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by Robin Alexander

Mindful or mindless?

I’ve been invited to attend a conference on the educational and economic importance of ‘non-cognitive skills’.  The invitation is accompanied by a glossy booklet in which various notables expatiate on the ‘development of character, non-cognitive skills, mindfulness and well-being’.

The invitation arrived while I was checking the final draft of the new CPRT report on children’s cognitive development and learning, commissioned from leading cognitive neuroscientist Usha Goswami and published earlier this week.

The two documents couldn’t be more different. In Goswami’s report, cognition – the ways, in Bruner’s words, that humans ‘achieve, categorise, remember, organise and use their knowledge of the world’ – is at the heart of the educational enterprise. But the conference booklet castigates this focus on cognition, re-labelled ‘cognitive skills’, for neglecting much of what education should be about.

What is going on here? And does it matter?

Let’s take the second question first.  Well yes, how we think about thinking, learning and knowing matters a great deal, and to no group of professionals should it matter more than to teachers, for exciting and advancing these processes in pursuit of an educational vision is their job. Indeed, one of the strengths of the professional world of primary education used to be its belief in the need for classroom relationships and decisions to be grounded in evidence about how young children develop, think and learn. Reflecting this, the first 10 chapters of the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review are devoted to children and childhood.

Such evidence doesn’t stand still, which is why CPR commissioned the research reviews that CPRT is now revisiting and updating. Nor is child developmental evidence on its own a sufficient basis for teaching, though there was a time during the 1960s and 1970s that some believed this and constructed teacher training courses accordingly, thereby offering trainees knowledge of children but not of how to teach them. Now, thankfully, our take on pedagogy is more comprehensive.

So when someone says ‘I’ve seen the future and it’s non-cognitive’ is this the latest stage in the refinement of our account of teachers’ core business or merely the latest educational fashion? What, to return to my other question, is going on here?

My conference booklet answers thus: today’s schools are not equipping tomorrow’s citizens and employees with what they will need in order to cope, work and prosper in a fast-changing world, so something different is needed. Nothing new here of course: during the past few decades pundit after pundit and report after report – including the Cambridge Primary Review – has levelled this same charge at established patterns of schooling in the UK.   The current iteration focuses, with some justice in view of the UK’s poor showing in international studies, on the importance of well-being and children’s capacities to manage their lives positively and productively. This was the claimed impetus for the Secretary of State’s recent intervention on character, grit and resilience (see our blog on 30 January).

But what is worrying about the current packaging of character, grit and resilience under the apparently novel banner of ‘non-cognitive skills’ is the way that far from offering something new it recycles and perpetuates some of the oldest, most damaging and least tenable dichotomies in the book, wrapping them in a brace of terminological contradications.

One such is the conference title’s stunning parodox of non-cognitive mindfulness.  Another is the very concept of a ‘non-cognitive skill’.  Is this possible?  The authoritative Foresight Report on mental capital and wellbeing thinks not.  Though in execution some skills become so habitual that we stop thinking about them, few if any skills are genuinely mindless. Acquired and honed through training and practice, skills also require knowledge and reflection, especially when – as with the skills with which education is particularly concerned – skills are infinitely perfectible. But then the problem here is in part linguistic, for these days every conceivable educational goal is tagged a ‘skill’ and knowledge is nowhere: basic skills, numeracy skills, literacy skills, creative skills, emotional skills, interpersonal skills, hard skills, soft skills, cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills …

Then, recycling that ancient dichotomy, my conference glossy continues: ‘Schools need to teach students not only academic knowledge and cognitive skills, but also the knowledge and non-cognitive skills they will need to promote their mental and physical health and successfully contribute to the economy and society … to counter the idea that promoting cognitive development and academic attainment is all that matters for the economy.’ Here, not only are ‘cognitive’ and ‘academic’ equated; they are also seen as neither conducive to children’s mental health nor economically relevant. So much for maths, science, design and technology and, oh yes, literacy.

Or take this definition, from a companion source: ‘Non-cognitive skills are those academically and occupationally relevant skills and traits that are not specifically intellectual or analytical in nature’. Academic but non-cognitive? Academically relevant but not intellectual?

Or this: ‘Non-cognitive skills include persistence, communication skills and other “soft” skills that are not objectively measured … unlike cognitive skills, which educators can measure objectively with tests.’  So communication, that most basic and demanding of basics, is ‘soft’, non-cognitive and unable to be assessed. And what touching faith in the objective measurability of the rest of the mainstream curriculum.

Or again, pursuing the same eccentric process of re-classification, the conference glossy helpfully includes in its list of ‘non-cognitive skills’ not just familiar items like ‘perseverance’ and ‘self-control’ but also ‘meta-cognitive strategies’ and ‘creativity’.  Apart from the mind-boggling idea that something can at the same time be meta-cognitive and non-cognitive, it’s the assertion that creativity excludes cognition – in the face of centuries of artistic and scientific endeavour – that most brutally nails this nonsense.

Knowledge versus skill, hard subjects versus soft, cognitive versus creative, cognition versus meta-cognition, thinking versus feeling, mind versus body.  Here, sartorially updated for 2015, is that same ‘muddled and reductive discourse about subjects, knowledge and skills’ of which in 2009 the CPR final report complained (pp 245-50); a discourse in which ‘discussion of the place of subjects is needlessly polarised, knowledge is grossly parodied as grubbing for obsolete facts, and the undeniably important notion of skill is inflated to cover aspects of learning for which it is not appropriate.’ Which is why, of course, supposedly ‘non-cognitive’ creativity is relegated to the non-core and Friday afternoons – something that in the interests of a more rounded education the apostles of non-cognitive skills rightly want to change, but for the wrong reasons. What a muddle.

So it was with relief that I turned back to Usha Goswami’s new report for CPRT. For here in place of fads, fancies, cod psychology and epistemological car crashes we have evidence carefully accumulated, searchingly sifted and expertly assessed; and, interestingly, a kind of resolution of the problem of how to define and place those wider attributes we all accept are necessary in today’s world – for I stress that I’m as concerned as anyone that schools should motivate and engage children, build their confidence, help them to manage their learning and their lives, and develop their social and communicative capacities. But, crucially, what the non-cognitive skills people see as separate from academic activity Usha Goswami sees as intrinsic to it. Her stance is not the exclusivity of cognitive versus non-cognitive, but the inclusivity of cognitive plus metacognitive.  In a key section on metacognition and executive functioning (which, taken together, are not far removed from ‘mindfulness’), she writes:

Metacognition is knowledge about cognition, encompassing factors such as knowing about your own information-processing skills, monitoring your own cognitive performance, and knowing about the demands made by different kinds of cognitive tasks. Executive function refers to gaining strategic control over your own mental processes, inhibiting certain thoughts or actions, and developing conscious control over your thoughts, feelings and behaviour … As children gain metaknowledge about their mental processes, their strategic control also improves. Developments in metacognition and executive function tend to be associated with language development, the development of working memory (which enables multiple perspectives to be held in mind) and nonverbal ability.

The report then goes on to document strategies through which in the classroom these capacities can be developed.

