the school (p 233)

While the submission from Bradford’s SACRE submission added (p 233):

[RE] …deals with some of the world’s most significant and ancient teachings and literatures and is, at its best, a challenging subject area.

What needs emphasis here is ‘at its best.’ When we strip down the curriculum stance of CPR and CPRT to its core value, it calls for not only religious education but the primary curriculum as a whole to be at its best.

A different perspective, also presented as evidence to CPR, comes from the British Humanist Association (BHA). BHA (p 234)

accepted the cultural case for teaching about religion but within a framework of even-handed and sympathetic exploration of belief, morality and worldviews from both religious and non-religious perspectives.

This view which is close to the wise words of Katy (age 7) in the prospectus of St Leonard’s C of E Primary School in Exeter – a member of CPRT’s Schools Alliance. Of RE at her school Katy says:

Everyone is included. It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in God and Jesus.

In line with all this, CPR’s final report argued (p 268), though with careful qualifications, that faith and belief should be one of the eight domains of a genuinely broad and balanced curriculum:

On the question of religious education, we take the view that religion is so fundamental to this country’s history, culture and language, as well as to the daily lives of many of its inhabitants, that it must remain within the curriculum, even though some Review witnesses argued that it should be removed on the grounds that England is a predominantly secular society or that religious belief is for the family rather than the school. However, while denominational schools see their mission as the advancement of particular religious beliefs and moral codes, non-denominational schools should remain essentially secular, teaching about religion with respect and understanding, but not attempting to inculcate or convert. Further, other beliefs, including those about the validity of religion itself, should also be explored. This approach helps us to resolve the quandary of moral education, for in teaching about a religion its ethical elements can be handled with the same sympathetic objectivity as we commend for the treatment of its beliefs and rituals.

CPR has gone out on a limb here, for an Opinium survey of 2013 religious education was rated the ‘least beneficial subject’. Almost certainly, this says more about the quality of RE teaching than the value of RE as such. RE is a valuable asset in the primary curriculum; introducing students to diversity and multiculturalism. It explores ethical issues and allows children to engage in difficult conversations in a safe and constructive environment. It allows for the breaking down of social, economic and cultural barriers and helps children to grow into confident citizens of a global community.

Matt Coward is Administrator of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust

November 27, 2015 by Michael Jopling

Support for vulnerable children: another ZPD?

To many educational practitioners, especially those who work with younger children, ZPD is one of the most widely-recognised acronyms. But I was recently reminded of another ZPD, which, although it is unlikely ever to rival Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, should make us think. In his A Year with Swollen Appendices (p. 301), Brian Eno identifies the ‘Zone of Pragmatic Deceit’, a ZPD which he describes as:

the social and mental inventions that exist to ease the friction between what we claim to stand for […] and what we actually have to do to make things work .

When the Coalition Government came to power in 2010, it was careful to express a concern with ‘vulnerable children’: there are numerous references in the 2010 White Paper, The Importance of Teaching, for example. But the White Paper was implemented alongside a range of pragmatic policies which undermined the effectiveness of initiatives like the Pupil Premium, the Coalition’s flagship education policy for combatting socio-economic disadvantage. As Lupton & Thomson (p. 17) have recently emphasised:

Post-election debate around socio-economic inequalities in education has largely focused on whether the new Conservative government will stick to its pledge to retain the Pupil Premium. A more important question is whether the Pupil Premium can be expected to have any meaningful impact as part of a suite of education and social policies likely to work in the opposite direction.

In Vulnerable Children: needs and provision in the primary phase, a research review commissioned by CPRT which will be published shortly, Sharon Vincent and I examine policies supporting and affecting vulnerable children since the Coalition Government took up office in 2010, and we explore the extent to which changes to policy and practice in this period have had any meaningful impact on the wellbeing and education of vulnerable children. As such, the report directly addresses the Cambridge Primary Review Trust’s first two priorities: to ‘tackle the continuing challenge of social and educational disadvantage, and find practical ways to help schools to close the overlapping gaps in social equity and educational attainment’ and ‘advance children’s voice and rights in school and classroom’.

