Comment on topical education issues from NAHT and associated authorshttp://www.naht.org.uk/comment.rssEmbattled prime minister John Major gave a couple of gifts to the English language. The first was the tautological phrase "safe havens" which was initially derided but now in common usage. The other was the ringing phrase that we should "condemn a little more and understand a little less" when it came to criminals. I'm now wondering if that mantra is engraved on the desk of the Chief Inspector of Schools. Chris Woodhead was famous for loudly and frequently asserting that there were 15,000 incompetent teachers in English schools. Now, a month into the job, Sir Michael Wilshaw is effectively saying that a quarter of school leaders aren't good enough. You won't find this anywhere on the Ofsted website, where the news and press releases section are filled with rather more anodyne tales. Sir Michael confined his remarks to the Sunday Times, telling a reporter he wanted "less tolerance of poor leadership" from which "everything flows... that just had to be said." But did it really have to be said, in those terms, at this point in the game? Underpinning Sir Michael's words are Ofsted figures showing that one per cent of schools have "inadequate" leadership, with "satisfactory" leadership in a further 23 per cent. The problem here is that Sir Michael is about to decree that satisfactory is anything but. Instead, it is about to become "requires improvement". Well, Sir M is the chief inspector and if he wants to move the goalposts on what is or isn't satisfactory, that's his prerogative. I'm just not sure that this is the way to manage people effectively. If I were a head whose rating was "satisfactory" I suspect I'd be feeling more demotivated than determined in the aftermath of those comments. Leadership theory talks about carrots as well as sticks: at the least suggesting that there was room for improvement and help on offer for leaders in the "satisfactory-but-won't-be-satisfactory-next-week" category might have been helpful. And if a quarter of school leaders are not satisfactory at a time when applications are not keeping pace with vacancies (funny, that) then where are these 5,000 good new head teachers to come from? Does Sir Michael see increasing numbers of school federations and chains plugging the gap, with "outstanding" schools swallowing their "satisfactory" neighbours? Where is the remedial programme and support for heads who may be struggling, particularly as local authorities lose staff? And while I entirely agree that poverty and deprivation shouldn't be an excuse for poor results, to completely disregard these factors isn't fair to schools or pupils either. There are many schools getting terrific results in areas of great deprivation, in contrast to their neighbours. But for one reason or another, some of those neighbouring schools may be getting a higher percentage of the really hard-core pupils, whose personal and family inclination is to disregard school and all its works. Despite the Government's best efforts, I have yet to see a league table which differentiates between the deprived and malleable child from an education-friendly family and the deprived and intransigent one from a family of school refusers. And he's right to stress the importance of good school leadership, and not least to the staff being led. I used to spend more time than was strictly healthy peering into the TES teacher chatrooms, where a regular complaint was about senior management team members' lack of support on disciplinary issues. But leadership is also about tone, and the tone emerging in reports of the Sir Michael interview is punitive rather than supportive. I do wonder why it always seems to be teachers, school leaders and schools which get the public whippings. Remember, we're in a world where officials could overlook hospitals with soaring death rates where patients were reduced to drinking water from flower vases, where bankers could carry on investing money in financial products they didn't understand -- and nobody cast the slightest aspersion until everything had gone disastrously wrong. But then, I'm not sure that any other profession is scrutinised in quite the same way. Our dentist was sighing the other day about yet another new regulation his tiny practice has to meet, that of proving that he is protecting patients' data. Does anyone actually look at his dentistry? "They used to call in patients at random, look at what you'd done and order you to re-do it if they didn't like it," he said, adding: "but they haven't done that for years now. Nobody checks the quality of our dental work: just everything else." Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack at googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=527Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:48:15 GMT20120206134815Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:48:15 GMT20120206134815Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:52:12 GMT201202061315212If I were a parent there, I would be absolutely aghast at what appears to be happening to a group of primary schools in Haringey, north London. Parents I have spoken to this week, whose children attend a Haringey primary which in November was placed in special measures by inspectors and which now seems to be being compelled into academy status, are enraged What leaves those I spoke to almost speechless is the extent to which they say they have been bystanders in the whole process, with the DfE not bothering to explain to them why a change in the school's constitution is needed, the detail of how it will improve matters or even what an academy is. The whole process, from parents first finding out that the school was being lined up to become a sponsored academy whether they liked it or not to the Government finalising that decision, would take only two months including the Christmas holiday, an absurdly short time for a decision which would change the school seemingly permanently. This, at least, is the view of parents fighting the forced move to academy status at Noel Park primary, a 580-pupil serving an economically disadvantaged, racially mixed community in Wood Green. I would guess there have been similar goings-on in the nine other English local authorities which the Department for Education has targeted for its first wave of “forced academy” conversions and which may be the model for many more across the country. I am continuing to write about this situation at length because I believe that, whatever you think about the academies policy, this process is shockingly undemocratic and disrespectful to views other than those within the Department for Education. It seems in these cases, that parents are only allowed a choice if it coincides with that of the Secretary of State. Although the campaign at Noel Park has been less high-profile than that at nearby Downhills school (which I wrote about here http://bit.ly/voANSD and here http://bit.ly/uUvwcN), feelings seem to be running just as high. In results collated this week, despite that seemingly damning inspection judgement, 208 parents – in an electorate of 400 – voted against Noel Park becoming an academy, with only 14 in favour and 16 undecided. It seems, though, that these views will count for nothing, with governors being given until the end of this week by the DfE to agree to academy status, or face the governing body being sacked and replaced by one appointed by the department itself to implement the academy move. The move towards academy status at Noel Park started, for parents, barely seven weeks ago, on December 16th, as they learned how ministers had reacted to Ofsted's verdict on the school. Following an inspection visit in November, the school had been placed in special measures. Yet this was greeted with shock – and disbelief in some quarters, of which more below – as only three years earlier, under the same head and with seemingly lower English and maths test results, Noel Park had been found to be good with outstanding features. Nevertheless, on December 16th parents were informed that the school had received a letter from Lord Hill, the schools minister, saying it would have to become an academy, and giving governors until only January 20th to agree. Governors have since won a stay of execution until today (Friday February 3rd), but the position remains the same. As at Downhills, what seems particularly to be enraging parents is the top-down nature of the whole process, with their views seemingly counting for nothing with the DfE, and no-one from the department even taking the time to explain the policy, or the detail of the school's likely future under a sponsor, to them. Noel Park's future is, then, simply being decided centrally from Whitehall. Edel Brosnan, an office IT manager with a daughter in year two at the school told me: “No-one at the DfE has had any contact with the parents, apart from when we have contacted them ourselves for information. The parents' body have just not been taken into the process at all. It's very, very hard to understand why that has been happening. “People are bewildered: they are feeling like: 'where did this come from'? Everyone is trying to keep an open mind about it, but there is no information, and there's no explanation. “It's just: 'this decision has been taken, and we'll keep you posted'. She added: “It's bewildering to me that DfE officials have not met parents, and that a minister has not been to the school, talked to parents and seen the children to learn about how it develops them, and the progress that they make.” Francois Joubert, another Noel Park parent, who also works in IT, who grew up in South Africa and has children in reception and year three at the school, said: “There is so little information…parents are wandering around saying: we are going to become an academy, but what's an academy?” The business of who might become a sponsor at the school seems, to this observer, particularly bizarre. Parents say two academy sponsors have visited Noel Park in recent weeks: the Kemnal Academies Trust – a chain of eight secondary and four primary academies – and the Academies Enterprise Trust, which is one of the largest academy chains, with 19 schools. Contact with neither seems to have been instigated by Noel Park, with Kemnal reportedly simply asked to sponsor it by the DfE. Parents are concerned that all of Kemnal's four primary schools are in rural or suburban settings with small numbers of pupils speaking English as a second language – compared to multi-ethnic, multi-lingual Noel Park, with its 50 per cent free school meals stats – and that Kemnal had not instigated interest in Noel Park itself. Opinions of the AET were more positive, but again, both Ms Brosnan and Mr Joubert were highly unhappy with the process. Kemnal took over the first of its primary academies in April last year, while the AET did so only last September, so both are still in their first year of running primary schools. Ms Brosnan said: “No-one has said to us: these are a range of possible sponsors, so would you like to pick the sponsor that you think would be best for the school, before the governing body votes. “I used to run a small business. This is not how you run a small business. It seems completely lacking in transparency and fairness: we have no information and the DfE obviously has loads of information.” It is fair to say that Tuesday's appearance by Michael Gove in front of MPs on the Education Select Committee, when he reportedly referred to opponents of the plan to force academy status on Downhills school as “Trots”, has not further endeared him to parents at Noel Park. Ms Brosnan added: “The people who have the information [in the DfE] seem under no obligation to share it with us, yet the minister in the Select Committee can crack jokes about the integrity and motivation of people who disagree with him. “That's really unprofessional. I would be up before human resources if that was the way I behaved at work.” Mr Joubert said, of the “Trots” claim: “It's just name-calling. I think he has got an absolute cheek. He's not bothered to even contact or speak to us or even send a representative to explain the situation to us. He's a coward. He is not going to come and face the music here in Haringey about what he is doing.” Then there is the timetable. Ms Brosnan said the December 16th starting point for the process meant that there was no time to carry out a detailed consultation with parents necessitated by such a big change at the school, with Christmas holidays virtually started. In the end, the snap poll of parents was conducted by the governing body after many families reportedly said one had to be conducted. The whole process of converting the school would have to be in place by the start of the coming academic year. “Which leaving aside the arguments about whether academy status is a good thing or not, September just seems an absurdly bad timetable. We are in special measures at the moment. My feeling is that we should be focusing on getting out of special measures, and not on a change of governance,” said Ms Brosnan. Finally, there is the issue of choice. Mr Joubert said he and his wife wanted a school which worked with the local community, not one which was imposed against its wishes. He said: “We chose to live here because we wanted to be part of a community, and we chose the school as part of that: to contribute to our community and feel part of it. Then someone comes along and wants to rip the heart out of that. We are not going to go quietly.” He added that while an emphasis on maths and English was important – improving the proportion of children achieving Government expectations in both subjects at key stage 2 is the reason given by ministers for the policy – he worried they would be over-emphasised in an academy. A new organisation might feel it had to focus too much on these two subjects, to get it through Ofsted's “narrow” inspection process, he said. “I want my children growing up with a broad education, to expose them to a wide range of possibilities. If I go back to my own upbringing, in South Africa, I did not have half the confidence that my children have, I did not have half the emotional and social skills that my children have. They're getting it largely from the school community and the confidence of the teachers. “I cannot state how angry I am about what is going on.” This chimes very much with the experience I had talking to parents at Downhills school, in Tottenham, before Christmas. The feeling then was that this was not a democratic process. Parents who had chosen to send their child to the school because of its ethos were particularly angry at the prospect of this potentially being taken away from them without them even being asked. I have heard that parents at another high profile “forced academy” primary – Montgomery, in Birmingham, where teachers have been on strike over the move – have also been feeling disenfranchised. The level of explicit compulsion in the coalition's forced academies policy is certainly greater than what went before. But it strikes me there was always been a large element of arm-twisting and centralisation in the opening of academies under Labour. The idea of sponsors not being arranged for a school by parents, the head or the governors but being put forward by officials within the education department in Whitehall certainly seemed to happen under the last administration. And it was often the case that central government bullied councils into academies, telling them they would not get their schools rebuilt under Building Schools for the Future if they did not let some of them close and re-open as sponsored academies. Although a different case can be made for academies whose governing bodies have chosen to convert under the coalition, in general the history of the policy has been that it has been a centralised initiative driven by a perceived need by politicians to be bringing about dramatic structural changes to English schools, for which they can then claim credit. The latest experiences in Haringey and Birmingham strike me as different from decisions on schools' futures, including school closures, over which local authorities have presided. As a local newspaper reporter in the late 1990s, I sat in on council meetings at which school re-organisations were discussed and argued at length by local politicians. Councillors pushing a closure plan would appear at a school to defend their decision, in contrast to the stance of ministers and their officials now. (Although DfE officials have visited schools to talk to governing bodies, this has been along the lines of “this is what the Secretary of State wants”, with no public explanation or defence of the policy on evidence-based grounds to the local community). In local government, the whole process would be far more drawn-out than two months, I think. Of course, school closures or re-organisations under local government were far from perfect. There were always complaints, for example, about council consultations being skewed to come to the outcome the council wanted. But at least there was a process. It is easy to spot the Government's response to all of this: process and consultation are for wimps. We just need to improve schools, and to improve them fast. This was the justification for the Government pushing through its Academies Act 2010, which opened the way for this element of compulsion, in double-quick time under emergency legislation. The astonishing thing about this latest development is the contempt for any sense of localism, or context: if a school's results are not good enough, that would seem to be justification enough for the Government's chosen reform route, and ministers' favourite policy - academy status -and there seems little that anyone can do about it. That last bit may not be completely accurate. Some 1,000 people reportedly took to the streets of Haringey on Saturday to protest against the forced academies policy in relation to primaries there, where another two schools seem also to be facing compulsory constitution changes. Mr Joubert said he would investigate legal challenges, possibly even under human rights legislation. At the time of writing 17 Labour MPs had signed a Commons Early Day Motion against the forced academies policy. So we will see; suffice to say these campaigns may not be universally welcomed at the DfE, despite the confidence of Mr Gove's appearance before MPs. Just finally, there is the question of Noel Park's Ofsted inspections. I should say here that I do not have enough detail to reach any kind of judgement on the reality of the school's quality, only having conducted interviews on the phone with parents and looked at the last two inspection reports, including the most recent, which said it required special measures. It is fair to say, also, that there are dark mutterings circulating in Haringey about the large number of primary schools which recently have been subject to negative Ofsted inspection judgements in the run-up to the Government's forced academies move in the borough. Any claims of political influence on the inspection process would be damning for Ofsted, although there is no hard evidence as yet, as far as I can see. What I do know is that it is a school with key stage 2 results which are below the Government's floor targets but which serves a highly disadvantaged community, with half its pupils eligible for free school meals, three quarters speaking English as a second language and with high pupil turnover, only half of its children having been with the school since year one. In 2011, “only” 56 per cent of its year six pupils achieved level four in English and maths Sats, which is below the Government's floor target of 60 per cent. (I say “only” in quotes because it is quite a thing to say that a school with this pupil clientele is performing poorly when one considers, of course, that level 4 was originally set as the performance of the average pupil.) But the interesting thing is how the latest Ofsted report on Noel Park contrasts not just with parents' views of the school – as measured by Ofsted's own statistics – but with the previous inspection judgement. So, of 105 parents who answered the question at Noel Park's last Ofsted inspection in November 2011, 101 said they agreed with the statement “I am happy with my child's experience at this school”. Four parents disagreed, two of them strongly. Now, arguments can be made about how parents might not have the “right” picture of the school: they may have low expectations of their child's teachers, that they do not see the detail of what is going on in lessons that inspectors gain and that they lack inspectors' professional expertise. Nevertheless, I find it strange that inspections can reach a verdict – the worst possible – which seems so at odds with parental opinion. And no substantive reasons seem to be given for this contradiction in the latest Ofsted report. And, for what it is worth – which I suspect is very little – all of the admittedly huge number of 12 people claiming to be Noel Park parents on Ofsted's “Parent View” website strongly agreed that they would recommend the school to another parent. But perhaps the most interesting contrast is with the previous inspection report on Noel Park, in September 2008. The lead inspector then, Ruth McFarlane, offered a rhapsodic view of Noel Park, saying in the report: “In the words of one pupil, 'this is a great school, and it's getting even better.” The school was then adjudged good for leadership, under its head, Tunay Hussein. The report said: “The headteacher has created a strong caring ethos. She is ably supported by senior leaders who share her vision and set very clear direction to improve pupils' progress whilst providing high levels of nurturing care. Achievement was also rated good by the inspectors in 2008, a few months after 65 per cent of pupils had achieved level four or above in English, and 54 per cent in maths. (In 