In other words, what the non-cognitive skills people present as a curriculum issue is in reality a pedagogical one.  Of course, there are always questions to be asked about the relevance, scope and balance of the curriculum, and England’s new old national curriculum has certainly not answered them. But communication, motivation, engagement, perseverance and self-control do not require the addition of a battery of pseudo-skills to an overcrowded curriculum. They require us to think differently about how we teach what is already there. So, given that one of the non-cognitivists’ main concerns is the contribution of education to the economy, I might just arm myself with an update of Bill Clinton’s 1992 election slogan, turn up at that conference and shout, ‘It’s the pedagogy, stupid.’

www.robinalexander.org.uk

Download Usha Goswami’s new CPRT report Children’s Cognitive Development and Learning.

Download the short briefing on Usha Goswami’s report.

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How well are primary academies doing? And how well is DfE doing with the evidence?

Has DfE, including its supposedly public-minded official statisticians, been misusing data in its drive to force on primary schools its favoured policy of academy status?

The question arises since I performed an analysis that seems to raise serious difficulties about a key statistic used by a minister to defend the academies scheme.

On February 2nd, education minister Nick Gibb was confronted on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme with the findings of a report by the cross-party House of Commons Education Select Committee. The committee, following an inquiry on academies and free schools, had concluded the previous week: ‘We have sought but not found convincing evidence of the impact of academy status on attainment in primary schools.’

The minister responded that sponsored academies – generally previously struggling schools which are taken over by a ‘sponsor’ entering into a contract with the Secretary of State to run the school – were improving faster than the national average.

He said: ‘We do know sponsored academies do improve standards of education in our schools. If you look at the primary sponsored academies, they’ve seen their reading, writing and maths results improve at double the rate seen across all schools.’ He added: ‘Primary [sponsored academies]…have seen their reading, writing and maths results improve at double the rate of local authority schools.’

This seemed to mark a change of position for the DfE, which less than a year ago concluded, in its publication Academies: research priorities and questions that ‘The research evidence [is] primarily based on secondary schools and with more and more primary schools becoming academies, further evidence is needed on what drives those schools to become academies and what makes them viable and sustainable.’

So was Mr Gibb’s statement accurate? Investigating, it became clear that the source was DfE’s Statistical First Release which accompanied the publication of primary league tables on December 12th, 2014. The document is headed with the reassuring logo ‘National Statistics’. It says: ‘Attainment in sponsored academies increased by 7 percentage points between 2013 and 2014, compared to 3 percentage points in converter academies and LA maintained schools.’

This statement seemed factual enough. But doubts began to surface in my mind after digging a tiny bit further into the data.

So, the 420 sponsored academies included in the statistic did indeed improve at faster than the national rate for other schools between 2013 and 2014, rising seven percentage points in the proportion of their pupils achieving level 4 in all of reading, writing and maths, from 61 to 68 per cent. By contrast, the 13,396 non-academy (local authority) schools rose three points, from 77 to 80 per cent, while, among 1,006 converter academies – generally previously successful schools choosing to take on the status – the rise was from 80 to 83 per cent.

The immediate question, though, was whether like was really being compared with like. With both types of school, other than sponsored academies, starting with higher average scores in 2013, sponsored academies would appear to have had more room for improvement.

Another way of looking at that is to say that, clearly, the closer a school gets to 100 per cent of its children achieving level 4s in all three subjects, the less scope it has to improve on this measure; at 100 per cent, it has no scope at all.

This would seem to be a basic statistical point. Yet it was not acknowledged anywhere in this statistical release that the higher rate of progress might be at least in part a product of sponsored academies starting from a lower base. The comparison used in the release, then, might be deemed invalid. Without further information it certainly looked potentially misleading.

The fairer comparison, then, would be to look at schools with the same statistical starting points. In other words, among schools averaging 61 per cent in 2013, did sponsored academies or non-sponsored academies improve faster?

Again, there is no mention of this potential statistical comparison in the release. So I have now performed this data analysis myself, based on the DfE’s official underlying school-by-school assessment data.

Staggeringly, this seems to show that, when schools with the same starting points in 2013 are compared, sponsored academies fared worse than a comparison group of primaries in 2014.

I am not a professional statistician, and the analysis below is rudimentary. But I did it in two ways. First, I decided to look at all schools which, in 2013, had exactly 61 per cent of their pupils achieving at least level four in reading, writing and maths. Remember, this was the average figure for 2013 sponsored academies.

This yielded 113 primaries: six sponsored academies, two converter academies and 105 non-academy state schools. Among the 107 that were not sponsored academies, results improved to 70.7 per cent in 2014, a rise of 10 percentage points.

Second, I widened the comparison group to include a much larger number of primaries: those which had results, in 2013, ranging from 56 to 66 per cent. Again, I made sure that this sample, of 1,650 schools, had an average result of 61 per cent in 2013.

What was the outcome? Well, the schools which were not sponsored academies improved on average to 72 per cent. So that’s an 11 point improvement, compared to a seven point gain in sponsored academies. (The 11 point gain included figures for academy converters; removing them from the sample, non-academy maintained schools – ‘local authority schools’ in Mr Gibb’s phrase – went up 10 percentage points, which again is higher than the seven points of sponsored academies).

So my research seems to point to an opposite conclusion – sponsored academy results rising less quickly than those of a comparison group – to that of the DfE’s official statistical publication.

It would have been easy for the DfE’s professional statisticians to have published a similar assessment. But they did not. Nor did they publish any statistical caveats about the sponsored academy-to-national-average improvement comparison they chose to use.

Why does this matter? It seems to me to be very important on the ground, where I hear regularly of communities struggling with campaigns against academy status being forced on them by DfE, in the face of claims by ministers that this should be the only option for school improvement.

Indeed, DfE guidance says that, in schools deemed inadequate, ministers’ ‘expectation’ is always that they should become sponsored academies.

Last month, David Cameron went further, proposing that thousands of schools deemed by Ofsted not to be inadequate but merely to ‘require improvement’ should become sponsored academies in the event of a new Conservative government.

But if statistical evidence on an area absolutely central to the current political debate about education is being made to say the opposite of what a reasonable person might think the data actually tell us, acknowledging the need to compare like with like, we have serious problems. Is evidence being made to fit policy, rather than vice-versa?

I’d make one final point.  In a recent article, Cambridge Primary Review Trust chair Robin Alexander, wrote: ‘Deep and lasting improvements in England’s education system will be secured only when, in their discourse and their handling of evidence, policymakers practise the best that has been thought and said rather than preach it, exemplify the educated mind rather than demean it.’

It is staggering that the DfE’s statistical publication was first released without the basic caveats and checks which would be expected of statistics students completing their assignments, and was then endorsed by a minister of education. And a minister of education with an enthusiasm for mathematics, at that. What kind of an example does this set for pupils? We all deserve better.

I invited DfE to comment on the content of this blog but it did not respond. 

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

The stance of ministers and DfE towards evidence has been a constant concern of CPRT and CPR, as it must be for any organisation that cares about the probity and efficacy of education policy and seeks to generate the kind of evidence that a well-founded education system requires.  CPRT’s concern is shared by the House of Commons Education Select Committee, which in 2014 launched an online enquiry into DfE’s use of evidence. Robin Alexander’s submission to this enquiry was published as the CPRT blog on 19 December.