Our review relates closely to Mind the Gap, the CPRT report by Kate Pickett and Laura Vanderbloemen, published in September 2015, which examined the evidence associating social and economic inequality with unequal educational outcomes. Inequality and poverty are primary causes of vulnerability in children. A growing body of evidence demonstrates the strong relationship between vulnerability in childhood (including abuse and neglect and exposure to domestic violence) and issues such as mental health, school underperformance and poor physical health in adulthood. This means that schools have a much broader role in relation to children they identify as vulnerable than merely focusing on educational attainment. In the report we take a dual perspective to approaching the still contentious and under-defined area of vulnerability in children, combining an educational perspective with a social welfare approach in order to shed light from allied but different angles.

One of the challenges we faced in writing the report was to define ‘vulnerable children’, for vulnerability remains a contested term. In 2010, the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review (p. 60) found that:

There is still a risk of ‘vulnerable’ becoming a professional euphemism, couched within a deficit model that views disadvantaged children as a ‘nuisance’, ‘incomplete’ or somehow ‘insufficient’.

Taking as our starting point Ainscow and colleagues’ assertion in one of the CPR research surveys that ‘difference in the primary school population is not so much identified as constructed […] and that implications for policy and practice flow from these constructions’, we review five different taxonomies of vulnerability in policy and research. Their variability was their most striking feature. Our analysis leads us to propose a needs-based definition of vulnerability, influenced by the more rights and assets-based approaches common in countries such as Scotland, in which vulnerable children are regarded as having special educational, complex and/or additional needs, caused by a range of intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Schools and other agencies working with children need to take such factors into account in an ecological and holistic approach that puts the child and their needs at the centre of support.

In reviewing national, local and in-school policy initiatives relating to vulnerable children, the deficit perspective feared and highlighted in the quotation above is all too evident in policy since 2010. The Troubled Families programme, instigated after the riots of 2011, is a case in point. Families and local authorities have criticised the use of the word ‘troubled’ and the willingness of politicians like Eric Pickles when Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, to assert when discussing the programme in 2012 that ‘we have sometimes run away from categorising, stigmatising, laying blame. We need a less understanding approach’. Such language contrasts sharply with the long term, universal approach adopted in the Getting It Right for Every Child (GIRFEC) initiative which was introduced in Scotland in 2005. We also discuss a number of policies and initiatives focused on supporting vulnerable children and families and involving school. These include the Pupil Premium, local authority policies such as Liverpool’s families programme, and in-school initiatives such as nurture groups and resilience programmes.

We conclude our report by noting that although there is a growing evidence base relating to the effectiveness of pre-school interventions, far less is known about the effectiveness of interventions during the primary phase. Some of the factors that have been identified as key to the success of interventions in the early years, such as targeting multiple areas of need and multi-agency working, are likely to be equally effective in the primary phase. A body of evidence suggests that early intervention across the age range and focused on the whole family improves wellbeing, protects children and makes financial sense. Evidence also shows that narrowly-focused programmes attempting to address single issues are unlikely to deliver the desired outcomes for vulnerable children.

One of the implications for policy and practice with which we end the report is that a strengths, assets and solution-focused approach is necessary to build resilience in children and families to equip them with coping skills so they can sustain progress once formal supports have been withdrawn. As the current furore over the proposed cuts to tax credits – which will disproportionately affect vulnerable children – indicates, it is difficult to see how this could be effected as long as pragmatic needs and deceits encourage policy makers to take with one hand even before they give with the other.

Michael Jopling is Professor of Education at Northumbria University and CPRT’s Regional Co-ordinator for the North East.

The CPRT report on vulnerable children by Michael Jopling and Sharon Vincent will be published in late December or early January.

November 20, 2015 by Marianne Cutler

Life after levels

Since September 2015, national curriculum levels are no longer being used for statutory assessments in schools in England. Schools are now required to develop new approaches to their own in-school assessment and this provides welcome opportunities for evolving purposeful assessment. But for many schools, gearing up for life after levels involves a step change in approach, and the challenges should not be underestimated.

The final report of the Commission on Assessment without Levels (September 2015) reminds us of the principles and purposes of assessment: (i) in-school formative assessment, (ii) in-school summative assessment and (iii) nationally standardised summative assessment. The report provides helpful guidance on writing school assessment policies, and raises important questions for teachers and school leaders when they consider data collection and reporting – what uses the assessments are intended to support, the quality of the assessment information, the frequency for collecting and reporting, and the time required to record the information – noting that much of teachers’ time that could be better spent in classrooms is unnecessarily taken up with data management systems. I am sure we could all agree with that.