2007, the corresponding figures were 57 per cent and 62 per cent respectively). Fast forward to November 2011, and the school's results – or “outcomes for individuals and groups” in Ofsted language- were adjudged inadequate. The report of the latest inspection visit, led by Sheena MacDonald, found: “Most groups, including those with special educational needs and/or disabilities, achieve less well than similar groups nationally, particularly in mathematics.” It added: “Pupils' attainment is low and their progress is inadequate. This has been the case for some years.” Yet the results in 2011, before Noel Park's latest Ofsted, show that 74 per cent of pupils achieved level four in English, and 66 per cent in maths, which is an improvement on 2007 and 2008. With Ms Hussein still in post, the latest Ofsted rated the school's leadership this time as “inadequate”, with the first comment in this section of the report being that the school's self-evaluation was too generous. It added: “The capacity for further improvement is inadequate since leadership and management, including the governing body, have not been effective in addressing long-standing weaknesses.” Edel Brosnan, who has called Ofsted to complain about the latest inspection verdict, told me: “It's very very difficult to look at the Ofsted report and not feel they are judging the school on intake rather than outcomes, because the school got good with outstanding features in its last Ofsted, in September 2008. “The school has not materially changed since then. It's Ofsted's framework which has changed.” Now, I'm sure that schools which have been good can slide, even when the leadership does not change. I don't know the detail of what has gone on at Noel Park since the last inspection. But what does amaze me is that there is not any indication in the 2011 Ofsted report as to why this latest judgement contrasts so dramatically with the previous one. If I were a parent with a child at Noel Park, I would like an explanation as to what has happened in the school such that the standards of education on offer to pupils have really gone backwards, as the two judgements would imply. As a reporter, I would like some explanation as to exactly what has changed in the running of the school. Instead, it is as if Ofsted starts from a clean slate every time, with no sense in the latest report of how the school was seen the last time it visited, and the need for inspectors to explain to parents why the two judgements are different: to provide a narrative link between the two. Ofsted's measurement system does indeed change very frequently, but the idea of acknowledging this as a factor in reports on which parents will rely, if indeed it is a factor, is a move of modesty which I am afraid I cannot really imagine from the modern inspectorate. It strikes me, again, as a flawed reporting system, and not one that is really parent-focused. Maybe Ofsted needs a notice to improve. -Stop press: I understand that Noel Park's governing body has now voted to accept academy status, under the sponsorship of the Academies Enterprise Trust, despite the parental vote against any forced academy move. Mr Joubert said parental campaigning and scrutiny of the academy arrangements would continue, however. If you have experience of the forced academy process, or observations on Ofsted, I'd be keen to hear from you at warwickmansell@gmail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=526Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:41:24 GMT20120203164124Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:41:24 GMT20120203164124Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:41:33 GMT201202031644133If Michael Gove was a tennis player, I suspect Andy Murray would have yet another self-assured opponent to worry about. Watching him perform for two and a half hours whilst answering a selection of friendly, unfriendly and plain bizarre questions from the House of Commons Education Committee was like an object lesson in political confidence. He was even relaxed enough to ask for permission, two hours in, to leave the room for a wee. Perhaps he'd adopted the technique apparently favoured by David Cameron, that having a full bladder is an excellent aid to swift response in these situations, and misjudged the quantities required. I'm sure he's not the first witness to have found himself in this situation, but I'm pretty sure (especially judging by the reaction of the committee) that he's the first to have admitted it. He was cheerfully unrattled by that, and by most of the questions asked by the committee save an increasingly tense exchange between him and Labour member Lisa Nandy, who was delving into the question of private email use in the Department. Here, he was somehow less than convincing, blinking uncomfortably as he was grilled. So, did we learn anything new during this session, apart from the aside that Gove minor is, as a new QPR fan, learning to deal with disappointment? And that dealing with disappointment is part of the reason that Gove major has emphasised competitive team games in school rather than those which might guard against obesity? And that if he were to be a James Bond villain, he'd like to be Hugo Drax, because of the rocket science? (I'm sorry Mr Gove, but whoever asked that question via Twitter was clearly thinking of the baddie who used to stroke the white cat in a menacing fashion). A quick glance through my notes confirms my overwhelming impression that no, Mr Gove barely deviated from what you'd expect, although there were some really interesting answers. It might be the first time a nursery worker for two-year-olds has been compared with a Regius Professor of Hebrew, but it was a point well worth making that both are equally important and part of the intellectual life of the nation, as are all teachers between those two extremes. A question on class sizes elicited a response suggesting that he thought 16 might be the average, but perhaps (as often) he's thinking of upper secondary rather than KS2. I suppose politicians always have to believe they are right, otherwise they'd be guilty of cynicism. The overwhelming message I took from the Gove tour de force is that he does genuinely believe that everything the Coalition is doing on education, whether it is the Free School programme, the shifting of school improvement from the LAs to the academies and their organising chains, or the hiking up yet again of floor targets is going to improve children's educational achievement and so their life chances. He had several goes at his interrogators for asking questions that he thought betrayed a mindset that disadvantaged children were less capable of leaving school with five good GCSEs, on one occasion suggesting that it was a "Trot campaign" to fight the move to turn Haringey's Downhills School into an academy. MPs are good at synthetic outrage, as ten minutes watching Prime Minister's Questions would attest, but the committee looked genuinely startled by this retort. While it's clear that Mr G clearly believes in what he's doing, following his logic is sometimes trickier, and the MPs' session did give one or two helpful insights here. I was scratching my head in puzzlement at his argument about schools being expected to perform above the average, apparently routinely (against the laws of maths, surely?) when chairman Graham Stuart (who suggested that Mr Gove's strengths might be literary rather than mathematical) read out a very handy question sent via Twitter: "Is there any evidence that it is possible to overcome normal distribution in educational attainment?" Mr Gove paused, then pounced: "I think there's a tendency for people to believe the normal distribution curve described educational attainment in the past and those have always fallen either side of it in the past are destined to always stay there. I don't know if you can shift normal distribution but I do know two things: the Flynn effect showing children becoming cleverer over time, and that in other countries you do not have the same relationship between deprivation and educational destiny as we do in this country." Could it be the drivers that are doing this, retorted Mr Stuart, adding that the "five good GCSEs" rule had seen England drop in the international league tables. He continued: "Your response to reinforce that floor and show increased machismo and commitment to raise the floor higher, at the same time making it harder to get there, thus pressuring the schools to game the system rather than focusing on the poorest and the weakest who are likely never to count." Pat Glass, a Durham Labour MP, put her finger on another apparent contradiction when asking how Mr Gove could reconcile his desire for Downhills to become an academy with his frequent assertion that his Government believed that head teachers should lead. On the one hand, he said, criticism was made of the government for being laissez-faire and only caring about grammar schools in rich areas: on the other hand they were accused of being heavy-handed. "We can't simultaneously be couldn't-care-less figures and wild interventionists," he opined, adding: "If people are doing a brilliant job, applaud them and get out of the way. If they aren't working: get stuck in." So there you have it: education policy, as the Government sees it, in a nutshell. Susan Young is an education journalist.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=525Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:41:16 GMT20120131224116Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:41:16 GMT20120131224116Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:41:16 GMT2012013122104116The new performance tables contain 400 per cent more information, according to schools minister Nick Gibb. At times it feels more like 4,000 per cent, with a diminishing chance of making anything sensible out of it all. The political message surrounding these new tables was that parents could now see how much progress children made at secondary school, based on their SATS results or whether or not they are disadvantaged. Presumably this is meant to help parents choosing a secondary, but the admissions timetable means they'd have to rely on an informed guess about whether their child was going to get a level 3, 4 or 5 months ahead of the test, and choosing a school on that basis. They'd also have to assume that the SATs were always marked perfectly, and that secondary schools actually took any notice of those results, as opposed to the CATs test which in many secondaries has become the Year 7 equivalent of the Harry Potter Sorting Hat. Moreover, parents or carers wanting to do well by a "disadvantaged" child would have to have a good old hunt around the data, and not just the top-line stuff. As well as its shiny DFE webpage, each school also has a freakishly detailed Excel spreadsheet, which stops just short of costing the head teacher's socks. Delving into that for one school, for instance, revealed that disadvantaged pupils were actually likelier to emerge with a full quota of Ebacc passes than all other groups bar the high-attaining ones. However, I suspect it's unlikely that many parents will wade through all the top line data on their local school and then fall on the additional spreadsheet with cries of joy. It's hard enough to make comparisons between what two schools are doing as it is. Where I think the new tables may genuinely be useful is in allowing schools themselves to look at detailed data from their neighbours. It may start as a curtain-twitching exercise (the average staff salaries at the school up the road are always interesting to read) but then some of the other figures start to catch the eye. If their stats for disadvantaged pupils look healthier than yours, or if their "low achieving" students are actually performing really strongly at GCSE, then you may want to pick up the phone and find out a little more about their approach. Education journalists like me have been writing about the "long tail of underachievement" attached to the English educational system for decades, but despite much theorising about the problem, nothing much has happened to counter it. I do wonder if this version of the tables might actually have a beneficial effect on the problem -- but note that much-praised school systems abroad generally don't publish data in this way. I haven't been a fan of performance tables, because of the distorting effect they've had on the education system and the high-stakes accountability which is now making life hell for many school leaders. They've been configured around a simplistic set of figures: not only were they high-stakes, but positively encouraged gaming the system, as the select committee looking at 16-19 exams has been hearing. The new tables are far from perfect, but also far more useful than their predecessors, nudging schools away from concentrating on pupils on the C/D boundary towards a broader approach. Perhaps, just perhaps, we're moving towards a system where official policy will encourage broad and deep education for all pupils, rather than the kind of political short-termism which got us to where we are now. If the Government truly wants to encourage this, subsequent tables will need to compare subsequent years' results for each group of students, to reward schools which are making a real effort. It will be interesting to see how they play this next year. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=524Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:44:44 GMT20120130104444Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:44:44 GMT20120130104444Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:44:44 GMT2012013010104444I was expecting to write a blog today about further evidence on the effects of exam-driven teaching on children's educational experiences, as revealed in written submissions to a current Parliamentary inquiry into secondary assessment. I find myself, however, drawn to focus again on the intricacies of how exam boards operate the system itself, because of some extraordinary and seemingly very revealing testimonies to that investigation. Since September, the House of Commons Education select committee has been investigating the exams regime for 15- to 19-year-olds. I gave evidence to the committee last week on the interaction between the exam system and accountability. Another theme of this inquiry, however, has been the debate around commercialisation in the operations of exam boards: the extent to which their modern development as multi-million-pound organisations – and particularly the competition among them for teachers' custom - has been beneficial to schools, colleges, pupils and the taxpayer. It is a very interesting line of inquiry, and one I can't recall being pursued in great detail elsewhere. Some of the submissions, as I say, are extraordinary. Graham George, a retired physics teacher who served for 25 years as a principal or chief examiner for A-level physics with the Edexcel board, offers one. “During this time I have seen awarding bodies change from being academic institutions to large business corporations, with attendant advantages and disadvantages,” he writes. While Mr George, himself a textbook author, backs the commercial activities of boards in areas such as textbook design – a very contentious subject which I will discuss below – he adds: “The commercial nature of the awarding bodies to become profitable organisations at the taxpayer's expense is to be deplored. The Government must find some way to regulate examination entry fees, which are crippling schools and colleges who are struggling to cope in the current economic down-turn.” In particular, Mr George highlights dividend payments he says have been made by Edexcel, England's biggest board by turnover, to its shareholders in recent years. Edexcel was bought by Pearson, the world's biggest educational publisher which also publishes the Financial Times, in a deal originating in 2003 and which made it the only one of England's three exam boards to be run for shareholder profit. (AQA is a not-for-profit organisation while OCR is owned by an arm of Cambridge University). Mr George's evidence says: "I personally find it highly objectionable that Edexcel has ploughed some £75 million of British taxpayers' money into the pockets of Pearson shareholders over the last couple of years. I suspect that I am not the only one!" This, of course, is potentially explosive. Expenditure on qualifications in secondary schools and colleges has rocketed in recent years. Not-for-profit organisations, such as Edexcel's rival AQA, can at least argue that money taken from schools and colleges is re-invested in the qualifications system which they use. By contrast, money given to shareholders would appear simply to be lost to state education as a whole. Supporters of the Edexcel approach would have to argue that the benefits of the involvement of a corporation such as Pearson in UK qualifications, including the ability of a large global corporation to invest in innovation, outweigh the money taken out of the system in this way. This, indeed, is Edexcel's line. (See statement below). I wanted to check that £75 million figure. Edexcel's accounts say £40 million has been paid out in “dividends” in each of the past four years, with this money I think going to Pearson itself. How much of that cash was then paid out to shareholders outside the company is more difficult to track. Edexcel, in its statement, does not dispute the £75 million figure. Pearson's annual report for 2010 says that £2.3 billion has been paid out to shareholders from the global business in the past 10 years. In any case, it is also worth bearing in mind how Edexcel's profits have soared over recent years, according to these recent accounts. (Note one). After-tax profits at Edexcel were 37.6 million, on turnover of £225 million, in 2007. In the year to February 2011, they had risen to £66.9 million, on turnover of £320 million. The profit rate – after-tax profit as a proportion of turnover - over that period also rose, as these figures imply, from 17 to 21 per cent. The great majority of turnover came from sales within the UK – in the year to February 2011, 90 per cent of Edexcel turnover came from sales to the UK, its latest accounts show - so money from British schools and colleges appears to be driving this. Shareholders must be delighted. Edexcel says early investment in technology shortly after the takeover, to the tune of £35 million, outstripped profits at the time and has brought about great benefits in professionalising the marking industry, mainly by having much examining now take place at the computer screen. Edexcel's accounts make clear that it is a rise in sales of vocational qualifications to schools and colleges, which rose 26 per cent in 2009 after a 15 per cent gain in 2008, which have driven these sharply increasing figures, with GCSE and A-level business rising much more slowly. I wonder about the political implications of all this. I wrote in my last blog here about Michael Gove's recent suggestion that the current structure of competing exam boards could be reformed. My guess is that concerns about these profits may put more pressure on Ofqual, to regulator, to try to act to hold down exam costs to schools and colleges. Mr George also writes about Edexcel moving away from being university-based: 25 years ago it was the University of London Examination Board and most A-level physics papers were set by university academics, while today it is a much more commercial organisation, with universities scarcely involved. But there is far more in the submissions than this. A sub-theme on one particular type of allegedly commercially-minded decision made by the boards is present in several pieces of evidence, including that of Mr George. This revolves around at least some of the boards, in some subjects, moving in recent years away from paying for face-to-face “standardisation” meetings between examiners, at which their marking work is checked and discussed with their supervisors in an attempt to ensure consistency, towards conducting this online and over the telephone. Cost-cutting is the reason I have heard or read given for this change by several senior examiners now, and not just from Edexcel. It is fair to say they have worries that it might be affecting the accuracy of some people's marking, while some examiners are also said to have been put off marking by the move: many like to discuss their questions about how to interpret a mark scheme at length and in person with a more senior examining colleague. Evidence from Neil McNaughton, a principal examiner at AS level in Government and Politics for Edexcel, says: “The 'standardisation' of examiners used always to take place in intensive, face-to-face meetings. With Edexcel (and, I think, other boards), these are being replaced by online meetings or other forms of 'remote' standardisation. “Naturally face-to-face meetings are far more expensive than 'remote' meetings and practices. That is undoubtedly why the boards are attracted by them. “All my close colleagues agree that this reduces the quality and accuracy of the standardisation process. However, it seems unlikely that we will return to face-to-face meetings.” Another piece of evidence, submitted by a Richard Nixon, a coursework moderator for GCSE applied science and an examiner for both GCSE and A-level chemistry and GCSE citizenship, also raises concerns about standardisation, having experienced both online and face-to-face versions through Edexcel. He writes: “[Having standardisation done through online or on the telephone] saves Edexcel lots of money in teacher release fees, travel costs and hotel bookings but not sure that it is the best way to prepare examiners for marking papers.” Mr Nixon writes that he raised the issue with Ofqual but was told it was up to Edexcel to decide how to organise standardisation. A final major theme of evidence on “commercialisation” concerns