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Planning, teaching, assessing: journey to coherence

In 2003, Fulbridge Primary School came out of Special Measures and in 2012 it was judged ‘outstanding’ in every Ofsted inspection area. Along the way, we were assessed by Creative Partnerships and in 2008 we gained the status of a National School of Creativity. In 2013, we converted into an Academy. In December 2014, we were invited to be a Whole Education Pathfinder school. Most significantly however, we became a member of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust’s Schools Alliance in 2014 and adopted the principles, priorities, vision, aims and curriculum domains of the Cambridge Primary Review.

Once we left the Special Measures Club we decided that more of the same would not work, so we embarked on a curriculum and school development journey that can fairly be called never-ending. On this journey we have been lucky enough to learn from the likes of Roger Cole, Mick Waters, Mathilda Joubert, Alan Peat, Lindy Barclay and Andy Hind. But it’s our decision to accept the invitation to work with the Cambridge Primary Review Trust that will have the biggest impact.

Before the Cambridge Primary Review we had been working to develop a curriculum based on creativity, first hand experiences and the local environment. This suited our school, its pupils, teachers and community.  But when the CPR final report appeared we discovered that it encapsulated both what we had been aspiring towards and what we had not yet addressed. So it not only aligned with what we were already doing but also offered us a way forward that would lead to further improvements. In this we heeded the parting comment of our lead Ofsted inspector: ‘Remember: “outstanding” is not perfect’.

So what have we done since becoming a member of CPRT’s Schools Alliance?

From September 2014 we started teaching, assessing and planning by reference to CPR’s eight curriculum domains: arts and creativity; citizenship and ethics; faith and belief; language, oracy and literacy; mathematics; physical and emotional health; place and time; science and technology.  These are not unlike DfE’s seven early years areas of learning and development – and indeed the CPR report made it clear that its domains were intended to encourage curriculum continuity from early years to primary and from primary to secondary – so we decided to adopt them throughout the school, from nursery to year 6. This meant that there would be significant changes to our assessment processes too, because assessment without levels was introduced nationally at the same time.

To demonstrate genuine commitment to a broad and balanced curriculum we wanted to assess children’s learning in every domain, so a great deal of thought, research and work went into creating an approach which provides effective assessment without losing the exciting and innovative curriculum that we created, which we believe, in CPR’s words, ‘engages children’s attention, excites and empowers their thinking and advances their knowledge, understanding and skill.’

The time to make changes is when you are doing really well; don’t leave it until things start going wrong. The master of this principle was of course Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, hence the unparalleled success that the Red Devils have enjoyed over many years. So we too have adopted that principle in the hope of creating a Theatre of Dreams at Fulbridge as he did at Old Trafford.

September 2014 brought major changes and initiatives such as the new national curriculum, the SEND code of practice and of course the new assessment requirements and we too changed many of our structures. Meanwhile we have had a new 240-place building constructed which allows us to move from a 3 to 4 form entry school.

We are an enthusiastic Google Apps school, so all the new structures were created in Google Drive on Excel sheets, a format that allows everyone to contribute and add to the master document that will cover all our short, medium and long term planning. This process proved to be a great way to ensure participation and ownership by all staff. Alongside this we are working with Pupil Asset, who have created a bespoke tracking system that will tell you – if you really want to know – whether a child with size ten feet, blue eyes and ginger hair is over or underperforming compared to national averages.

Planning, teaching and assessing are the keys to everything that happens in our classrooms. We took the government’s proposed freedoms as a genuine invitation and made sure that each part of the cycle linked to the others. Thus, we use the same criteria to plan, teach and assess. To start the process we look at what we want to assess, having merged the CPR’s eight curriculum domains with the new national curriculum. We have created areas of assessment within each domain, aligning them with the attainment targets from the primary curriculum. In addition, we looked at how this linked to the topics and themes we teach, taking away parts of the new curriculum we didn’t want to use and adding any parts that were missing – the most serious omission being oracy.

We followed the same process of aligning curriculum domains and assessment strands in our EYFS Developmental Matters statements. Planning, teaching and assessing are now coherently and consistently applied and practised from nursery to year 6.  During the current school year we are establishing what works and what fits, modifying elements as necessary so that by the end of the year we will have refined and embedded a system that we can take forward.

In basing all we are doing on the Cambridge Primary Review, we know that what we are doing is based on sound evidence, which makes a refreshing change when we think back to some of the initiatives that successive governments have introduced.

To support all these changes, our website was updated. Links to the CPRT  website were easily made, but ensuring that the site’s curriculum area reflected all we are doing as a member of CPRT’s Schools Alliance took more time. After consulting staff and Governors, our new Ethos and Aims statement was uploaded onto the site. This adapts the CPR educational aims to reflect our overall approach and the character of our school community.

Iain Erskine is Head Teacher of Fulbridge Academy, Peterborough and a member of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust Schools Alliance. This is the second in a series of occasional blogs in which Alliance members write about their schools and we provide links to enable you to discover how their vision works in practice.

For further information about Fulbridge Academy, click here.

For other blogs about featured CPRT Schools Alliance schools, click here.

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Respecting children’s voices

As an educational researcher who has worked in the field of student voice for the past 22 years, I was fascinated to pick up the recent CPRT Research Report by Dr Carol Robinson, Children, their Voices and their Experiences of School: what does the evidence tell us?, introduced in Robin Alexander’s CPRT blog on 12 December.

Carol’s insightful review documents the developing influence of the ‘children’s voices’ movement, and offers an exciting agenda for future practice, policy and research. While the report shows us clearly that much has been gained through researching pupils’ views and the adoption of children’s voices principles, it also acknowledges that there is still a long way to go before these ideas are fully recognised and acted upon, both in the UK and internationally. While Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) confers on every child the right to be consulted and to participate in decision-making, how these principles are put into practice opens up new questions and challenges, particularly for teachers and schools.

Among the questions often raised about the children’s voices principles are the following:

  • Is the idea of respecting children’s voices a ‘luxury’ that schools no longer have time for?
  • Has the children’s voices movement overstepped the mark by giving children too great a say in decision-making in schools?
  • Should we allow children to take responsibility for their own learning?

Let’s look at each of these questions in turn.

Is the idea of respecting children’s voices a ‘luxury’ that schools no longer have time for?

After a presentation on our children’s voices research a few years ago, a head teacher stood up and told the audience that he was deeply grateful for the way in which our research had allowed him to re-focus his attention back onto the children in his school and their learning. He spoke of how the pressures and demands of the prevailing educational policy climate had temporarily eclipsed his thinking about the most important concerns.  His was a powerful statement about the value of respecting children’s voices: centring teaching practice on children’s voices in this way redirects us back to the things that matter, that make a real difference to children’s achievement and their love of learning. Far from being a luxury, the recommendations in Carol’s report show us that respecting children’s voices lies at the heart of a successful school community and offers a set of principles which every school should embrace.

Has the children’s voices movement overstepped the mark by giving children too great a say in decision-making in schools?