Of course for many schools, meaningful assessment has been a priority for a long time. Iain Erskine, principal at Fulbridge Academy, a CPRT alliance school, provided some detail on their approaches to assessment in his February blog and vice principal, Ben Erskine, has expanded on this for their approach to science:

Children pursue and investigate projects each term that are linked to the topic theme they are studying. Each project has realistic and creative links that allow for opportunities to apply their learning in a real sense, learn the science involved, use their enquiry skills, as well as having some kind of design and technology element. At Fulbridge we teach science and technology as one lesson twice a week. Each term has either a biology, chemistry or physics focus and within this focus, the scientific enquiry and the design and technology curriculum areas are taught. Children are then assessed each term against the areas of science (and technology) that has been covered and their confident use of scientific and technical language.

The approach at Fulbridge chimes with the Nuffield Foundation’s Developing policy, principles and practice in primary school science assessment report in 2012, which was led by Professor Wynne Harlen and sets out a proposed framework for the assessment of science in primary schools. The framework (illustrated as a pyramid model on page 21) describes how evidence of pupils’ attainment should be collected, recorded, communicated and used. The report details how assessment data can be optimised for different uses and outlines the support needed to implement the procedures.

So what could this look like in practice? A follow-on initiative, the Teacher Assessment in Primary Science (TAPS) project is taking place from 2013 – 2016. TAPS is funded by the Primary Science Teaching Trust (PSTT) and is based at Bath Spa University, which co-hosts CPRT’s south-west regional network. This initiative has developed the pyramid model for the flow of assessment information through a school and operationalised it into a whole school self-evaluation tool to support schools in identifying strengths and weaknesses in their assessment systems, and to provide an exemplified model of good practice.

Sarah Earle, TAPS project lead, comments:

Schools working with the TAPS team have stepped back from tracking systems to look at what would make a difference to children’s learning. They have explored a wide range of ways to elicit, focus and record children’s ideas to develop more valid assessments, and have taken part in moderating discussions to support reliability of teacher assessment. These discussions need to continue to support a shared understanding across the school, with both a new curriculum and new assessment guidance – in the form of the interim teacher assessment framework for 2015-16 at the end of Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2. Most subject leaders are endeavouring to maintain a focus on working scientifically and on assessment for learning rather than being driven by tracking systems.

Sarah shared some case studies from this project in an article ‘An exploration of whole-school assessment systems’ published in the January/February edition of Primary Science. The case studies described different approaches to assessment but identified a shared number of features of good practice: assessment is embedded in the planning process; children are encouraged to take responsibility for their own learning; assessment is ongoing; and there is a clear understanding of ‘what good science looks like’ across the school.

For example, a key focus for assessment at Northbury Primary School is the elicitation of children’s ideas. Units of work are in outline form, each beginning and ending with a thought shower which allows both children and teachers to see progress at the end of the unit, but perhaps more importantly this gives the teacher a starting point for planning. Detailed plans are not completed in advance which allows lessons to take into account initial questions raised by the children and their starting points. This is particularly important as pupil mobility is high.

Assistant Northbury headteacher and science co-ordinator, Kulvinder Johal, comments:

The TAPS pyramid model has been useful from its inception. The first draft, which I was privy too, helped me to gauge what we were doing well and where our gaps were. The gaps will vary from school to school as we are all strong in different areas. Our gap was in identifying next steps in learning. Coupled with some of the key messages from the Ofsted Maintaining curiosity: science education in schools 2013 report , I realised we needed to set science targets for our pupils, much as we did and do in literacy and numeracy. Now our pupils have science targets that they work towards and that they assess themselves against. Having made progress in this area, we then returned to the TAPS pyramid to see where our focus should be and we realised we needed to do more moderating of science work and so we are beginning to address this issue. The TAPS pyramid leads us to better practice, improvements and new challenges, and is a really useful working document.

Shaw CE Primary School has also used the TAPS pyramid model as a focus for improving their approach to assessment as Carol Sampey, Deputy Head and Fellow of the PSTT, notes:

It has been good to be one of the 12 schools who have worked together with Bath Spa to help develop this tool. In my school, we have discussed what good assessment for learning looks like and last year we used the TAPS pyramid as a generic teaching and learning tool when doing lesson observations. Our view was that if teachers were aware of and then incorporating the ongoing formative assessment strategies in all of their teaching, learning would improve across the board. Teachers found this helpful and these strategies became a focus of performance management last year. Practice has improved as a result. It has also been helpful in making our teachers more aware of how to involve the pupils in self – assessment. A next step is to begin to use the TAPS pyramid as a resource tool – to try out focus assessment tasks and to look at what other schools have been doing. I am also going to introduce the TAPS pyramid to other schools in our science cluster.