exam boards' association with the GCSE and A-level textbook market, including their endorsement of books badged as tied to each exam. Pearson itself now operates a publishing brand called Edexcel, tied to the exams it provides through the board of the same name. In my book on results-driven teaching, I devote a chapter to what I have come to believe are the narrowing educational effects of teaching through exam-orientated textbooks and other resources. This practice comes in for scathing criticism in several submissions here. The Society of Authors, whose membership includes more than 700 education writers (not including me, at the moment), includes in its evidence a host of quotes from individual members about this issue. One says: “We are all so driven as teachers to ensure students pass examinations that we have lost sight of the fact that we are supposed to be educating children. As a teacher, I am finding students to be ever more unwilling to think independently because all they want is the answer.” Another says: “I am.disturbed by the commercialisation of examinations and the links between publishers, examinations and textbooks. The specification is written, the textbook written by the examiners meets only the specification, and the teaching is restricted to the textbook. It is a circle that is difficult to break and destroys innovation, creativity and good teaching and learning.” And another: "Publishers have stifled initiative in their pursuit of materials more or less guaranteed to 'get pupils through the tests', which is what the schools want... until you get rid of this mentality or change the tests they will continue to do so. The exams are the tail which wags the dog." Other criticisms of board-endorsed textbooks come from organisations including the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education, Mathematics in Education and Industry and SCORE, an umbrella body for five leading science organisations, while the British Academy is concerned about Edexcel being owned by Pearson, a publishing company. The submission from Oxford University Press gives an insight into commercial and professional rivalries in this field. It writes: “OUP has serious concerns about the commercial activities of awarding bodies and their links with publishers. The boundaries between awarding bodies and publishers are increasingly blurred, giving rise to very real conflicts of interest. These clearly affect the perceived worth of the exams and, in OUP's view, are also likely to undermine their actual worth, by encouraging narrow focussed teaching with no scope for differentiation of approach, undermining the scope of a pupil's educational experience and genuine attainment. Public confidence in the administration of exams is also affected by concerns about these issues, and must be restored.” The submission includes a claim from OUP that its representative was banned by Edexcel from an unnamed exam event in 2009 at which textbooks published by Pearson under its “Edexcel” publishing brand, written by an Edexcel examiner, were promoted. There is much, much more, among 71 written submissions at time of writing. Among concerns that England's current accountability regime may not be helping produce a good education for children, I would highlight evidence from Janine Clatsworthy, an English examiner, teacher and former local authority adviser. She appears to approve of some form of statistics-based accountability as helping to raise some schools' expectations of pupils. But she adds: “In schools where the 5 A*-C [grades] are an over-riding concern, almost all the school's energy will be focussed on the C/D border, with insufficient attention being given to those pupils who should be achieving B, A or A*: ironically, disadvantaging the most able and undermining their clear potential to become university undergraduates and – in the long term – raising their life expectations. Yes, the old chestnuts of the level of family support, discipline and expectation in impoverished households does impact pupil progress, but focussing overwhelmingly on the C/D borderline – and 'teaching to the test' has an equally limiting effect.” The Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education writes: “At times, the assessment system, and the regulations which govern it, undermine the broader aims of the national curriculum and [at post-16 level] the A-level subject criteria.” Returning to the issue of commercialisation, I have always thought that the move, under Charles Clarke, education secretary at the time, to allow part-privatisation of our exams system through Pearson's acquisition of Edexcel, has needed close scrutiny. In the past, I have written about positives as well as negatives stemming from boards becoming more “commercial”: undoubtedly greater business sense within the awarding bodies has helped both to move their finances on from what a decade ago seemed in some cases to be quite parlous positions – with resultant risks for schools and colleges using their products - and to bolster investment, especially in technology. I told the inquiry last week that, in the end, I was not persuaded by the benefits of a single exam board over today's system of competing boards, with the ability of teachers to take their “business” elsewhere should they feel let down on marking by a particular board particularly high up in the list of reasons, with reservations, to retain the current structure. (See my last blog). However, concerns raised through this inquiry – and through the Daily Telegraph's coverage in December of some examiners' conduct at training events – are bound to prompt further reconsideration of the overall effect of the competitive profit motive on the exams business. The statement I received from Edexcel in relation to profits having put Mr George's comments to the board follows: "When Pearson first took a controlling stake in Edexcel in 2003, the UK examination system was creaking under the pressure of a dramatic increase in volumes and complexity of qualifications. Many papers were lost as scripts were shipped around the country. Outdated practices and marking scandals had badly shaken public confidence in the system as a whole. This was the system that Ken Boston [former Qualifications and Curriculum Authority chief executive] described as a “19th century cottage industry”. "The problems that the Government faced with the national curriculum tests in 2008 demonstrate that these risks still need to be managed very carefully today. “The £35m investment Pearson made in 2003 in the development of innovative new mechanisms for online marking and infrastructure to deliver more reliable and professional systems has underpinned the stability of our examinations ever since. This investment was, at the time, some five times greater than Edexcel's annual profits, and we have continued to invest in developing and upgrading our systems. Other boards have spoken publicly of these changes as a catalyst for their own modernisation programmes. "Within the right regulatory environment commercial organisations can encourage innovation and improvement. For example, the development of national and international qualifications enables the UK to learn from new developments and best practises [sic] around the world, especially from those countries where high quality education is proving to be a major source of economic growth and global competitiveness. "As a large commercial organisation that is in education for the long term, we are acutely aware of our responsibilities to young people and teachers. These people choose our products because they represent high quality and bring with them a reputation which in itself enables progression. Commercial pressure pushes us to raise standards, not to lower them.” All submissions to the committee's inquiry can be accessed from this page: http://bit.ly/wcE3xf Last week's oral evidence session can be watched here: http://bit.ly/z5stU0 (Note one: In December, the Daily Telegraph reported that Edexcel's profits were £10 million in 2004. In 2003, accounts for London Qualifications, the organisation running Edexcel which Pearson bought, were £3.6 million, its accounts show.)http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=522Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:23:18 GMT20120124152318Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:23:18 GMT20120124152318Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:24:15 GMT201201241532415The black hole is a staple of science fiction films, as the plucky spaceship crew do their best to avoid getting sucked into it and dashed to oblivion. I had much the same feeling watching this week's instalment of the education select committee's enquiry into England's public exam system. The committee, bless them, are spending quite a bit of time testing the hypothesis that a single exam system might be the best answer to grade inflation, teaching to the test, over-helpful seminars by examiners and all the other allegations which have brought this issue to the boil. But this week's rather wonderful gang of witnesses had other ideas, and although they were willing to agree that all of these problems did exist, insisted on citing all sorts of other interesting causes for them, dragging the committee into areas it wasn't sure it wanted to go. To sum up several threads of argument across two sessions, the various witnesses were pointing out that the English exam system has changed for all sorts of reasons, usually good ones. Take the desire to broaden opportunities. So physics, for instance, has been made more accessible in order to get more girls taking it, and has been very successful in that. UK universities are unusual in that students are ranked for entry, and therefore A Level results are important for that -- and as the system changed to mass entry, so the exams had to cover a wider range. And as one witness pointed out, this wider range of student ability would also partly explain why first-year university courses had often had to change. And, as various witnesses pointed out, exam results have improved over time for a multitude of generally good reasons: teachers and schools are more focused on getting those C-plus passes, the cohort has become more middle-class, exams have been modularised to make them accessible to a broad range of students the nature of the questions themselves have changed, and there's a "ratchet effect" where people get better at doing an exam which remains stable. Professor Jo-Anne Baird of the Oxford Centre University for Educational Assessment explained: "Learners and teachers these days are very strategic. We've made it transparent. We talk as though it's a bad thing to demonstrate to people what you have to do to get the grades in a particular subject. That's what we call teaching to the test. But throughout the system there was always access to that transparency for some people who had access to examiners now it's ..transparent for everyone. It has its problems... but it also has its advantages." The killer question -- or perhaps I mean the killer answers -- came when MP Damian Hinds outlined an enormously long list of suspects and asked what each panel member would name as the top three factors in grade inflation. Dr Michelle Meadows of AQA cited the reforms to A Level which meant students would start off with four AS courses and drop their weakest subject at A2. This alone made a big difference, compounded by "teaching to the test" -- which the panel, unlike the MPs, clearly thought was not inherently bad. The question was then asked of Tim Oates of Cambridge Assessment, and the chair of the expert panel on the Government's current curriculum review. Clearly reluctant to give a simplistic answer, he was pressed, firmly by Mr Hinds. "With all those caveats... change is the top," he said. "Change has driven the system in all sorts of directions which has meant that standards have been technically difficult to control. Teaching to the test, narrow instrumentalism right the way through the system and a culture of ever increasing results and expectation and performance pervades the system." This theme of change was one to which the witnesses returned with vigour, implicitly making the point that whatever action Mr Gove decides to take over exam standards, that it actually risks accelerating grade inflation. As one panellist said, wearily, making such changes were something that needed to be done in real time rather than political time in order to avoid the inevitable unintended consequences. But it wasn't until the second witness session of the morning that the focus really changed to the contribution of schools. Stephen Ball said the work of schools was "unequivocally" responsible for the increase in exam results and it was a stunning achievement. But, he said, this was at the expense of targeting some students at the expense of others. And it took the second session and the contribution of my colleague Warwick Mansell to drag the MPs once again towards that black hole, reminding the committee of the enormous pressures facing schools to meet assessment targets or face the consequences. "If you wanted a good system, you wouldn't start by assessing schools on a set of statistics," he said. "You set schools performance indicators... do I think that helps or hinders schools trying to give pupils a good education? I think it hinders it. I just think it's very English this system... but generally we tell teachers what matters this particular number or set of numbers. "People acknowledge the side effects, and say the answer is to look again at the measures, to change the measures, because we can't change this idea that we need to have statistical monitoring of some kind or to put such emphasis on it." He said: "There's huge issues about saying that all that matters about what you learn is that grade at the end of it." At this point the panel moved on to other matters, safely away from the black hole. But it's going to be fascinating to see what they make of all this -- and what the Government decides to do on exams, with or without any advice contained in the committee's upcoming report. Susan Young is an education journalist.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=520Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:28:26 GMT20120119122826Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:28:26 GMT20120119122826Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:30:00 GMT2012011912123000Talk about double whammies. From September, Ofsted inspectors can turn up without so much as a five minute warning, just as the ICT curriculum vaporises, to be replaced with -- what? It's enough to turn any headteacher into a gibbering wreck. Having read all the stuff on the DfE website about the disapplication of the curriculum, noted the twitterstorm of happy ICT-wallahs, and attempted to watch an (inaudible) live webcast of the Gove speech from someone in the second row, apparently armed with a smartphone, I didn't feel much the wiser. From various hints dropped in the speech and various media outlets, plus the information available on the official website, you're left with the picture that there is about to be a 12 week consultation on the disapplication of the ICT curriculum from September, which would last until September 2014 when the compulsory status of ICT in the school curriculum will have been considered by the National Curriculum review team. The documentation mentions the potential for universities and business to set up GCSEs for schools and programmes of study. "Companies such as Microsoft and Google and Cambridge University are already working with technology education organisations, such as the British Computer Society, to produce free materials for schools. More are expected to follow," says the press release, which opens with the following lines: "Education Secretary Michael Gove today announced he was scrapping the existing ICT curriculum. In its place, he will introduce new courses of study in Computer Science. The move, which is being supported by industry experts including Ian Livingstone – co-founder of Games Workshop, would give schools the freedom to create their own ICT and Computer Science curricula that equip pupils with the skills employers want." I scratched my head and contacted the press office to ensure I'd understood correctly that for two years ICT will remain compulsory but without a compulsory curriculum: that teachers could teach what they liked, with the possibility of getting some degree of help from the industry. Frankly, this seemed pretty extraordinary, even from a Secretary of State who says heads and teachers should make their own professional decisions. But a little further digging has revealed that's probably not quite the situation. You'll have noticed that the speech was given at BETT but the consultation isn't formally announced until next week. It's looking likely, shall we say, that any interim arrangements between a disapplication (if it goes ahead) and the Review's conclusions would contain rather more in the way of formal requirements and curriculum help. A bigger question, though, might be where heads are going to find teachers who can fulfil the demands we're presuming any new ICT "curriculum" will make of them. There's been much talk of pupils learning to program, and much of the current impetus for change has come from the UK games industry: but what proportion of the current teaching force has used that skill themselves? There's also the note of caution that while everyone is likely to need to be a computer user, far fewer people will need or want to do programming. Lessons will still need to cover the basics of word-processing, internet use and emailing, in the same way that structuring an essay should be (but often isn't) a basic taught secondary skill. However, the difference is that these things are now everyday tools rather than something exotic. I recall a conversation with a teacher some years ago, in which it was emphasised that my child was on course for a distinction in the ICT qualification if she managed to successfully forward an email. Something tells me that part of Mr Gove's zeal on this comes from personal experience on discovering exactly what children are expected to do in earning these qualifications.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=519Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:46:39 GMT20120111154639Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:46:39 GMT20120111154639Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:47:40 GMT201201111534740Radical change seems to be on the cards for England's GCSE and A-level exam system in the wake of last month's revelations in the Daily Telegraph of examiners seeming to give too much help to teachers, attending advice seminars, about the content of forthcoming exams. Undercover journalists also filmed a GCSE geography chief examiner for the Edexcel board, Steph Warren, saying that schools had moved to her board because its course was easy, while a maths examiner from rival board OCR also claimed Edexcel was seeking to attract schools to its version of exams by making its questions “straightforward”. I witnessed similar behaviour myself, back in 2005, in research for my book on the pressures on schools to raise their pupils' results. I sat in on two seminars, one in which a senior French examiner advised teachers how to get pupils through their GCSE by scripting oral answers, copying phrases for coursework assignments and not bothering with grammar; and a second in which an influential history examiner said that a “realpolitik” or “ends justify the means” approach to raising results meant that good students did not need to be stretched to get the highest marks. The results-are-everything culture imposed on schools can lead to this kind of thing being normalised, but I still found it shocking and depressing. A widely-made complaint about the exams system, heard much more forcefully in the light of the Telegraph's revelations, has been that competition between the boards lowers education standards, as awarding bodies seek to make their exams easier as they chase the business of schools who are now very motivated to improve results however they can. So, in reaction, Michael Gove has suggested that direct competition between exam boards could be scrapped. In its place, he has picked up on an idea which has been gaining currency over the last year or so. This would see direct competition between the boards for schools' “business” replaced with a structure in which each board would bid (presumably to the government) for a contract to run an exam in an individual subject. This has been likened to the system of rail franchises, whereby companies compete to provide a service on particular routes for a set period of time. There would, then, not be a range of boards offering exams for each subject, but just the one. It's likely we would still have the current range of GCSE and A-level boards, but each would only be active in the particular subjects whose contract they had won, rather than across the full range. All this is tentative at the moment, with Mr Gove saying before Christmas that he would await a report by Ofqual into the Telegraph's revelations before making any final decisions. But, as someone who has covered the ins-and-outs of the exams and testing system for nine years now, I thought I'd offer some thoughts. Although the idea of a single exam board – or at least a single board in each subject – would have positives, I think it would also have serious downsides. I'd be cautious about making this move, then, and think Mr Gove would be well advised to consider other reforms to the system at least alongside it, if not as alternatives altogether. So, again, removing competition between the boards for schools' business would have one apparent upside, in that it would seem there would be no danger of boards seeking to attract business by making their exams easier to