A common criticism of children’s voices principles is the concern that giving children an active say and involvement in decision-making could undermine teachers’ authority in schools. Some teaching unions have opposed children’s roles in interviewing teacher job applicants, for example, on the grounds that such activities might compromise pupil-teacher relationships while this type of decision-making, they argue, represents a step too far in changing the dynamics of power. However, as Jean Rudduck argued, respecting children’s voices does not mean that pupils’ views take precedence over teachers’ authority, nor must it result in a silencing of teachers’ own voices in the decision-making process. While it is important that children’s views are considered seriously and without tokenism, there is a clear balance to be struck, and a school ethos that is framed on values that embrace responsibility, reciprocity and community sets the parameters for ensuring that the voices of all, whether adult or child, are heard and respected. There are many schools around the country which have successfully embedded children’s voices principles in their practice. One of them is the Exeter school featured in Jo Evans’s CPRT blog on 21 January. Over the coming months the CPRT website will be showcasing other schools where CPRT principles, on this and other matters, can be witnessed in action.

Should we allow children to take responsibility for their own learning?

There is clear evidence from psychological studies showing that encouraging young learners to develop a sense of responsibility for their learning has a significant and positive impact on their achievement and attitudes to learning. US researcher, Carol Dweck, for example, has demonstrated that the children’s motivation and achievement are dependent on having a sense of ownership and responsibility for their learning. Giving children choices in their learning also provides opportunities for teachers to design classroom activities that respond to children’s interests and prior knowledge so that learning becomes more engaging and relevant.

Over to you  

  • What do you think about the role of children’s voices in primary education?
  • Does your school have interesting children’s voices practice or experiences to share?

To discover more about these ideas

Cambridge Primary Review Trust has been working with Pearson to develop a number of professional development programmes, including one focusing on children’s voices. This exciting new course looks at involving children in the development of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment and is designed for senior leadership teams.

The Rights Respecting Schools programme has been developed by UNICEF to support schools interested in putting the UNCRC recommendations on children’s rights at the heart of their practice. The programme offers training, resources and an award scheme for any organisations working with children and young people around the UK.

On 1 January Julia Flutter joined CPRT’s directorial team, taking responsibility for developing the Trust’s communication strategy.

  • Read more about CPR’s evidence and recommendations on children’s voices in its final report (Chapter 10) and the commissioned research surveys on children’s voices published in 2010 and 2014.
  • Find out more about the professional development packages arising from CPRT’s collaboration with Pearson.

by Robin Alexander

True grit

Those who thought that the departure of Michael Gove might give schools a breather before the 2015 election, liberating them from the weekly explosion of initiatives and insults, reckoned without the ambition of his successor. These days, few education secretaries of state are content to do a good job, deeming it more important to leave an indelible mark in the name of ‘reform’. To this lamppost tendency Nicky Morgan appears to be no exception.

Her wheeze, and it’s a biggish one, is to make Britain ‘a global leader in teaching character and resilience … ensuring that young people not only grow academically, but also build character, resilience and grit.’ To that end, DfE has invited bids for projects showing how ‘character’ can be built, and on 16 March there’ll be a grand ceremony at which the 2015 Character Awards of £15,000 each will be presented to 27 schools, with a £20,000 prize for the best of the best. Morgan modestly defines her chosen legacy as ‘a landmark step for our education system.’

In the same way that New Labour claimed, witheringly but inaccurately, that before the imposition of its national literacy and numeracy strategies England’s primary teachers were ‘professionally uninformed’, so Nicky Morgan’s happy discovery of something called ‘character’ implies that schools have hitherto ignored everything except children’s academic development; and that creativity, PSHE, moral education, religious education and citizenship, not to mention those values that loom large in school prospectuses, websites and assemblies and above all in teachers’ daily dealings with their pupils, were to do with something else entirely. Remember the not-so-hidden ‘hidden curriculum’? If there is a ‘landmark step’ then, it is not character education but its political appropriation and repackaging.

So what, in Morgan’s book, constitutes ‘character’? Its main ingredients, as listed in the guidance to applicants for the DfE grants and character awards, are ‘perseverance, resilience and grit, confidence and optimism, motivation, drive and ambition.’ (Readers will recognize ‘resilience’ as one of the most overused words of 2014). Rather lower down the list come ‘neighbourliness’, ‘community spirit’, ‘tolerance’ and ‘respect.’

Like so much in recent English education policy, this account of character is imported from the United States. The Morgan character attributes are almost identical to those in the eponymous Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed: grit, curiosity and the hidden power of character, and in Dave Levin’s evangelising Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). Here, then, we have a melding of the no-holds-barred values of corporate America with that fabled frontier spirit portrayed by John Wayne. ‘Grit’ anchors the education of character in both worlds.

But there’s a third element. In a speech in Birmingham last November prefiguring the DfE announcement, Morgan said pupils should ‘leave school with the perseverance to strive to win … to revel in the achievement of victory but honour the principles of fair play, to win with grace and to learn the lessons of defeat with acceptance and humility.’ No prizes for spotting the source of that little homily. These are unambiguously the values of England’s nineteenth century public schools: values directed not to the nurturing of mind but to physical prowess on the games field, an education veritably conceived as no more or less than a game of rugby or cricket. And not just education: life and death too, as immortalised in the Newbolt poem in which the playing field morphs into the trenches of 1914-18: ‘There’s a breathless hush in the close tonight / Ten to make and the match to win / The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead / Play up, play up and play the game.’

If character is important, which it surely is, is such an idiosyncratic and unreconstructedly male account of it good enough, and is it for government to impose this or any other notion of character on every child in the land, of whatever inclination, personality, gender or culture? In one of two excellent blogs on this subject that I urge prospective applicants for the DfE awards to read, John White thinks not. He says: ‘Nicky Morgan is not wrong to focus on personal qualities, only about the set she advocates. This is tied to an ideology of winners and losers.’ (As, appropriately, is DfE’s Character Awards scheme itself). He reminds us of the considerably more rounded values framework appended to the version of the national curriculum that was introduced in 2000 and superseded last September, and he argues that ‘no politician has the right to steer a whole education system in this or any other partisan direction.’ For White, Morgan’s foray into character education is further confirmation of the need for curriculum decisions to be taken out of the hands of politicians and given to a body which is more representative, more knowledgeable and culturally more sensitive.

The other recent must-read blog on character education is by Jeffrey Snyder in the United States. He cites evidence that ‘character’ is more likely to be determined by genetically-determined personality traits than the efforts of teachers, and indeed he argues that anyway nobody really knows how to teach it. In this context it’s worth asking what those pupils subjected to 1850s/1950s character-building really learned, and whether there is indeed a correspondence between success on the playing field, in work and in adult life. And since you ask, did fagging and flogging really make for manliness (whatever that is) or were they merely perversions by another name?

Snyder argues, too, that the ‘perseverence, resilience and grit’ account of character ‘promotes an amoral and careerist “looking out for number one” point of view’ adding, tellingly: ‘Never has character education been so completely untethered from morals, values and ethics.’ As a result, ‘character’ is as likely to be harnessed to the pursuit of ends that are evil as to those that are good. ‘Gone’, adds Snyder, ‘is the impetus to bring youngsters into a fold of community that is larger than themselves … When character education fails to distinguish doctors and terrorists, heroes and villains, it would appear to have a basic flaw.’