This is an encouraging picture, and for these schools there certainly is life after levels, and not just for science. Since the TAPS pyramid is based on good practice in formative assessment, then many of the examples, such as peer assessment, are relevant across the primary curriculum. The structure could be used for any system of teacher assessment where validity is supported by using a range of information from the classroom and reliability is supported by moderating discussions.

There will be many different approaches to assessment by primary schools across the country in making the most of the opportunities presented by the removal of levels. Sharing ideas, plans and best practice at this time is particularly helpful, and I invite you to share these through CPRT and elsewhere.

Marianne Cutler is Co-Director of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust and Director of Curriculum Innovation at the Association for Science Education.

Assessment reform is one of CPRT’s eight priorities. CPRT encourages 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.’

See also CPRT’s research report and briefing Assessment, Standards and Quality of Learning in Primary Education by Wynne Harlen (2014)

November 16, 2015 by David Whitebread

Crisis in childhood: the loss of play

A widely recognised and dramatic cultural change over the last two generations, in the UK and many other modern, urbanised and technologically advanced countries, is the change in children’s life experiences. The generation of ‘baby-boomers’ born just after World War II experienced a childhood in which they played out in the street or in the local fields and parks, in groups of children often of very mixed ages. This relative freedom and experience of free play and unstructured time has now very largely disappeared. As I have noted in The Importance of Play, it is currently estimated that around half of all children world-wide now live in urban settings, and experience very reduced opportunities for free play, and particularly free play outdoors, and in natural environments. And as documented in the Cambridge Primary Review final report (pp 53-62), parental concerns about traffic, ‘stranger danger’, germs, disease and so on, have resulted in children’s home lives being structured and supervised to an extent which would have been regarded as bizarre only a couple of generations ago.

This is not simply a romanticising of the past, but is a cause for serious concern. The anthropologist Peter Gray has demonstrated that the loss of free play opportunities for children over the last 50 years has been accompanied by alarming increases in children’s mental health problems.

There is also good evidence that rich play opportunities in the home support children’s transition into school. A recent study by the developmental psychologist Jane Barker in the United States, for example, showed that the more unstructured time children had while out of school, including both indoor and outdoor unsupervised free play and family excursions to settings such as the seaside and museums, the better their ‘executive functioning’ – a crucial set of cognitive skills that support children’s abilities to concentrate, to maintain their attention on task, and that are consequently highly predictive of academic achievement.

In the UK, a study led by Claire Hughes found that the strongest predictor of language and cognitive development among children at the point of starting school was an item completed by their teachers indicating that the child ‘talks about fun activities at home’.

However, we know that the stresses of urban living, particularly for those living in poverty, often significantly reduce the amount of fun and playfulness in the home context, and it is clear that this loss of play experiences in children’s early years reduces their preparedness for school.

One obvious means by which the negative effects of reduced play opportunities in the domestic context could be ameliorated would be the provision of rich play experiences in pre-school and in early schooling. This was a key recommendation of the Cambridge Primary Review, which noted that children in the UK start formal schooling at an unusually young age and reported that evidence from international comparisons and from research, backed up by the opinions of those teachers and parents who argued (p 168) that ‘children are ill-served by starting school at four and embarking on formal, subject-based learning almost immediately.’

Consequently, though subject to concerns about baseline testing, CPR welcomed the Labour government’s Early Years Foundation Stage and recommended (p 491) that it should be extended to age 6, and that the feasibility of raising the school starting age to that age should be examined. However, anticipating the misreading of this recommendation which duly occurred, CPR stressed that the central issue was not the school starting age as such but ‘the character and quality of what our youngest children encounter, whether in pre-school or school settings.’

Tragically, however, in direct contradiction to all the evidence, the trend in UK education policy has been in completely the opposite direction. In the name of ‘raising standards’ and ‘increased rigour’, today’s young children in nursery and primary schools in the UK, the USA and some other developed and developing countries, are being subjected to a long-discredited curriculum which emphasises learning facts at the expense of developing the skills and dispositions that support children in becoming powerful, confident and enthusiastic learners. Many commentators have rightly expressed concern that, at the start of the 21^st century, when, more than ever, we need to be educating our children to be creative problem-solvers, innovators and confident, adaptable learners, this is a totally counter-productive situation. Among the many other concerns about this current direction of travel of education policy for our youngest children is the loss of teaching approaches and learning opportunities grounded in activities which are playful. In the UK, opportunities for young children to learn through playful activities are now almost or completely absent from Year 1 onwards in many primary schools, and under increasing threat in Reception classes and even pre-school settings. The current accountability regime, and the relentless, high-stakes, formal testing of even our very youngest children (baseline assessment at age 4, phonics test at age 6, and the threat of the re-introduction of KS1 SATs at age 7) have seen to that.