pass, or at least giving this impression to schools. Now, I've never been convinced, on this, that boards go in for anything as crude as deliberately lowering grade thresholds to try to bump up their numbers. There is a case, I think, that boards in general might worry so much about their market share that, while not seeking deliberately to make each exam easier, they at least would not want their assessments to be seen as more difficult than those of their peers. For an example of the pressures the boards are under - with many if not most schools under great strain through the government's accountability system for their results to rise steadily, year on year - see this article I wrote for the Guardian in 2009. ( http://bit.ly/2usTF ) It's not always that simple, though. I have come across evidence of boards resisting such pressures, as this 2008 ( http://bit.ly/AtsSvi )report on AQA seemingly wanting to set a higher standard for a new GCSE science exam than its rivals would suggest. However, the boards don't always help themselves, if they want to be viewed by the wider public as standing above the business of seeking schools' business by lowering standards. I reported in 2006 how Edexcel was at that time marketing a series of multiple-choice tests for science GCSE on the basis that it gave pupils “more chances to succeed” and “allowing them to be tested on material when it's fresh, and can take multiple tests before submitting their best performance”. Edexcel also apologised in 2004 for a maths exam which had proved difficult, promising to make it “more accessible” (Note 1) the following year. I have also had it put to me, by teachers and educationists of – I think – a wide range of political perspectives, that competition between the boards for business does indeed lead to that “race to the bottom”. But the disadvantages to be weighed, in moving away from the current arrangements, would be quite considerable. First, the most glaring, for me, is that teachers would no longer have a way of venting their frustration with a particular board by taking their business elsewhere, should they be unhappy with the service it provided. Often, when I've spoken to teachers who have been on the end of what they think is poor performance by a board – usually over complaints of bad marking, and an alleged unwillingness of a board to sort it out properly – the idea of opting for a competitor is one of the only ways of taking some control over a situation in which they feel that they and their pupils have been treated unfairly. Changing boards is often not an easy step to take, of course, with often new textbooks to buy, and the conventions of a new syllabus and assessment to master afresh. But having this power is worth something. So I would suggest that, if ministers do take this decision, it is not going to be uniformly popular in staffrooms. Second, having a single board – either one in each subject, or one board for everything – might risk making England's already highly centralised, ultra-political education system even more so. Boards which make their income by competing for the business of schools and colleges – especially ones with an establishment such as Cambridge University behind them, as in the case of the OCR board – have a degree of independence from ministers which might not be possible were they under more direct oversight by one politician, or even competing for business not from schools and colleges, but from the Government. Third, on a more practical level, there is the question of the inevitable upheaval which arises from major structural change. One of the last major organisational changes in the assessment world in England came, of course, in 2008, when the decision to bring in an outside firm – ETS – from America to run our Sats marking system ended in spectacular failure. The GCSE and A-level exam boards were themselves not in a particularly healthy state as of around 10 years ago, after the last big changes in the boards' structures, when amalgamations of smaller organisations into three awarding bodies in England were still bedding down. Things are much more stable now, in terms of the way the boards operate. Although a string of mistakes in last summer's exams did not show the boards in good light, these were not on the scale of, for example, the ETS debacle. So there will be major risks with any big structural change. Finally, and perhaps related to this, the economics of exam boards would need serious consideration before any change was made. As I have always understood it, subjects for which hundreds of thousands of pupils are entered through each board every year, such as English and maths GCSE, generate large proportions of each board's income. This, the boards say, then helps to cross-subsidise exams in less popular subjects and qualifications. A board competing for a franchise in a major subject and losing might, then, face a serious impact on its overall finances, which might create knock-on problems for schools and colleges. Would boards want to bid for minority subjects if they lost out for franchises for more popular ones? And if a board were running only minority subjects, would it feel the need to hike exam fees to compensate? All these issues suggest to me potential headaches for a new system, bearing in mind our current starting point. What alternatives could there be to scrapping the current system of competing exam boards? Well, I'd look at the ways in which examiners earn money. There is a clear moral case, I think, simply for banning any examiner from taking money to offer advice on how to do well in exams over which he or she has influence. This would rule out examiners being paid to speak at conferences on their exams, or to earn money by visiting schools directly to give advice. Reading the above paragraph back to myself, it does seem strange that this has ever been allowed to happen. I know the argument which is used to justify it – along the lines of there being no harm in examiners giving schools clarity on what is, in general terms, to be expected – but really: paying examiners for advice on how to do well in exams they set? No potential problems there then… If advice on how to succeed in an exam is valuable and thought to be legitimate, and institutions and pupils are supposed to be competing on equal terms, it should be made available for free to all. Examiners, boards and companies should not be trading on “inside information” about exam success, even when the defence is offered that this is sufficiently non-specific about the content of particular papers to be acceptable. I heard Andrew Hall, chief executive of AQA, argue at a conference last year that restricting examiners' freedom of trade in this way might be difficult, given that most of them operate on a freelance basis. If this is so, should serious consideration not then be given to employing those holding senior positions in the system in-house? Finally, though, anyone seeking to reform this system effectively has to recognise that the business of using exam grades both for their original purpose – assessing how well a pupil has mastered a course of study – and for holding their teacher and school to account inevitably carries a risk of corruption. Teachers now have incentives to look for short-cuts which will enable them and their institutions to look good, really however this can be achieved. This can vary from the unethical – providing too much help to pupils with coursework or controlled assessment – to the not unethical but arguably anti-educational, such as the widespread use of exam-specific textbooks written by examiners and focused very closely on the likely content of each paper. I think that has to be taken on board at a fundamental level for any change to succeed. If you think, as I do, that the corrupting and anti-educational effects of judging teachers on their pupils' results are pervasive and damaging, you need to do accountability in a different way, because holding teachers to account through their pupils' exam grades will always carry the risk of lowering, rather than raising, standards. This is the case no matter how much anyone argues that teachers and schools should resist any bad incentives that exist. If, on the other hand, you view “high-stakes” results-based accountability as unavoidable and necessary, you need to police the system much better. You need to recognise at every stage that the chase for results comes with it serious potential downsides as well as – to its supporters – benefits and seek to minimise those side-effects where you can. It is not enough simply to blame teachers who follow the systems incentives and to say they should not. Although this government, like the last, has sought to change indicators and reform assessment systems in piecemeal fashion to tackle some of the side-effects, I'm not sure Mr Gove has recognised the depth and challenge of the kind of reform which would be needed really to root out these problems properly. (Note 1: In fact, that word “accessible” is interesting. It has a technical meaning in the exams world: papers should not be “inaccessible” for pupils if, for example, questions are written in a way that is not clear or confuses pupils, so that their underlying understanding of the subject is not assessed properly. So boards could be said to be acting reasonably by making their exams “accessible”. However, over the years I think the word has also been used to suggest to schools and colleges that an exam will not present unexpected, or too many, difficulties to their students.)http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=518Tue, 10 Jan 2012 09:27:06 GMT20120110092706Tue, 10 Jan 2012 09:27:06 GMT20120110092706Tue, 10 Jan 2012 09:27:06 GMT201201100992706While it's not the start of a new year for schools, the early days of January often set the tone in a very different way. Such was probably the thinking of the education secretary, Michael Gove, when the decision was made for him to give a keynote speech on the academies programme in the first couple of days of term. It probably wasn't part of the plan that the tub-thumping speech was being delivered on the same morning that sentences were being handed down in the case of an 18-year-old murder case which in many ways has transformed British society. I remember being sent by the TES to Eltham in the aftermath of the murder of Stephen Lawrence to see how the local secondary schools were dealing with it and attempting to raise the aspirations of their pupils. There'll be a cutting somewhere in my attic which would remind me of the details, of the hope and the ambition which the schools (both since renamed, I suspect) were trying to instil. But what stands out for me are two memories: the resigned, almost unsurprised, attitude of the pupils to what had happened, and the strangeness of standing, in the dark, close to the spot of the attack. The road was wide, busy, and solidly suburban: not a place you might imagine would hold such dangers for a hard-working young man on his way home one night. In short, it wasn't a stereotypical haunt of racist young thugs -- which meant, chillingly, that anywhere could be. The black youth, Stephen, was hard-working and academically aspirational, in notable contrast to his white attackers -- that, too, challenged the stereotypes still held in some minds. While things have changed a great deal since then, people in the UK are still being physically attacked purely for their race or origin. And in a new interview, Stephen's mother Doreen points out that there is still much to be done in society and particularly in education. Those convicted of murder this week would have gone through school in the 1980s, a very different time to now, but this issue almost felt like a missing element of Michael Gove's speech on academies. "Not enough has been done in the education system; they did not roll out proposals of the inquiry, saying that it was up to individual schools and teachers. But it shouldn't be, some things need to be imposed, nobody is holding them to account," said Mrs Lawrence, adding: "After 18 years we are still struggling and we shouldn't have to." The Stephen Lawrence Trust itself has a mission to support young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, having so far created 100 bursaries and now fundraising to create more opportunities with an educational and a job-ready programme. Clearly it would have been wrong for Mr Gove to have made any reference to the case in a political speech, and might have been seen as opportunistic. And clearly heads don't need reminding about the fundamentals of equality. But perhaps in a self-congratulatory speech about how schools can work to create the best outcomes for all their pupils, that might have included some reference to how education can overcome not only social disadvantage and poverty, but low aspirations and perceived disenfranchisement, and challenge attitudes which can prove so harmful for society (big or otherwise) and individuals themselves. Citizenship is one of those subjects which is likely to find itself shifted from a central position in the curriculum as part of the current review. It might be timely if political support were given to the idea that discussions about equality should remain part of every school's educational remit. And it might also be timely for papers now cheering on how British justice has come good after all these years to remember this week next time they chase up a story on how a school's tackling of racism is "political correctness gone mad". Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@gmail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=517Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:10:36 GMT20120104171036Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:10:36 GMT20120104171036Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:13:06 GMT201201041751306I am looking forward to finding out whether there was more heat than light generated by the newspaper story suggesting that primary schools are going to have to get a lot tougher on poor attendance. The nuggets of hard fact in the tale appear to be the new Ofsted framework, now just days away from a school near you, plus quotes from the Government's behaviour tsar Charlie Taylor, who's suggesting that nurseries should be chasing up early patterns of non-attendance. But it's such a grey area, this one, that many schools will venture into it at their peril. Yes, there are clearly some families who aren't terribly sold on the notion of school, and whose dedication to good attendance may be somewhat on the casual side. You might well want to chase up there. But there are also families for whom the worsening economic situation may mean that a few days or a week out of school is the only way they can have any sort of break or holiday, which may be much-needed. There are families -- I've met them -- who keep their children off school at the slightest sniffle, because that's how seriously they take any sort of illness. But there are also families whose kids are going through one of those awful periods where they pick up one bug after another. Not only do they need a little time to recover, but it's also helpful if they're not feeding into the constant swirl of snot and infection which is your average primary class. So how are schools to differentiate between the sniffling child whose family tradition says they should be tucked up in bed, and the streaming child who's suffering their third heavy cold in a term and feels too rough to learn anything? I am not convinced, either, that the heavy rhetoric currently directed at parents as to the evils and lifelong loss to a child's education of a single day out of school is a useful tactic. Parents aren't daft: they are perfectly aware that the degree of learning which goes on in, say, the last week of the summer term isn't comparable with what's happening in the classroom six weeks earlier. Simply repeating the mantra that losing a day's education (no matter which day, at what stage in a child's school career) risks losing the trust of the people who are being addressed. But I do have an idea, which I'd like to offer as a little New Year present. There are five Inset days in the year. Why not put the dates of a couple of them up for a parental vote: would they prefer these days to be arranged at one end of a holiday, as usual, or placed sometime mid-term, either tacked on to a weekend (to give the opportunity for a cheap, short break), or midweek to allow families the opportunity of a cheaper and less crowded day out or shopping trip? If parents actually had some influence over days when they could legitimately take children out of school, then some of the less legitimate days might well stop. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@gmail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=516Fri, 30 Dec 2011 10:22:29 GMT20111230102229Fri, 30 Dec 2011 10:22:29 GMT20111230102229Fri, 30 Dec 2011 10:22:29 GMT2011123010102229As a statement which is the polar opposite of reality – at least as is being observed in schools in one north London borough now – it is hard to beat. “Teachers, not politicians, know how best to run schools.” (Note one) This was the headline offered by the Department for Education above the press release of one of Michael Gove's first interventions as Education Secretary, in May 2010. In a letter to all schools, Mr Gove urged them to consider the benefits of academy status. The press release quotes him as follows: “The Government is genuinely committed to giving schools greater freedoms. We trust teachers and head teachers to run their schools. We think head teachers know how to run their schools better than politicians and bureaucrats.” This line – that heads and teachers, not politicians or the dreaded “bureaucrats” (note two), know best how to run schools – has featured prominently since then, in DfE speeches and press notices in relation to academies in particular. I have spotted the claim, for example, in a speech by Mr Gove from last January highlighting the fact that, at that time, one in 10 secondary schools had become academies, and again in comments in October by Nick Gibb, the schools minister, in relation to academies' GCSE results. Now 10 days ago, I visited what seemed to me – from, admittedly, one short visit - to be a lovely primary school in Haringey, north London. The head and staff see no reason to convert to academy status. Indeed, to do so would be a huge distraction from the improvement journey they have been on for the past 12 months, while also creating upheaval for the pupils, they argue. The governors have passed a unanimous motion against academy status. There is a vigorous parental campaign against it, and some parents I spoke to were outraged that, having chosen the school for their children because of its ethos, its character might change as it became an academy under the joint control of an external sponsor and the DfE. Despite all of this, it seems that the governance of this school will indeed change, in a process brought about in a matter of weeks and seemingly without any meaningful consultation, because a politician, Mr Gove, supported by “bureaucrats” from the DfE, is advocating it as the right thing to do. This much was set out in a meeting held at the school between two DfE representatives and Downhills governors, at which it was made clear that the Secretary of State expected to see sponsored academy status for schools in Downhills' position. (It is on a notice to improve from Ofsted, though the inspectorate said it was improving following the last visit, in September, and has been below ministers' Sats floor targets in recent years although again the latest set of data see it above the government's centrally-set thresholds.) Jacky Griffin, a consultant working for the DfE as part of a team focusing on promoting academy status for schools in nine local authority areas, told the meeting: “What the Secretary of State said in June and subsequently is that, in his view, the best option for schools where performance has been low for some time is that they become a sponsored academy… “Our preference would be, and it is with every local authority, and every school that we have worked with, is that the school is going to be a sponsored academy. “We would much rather work with the school, with the local authority and it gives us a better chance of finding the right sponsor, the right partner.” This school is one of hundreds across England seemingly soon to move to academy status not because either the staff or the community have opted for it, but because a “politician”, the Secretary of State for Education, is requiring it of them. As I say, the irony – if that is the right word in this case – is probably hitting staff and parents at Downhills, this school in Tottenham, with a sickening force at the moment. Certainly, it will have hit the head teacher and governors, for whom tears at what is happening to the school have been in evidence. I've written about what is happening at Downhills and other schools for the education section of today's Guardian. (http://bit.ly/voANSD) The first thing that struck me about this story was the extreme level of centralisation of policy-making and power now evident in the English education system. Despite, in this case, little evidence that anyone connected to this school wanted it to happen, conversion to academy status now seems on the cards because Mr Gove would appear to have the power to force it through. There seem very few checks and balances, which would allow for anyone to question whether Mr Gove's interpretation of the performance of the school is correct, or whether the case for intervention has been made. (Note three). This has been made possible through a steadily ratcheting-up of the Secretary of State's power, in a process which began under Labour. The Education and Inspections Act 2006 gave local authorities the power to intervene, by issuing an