Snyder’s third objection, and it applies equally to the Morgan view of character and to the Gove definition of essential knowledge, is the sheer narrowness of the educational vision being promoted. In this context, it’s worth asking how the Cambridge Primary Review’s 12 educational aims might be classified. Are ‘wellbeing’, ‘engagement’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘autonomy’ about character or something else? Do such responsive and responsible CPR aims as ‘encouraging respect and reciprocity’, ‘promoting interdependence and sustainability’, ‘empowering local, national and global citizenship’ and ‘celebrating culture and community’ have anything to with resilience and grit?

Actually they do, for it takes considerable grit and resilience to live the values of reciprocity, interdependence and community in a culture of winner-takes-all individualism; or to champion sustainability when the prevailing ethic is rampant materialism and unfettered economic growth; or, as so many educationists have learned to their cost, to hold firm to a principled vision of children’s education in the teeth of government atavism and disdain. Captains of industry and sports personalities do not, as Morgan appears to believe, have a monopoly of courage and determination. In any event, the imperative here is to tie perseverance, grit and resilience to socially defensible aims and values, for, as Snyder noted, that for which we teach children to strive must be educationally worthwhile.

It will be interesting to see what accounts of character, and what strategies for promoting it, DfE rewards when it distributes its grants and prizes for character education on 16 March. With the national strategies Labour gave us what one CPR witness called a ‘state theory of learning’. Will the coalition government’s bequest be a state theory of character? (Which, for those who know about vospitanie in Russian and Soviet education, has similar political overtones). Let’s hope that Morgan’s judges put vision, ethics, social responsibility and plurality back into the frame.

We can presumably trust that proposals to reintroduce fagging and flogging are unlikely to be shortlisted, though these days one never knows.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

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Living the CPRT ideal

In 2010 I became head teacher of a primary school in Devon. After assessing the challenges we faced we became involved with the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, and in association with other interested schools we began to research ways to enhance pupils’ engagement in their learning.  That small scale project became the bedrock of our school improvement plan. Four years on, the same thread of thinking, firmly embedded in the principles of the Cambridge Primary Review, continues to inform our work.

If you visited us, what would you see that’s distinctive, or that marks us out as a member of CPRT’s Schools Alliance?

Principles pursued with confidence. We strive for a principled approach not only to the curriculum but also the whole experience we offer to children in our care. The Trust’s aims have been used as aspirational tools to remind us of what is important over and above government priorities. If you visit our website you can see how we have made our educational philosophy explicit to parents and others. My previous school moved from being deemed inadequate by OFSTED to outstanding, and my experience of leading this process gave me the confidence to take responsibility for the independent path we have chosen to follow in my present school.

Planning informed by CPRT priorities. While continuing to drive for improved progress and attainment in English and mathematics we have incorporated CPRT priorities into the actions we take in relation to these goals and strategic planning more widely. Thus (i) we work to help pupils take greater responsibility for their own learning (Pupil Voice, Community); (ii) we ensure that assessment drives the progress and attainment of every pupil rather than merely measures it (Equity, Assessment); and (iii) keeping our aims firmly in mind we use high-quality teaching to achieving the very best outcomes for all (Pedagogy, Curriculum, Aims).

Practice informed by evidence. To ensure that evidence continues to inform our practice we operate a tiered approach to action research. This includes termly and half-termly whole school classroom-based research projects with shared foci, lesson study in cross year/school groupings, and individual research projects. Following recent training as part of CPRT’s South West Research Schools Network, we are now going one stage further and developing  pupil-led research projects.  All this in-school research activity links to the three strategic strands listed above and gives a depth to our school’s practice which it would not have if we merely followed government guidelines or requirements to the letter. Researching and discussing research are therefore no less fundamental to our approach to professional development and performance management and have enabled us to provide leadership for research and development in more than one teaching school.

Flexible curriculum, responsive teaching. Keeping the curriculum meaningful and engaging is essential but also challenging, and we have developed a number of ways to monitor and refine it. Of these, the most obvious yet important is engaging pupils in frequent discussion about their learning. In addition, an assessment tool called Pupil Attitudes to Self and School (PASS) provides quantitative whole-school data, while our home learning approach is pupil driven: the more positive the response in the home learning to learning experiences in school, the more inspiring the topic. Our teachers are now used to adjusting the curriculum in line with evidence from these sources so that it is truly responsive to pupils and their world.

Values-based staff recruitment. Being a church school we recruit people who in the first instance can show how they will contribute to its distinctiveness. But as a member of CPRT Schools Alliance we also ask candidates to observe our children and teachers at work and identify how what they observe reflects CPR aims and CPRT priorities. This enables us to identify those who are genuinely receptive to the values and principles in which the school’s teaching is embedded.

Revisiting core ideas.  In a period of increasing instability and sudden policy shifts it’s all too easy to be deflected from the long-term educational path one has mapped out. Re-reading the CPR final report and revisiting the CPRT aims and priorities reminds us why we are in teaching, and it provides the evidence and arguments to justify our belief that we can and must trust ourselves as professionals to provide for our pupils’ development and learning.

Jo Evans is Head Teacher of St Leonard’s C of E Primary School in Exeter, and Joint Leader of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust’s Schools Alliance.

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Pictures for Schools: a brilliant idea worth reviving, or an expensive luxury?

If you had the chance to introduce your pupils to original works of art in the classroom (such as framed paintings and prints, sculptures, ceramics and embroideries), would you take it? And what would you do with it?

Almost seventy years ago, a scheme was established which aimed to enable to teachers and educators to do just that. Set up in 1947 under the name of the Society for Education through Art, Pictures for Schools was founded and driven by painter and educator Nan Youngman, art adviser to Cambridgeshire’s innovative Director of Education Henry Morris.

Pictures for Schools took the form of a series of annual exhibitions held at prestigious London galleries until 1969. Artworks by established artists, students and recent graduates were sold at prices designed to be within the reach of educational buyers. Directors of Education and art advisers from local authorities made the trip to London to purchase work for burgeoning town, city and county art collections for loan to schools. Northern buyers included Rochdale, Manchester, Lancashire and Carlisle, along with the West Riding and Newcastle, West Bromwich, Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottingham regularly visited from the Midlands, and authorities in Bristol and Dorset purchased work for schools in the South West. London County Council, Bromley, Harrow, Croydon, Cambridge, Hertfordshire, Essex, Kent and Great Yarmouth were among the main purchasers from the South East.

Other educational buyers, though smaller in number, included primary, secondary and independent schools, and teacher training colleges. Museum services benefited from levels of staffing and support unimaginable today, such as in-house carpenters to frame paintings and create carry-cases for sculptures, and dedicated vans to transport work to schools. Art advisers visited schools to advise on the siting and hanging of paintings, and insurance, and ran weekend courses on the use of art in schools.