While there is much that we still do not understand about how play supports learning and mental health, the evidence of its benefits for a number of areas of development is unequivocal. As I have reviewed elsewhere this evidence comes from a wide range of anthropological, neuroscientific, psychological and educational studies. From anthropological studies of children’s play in extant hunter-gatherer societies, and evolutionary psychology studies of play in the young of other mammalian species, it is clear that play is an adaptation which evolved in early human social groups that enabled humans to become powerful learners and problem-solvers. Neuroscientific studies have shown that playful activity leads to synaptic growth, particularly in the frontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for all the uniquely human higher mental functions. Studies in developmental psychology have shown that a playful approach to language learning, as opposed to formal instruction, offers the most powerful support for the early development of phonological and literacy skills. Play has also been shown to support intellectual and emotional ‘self-regulation’, a key predictor of educational achievement and a range of other positive life outcomes.

Within educational research, a number of longitudinal studies have provided evidence of long-term outcomes. In a 2002 US study, for example, Rebecca Marcon demonstrated that, by the end of their sixth year in school, children whose pre-school model had been academically-directed achieved significantly lower marks in comparison to children who had attended child-initiated, play-based pre-school programmes.

The irony is that, certainly in the UK, much of the motivation for moving towards a more instructional model of teaching at ever-earlier phases of schooling appears to derive from a desperation to match the scores achieved in PISA tests by 15 year olds in countries such as China, Singapore & Korea, where the limitations of this approach are now widely recognised, and where moves are being made to move to more creative and often play-based pedagogies. The development of material-based outdoor play facilities in the Anji district of China is a good example of this kind of development.

As a consequence of current UK education policies, our children are amongst the least happy in the world, with worrying increases in mental health problems, and well-informed, inspirational teachers are leaving the profession in droves. The very likely impact of these trends for the quality of children’s education is only too evident.

At the same time, however, there are encouraging signs. The crisis in play opportunities, in the home context and in early schooling, is now widely recognised and many national and international bodies are working at the level of policy to develop responses to it. Even in the UK, the All Party Parliamentary Group on a Fit and Healthy Childhood, originally established through concern over the shocking rise in childhood obesity, has recognised the crucial role that play has in supporting all aspects of children’s development, and has issued a specific report on the importance of play for children’s healthy development physically, mentally, emotionally and in relation to school achievement.

There is also, currently, an exciting resurgence in serious scientific research attempting to understand the essential components of play, what happens in the brain when we play, how playfulness develops, and what experiences support it, how it relates to other important aspects of development, and in what ways playful activities and pedagogies might be developed in schools. Several recent edited volumes attest to the number of young researchers world-wide who are beginning to take an interest in play as an important topic for enquiry.

At Cambridge, the LEGO Foundation have sponsored the Play, Learning and Narrative Skills (PLaNS) project demonstrating the potential of a playful approach to supporting primary school children’s development as writers. We have also now just launched, supported by a further generous donation from the same source, the Play in Education, Development and Learning (PEDAL) research centre, which will be led by an endowed Professorship, and has been set up to conduct rigorous scientific research to address the many important questions relating to the role of play and playfulness in human development.

Play is sometimes dismissed as essentially trivial, as something young children do but which serves no purpose and which they grow out of. The evidence we have, however, from an increasingly rich and rigorous research literature, is that play is a fundamental human characteristic which supports our unique qualities as creative problem solvers, as innovators and as a highly adaptive species. Arguably, our culture, our science and our technological achievements all arise, at least in part, from our playfulness. We put our children’s future at risk, and their ability to deal with the many difficulties that the human species will confront through the 21^st century and beyond, if we do not recognise the importance of play and begin to develop policies, both in relation to our domestic arrangements, and our schooling systems, that support and nurture their natural and adaptive playfulness.

David Whitebread is based at Cambridge University Faculty of Education, where he is acting director of the new PEDAL centre.

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