improvement notice, in schools which were identified as “underperforming”, on a variety of measures. When that law was passed, ministers wrote to local authorities urging them not to be afraid to use this method. Further legislation under Labour then centralised this system further, with the Secretary of State granted the power to force a local authority to issue a warning notice. But the most recent education act appears to take this even further. If I've read this right, it says: if a local authority decides to rebuff the Secretary of State's attempt to get it to give a warning notice to a particular school's governing body, it must write to the Secretary of State to let him know. In which case, he can order the local authority to follow his instructions anyway. And the local authority must comply within five days. Oh, and they must send him a copy of this notice as soon as they send it. (See http://bit.ly/sTsWRT ) Now, last year's Academies Act then further cemented this centralising trend, by allowing the Secretary of State effectively to intervene in the management of a school himself, by issuing an Academy Order to require it to leave the local authority. Schools which were identified as eligible for such intervention, in the Academies Act 2010, were those in an Ofsted intervention “category” or “eligible for intervention”, as defined in some other way, through Labour's original 2006 Act. And, it turns out, or so NAHT advice informs me (see this link:http://bit.ly/rrKHBv ), that “eligible for intervention” also embraces schools where the local authority has issued a “warning notice”, because of results which are felt not to be good enough. Coming across this stuff, I must say I wonder if this country is becoming the sort of place I always thought it wasn't: one where central power can be allowed to go more or less unchecked, in pursuit of some goal which also tends to be defined by those wielding the power, in this case that education standards – as defined, again, by those with the power – have to rise. There is an authoritarian, almost Orwellian, strain to all of this which is becoming very worrying. Underlying this, of course, is a belief that the Secretary of State is the ultimate guarantor of high standards in our schools. In his letter to Downhills, Lord Hill, a schools minister, writes that not only was it in an Ofsted “category”, but that it had “been below the floor standard for the last 5 years”. Well, let's leave aside the fact that the school was said by Ofsted to be improving satisfactorily at its last inspection, and therefore on a trajectory it believed it should be allowed to complete. And let's gloss over the fact that, actually, results published last week, just three days after Lord Hill's letter was received, show it above floor target. The deeper point is that, if you were being charitable to Mr Gove, this is coming down to a dispute over who has the best interests of the school's pupils at heart. It is right that the centre wields that power, it is contended, since this ensures that schools are always put under pressure to improve. One argument against that would be that the centralisation now apparent in this system, at least in relation to schools where results are not felt by ministers to be good enough, is dangerous because it allows only one person's interpretation of those results to carry the day. Mr Gove and his civil servants are looking at results data and Ofsted's judgement that the school needs intervention, the latter of which will have been heavily influenced by test statistics. They are then making two judgements: first that results are not good enough, and second that a structural solution - academy status with responsibility for the school to rest with an external sponsor - will improve those results. Those contesting these judgements, by implication and effectively also by assertion - if the recording of the meeting between DfE representatives and Downhills governors at which the sponsored academy route was laid out is anything to go by – simply need to have higher standards for the children they educate, or so the argument would go. It is extraordinary, though, that this viewpoint can be reached by Mr Gove seemingly without detailed local knowledge, and without any meaningful consideration of the views of parents in particular, as well as of staff. Then there is the data itself. A bit of context is needed here. Downhills educates large numbers of pupils eligible for free school meals (43 per cent), plus, the school says, more pupils which, because their parents do not qualify for state benefits, are not eligible for free school meals despite being very poor. They thus do not show up in the DfE's disadvantaged pupil statistics, it is claimed. As far as I can see, the school also goes out of its way to be inclusive. In 2009, the last year for which test data was available when inspectors conducted their last full inspection in January this year, Downhills had a bad year results-wise, which appears to have triggered that notice to improve. Unfortunately, teacher assessment data from 2010, when the school boycotted the Sats tests, is not being taken into account by the DfE in its judgement on whether this school, and others, have been above or below the KS2 floor targets in recent years, meaning the 2009 figures assume extra weight. The school also tells me that a small change in the number of pupils who are counted as not having been with the school sufficiently long to be included in its published KS2 data is likely to improve its published results from 61 per cent achieving the “expected” level four in English and maths to 64 per cent. This may not sound like a lot, but it could make a difference to the way the school is perceived when the DfE's (unilaterally imposed, and backdated) floor target now sits at 60 per cent. In other words, each set of figures is subject to interpretation. A different person, looking at these figures, might view them differently. But, crucially, ultimately only one person gets to interpret the statistics here. Again, this is authoritarianism, which stands in stark contrast both to allegedly decentralising coalition notions such as the “Big Society” and to the idea that millions of local decisions – parents choosing the schools they like –rather than top-down moves from Whitehall – should be given priority. But remember that this is not just a dispute about whether results are good enough; but whether a particular method which it is claimed will improve schools actually will do so. And, here, staff and governors at Downhills appeared to have a point when they argued, in their meeting with the DfE representatives, that there was very little evidence for the success of sponsored academies in the primary sector. That's not surprising, of course, given that so far there have been very few sponsored academies in the primary sector. As Ms Griffin told the meeting: “There is not a great deal of evidence specifically from primary academies [but there is] a wide range of evidence to support the academies programme more generally. That is focused in secondary, and there is no reason to believe that the elements of the programme, of the structure, will not work equally well in primary.” To repeat, the level of centralisation is extraordinary. Not only is one man's interpretation of results data seemingly unchallengeable by a school, its elected governing body or its community, but a policy is being pushed forward as the solution for which people, essentially, are having to take on trust from that one individual that it is a better option for their school. I could stop this blog here, with those worries about centralisation. But many people would argue I had not gone far enough, because, they would contend, Mr Gove also has an ideological aim for our schools system: he wants privately-managed providers, rather than local authorities, to be dominant players. Many feel that the long-term agenda is to allow profit-making institutions to run schools. It would be quite simple, it is contended, to allow the non- profit-making organisations now operating academy chains to be replaced by – or turn themselves into – conventional private companies. If that analysis is true, then, in concentrating power so heavily in one man's hands, we will effectively have allowed that individual to have forced through his own private (note four) agenda on at least a large part of the schools system, with the alleged low performance of hundreds of schools simply the vehicle for the pursuit of that agenda. I suspect, also, that the case of Downhills, other schools in an Ofsted “category” and those under the floor targets are only the tip of an iceberg in terms of schools which could be affected by structural governance change; certainly stories are emerging of local authorities all over the country feeling under pressure from the DfE to push other schools towards academy status. It's scary stuff, but in contrasting the lovely atmosphere of that school in Downhills with the “brutality” of the academy conversion process, I wonder if the scary stuff isn't winning out at the moment. Just almost as a postscript, having visited Downhills I think it's more necessary than ever to keep in mind the positive aspects of what goes on in schools up and down the country at the moment. For example, Downhills reported that it gives free music tuition to every year four pupil, in this disadvantaged area of Haringey; a fact seemingly not picked up by Ofsted inspectors whose report focused mainly on test results data. We should not forget, either, that Ofsted itself has consistently found huge numbers of parents supportive of their local school, with in excess of 90 per cent agreeing with the statement “I am happy with my child's experience at this school”, although this fact has tended to be buried within the annual report of the Chief Inspector of Schools. I also conduct interviews regularly with heads of international schools, as part of a series I am writing for the Daily Telegraph's international edition, and am struck by how regularly they comment on both the benefits of England's national curriculum approach to teaching, and on areas such as special needs provision; it seems that, in many other countries, this is not a strength. Of course, the system is not perfect. We do want more people not to have left school with a less-than-positive view of the whole experience. I'm hardly one to argue that assessment and accountability structures in particular are not producing some serious problems in schools. But still…all those arguing that the system needs radical structural change need to be treated with caution. It may just be that it's true: other people than national politicians are best-placed to make key decisions on schools' futures. (Note one: following a brief twitter discussion with Sam Freedman, Mr Gove's policy adviser, last night, my reading of it is that this statement only applies to “successful” schools, with success defined by the DfE). (Note two: DfE press releases containing this phrase have probably gone through a civil servant “bureaucrat”, just to add to the Alice in Wonderland feel to all of this…) (Note three: In this, I think it even contrasts to school closures conducted in the past through local authorities, which would seem to have left the option of an appeal to central Government by parents fighting school closures, if I recall correctly having covered a school closure story in detail more than a decade ago. Under Labour, government “hit squads” were also sent in to schools including Hackney Downs, the comprehensive in east London which eventually became the lauded Mossbourne Academy. But these changes happened on a much smaller scale than is envisaged now.) (Note four: I've just checked the Conservative party's manifesto and, though it did mention bringing in academy providers to run schools which had been in special measures for more than a year, there was no mention of doing the same for other schools, such as Downhills. This has not, then, been flagged up for voting on by the electorate.)http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=515Wed, 21 Dec 2011 11:17:18 GMT20111221111718Wed, 21 Dec 2011 11:17:18 GMT20111221111718Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:34:08 GMT201112211423408f you've got a bit of time before the New Year, there's some interesting reading to be done on the new National Curriculum. As so often with these things, the spun version of the expert group's progress reports doesn't bear much resemblance to the roughly 300 pages, spread over three weighty documents plus appendices, of material which explains their research and thinking so far. I approached it in the knowledge that a) the whole project is so huge that it's been put back by a year, b) the Government is keen to get times tables and other bits of maths into the primary curriculum, and c) there's a lot of comparison with high-achieving educational systems going on. And that, I think, was about all I knew. But read at least the main document, The Framework for the National Curriculum, and things are suddenly a lot more interesting and a lot more reassuring. There is a proper debate about the aims of education and what it means to us culturally going on around this curriculum review. And while it's correct (and fundamental) that the expert panel are looking at countries which do better than us in PISA and TIMSS, it's not just with the idea that we'll nick bits of curriculum wholesale, the impression which the daily papers seem keen to foster. "We recommend that a statement expressing the contributions of education to national development should be published and debated in a public consultation on the proposals that emerge from this review, with a view to setting explicit, high-level expectation to frame the greater autonomy that is now available to schools under the Government's wider reforms," says the report. The list of aims "which indicate our thinking" also makes interesting reading. "The school curriculum should develop pupils' knowledge, understanding, skills and attitudes to satisfy economic, cultural, social, personal and environmental goals," it says, going on to describe five specific outcomes. In brief, these are: *to satisfy future economic needs for the individuals and the workforce as a whole, including the development of secure knowledge and skills in communication, literacy and maths, and confidence in acquiring new knowledge and skills;*to appreciate national cultures, traditions and values of England and the other UK nations, whilst recognising diversity and encouraging responsible citizenship;*provide opportunities to participate in "a broad range" of educational experiences and gaining knowledge and appreciation in the arts, sciences and humanities, and gaining "high quality" academic and vocational qualifications at the end of compulsory schooling;*supporting personal development and empowerment*promote understanding of sustainability But that's not the half of it. On a quick read -- and I plan to come back to this document for a slower perusal -- there are really interesting things being suggested and discussed. There are suggestions that Key Stage 2 might be chopped in half, to improve the experience for children in year 5 and 6. The National Curriculum might lose some subjects to the basic curriculum -- in other words, they would still have to be taught but as each school chose. This would give schools the chance to develop specialities they felt important, such as thinking skills. Design and technology, ICT and citizenship would move to the basic curriculum. Core subjects would remain as now English, maths and science, with geography, history and PE foundation subjects at KS 1-4, art/design and music foundation subjects at KS 1-3, and modern foreign languages in the foundation for KS 2-4. The expert group is worried that existing arrangements narrow the curriculum too early, and notes that this happens in England earlier than high-attaining competitors. " This has the consequence at Key Stage 4 of depriving many young people of access to powerful forms of knowledge and experience at a formative time in their lives, and foreclosing on some pathways and choices. As with many of the changes that we feel are suggested by the international evidence, this would place pressure on the skill base of the existing teaching force, and we recognise that significant problems of teacher shortages in specific subject areas exist," says the report. It continues: "Specifically we recommend that, in addition to existing arrangements, curricular provision in the following subjects should be made statutory at Key Stage 4: geography, history, modern foreign languages (all foundation subjects within the National Curriculum), design and technology and 'the arts' (both parts of the Basic Curriculum). We go on to explain our recommendation about 'the arts' in more detail later in this chapter). "We are aware that, contrary to the intentions of the review to slim down the National Curriculum these recommendations may appear demanding. However, while it is proposed that core subjects in the National Curriculum will have detailed Programmes of Study and Attainment Targets, other subjects and topics including those outlined above could be stated in the form of short, refined and condensed listings or descriptions of requirements concerning essential knowledge, understanding or skill. This would protect the breadth and associated quality of learning experience which we have observed as a tendency in high-performing jurisdictions without creating an overloaded curriculum." This doesn't mean, says the panel, that this whole range of subjects would be tested at GCSE or in any other way. In addition, it says work would need to be done on whether this was motivating or demotivating for pupils, and might affect attendance. However, the report is very definite that the arts and music are a good thing for students in many ways and that England is unusual in allowing them to be dropped at 14. And then, comes a glorious paragraph. " In addition, we are concerned that an instrumental attitude, which values test and examination results and certificates as ends in themselves, has become increasingly evident in the English system. This diminishes the priority that should be given to ensuring that the underlying learning being accredited is deep and secure. In order to mitigate this narrow instrumentalism in learning, urgent attention will need to be given to relevant control factors, particularly assessment systems and accountability measures affecting all schools. If assessment and accountability systems are to be valid, they need to represent all valued learning outcomes not just a narrow subset of them. In this context, the role of Ofsted and school governors in ensuring that a school's curriculum is broad, balanced and fit for purpose will be crucial." What else? In brief, the panel want to see a place for oracy in the curriculum, and are exploring alternatives to assessment by the current system of levels, preferring a "ready to progress" indicator. "Performance tables could be constructed on the basis of the proportions of pupils in any cohort having reached the 'ready to progress' level at the end of the key stage (i.e. every two years, if our earlier recommendations are accepted). Of course there are a range of subsidiary issues that would need to be considered. However, the proposition holds the potential to make a simpler system that is also more valid. It would also preserve the importance of teachers' ongoing assessment in relation to specific learning objectives, whilst providing concrete information for parents/carers and receiving teachers, " says the report, adding that this idea should be fully explored through consultation. You can see why they need extra time: this one is going to take a lot of discussion and consultation to get right. And there really will need to be consensus on this one, given that its implementation would be perilously close to the next general election. And that can be fatal: remember the Rose Review curriculum that failed to become law even though all the documents were already in schools.