Although submissions of all kinds were welcomed – as long as they did not ‘play down’ to children – and some were bold, abstract and vibrant, there was a bias towards representational work such as still-lifes and landscapes. Art educator Marion Richardson, a major influence on Nan Youngman, encouraged her young pupils to seek inspiration in the scenery all around them, and many of the works in Pictures for Schools presented children with sights drawn from the everyday. As well as the London monument pictures of Edward Bawden, which consistently sold well, and stylised prints depicting Oxbridge colleges, best-sellers included the murky industrial landscapes of John Kenneth Long and George Chapman’s stark black and white images of people going about their daily life and work, and children playing in the street. Prints such as linocuts – especially the colourful prints of Peter Green – also proved popular, as they were in a medium easily replicable in the classroom.

The ideas motivating Pictures for Schools were very much of their time. During and after the Second World War, as the rebuilding of Britain was debated in both the public and political spheres, educators called for art education to be given a central position in the new school system. This received support from the Ministry of Education, as part of a project to promote British culture, improve the public’s standards of taste and create a new generation of citizens and educated consumers who were capable of exercising judgment in aesthetic matters and making informed choices and purchases.

By the end of the 1960s, ideas about education were changing and as education budgets were cut Pictures for Schools was forced to come to an end. As early as the 1980s, some of the work in county collections was seen as old-fashioned. In the decades that followed, some work by previously lesser-known artists has risen in value, making it difficult to lend and insure, and several local authorities have realised that the work, often in storage and unseen for years, represents valuable potential income.

Although most county collections have been sold, and it is difficult to ascertain the whereabouts of many artworks once in public ownership, in a few areas of the country it is still possible for schools to borrow work purchased from Pictures for Schools today, along with more modern work. These include embroideries, along with other work purchased from Pictures for Schools in the 1960s by the still-thriving Reading Museum Service. Derbyshire Museum Service, one of the largest, has retained the bulk of its collection. Although some paintings have been sent to local museums for safekeeping the service, based in Derby, continues to invest in new work by visiting local artists. Leeds Art Gallery, meanwhile, has its own school loan scheme, Artemis, which offers workshops to introduce teachers to the collection.

We’ve all seen sculptures sitting outside the school entrance, paintings of grandees in the school hall, or wishy-washy landscapes displayed in reception areas, but the organisers of Pictures for Schools intended that the work in schools should be seen and looked at close-up by children. Here, the use of originals as opposed to reproductions was key, as it was thought to be crucial that children could identify first-hand how the work was made: the mark of the brush-stroke or the pinch of the clay.

One of the shortcomings of Pictures for Schools, however, was that, once the work had been sold, there was no specific guidance given to schools about how to make the most of it. Some of the individual authorities contacted the organisers asking for artists’ contact details with a view to compiling biographical notes, and several authorities later sent out sets of notes with the artworks. One former art adviser from Cambridgeshire, also a teacher in the 1970s, told me that he had passed artworks around the classroom, using them as the starting point for debate and discussion, which is exactly what the organisers envisaged.

Unfortunately, today loan services have to compete for schools’ already precious time and monetary resources, and the debate about the value of arts subjects in the curriculum is ongoing. Is there a place for original artworks in twenty-first century schools or are they an expensive luxury?

Natalie Bradbury is researching a PhD about Pictures for Schools at the University of Central Lancashire, which she blogs about at www.picturesforschools.wordpress.com.  She welcomes comments from anyone with experience of Pictures for Schools and county collections and museum services, and can be contacted at NBradbury@uclan.ac.uk. 

The arts, creativity and CPRT research schools. Find out more about CPRT’s efforts to enhance the arts and creativity through its South West Research Schools Network.

The Cambridge Primary Review final report said (Children, their World, their Education, pp 267 and 493): ‘The most conspicuous casualties [of the so-called ‘standards agenda’ of a narrow curriculum and high-stakes tests] are the arts, humanities and those kinds of learning which require time for talking, problem-solving and extended exploration of ideas … We wish to encourage a vigorous campaign to advance public understanding of the arts in education, human development, culture and national life, coupled with a more rigorous approach to arts teaching in schools.’ 

What do you think?

by Robin Alexander

2015: teach local, learn global

We ended 2014 with one official consultation. We begin 2015 with another. The two couldn’t be more different.

In December we responded to the online enquiry of the House of Commons Education Select Committee into the UK government’s use of evidence to inform policy. Not for the first time, but in common with many of the enquiry’s other 500 respondents, we voiced deep concern that despite DfE’s ostensible interest in ‘evidence-informed policy’ its approach to evidence is all too often selective, ideologically partisan and methodologically naive.  It remains to be seen whether the Select Committee will call DfE to account on this score, or whether its members will merely shrug and say ‘That’s politics.’ Which, depressingly, it is.

But all this will seem parochial in comparison with the agenda to which another organisation invites us to respond, for it deals with nothing less than the responsibility of national educational systems, including our own, ‘to improve the quality of life, promote decent employment, encourage civic participation and enable all citizens to lead a life with dignity, equality, gender empowerment and justice’. All citizens, everywhere, not just in the UK.

The quotation comes from a UNESCO concept note outlining how progress in global education should be monitored after 2015, the year in which the current UN Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education (which in many countries won’t be achieved) is superseded by an even more ambitious set of goals which apply as much to rich countries as to poor, and tie education firmly to the increasingly urgent global imperatives of equity and sustainable development.

Both of these happen to be among CPRT’s eight priorities, and if you check the new CPRT priorities in action page of our website you’ll see how we and our partners are beginning, within our modest resources, to pursue them. But if you want a sense of the gravity of the challenge we all face, read the UN’s December 2014 synthesis report The road to dignity by 2030: ending poverty, transforming all lives and protecting the planet.

The report ends thus:

Today’s world is a troubled world, one in turmoil and turbulence, with no shortage of painful political upheavals. Societies are under serious strain, stemming from the erosion of our common values, climate change and growing inequalities, to migration pressures and borderless pandemics. It is also a time in which the strength of national and international institutions is being seriously tested. Because of the nature and the scope of this daunting array of enormous challenges, both inaction and business-as-usual must be dismissed as options. If the global community does not exercise national and international leadership in the service of the peoples of the world, we risk further fragmentation, impunity and strife, endangering both the planet itself as well as a future of peace, sustainable development and respect for human rights … 

The year 2015 is hence the time for global action … We must take the first determined steps toward a sustainable future with dignity for all. Transformation is our aim. We must transform our economies, our environment and our societies. We must change old mindsets, behaviours and destructive patterns. We must embrace the integrated essential elements of dignity, people, prosperity, planet, justice and partnership. We must build cohesive societies, in pursuit of international peace and stability … We have an historic opportunity and duty to act, boldly, vigorously and expeditiously, to achieve a life of dignity for all, leaving no one behind.

‘Think global, act local’ has become a cliché. Worse, it has been hijacked by multinationals to advance enterprises that are anything but sustainable or equitable.  But educators can reclaim it. The UN’s global education agenda is directed at governments, so at the start of 2015 we should demand to know how our own government will respond, or whether this major report and the evidence that informs it, will be kicked into touch like so many before it.  But the UN’s education agenda requires no less energetic action in the classroom. Teach local, learn global.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

If your school is working to advance the UN – and CPRT – goal of ‘a sustainable future with dignity for all’ and you would be willing to share your ideas with others in the CPRT network, please let us know. Contact administrator@cprtrust.org.uk.

You will find websites of these organisations relevant and helpful:

Sustainable Schools Alliance
Sustainability and Environmental Education
Think Global (the Development Education Association)
Tide Global Learning
TEESNet (formerly UK Teacher Education Network for education for sustainable development and global citizenship)

Read the full December 2014 UN synthesis report on global education after 2015, quoted above.

Contribute to shaping the focus of the 2016 report on Education, sustainability and the post-2015 development agenda (closing date for comments: 28 January).

Read responses to the House of Commons Education Committee enquiry into DfE’s use of evidence.

by Robin Alexander

From phonics check to evidence check

In ministerial speeches ‘evidence-based policy’ is now as almost as routine as ‘I care passionately about …’ and is as likely to be greeted with hollow laughter. So it’s to the credit of the House of Commons Education Select Committee that it has undertaken an enquiry into the use of evidence by the Department of Education, asking  DfE to list the evidential basis of a number of policies  before inviting the public to comment via a web forum. Nine areas of policy were nominated for these ‘evidence checks’: phonics, teaching assistants, professional measurement metrics, summer-born children, the National College of Teaching and Leadership, universal infant free school meals, the impact of raising the school participation age, music, the school starting age. There was a further section on DfE’s use of evidence generally and this prompted the largest number of responses, including the  following which we reprint as our final blog of 2014. It’s longer than usual, but then you won’t be hearing from us again until January.

DFE’s use of evidence

Several contributors to this enquiry commend DfE for its commitment to evidence, but surely this is a minimum condition of good governance, not a cause for genuflection. More to the point are the concerns of Dame Julia Higgins that DfE’s use of evidence is inconsistent (or, as Janet Downs puts it, ‘slippery’) and those many other contributors across the Committee’s nine themes who find DfE overly selective in the evidence on which it draws and the methodologies it prefers.

The principal filters appear to be ideological (‘is this researcher one of us’?) and electoral (‘will the findings boost our poll ratings / damage those of the opposition’?) and such scientifically inadmissible criteria are compounded by DfE’s marked preference for research dealing in big numbers, little words and simple solutions.

In the latter context, we should be wary of endorsing without qualification the view of several contributors that the randomised control trial (RCT) is the evidential ‘gold standard’, trumping all other attempts to get at the truth. Education is complex and contested, and its central questions are as much ethical as technical – a challenge which the fashionable but amoral mantra ‘what works’ conveniently ignores. The RCT language of ‘treatment’ and ‘dosage’ is fine for drug trials but is hardly appropriate to an activity which is more craft and art than science, and in untutored hands the effort to make teaching fit this paradigm may reduce to the point of risibility or destruction the very phenomena it claims to test. I should add that I make these observations not as a disappointed research grant applicant but as recipient of substantial funding from the rightly esteemed Educational Endowment Foundation for a ‘what works’ project involving RCT.

Of the nine ‘evidence check’ memoranda submitted to the Committee by DfE, those on phonics, the school starting age and the National College most conspicuously display some of the tendencies I’ve so far identified. Thus the defence and citations in DfE’s phonics statement neatly sidestep the methodological controversies and evidential disputes surrounding what is now the government’s mandated approach to teaching reading, so the contributor who applauds DfE’s grossly biased bibliography as ‘accurate’ is plain wrong.

DfE’s school starting age citations carelessly – or perhaps carefully – attribute a publication of the Cambridge Primary Review (Riggall and Sharp) to NFER, but again avoid any evidence running counter to the official view that children should be packed off to school as soon as possible; or the more nuanced finding of the Cambridge Primary Review that the real issue is not the starting age for formal schooling but the availability and quality of early years provision, wherever it takes place; or indeed the inconvenient truth that some of this country’s more successful PISA competitors start formal schooling one or even two years later than England.

As for the National College of Teaching and Leadership (NCTL), no independent evidence is offered in support of DfE’s insistence that this agency, and the models of teacher training and school improvement it espouses, justify its consumption of public funds. Only two publications are cited in DfE’s ‘evidence check’. One is NCTL’s statement of accounts; the other a DfE press release which is neither evidence nor independent. Proper evaluation of NCTL became all the more essential when DfE abolished the relatively ‘arms length’ bodies that NCTL subsumed and charged it with ‘delivering’ approved policies. Of course NCTL can be shown to be effective in relation to the delivery of policies x and y. But what if those policies are wrong?

The Committee has received many unhappy comments from parents about schools’ draconian responses to term-time absences. These highlight a further problem: there are important areas of educational policy, at both school and national level, where evidence is rarely or never on view and parents and the electorate are expected to comply with what may be little more than unsubstantiated claims. In the case of those blanket bans on term-time absence about which so many parents complain to the Committee, as with the tendency to fill more and more of children’s (and parents’) waking hours with homework (i.e. schoolwork done at home) of variable and in some cases little educational value, there appears to be a deep-seated assumption that schools have a monopoly of useful learning. The Cambridge Primary Review scotched this mistaken and indeed arrogant belief in the comprehensive research review on children’s lives outside school that it commissioned from Professor Berry Mayall. Except that the then government preferred summarily to reject the evidence and abuse the Review team rather than engage with the possibility that schools might do even better if more of them understood and built on what their pupils learn outside school.

So although the Education Committee has applied its ‘evidence check’ to nine areas of policy, it might also consider extending its enquiry in two further directions: first, by examining the evidential basis of policies and initiatives, such as those exemplified above, about which teachers, parents and indeed children themselves express concern; second by adding some of those frontline policies which DfE has justified by reference to evidence but which are conspicuously absent from the Committee’s list.

Examples in the latter category might include: (i) the government’s 2011-13 review of England’s National Curriculum; (ii) the development of new requirements for assessment and accountability in primary schools; (iii) the rapid and comprehensive shift to school-led and school-based initial teacher education; (iv) the replacement of the old TDA teacher professional standards by the current set; (v) the strenuous advocacy and preferential treatment of academies and free schools. Each of these illustrates, sometimes in extreme form, my initial concerns about politico-evidential selectivity and methodological bias.

Thus in the 2011-13 national curriculum review ministers deployed exceptionally reductionist and naive interpretations of the wealth of international evidence with which they were provided by DfE officials and others. They resisted until the last moment overwhelming evidence about the educational centrality of spoken language. They ignored Ofsted warnings, grounded in two decades of school inspection (and indeed evidence going back long before Ofsted) about the damage caused by a two-tier curriculum that elevates a narrow view of educational basics above all else – damage not just to the wider curriculum but also the ‘basics’ themselves. And they declined to publish or act on their own internal enquiry which confirmed the continuing seriousness of the challenge of curriculum expertise in primary schools, an enquiry which – and this much is to ministers’ credit – DfE undertook in response to, and in association with, the Cambridge Primary Review. The report of that enquiry, and the wider evidence that informed it, still awaits proper consideration. A job for the Education Committee perhaps?

Similarly, DfE, like its predecessor DCSF, has stubbornly held to its view – challenged by the Education Committee as well as numerous research studies and the Bew enquiry – that written summative tests are the best way both to assess children’s progress and hold schools and teachers to account, and that they provide a valid proxy for children’s attainment across the full spectrum of their learning.