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=514Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:57:28 GMT20111221095728Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:57:28 GMT20111221095728Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:57:28 GMT201112210995728You wouldn't expect a House of Commons committee session asking questions about exam standards to be a barrel of laughs, and you'd be right. But there was one utterly joyous moment in this week's session, when the discreetly glamorous head of Ofqual, Glenys Stacey, was answering questions about her view on the relative ease of different boards' exams. She had recently visited an independent selective girls' school and asked one teacher why they had decided to move boards. "She was very impressed by the levels of service provided around the qualification," said Ms Stacey. The chairman, Graham Stuart, leaned forward. "I don't know how many teachers are going to say to the head of Ofqual that we thought this would be easier," he said, adding words to the effect of: "Call me cynical, but they're not going to say we've got the worst results in this area and the head is going to sack me." This moment of cheer was all the more welcome for its status as, frankly, a nugget in a workmanlike session. The MPs enquiry into exams for teenagers had taken a minor diversion this week to poke around the Daily Telegraph's sensational stories about examiners' seminars. It was a curious morning. The first half-hour was given over to the three examiners whose words had been splashed over the Telegraph. To paraphrase the three, two of whom who spent a great deal of time pointing out the details of papers (a pity the cameras were trained on their anguished faces, rather than the presumably bemused expressions of the MPs) they had been misunderstood and taken out of context, providing no information about upcoming exams which was not available on their board's website. There were striking moments. Paul Barnes, answering a question about exam passes versus education, recalled his own O-Levels in the 1970s, where he passed history with a single exam containing five essays. The current cohort, he said, had to do three one-hour papers and two controlled assessments for which "an impressive amount of material" had to be known. "Multiply that by 10 or 11 subjects as well," chimed in fellow examiner Paul Evans. The head honchos of the big exam boards, wheeled out next, gave such a good impression of themselves and the system's integrity that one member later commented that he was minded to give them a knighthood. And finally came Ms Stacey, admitting that her current bedtime reading was my colleague Warwick Mansell's Education by Numbers, which lifted the lid on the exceptionally-helpful nature of some exam seminars years ago. So far, she said, the rough transcripts provided by the Telegraph had not contained anything of concern but 54 hours of tape were now being transcribed by Ofqual. The MPs repeatedly asked questions about the system and people's confidence in it, each of which she answered with exquisite precision (Ms Stacey is a solicitor by trade) and outlining work already undertaken since the regulating body came into being. There were, she said, good signs but sufficient concern about grade inflation, construction of questions, where boundaries lie, "for us to sit up and take notice" she said, adding: "Let's get a grip on this. There is a a little bit of correction to be done." "We are identifying facets of the system which will undermine confidence," she said, identifying grade inflation. An area of concern to teachers, she said, was marking, and Ofqual was working on these two areas. Readers may be interested to know that she is also mindful that whistleblowers contacting Ofqual don't currently enjoy the same protection as those reporting concerns to other public bodies and this is one new power she is seeking. Was a fundamental reform of the system necessary? "The question as to whether fundamental reform should be applied up to the Government. My view is that I am the regulator and I will regulate." There may only be specific points of concern at present, but I'd lay money that Ofqual's regulation is going to be both firm and effective as the rules are tightened in 2012. Susan Young is an education journalisthttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=513Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:34:55 GMT20111216163455Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:34:55 GMT20111216163455Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:35:51 GMT201112161643551So the big story of the day is the strong steer apparently given by some exam boards to teachers going along to their paid seminars, and Michael Gove is demanding a full report on this practice within a fortnight. But it's not a new story. My colleague Warwick Mansell wrote all about this for the TES in 2007, and the BBC had another go at it a couple of years later. Why the furore this time? And why such a furore when the House of Commons education committee's current full enquiry into exam practice is looking at some of the questions arising from today's reports? I suppose the difference is that this time round it fits the current political agenda. The last Government's narrative was that it was doing everything possible to raise standards and achievements in school, and an improving rate of exam passes supported the idea that they were succeeding in this. League tables and the way Ofsted inspections work meant that no matter how many doubts schools had, it was not in their interests to raise awkward questions. Now, the Government narrative on education is very much a traditional Tory one, with the promise of a return to basics and rigour, and this story is therefore a perfect fit for whatever Mr Gove would actually like to do around exams and curriculum (remember, the new draft curricula are still not out and getting later and later). The new enquiry into exams also has the advantage of being comparatively simple and provable: older hands will remember the Standards Over Time enquiry in the 1990s where it proved nigh-on impossible to prove one way or the other whether papers had actually become easier. The thing is though, that if examiners are dropping stronger than allowable hints about upcoming papers and how pupils should answer them, that would clearly be wrong ... but would also be the result of an awful lot of other major changes in education during the past 20-odd years. What we have is the situation where politicians are demanding more and more of schools, and league table position becomes vital. If teachers could either teach the whole syllabus or concentrate on the bits they knew were likelier to come up, with a side order of intensive exam technique, what would their preferred option be? They want their pupils to do well, their department to do well and the school to do well: therefore there's a lot of pressure to go for the option where results might be a bit better. You can see this drive in the homework given out by many secondary schools, where the actual task is accompanied by a level descriptor sheet. Pupils have to juggle the two lists of demands to get the best marks. Fiddling the system or a broad education? You decide. But remember, Ofsted likes to see that pupils know their level and what they have to do to improve. Then of course the education market goes far beyond schools. Each of our exam boards is competing for trade with its rivals, as Education Committee MPs heard last week (see my last blog for details). It's not in the interests of any exam board to be less competitive, which in this context would probably means setting harder papers. The customers -- schools -- want the maximum number of passes and top grades, which in turn pleases parents, potential parents, and the LA, academy chain and the government. Schools not getting the grades they want can simply vote with their feet. So one option open to the Government might well be to have a single exam board, as the MPs were considering last week. But to hand a multi-million pound industry over to a single provider would be a huge step, particularly for a party which traditionally likes to break up state monopolies in favour of competition. And exam boards are only part of this particular story. It will be really interesting to see what happens next. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@gmail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=511Thu, 08 Dec 2011 15:52:23 GMT20111208155223Thu, 08 Dec 2011 15:52:23 GMT20111208155223Thu, 08 Dec 2011 15:52:54 GMT201112081535254I have been writing about the Government's academies policy, on and off, since about 2002, but this was an angle I had never come across before. Speaking at an event organised by the Campaign for State Education and five other organisations which are critical of the policy, the barrister David Wolfe set out the legal basis on which academies stand. And what he had to say was in many ways very strange. I think that the public would also find aspects of what he said surprising, if they were ever faced with trying to get to grips with the intricacies of the academies policy. And it may be that, legally or even philosophically, problems are being stored up for the future which will become more apparent as more schools convert. Mr Wolfe, who regularly works for parents and pupils challenging decisions by academies and other schools, was speaking at a conference entitled “Caught in the Act”, which offered attendees the chance to hear detailed scrutiny of issues around the passing of the Education Act 2011. This became law only last month and includes clauses on academies. And the nub of the two presentations he made was that academies, essentially, are not covered by the main body of education law, as it has developed since the 1944 education act. Thus, he said, non-academy schools - or “maintained schools” as the law calls them – are covered by legislation embracing aspects of their provision including their governance, their admissions, the curriculum, the provision they must make for children with special educational needs, and so on. In academies, by contrast, the “rules of the game” in these areas tend not to be set out through acts of Parliament but rather through a funding agreement: the lengthy document which each academy signs with the Secretary of State for Education to allow the academy to qualify for state funds and thus to be established. Essentially, it is a contract between the trust running the academy and the Secretary of State. Why does this matter? Well, Mr Wolfe's central argument, I think, is that the rules as to what is to count as legal depend on the type of school it is and, in academies, on the contents of the funding agreement with the Secretary of State. With the academies sector growing, this is starting to have implications for large proportions of state-funded provision, mainly in the secondary sector. So, where once there was one body of law for the entire state sector, now what is legal depends on what is set out in each funding agreement, that contract between academy trust and Secretary of State. As Mr Wolfe put it to me: “I have spent the past 20 years doing education law. Before the advent of academies, if I was presented with a kid from Exeter, or from Birmingham, or from Newcastle, saying they had been excluded, for example, it would be the same response: is this in accordance with education law? “Now, my first question would be 'which academy?' and then I go straight to download the funding agreement. The idea that a child in Exeter should be subject to the same law as one in Newcastle does not apply now; it depends on the funding agreements which apply to individual academies.” This sounds like a lawyer's field day to me, and it seems Mr Wolfe would not disagree. He added that the fact that academies, unlike maintained schools, could no longer automatically rely on in-house legal advice from their local authorities could also make matters more complicated for them, as they might have to buy in legal support from solicitors charging by the hour. Aside from the practicalities for schools, this has serious implications. First, Mr Wolfe said it was impossible to generalise at all what the legal position on particular issues was with regard to academies as an entire sector. This was the case even with the Government's recent move to change the school admissions code which – in an aspect welcomed by critics of the academies policy –ministers said would ensure academies were now subject to the code. Mr Wolfe told the meeting: “The [school] admissions code applies to some academies. For the Department to say that it applies to all academies is simply…wrong. “Anything school-specific about exclusions, curriculum, admissions and so on…is covered in an Act of Parliament for maintained schools but that Act does not apply to Academies directly. It only applies if the academy's funding agreement says so. “The funding agreement might say: 'this academy will comply with the admissions code'. But it does not have to say that. And not all of them do.” In other words, the legal position will vary by individual academy. There are other serious implications, I think. First, if Mr Wolfe's view is correct, a principle of equity – that children should be treated equally whichever school they attend –may be being sacrificed in the claimed drive to provide greater freedoms to academies. In other words, the rules of the game – how pupils should be treated –may vary according to what is set out in the funding agreement. Mr Wolfe added that academies created recently under Michael Gove were – “to [Mr Gove's] credit” - tending to be established according to more of a standard funding agreement – which was actually closer to the regulations governing maintained schools – than was the case under Labour. But there were still some strange anomalies, he said. For example, in the latest Education Act, the government moved to change the rules on exclusions such that, in relation to maintained schools, appeals panels cannot now overrule the judgement of a head teacher to exclude a child. Mr Wolfe said that some academies said, in their funding agreements, that they would behave like maintained schools on exclusions, and thus that they would legally have to follow and abide by this change. But others said, in their funding agreements, they would have “old fashioned” appeals panels, as existed when the funding agreement was signed, where heads' judgements could be over-ruled. Thus, they would have to abide by these rules, which had now been changed in maintained schools. In this way, he said, funding agreements could essentially preserve the law in academies in line with what was agreed at the time, rather than being subject to change, as happened in maintained schools. Perhaps the most fundamental point he made, however, was in relation to the legal safeguards for pupils and parents in academies. Strictly according to the law, he said, these were non-existent. He said: “Academies are set up by a legal contract between two parties. [The academy trust and the Secretary of State]. They both have rights. No-one else does.” Parents and pupils' rights, in maintained schools, were subject to Acts of Parliament which, Mr Wolfe said, said “the governing body of a school shall do this, the head teacher shall do this”. Parents finding that a school had broken these rules could therefore bring legal proceedings. By contrast, academies could take a different course. Mr Wolfe said: “The strict legal answer from the academy is to say [to a parent who challenged them]: 'what is it to you? We have a contract with the Secretary of State, and you have no rights under that contract, so you can go and whistle.” (Note one). In practice, he said, he was regularly challenging academies having been approached by parents concerned about, for example, a school's approach to an exclusion, or to the curriculum. Although it could be possible for the law to be on the academy's side, in every case he had dealt with so far the academy had reached a settlement or agreement with the parent, perhaps, he said, because they did not want the courts to be scrutinising the detail of the legal framework. Mr Wolfe said he was handling about one case a week from parents in relation to academies. He gave an example of a recent case. A year 10 child had been causing “low level disruption” in his school. The school did not exclude him, but organised for him to go and “work on a farm” for one day a week, and then to “teach himself GCSE” at home for the other four days. In a maintained school, the school would have to write to the parent to explain why it did not plan to teach the child the national curriculum, and the parent would have a right of appeal. In this particular academy, the funding agreement said it had to teach the core subjects of the national curriculum unless the head teacher thought it was not appropriate for a particular group of children. This was an apparent get-out in this case, and there was no need to write to the parent to state what was happening. But Mr Wolfe said: “We threatened legal proceedings, and in the end they agreed to provide catch-up support [for this pupil].” Frightened about the prospect of adverse publicity, the academy was, then, having to make alternative arrangements for the boy. I must admit to being slightly puzzled as why this happened if, in theory at least, the boy and his parents may have no legal rights in terms of the academy funding agreement, but the practical implications for the school of a dispute also seem to be being taken into account here. In any case, the position for schools on this, then, Mr Wolfe said, could be very messy and the central problem was that there was not a process setting out the rights of parents and pupils: the key document was an agreement between the Secretary of State and the academy. All of this leaves me thinking that the title of the blog Mr Wolfe has recently set up on the subject of academies and the law – “A Can of Worms” – is probably apposite. There are ways of defending this arrangement. Politically, ministers will argue that the vehicle of academy status gives schools extra flexibility in the approaches they take to aspects of school life such as the curriculum. Legally, in terms of ensuring pupils' and parents' rights, I guess the Government would have to argue that the Secretary of State is a democratically-elected politician and will be…erm…the guardian of the public interest – and thus the parent and pupil interest – in negotiations with academy trusts over what goes in the funding agreement. But that seems, to put it politely perhaps, quite a long chain of causation or influence between the leverage voters have over any politician at the ballot box and the intricacies of what might be in an academy funding agreement. I checked with Mr Wolfe and it is still possible for the Government to include academies within the law governing mainstream state schools, on any issue the Government chooses. This would have the effect of superseding any individual academy funding agreement. But the Government would have to specify that academies were covered in any future education law, or else it would only apply to maintained schools; so academies are covered by their funding agreement unless the law says differently. The whole process seems potentially very messy, and also opaque. Although individual academy funding agreements (Note two) are available online, trying to make sense of the law as it applies to the hundreds of academies now in existence is now no longer, as it would be in the case of state schools, simply a matter of looking at and trying to understand what an Act of Parliament says. It is also difficult to imagine widespread coverage in the media – or a national debate – around the contents of individual academy funding agreements. This was brought home to me powerfully a couple of years ago, by the way, when I did try to look at what individual funding agreements said under Labour. Reading through these documents, I came across “side agreements” between the Secretary of State and a chain of academies, which seemed to be designed to lessen the short-term financial burden on a sponsor. These arrangements seemed to have received virtually no public or Parliamentary scrutiny or debate, despite the public money seemingly implicitly at stake. ( I wrote about this here: http://bit.ly/5mqHWN Note three) As more schools become academies, of course, a larger section of our system will be being run according to these piecemeal, largely unscrutinised, arrangements made between the Government and academy trusts. Does an education system run according to the contents of individual contracts between the Secretary of State and private organisations ring alarm bells for you? Well, it does seem rather a strange way of going about matters to me. A can of worms indeed. David Wolfe's website is: http://www.acanofworms.org.uk/ Note one: On his website, Mr Wolfe puts up what seems to me to be a contrast with the fee-charging sector. Although academies are said to be state-funded “independent” schools, the important contract is between the academy trust and the Secretary of State. By contrast, in conventional independent or fee-charging schools, there is essentially a contract between the school and the parent paying fees. Note two: But not, yet, it seems, funding agreements for “free schools”, which is another issue again, and outrageous given that public money is being spent and yet the public seems not to be being told either exactly what the rules are for its spending in these schools, or how much is being spent. Note three: I wonder whether the sums which sponsors appeared to pledge in funding agreements set up under Labour could now be legally enforced, even though the academies policy no longer requires a financial commitment from sponsors.