Then, and in pursuit of what has sometimes looked suspiciously like a vendetta against those in universities who undertake the research that sometimes rocks the policy boat, DfE has ignored international evidence about the need for initial teacher education to be grounded in equal partnership between schools and higher education, preferring the palpable contradiction of locating an avowedly ‘world class’ teacher education system in schools that ministers tell us are failing to deliver ‘world class’ standards. Relatedly, DfE has accepted a report from its own enquiry into professional standards for teachers which showed even less respect for evidence than the earlier and much-criticised framework from TDA, coming up with ‘standards’ which manage to debase or exclude some of the very teacher attributes that research shows are most crucial to the standards of learning towards which these professional standards are supposedly directed.

Finally, in pursuit of its academies drive government has ignored the growing body of evidence from the United States that far from delivering superior standards as claimed, charter schools, academies’ American inspiration, are undermining public provision and tainted by financial and managerial corruption. England may not have gone that far, but new inspection evidence on comparative standards in academies and maintained schools (in HMCI’s Annual Report for 2013-14) should give the Committee considerable pause for thought about the motivation and consequences of this initiative.

In relation to the Committee’s enquiry as a whole, the experience of the Cambridge Primary Review (2006-10) and its successor the Cambridge Primary Review Trust is salutary, depressing and (to others than hardened cynics) disturbing. Here we had the nation’s most comprehensive enquiry into English primary education for half a century, led by an expert team, advised and monitored by a distinguished group of the great and good, supported by consultants in over 20 universities as well as hundreds of professionals, and generating a vast array of data, 31 interim reports and a final report with far-sighted conclusions and recommendations, all of them firmly anchored in evidence, including over 4000 published sources.

Far from welcoming the review as offering, at no cost to the taxpayer, an unrivalled contribution to evidence-based policy and practice in this vital phase of education, DCSF – DfE’s predecessor – systematically sought to traduce and discredit it by misrepresenting its findings in order to dismiss them, and by mounting ad personam attacks against the Review’s principals. Such behaviour in the face of authoritative and useful evidence was unworthy of holders of elected office and, for the teachers and children in our schools, deeply irresponsible.

It is with some relief that we note that DfE’s stance towards the Review and its successor the Cambridge Primary Review Trust has been considerably more positive under the Coalition than under Labour, and we record our appreciation of the many constructive discussions we have had with ministers and officials since 2010. Nevertheless, when evidential push comes to political shove, evidence discussed and endorsed in such meetings capitulates, more often than not, to the overriding imperatives of ideology, expediency and media narrative. This, notwithstanding the enhanced research profile applauded by other contributors, remains the default.

 

www.robinalexander.org.uk

This particular Education Committee enquiry was set up as a web forum, with a deadline of 15 December. The DfE evidence checks and the comments they provoked may be viewed here.
DfE’s use of evidence attracted 154 comments, followed by summer-born children (111), phonics (90) and the school starting age (64).

by Robin Alexander

New evidence on childrens’ voices and rights. But does DfE get it?

Children, their World, their Education. The basic premise of the Cambridge Primary Review (CPR) was as clear in the title of its final report as in its choice of investigative themes and questions: education is meaningful only when educators understand and coherently respond to the nature and needs of children and the society and world in which they are growing up. Mastering the practical skills of teaching is a necessary but not sufficient condition, and as an educational rationale mantras like ‘effective teaching’ take us to the nearest 3Rs test but no further.

A more comprehensive rationale was crystallised in the twelve aims for primary education that were at the heart of CPR’s final report and that  now inform the work of an ever-increasing number of schools.  In preparing the ground for these, CPR met and listened to children and those who work with them, and many more children added to these face-to-face conversations by writing in. We also commissioned reviews of research on children’s development, learning and lives inside and outside school.

One of these research reviews was on children’s voice and today CPRT publishes its sequel: Carol Robinson’s update of the report that she and Michael Fielding first produced in 2007 and then revised in 2010 for inclusion in The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys.

Last month saw the 25th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). The UK is a signatory, but just how far short of the UN’s ideals we fall is daily all too apparent in the media and in CPRT’s recent blogs on young carers, the government’s proposed policy ‘family test’, and the fate of those millions of children caught up in conflict or lacking access to education as a basic human right. Nor is CPRT convinced that the new national curriculum has yet registered that these matters demand a more serious and committed response than DfE has so far provided, though we are certainly convinced that making citizenship optional in primary schools transmits entirely the wrong signal.

Yet all is not gloom, doom and hollow promises. Carol Robinson’s report documents the encouraging growth of research and practice in the area of children’s agency, voice and rights, and of impressive movements like Rights Respecting Schools. Always at risk of being treated tokenistically, children’s voice in many schools now means considerably more than stage-managed deliberations on food and wet playtimes.  This progress should be celebrated.

Probably not at DfE, though:  its recent advice on promoting ‘British’ values rightly encourages schools to ‘ensure that all pupils … have a voice that is listened to’ but confines that voice to the task of demonstrating ‘how democracy works by actively promoting democratic processes such as a school council whose members are voted for by the pupils.’ To DfE, then, voice equates with vote, and we know how little, in Britain’s electoral system, votes count for, or how little notice our democratically-elected government takes of the voices of others than those who toe the party line, not least on educational matters.  But we won’t tell our children about this, will we, for in the official account of British values parliamentary democracy is the envy of the world.

In fact, the most basic test of the seriousness with which we treat what children think and say is not the election of a school council – valuable though its deliberations can be – but the extent to which empowering, exploring and building on children’s articulated ideas is central to our every teaching encounter and to the everyday assessment for learning which at best informs both children and ourselves. Children’s voices will remain unheard, and their understanding will advance thus far and no further, if ‘speaking and listening’ means that teachers do all the speaking and children all the listening; or if the writing through which children express their ideas is confined to repeating those of the teacher.

That’s why CPRT’s eight priorities include not only a commitment to ‘advance children’s voice and rights … in accordance with the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child’ but also contingent commitments to the development of patterns of teaching and assessment for learning in which genuine dialogue is paramount. This term we have published Wynne Harlen’s report on assessment and Carol Robinson’s on children’s voices. Next term we’ll be presenting reports from Usha Goswami, David Hogan, Dennis Kwek and Peter Renshaw on learning and teaching. In parallel, we are working with Pearson to develop jointly-branded CPD programmes in these areas. All these initiatives are united by the imperatives of childhood.

It is classroom pedagogy that most tellingly liberates children’s voices; but in the wrong hands it is pedagogy that most decisively suppresses them.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

View/download Carol Robinson’s CPRT research report Children, their voices and their experiences of school: what does the evidence tell us?

View/download a four-page briefing on Carol Robinson’s report.

View/download Wynne Harlen’s CPRT research report Assessment, standards and quality of learning in primary education and/or the accompanying four-page briefing.

Find out more about these and CPRT’s other research initiatives.

Find out more about the joint CPRT/Pearson CPD programmes on children’s voice, assessment and other topics.

Read the DfE guidance ‘Promoting fundamental British values as part of SMSC in schools’ (November 2014).

Contact

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