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=510Fri, 02 Dec 2011 14:25:44 GMT20111202142544Fri, 02 Dec 2011 14:25:44 GMT20111202142544Fri, 02 Dec 2011 14:25:44 GMT201112021422544It's a bit of a sad indictment of our national interest in education that the best and widest-ranging discussions on education -- what it's for, how it's organised -- are often tucked away in a Commons committee room. This week the MPs' education committee was taking evidence from heads and college principles on 16-19 exams, in a lively discussion which ranged through the EBac and university technical colleges, through modular courses, through the plethora of exam boards and the continuing failure to provide excellent vocational pathways. And they managed all this in just over an hour. You're unlikely to read anything about this anywhere else, thanks to the committee's impeccable timing. It opened proceedings for the day shortly before George Osborne stood up a few hundred yards away (and with what he said, further stiffening the resolve of heads and teachers to strike by announcing a public sector pay cap on top of the current freeze). It's a shame that the discussion was so overshadowed by events: the eventual report should be required reading for DfE mandarins and -- dare I say it -- ministers. The committee had some interesting questions to ask. The opening gambit was to ask the panel whether the current exam system for 16 to 19 year olds "served them well". Rob Pritchard, head of St Mary's Catholic High School in Ilkley, pointed out that at present GCSEs are seen as a passport to A Levels, an indicator of a child's knowledge and to inform employers. In addition, they were seen as a method of judging schools. "We have a plethora of examinations... confusing to many young people, employers and universities," he said. Martin Collier, head of St John's School in Leatherhead, was in favour of examinations at 16 and 18 but was equally concerned by the number and variety now available, including the International Baccalaureate and the Pre-U. "There's no overview... people are looking for what they perceive to be the better qualification," he said. But there needed to be a clear pathway up to 18: the current situation was complex. There was some debate round the English Baccalaureate, with the panel concerned that it might limit the options of some pupils who might be better off with other qualifications, but some consensus that it was working well with the pupils currently opting to take it. The main dissenter here was college principal Teresa Kelly, Principal of Abingdon and Witney College, who wanted a real vocational equivalent. Vocational qualifications were a recurring theme, with the ghost of Tomlinson invoked "with a wry smile" and mention of the "stillborn" Diploma. UTCs? The drawback there is that they involve taking students who are doing well out of their existing school. Ms Kelly explained how her college was currently working on a potential partnership which might get round this problem. One committee member wanted to know how much schools and colleges involved their local employers in a practical way, to be told that the demands of the syllabus set limits on the possibilities. Modularisation of the GCSE syllabus? Mostly not a good thing, opined the heads and principals, but something which had its place in some subjects. And as Mr Collier pointed out tartly, once the system changed back to a "linear" form with final exams, the exam boards would need to revise their courses, currently geared to a modular model. Ah, exam boards. It's fair to say that the current system came in for a bit of a hammering, whether for the branded tie-in course books, the modular exams ("If I was being cynical I'd say it was to increase profit") or the sheer number of boards out there. One of the heads pointed out, rather sweetly, that the current system legislated against exams being made harder as the boards had customers to keep. And it emerged, clearly to the committee's surprise, that schools and colleges might choose to change boards for a particular subject if they felt marking and the response to any subsequent complaint were poor. So given the panel's reservations about the current system, who should drive change? The answer was interesting: a partnership of "interested parties" to come up with a "coherent plan, a long-term vision" of how to develop qualifications for different groups. This partnership should include universities and employers. Politicians, notably, weren't included in the answer. Which is why this eminently sensible suggestion is unlikely to ever come to pass. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@gmail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=509Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:05:47 GMT20111201140547Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:05:47 GMT20111201140547Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:05:47 GMT201112011420547Prime Minister's Questions should be an entertaining watch next Wednesday, since Mr Cameron agreed with Tory MP Louise Mensch that where possible parents with childcare problems caused by the strike should take their offspring to work. Danny Alexander of the Treasury is apparently planning to do so. While this clearly won't work if the day job is in A and E, it's hard to see any reason whatsoever why MPs couldn't sort out their little local difficulties in this way. And it might even raise the tone of the debate, particularly when, as this week it was largely about youth unemployment and the strikes. Having a few kids and teenagers dotted around the venerable chamber as the two sides slug it out about whose fault it is that there are now more than a million under-25s out of work, and whether the newly-announced job creation plan is enough, might perhaps concentrate minds a bit. What would MPs actually say to teenagers for whom the post-school prospects are either uncertain employment or some of the most expensive universities in the world? What might the (mostly) expensively-educated Government front bench ask their young guests about their education, and their hopes for the future? But all these questions are probably academic, as MPs and their families probably don't cover the broad spectrum of British society that you might get in other workplaces. The age profile is probably high enough that there are comparatively few MPs with younger children, and the higher-than-average salaries might help with emergency childcare options. Moreover, I'd lay a (modest) amount of money that private schooling is a more common choice among this group of parents than it might be in, say, A and E. Furthermore, even state schooled MPs kids are not going to be an entirely representative bunch, are they? There has been the odd lurid tabloid tale in the past about some MP's teenager going off the rails with drink or drugs for a bit, but in the main they are privileged middle-class kids, most of whose parents would have ensured well before the EBac arrived that they took the academic GCSEs, including maths and English, with education to 18 and beyond almost a given. And in some ways that's a real shame, because it might be genuinely useful for MPs and frontbenchers to encounter real young people from all walks of life themselves. Lord Puttnam told a conference at the weekend of his concern that politicians he'd met recently in the DfE "aren't looking at the reality of our current context but instead are looking at education as they wish it was, and as it used to be, " and that there was a risk that pupils would simply give up in the face of a traditional curriculum being forced on schools. While I don't think he's entirely right about the answers, it does seem to me that this generation is going to face a rather different life -- both inside and outside work -- than their predecessors and that any reform of the curriculum and discussion about what should happen in schools and colleges should be taking this into account and discussing with some urgency. What skills will these kids need in five or ten years time to look for work, to navigate what looks like an ongoing housing crisis, and to live enjoyable and useful lives in what may still be difficult times? How can we help them make sense of the worlds where any information is a mouseclick away and as a result general knowledge can be alarmingly sparse? How can they learn the resilience to keep on trying for jobs, or to keep on improving their skills? It would be good if strike day actually led MPs and other opinion formers to actually chat to some of the kids they meet and consider their concerns. Unfortunately the likelier option will be that they simply bleat about the lack of a day's childcare. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@gmail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=507Fri, 25 Nov 2011 12:04:19 GMT20111125120419Fri, 25 Nov 2011 12:04:19 GMT20111125120419Fri, 25 Nov 2011 12:04:19 GMT2011112512120419It is one of the most important and far-reaching reforms currently under development in education in England. In June, teachers' subject associations were promised, in a generally well-received move by Michael Gove, that they would get a first glimpse of how it was shaping up by August. (Note 1) But what exactly has happened to the national curriculum review? This, remember, has been given the task of coming up with new curricula covering education right through from the start of key stage 1 to the end of key stage 4. Yet here we are, now in the second half of November, and there has still been no glimpse of early drafts of the new curricula in English, maths, science and PE, which are scheduled to start being taught in schools in less than two years' time. No-one within teachers' subject organisations seems to know, or have been told, the detail as to why there has been a delay in this first, unofficial, phase. Formal consultation for the curricula for these subjects is supposed to start in January, with first teaching from September 2013. There has been no indication that that official timetable has slipped – although one source now tells me the phrase is “spring 2012”, rather than January, for the start of formal consultation on English, maths, science and PE – but the mystery as to how the review is currently going is ringing alarm bells with some. I was unable, looking into this topic last month, to get meaningful information from the government on who had been involved in any drafting of detailed new national curriculum programmes of study, and even those who have at one stage been close to that process seem baffled now as to whether work carried out over the summer will end up seeing the light of day. The Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education's website makes clear that that organisation was gearing up to consult the maths community on draft Programmes of Study for the new maths curriculum over the period September 5th – 21st. This was part of what was being hailed at the time as an admirably transparent approach from the Department for Education. Yet the website has since been updated to say: “The process [as described above] will no longer be taking place on the timescale described. The Department has decided to delay this pre-consultation phase until the Programmes of Study have been developed to a more advanced stage. The intention remains to make drafts available to the community prior to the formal consultation in early 2012, but in order to make this process more meaningful it is expected that this will now take place later in the autumn . The overall timeline for the national curriculum review and its implementation remains the same, with formal consultation early next year. “The Department has asked ACME to pass on its apologies for any inconvenience caused.” I gather science organisations were then preparing to do a similar exercise with their members in October, only for, again, nothing to appear. Although civil servants have told them that the first versions of curricula are being held back until they are at a “more advanced stage”, there seems no more information than this. “We are in the dark. It's a case of not knowing, and that's the whole community not knowing,” Annette Smith, chief executive of the Association for Science Education told me. Another science source said: “The last I heard from anyone involved was the beginning of October. The whole thing is shrouded in too much secrecy.” It seemed as if individuals were being asked to write sections of the new curriculum, I was told by this source, but there was no communication around who they were. On September 29th, I asked the Department for Education who had been involved in working groups which, over the summer, had been given the task of detailed writing of new draft Programmes of Study. On October 3rd, I only got a vague answer back from the DfE. It said : “Since the summer, we have engaged with a number of experts - including practicing (sic) teachers and members of the subject organisations. These include: the Royal Society, the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education, the Association of Science Education, the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Society of Biology, the Science Community Representing Education (SCORE), the Association of Physical Education, and Sports England.” This, however, would seem to refer to general information-sharing events which took place in the spring and early summer, rather than the more specific business of actually writing the new curriculum. At that time, the DfE could not even tell me whether the new curriculum is to be introduced in all year groups simultaneously, or more gradually, with certain year groups going first. Ten days ago, I asked someone close to the review itself when we might expect to see early drafts. I was told that something would be available in about two weeks' time. Another subject association source said that delays might not be a bad thing: a danger was that reviews rushed towards implementation, and it was better to get any draft right – or nearly right – before releasing it than simply to put something out too quickly. However, rumours are circulating that the hold-up is at a political level, with ministers unwilling to sign off the recommendations of the curriculum review group. I wrote (http://bit.ly/qWs79B ) last month that some views of ministers – especially, according to most people I ask, the schools minister Nick Gibb – in support of the teaching of long division in primary school, seem at odds with the opinion of, as far as I can see, the broad spectrum of maths educators. Although ministers' enthusiasm for the teaching of systematic synthetic phonics is well-known and open, there seems to this observer also to be a hidden agenda around an encouragement of more traditional methods of teaching in mathematics. Earlier this month, Ofsted published a report of an investigation it was asked to make into the teaching of maths in “successful” primary schools, half in the state sector and half independent prep schools. This, says the report, was following a “ministerial request”. What interested me was that the inspectors seem specifically to have been asked exactly when and how these schools introduce “traditional” methods of teaching the mathematical functions, including long multiplication and long division. Now, I am not going to take sides in this debate – I don't feel qualified to take a view as to whether “traditional”or “modern” is best - but there is certainly a lively argument within the maths community as to whether these traditional approaches or alternative methods, which have been widely used in recent years, are more effective. (Note 2) If there is an agenda to promote a particular type of teaching, ministers should at least be upfront about it, set out the case for it and preside over an informed, transparent debate, rather than simply making moves behind the scenes. I've had another look at both the Conservative Party manifesto and the two coalition agreements, however, and there is no mention of the promotion of “traditional” maths teaching. If there is one, of course, it would sit rather oddly both with repeated assertions by ministers that they are giving teachers more freedom and with what I thought was the philosophy behind the review: that the detail of pedagogy will be off-limits. Another view that has been put to me is that problems have followed the decision to scrap the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency and have civil servants employed by the Department for Education, rather than subject experts working for the QCDA or its predecessor body the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, providing the administrative infrastructure for the review. For all the initial commitment to openness of this review, and the willingness of the leader of its expert group, Tim Oates, to tour the country talking about it, this inquiry currently seems decidedly un-transparent. - Note 1: See Michael Gove's speech to the Royal Society: http://bit.ly/k6dZjb Note 2: As I said, there seems widespread agreement among maths educators against the teaching of long division in primary school. With regard to more “traditional” methods of teaching the functions such as multiplication, there is a split among the experts. Note 3: timetable: - August 2011: First unofficial drafts Programmes of Study in English, maths, science and physical education were expected to have been made available to subject associations. But they have yet to be seen. - “Early 2012”, according to the current timetable on the DfE's website: Official drafts in these subjects to be made available for public consultation. - Spring 2012: Ministers make final decisions on these subjects, and announce which other subjects are to be included in the second phase of the national curriculum review. - September 2012: New Programmes of Study in these subjects available in schools, to prepare for first teaching in September 2013.. - Early 2013: Official drafts in other national curriculum subjects, as part of the second phase of the review, put out for public consultation. - September 2013: Materials in these subjects available in schools. Meanwhile, teaching of new Programmes of Study in English, maths, science and PE begins. - September 2014: First teaching of new Programmes of Study in other national curriculum subjects.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=506Mon, 21 Nov 2011 12:44:20 GMT20111121124420Mon, 21 Nov 2011 12:44:20 GMT20111121124420Mon, 21 Nov 2011 13:49:21 GMT201111211314921After the same gestation period as a baby elephant, the new Education Act has finally been born. It's been almost 11 months since the Bill's first reading in the House of Commons, and the thing has gone through 46 separate events and sittings in both houses during that time. Remarkably little has changed, but there's been a lot of debating and arguing around particular areas, with some significant movement on some of these. But reading through the main points once more, it feels as though most of it has been law throughout this Government, given the number of times in which we've been assured that the contents are going to transform our schools. So from now on you can search pupils without consent for "dangerous or banned" items and issue instant detentions. Teachers accused of assaulting pupils can't be named before they are charged (unless they work in an FE college), and the Secretary of State can now close underperforming schools. Disadvantaged two-year olds have an entitlement to free early years provision, and the GTCE can finally be closed (may it rest in peace). There's also the presumption that any school which needs to be opened will be free/academy, and outstanding schools are now exempt from regular Ofsted inspections. All the hours and hours of time which have gone into the making of this Act have produced some small but significant tweaks, mostly in the final knockings. For instance, the final sitting this week included a full-on charge from Labour against the outstanding schools' Ofsted exemption, particularly in the light of the Prime Minister's rant against coasting schools. Schools minister Nick Gibb gave a very interesting qualification of this new rule, saying: "I can confirm that there will be annual risk assessment for outstanding schools, which will normally commence three years after the last inspection. Where there is a change of head teacher before that point, however, the chief inspector has agreed to bring forward the risk assessment, including an HMI review. "Ultimately, however, we have to leave it to the professional judgment of the inspector to determine whether an inspection should be triggered. Factors to be taken into account might include: a school's performance data that had previously been judged to be less than outstanding in achievement or teaching not showing signs of improvement since its last inspection; progress measures showing that pupils or students were not making good progress in comparison with similar groups nationally; or below-average attendances showing little sign of improvement. Many factors can act as a trigger for an inspection." Other changes made along the way are a promise made in the House of Lords that the Secretary of State would keep a list of registered teachers as well as those who had been banned from the sector. Equally significant for many schools is that the removal of the "duty to co-operate" which was in the Bill until some six weeks ago, was itself removed after the passionate intervention of Lord Laming and a couple of other peers. Though it turns out that this potentially "prescriptive" duty has been allowed to remain for purely pragmatic reasons: that it may be required while new SEN arrangements are being made. Or, to quote Mr Gibb: "We were never against co-operation. It is very important that schools, academies and free schools continue to co-operate with other state bodies, locally and nationally, that affect children. That was our reason for removing the prescriptive duty. A number of changes are happening in relation to the Health and Social Care Bill and the SEN Green Paper and, having considered the matter further and reflected upon it, it is better to maintain the duty until deliberations over those measures are complete and until decisions about the SEN Green Paper have been taken." I suppose that might be a hint that the duty to co-operate may eventually be legislated out of existence, but, refreshingly, that's the only suggestion so far of any further education legislation beyond what may be required over SEN. Perhaps that's because no-one concerned can face the prospect of another 11 months mulling over legislative details If that really is it for this Government, that would be almost as much of a record as the time this Act has taken -- but on the other hand, when you've turned upside down many of the structures of state education during your first 18 months in power, it's probably unnecessary to do much else other than sit back and watch the consequences.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=505Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:53:37 GMT20111116135337Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:53:37 GMT20111116135337Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:53:37 GMT201111161315337What with all the current concentration on school status, bribing first-class physics graduates to become teachers, and elevating the classic GCSEs to league table sainthood, there isn't much talk of school development these days. Perhaps that's because schools aren't allowed to develop any more, only improve. So I was quite intrigued by the new book just published by Raphael Wilkins, an associate director at London University's Institute of Education and a chap with a wide background in education. It's a large book, and I can only claim to have skim-read it so far, but the title gives you the basic premise: Research Engagement for School Development. What Wilkins is saying isn't surprising in the least, but interesting: that schools where staff are encouraged by school leaders to do some of their own research are less likely to meekly accept what they are told and more likely to trust their own judgement. Schools which operate in this spirit of enquiry also tend to have better morale, find the best learning approaches for their pupils, and discover good effects on the community. Moreover, teachers who are encouraged to do their own research are better able to think for themselves and trust their own judgment, although Wilkins stresses that it's better to have a whole-school approach. Being "research-engaged" means reading and investigating published research as well as doing your own, he says. However, Wilkins finds that telling schools to take a particular approach because research suggests it works is counterproductive. Teachers do not feel personally engaged by this, he argues. “The idea of research engagement at school level rests upon a different set of assumptions. Its emphasis is not upon the top-down systemic application of 'proven practice', but rather upon the self-motivated professionalism of teachers, drawing from a range of internal and external sources of evidence to make judgements about what will 'work' best in their specific context.” On the face of it, this fits perfectly with what the Government says about trusting heads and teachers, and yet somehow seems curiously subversive. After all, this would suggest that the 1950s model of schooling which appears to be inspiring current educational policy could even -- eek -- be challenged by informed schools where staff had collectively researched what works and decided to go their own way. Any research-informed schools out there? I'd love to hear about your experiences. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@gmail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=503Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:46:28 GMT20111111104628Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:46:28 GMT20111111104628Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:46:28 GMT2011111110104628What is it with the TES and teacher unions? 10 days ago, my former employers had a cover which led on an article asking the question, above a picture of …ahem…a hearse, “do the unions have a future”? I think that was a strange question to ask, especially at this current moment in the history of the teachers' associations and the wider union movement. Therefore, I wanted to try to analyse and deconstruct the arguments in the coverage. The place of unions in schools, of course, is central to education in this country and I wanted to seek to make some comments as an observer. The coverage – the front page question was followed by a feature and also a leader column (http://bit.ly/ttUIVJ) written by Gerard Kelly, the editor –came despite a sharp rise in teacher union membership in recent years, as I discovered after looking at official data after reading the pieces. By my calculations, official, fee-paying union membership has grown by 10 per cent in the past seven years. Figures from the Certification Officer – which compiles the data on union membership, and was the organisation cited in the TES article, though not in this way – show total fee-paying membership of the six unions operating in England rose from 706,866 to 776,039 from 2004 (note 1) to 2010. This appears to be an improvement from a high base, too: in 2002, I wrote an article for the TES (http://bit.ly/vBLZwl) on how union membership was at that time at its highest level since the 1970s.(note 2). The TES feature article did admit, at its start, that “as the pensions row brings thousands of new recruits to the teaching unions, their future may seem secure”. But there was no sense, in the piece, that this growth in numbers easily pre-dated the current pensions row, or of the scale of the rise. The piece itself seemed to be listing four threats to the unions' futures, or to their very existence if you take the front page at face value. First, the rise of academies was putting at risk national pay and conditions arrangements. “The consequences are serious: an erosion of union leaders' power to negotiate on a national basis,” warned the piece. National pay and conditions were “historically a key raison d'etre for organised labour in schools,” it added. “National pay bargaining may limp on for a few more years but it won't be binding on large chunks of the system and it can't be long for this world,” the leader added. Now, of course it is true that academies do not have to abide by the national pay and conditions agreement, and that their numbers – in the secondary sector, at least - have grown “explosively” in the past year, as the leader says. It is also true that classroom unions have long feared that the academies policy may erode national pay and conditions arrangements in the long run. Yet what is the evidence that this is actually happening, at school level across the country? This is an empirical question, which as far as I can see the TES hasn't looked into in detail at the school level. It is certainly not hard to find academies offering salaries quoted with reference to national pay scales in adverts printed in recent editions of the TES. And looking into the funding of academies in the past six months, I have had academy heads tell me they won't touch teachers' pay and conditions for fear of the reaction among staff. How representative is that reaction? I don't know. I'm not sure anyone does. Lord Hill, the schools minister, was presumably so worried that there would not be big changes that he warned in January that schools signing up to national pay and conditions agreements could be stopped from becoming academies. (http://bit.ly/eDT5po) Classroom unions are clearly worried. They may not be inclined to take all academy principals' statements of abiding by national pay and conditions at face value. Or they warn that, when the principal changes, the policy might change. On the other side of this argument, government sources, and some academy principals themselves, have been known to suggest that pay and conditions can be higher in academies than in conventional maintained schools. Summing up, the actual future impact of the academies scheme on teachers' pay and conditions is, it seems to me, an open question. And unions' raison d'etre is not the existence of national pay structures, but to represent their members, in whichever way they can. Even in academies which do not recognise national pay and conditions, that will continue. Related to this, the piece says, as a second threat, that the rise of academies - allied to cuts in local authority budgets - is putting at risk “facilities time”, during which union reps are paid to carry out union business. This, clearly, would seem to be another challenge for unions. But a threat to their very existence? In what way? There's not much detail in the piece about the organisational challenges the unions would face. Third, the article cites a drop in influence with ministers. It says: “the fact is that, since the departure of the Labour ministers from Downing Street last May, unions' influence on politicians has dramatically dropped”. This is backed up by the leader. It warns: “The unions face a Government that is cordial but cool. Their clout is not what it was. The days when general secretaries wafted in and out of Whitehall are long gone.” It is hard to know where to begin with this. Some political context is needed: we have, of course, moved from a Labour to a Conservative-led government over the past 18 months. This might have something to do with this attitude shift among ministers. The implication of the leader is that Conservative ministers are neutral, dispassionate bystanders on the scene of union affairs, waiting to be impressed or not as to whether union leaders will act in the best interests of the country as well as of their members, and that approval from the Secretary of State – seemingly whatever his intentions for the schools system and for teachers' pay and conditions – is the criterion by which they should be judged. Again, this is a strange take on the way the relationship works. Of course, unions always have to decide how closely they want to work with government – when to rattle sabres, and when to seek to negotiate. And a case can be made that the closeness of some unions' relationship with ministers in the “social partnership” years under Labour would make things more difficult under the Tories. But that is very different from suggesting, as here, that the fact that a government is not supportive of unions is a failing in itself. Unions have to support their members. Their strategies in doing so will, inevitably and obviously, be heavily influenced by the actions of government. And there is little mention or analysis in this TES edition, as I want to go on to say later in this piece, of the substance and detail of the unions' current dispute with ministers over pensions. Any dispute carries risks on both sides, and that includes on the Government's. Ministers' actions are as worthy of detailed analysis as the unions' stance. The fourth threat to unions' futures, this piece argues, is the fact that they are not joining together as one. Well, the arguments for unity have been well-rehearsed, and to be fair, both sides of this debate are presented in the feature. The case for unity is that it presents a stronger negotiating bloc with government. The case against it is that having different associations represents healthy competition for the representation of the varying wishes of the teacher workforce. Whatever the merits on both sides of this argument, the fact is that teachers' unions have survived without unity for a long time, and seem numerically to be growing stronger. So this is not a threat to their existence, either OK, so I don't think any of the reasons cited suggest an existential threat for unions. If there is a threat to their existence in the current form – through, for instance, the rise of academies - I don't think a case is made here as to how exactly this means they have to change, or even as to the scale of the threat. If ministers are planning fresh moves to reduce the power of unions, we are not told about them. Teacher unions remain, as charts illustrating the feature show, far stronger numerically than they are in the rest of the UK workforce. The quoted 74 per cent of teachers “unionised” seems a huge figure. It would be interesting, actually, to explore the reasons for this difference with other parts of the economy. I would also like to read about the impact of unions at individual school level. But there are bigger issues here, too. First, it seems, again, odd that this question is being asked when the union movement would at least seem to be going through a period of strength, or at least of opportunity. As mentioned, the feature does highlight the fact that the pensions issue has gained unions members, but there is no acknowledgement that wider events over the last three years might have strengthened activism. It is currently not hard to find support, in glimpses at least in almost all parts of the media, for protest against the inequities of the financial system and wider economy. For example, the Financial Times regularly carries articles questioning the disconnectedness of rising executive pay, while the largely right-of-centre London Evening Standard runs columns taking the side of those camped outside St Paul's against the now shelved plans by the church to move them on. The rising inequality of recent decades also leads some to suggest this is linked to the decline of organised labour in the private sector over the corresponding period. And, of course, it was estimated that 250,000-500,000 people took to the streets of London in March to protest against the cuts. Activism, then, hardly seems on the wane. But the final “big picture” point is this: what about the substance of the unions' current dispute with ministers over pensions? For all the coverage as to the future of the unions themselves, where is the analysis of, essentially, the merits of their latest case? An issue of similar importance to, say, readers of the FT, would have been analysed to death by FT commentators as well as its reporters. There seem, also, to have been few human interest stories as to how individual teachers, and TES readers, are going to be affected by the pensions changes. Although the magazine has covered the intricacies of the pensions row in some detail, this approach seems to have been taken only occasionally. (See here: http://bit.ly/pzmDi8) Maybe the teachers who are angry about this central aspect of Government policy are wrong. Maybe their positions need to be tempered by a consideration of the overall impact of pensions provision on national finances. But I'd like to hear their voices anyway. Often, in the pages of the TES - although the magazine continues to break interesting, important exclusives which grapple with policy in ways often not offered by the mainstream dailies - unions can seem to be getting a tougher ride than coalition ministers. Given the scale of the changes being put through by this government, the lack of a detailed critique is surprising. - It was interesting to read last week that Michael Gove had told heads and local authority leaders to stop “whingeing” about a lack of resources and not to “reach for excuses” instead of getting on and improving their schools. (http://bit.ly/t7QZpa). Yet, as the latest set of economic growth figures were released a couple of days later, I found myself listening to the usual stock of “explanations” from Conservative MPs for the less-than-fantastic position of the economy over the past year. Chief among them were the “mess Labour left” (despite the fact that in 2007 the Conservatives signed up to Labour spending plans http://bbc.in/a0ohL8 , lest we forget) and the current problems in Europe. In recent months, we've also had slow growth blamed on the snow, on the Royal Wedding and on the Japanese tsunami. Reasons, or excuses? Accountability should work both ways. Note 1: 2004 was the earliest year on the Certification Officer's website for which I could find comparable figures for all the unions. By the way, DfE figures show teacher numbers in state-funded schools in England grew by three per cent over the period 2005-2010. With support staff numbers rising by 27 per cent over the period, the total growth in the schools workforce was 14 per cent. Note 2: These figures are not strictly comparable, as my reporting in 2002 was based on total membership, which includes non-paying members. The 2004-2010 stats are based only on members who boost union revenues.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=502Mon, 07 Nov 2011 12:53:49 GMT20111107125349Mon, 07 Nov 2011 12:53:49 GMT20111107125349Mon, 07 Nov 2011 12:53:49 GMT2011110712125349So Sir Michael Wilshaw has jumped the final hurdle to becoming Chief Inspector for Schools, with the publication of the Education Select Committee report recommending him for the job. But frankly, it was a foregone conclusion, having watched the MPs and Sir Michael in action earlier this week. From the rather desultory line of questioning, and the large number of empty chairs, I'd guess the committee had rather felt that way as well. But sometimes interviews can be interesting without actually taking you anywhere, and this one rather fell into that category. Above all, I was fascinated by the body language of the new Chief Inspector. Not for him the steepled fingers of the politician. Sir Michael's arms spent the entire session folded robustly across his body. Defensive? He didn't seem particularly defensive: more, I'd think, that he couldn't quite see why he was being questioned by the MPs. And many of the questions were pretty good, circling round his ability to run such a huge organisation across a wide range of places to be inspected from the background of an (excellent) head teacher. His answers were pretty straightforward as well, and delivered with some humour. No, he couldn't claim to know lots about children's social care, but there were experts at Ofsted with whom he'd be working closely. No, he hadn't managed a budget this big but his school's budget was large and he'd be working with the experts at it. And so on. He got animated when explaining that he'd never have likened himself to Clint Eastwood had he known there was a reporter in the room, but stuck by the underlying idea of the analogy. And he effectively revealed that he'd been headhunted by Michael Gove for the job, which is no great surprise but nice to have officially confirmed. This looks better, too, when you read the Committee report and discover that there were two attempts to fill this post over several months, with only one applicant from each round (of whom one was Sir Michael) found to be appointable. For many people this will have been an opportunity for a first look at the man whose utterances for at least the next 18 months are really going to matter to people working in schools and children's services. Refreshingly, there was no management-speak or educational jargon, no impenetrable sentences designed to sound good and mean nothing. Unless he gets nobbled, I think his first outing has confirmed what we were expecting: a plain-speaking HMCI with high expectation of schools, particularly those doing just well enough. He has first-hand knowledge of the kids who need the help of social services, and clearly genuinely cares that they get the best possible help. It's a big job, but he's a big man, physically as well as in presence. He's a headteacher, who's devoted his working life to the areas where Ofsted is acting as a critical friend: what better preparation or qualification could there be for the job? And while it might have seemed a bit of special pleading for Michael Gove to get his favourite headteacher in this enormously symbolic post, he's looking to me like a good choice. Just don't expect him to be a comfortable one. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=501Thu, 03 Nov 2011 18:43:10 GMT20111103184310Thu, 03 Nov 2011 18:43:10 GMT20111103184310Thu, 03 Nov 2011 18:43:10 GMT201111031864310In a few years time, I think we'll be remembering this week as the date when the job of being a head took a significant lurch in a different direction. Broadly speaking, anyone who's come into the job during the last decade or so is used to dealing with a budget which tends to get bigger or at the worst case stand still. As the IFS report now makes clear, we've arrived in the era of shrinking education spending where the only state schools unlikely to get an enforced "haircut," as the bankers like to put it, are those with large numbers of kids eligible for the pupil premium. Total public spending on education in the UK will fall by over 13 per cent in real terms between now and the year 2014-15, the largest four-year cut since the 1950s. Capital spending is being slashed, higher education is losing out, and 16-19 provision and early years funding also face dramatic cuts. Schools, say the researchers, are relatively protected, although the majority will see real-terms cuts. Moreover, this comes at a time when the rhetoric of the Coalition puts increasing weight on the role of the headteacher in doing the right thing and schools going it alone. For those new to the concept of making major and consistent educational economies, there's a rough ride ahead. One problem for heads is that as a nation what we expect schools to do has changed an awful lot since the 1950s when we last saw a contraction like this. In those days, kids were sent off to school for a basic academic or technical education. Bad behaviour earned lines, detentions or corporal punishment, with expulsion as a last resort. Neither parents nor government expected schools to work with pupils to solve the underlying problems preventing them from learning, and academic expectations were generally lower, with a school-leaving age of 14, few pupils taking O Levels, and CSEs not introduced until later. Effectively, many pupils left school without any qualifications and went straight into work. A Levels were for a minority, and a tiny percentage expected to go on to university. Society's changed a lot too, with less certainty around family structures. Moreover, we now take the trouble to find out about how children feel whereas 50-odd years ago they were just expected to get on with it, no matter how miserable family or school life might have been. Dyslexic or autistic in 1955? Tough. Special educational needs? What are they? Aspirational parents then might have tried to get their children into the grammar school for a nice white-collar job, but helicopter parenting, tutoring, and all the rest of it were unheard of.All these genies aren't going to go back in their bottles. The Government isn't going to stop demanding rising standards, and parents aren't going to go back meekly to accepting anything that school says. But the money available is going to shrink as heads and their governing bodies face up to some increasingly unpalatable decisions. Unfortunately, the past will hold few useful lessons: we've all changed too much in the last half-century. Heads are going to be making it up as they go along. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@gmail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=499Thu, 27 Oct 2011 17:15:38 GMT20111027171538Thu, 27 Oct 2011 17:15:38 GMT20111027171538Thu, 27 Oct 2011 17:15:38 GMT201110271751538I have been thinking a lot about the above questions in the past few weeks, spurred in part by the announcement of Ofsted's new draft inspection framework for 2012 onwards. There has been some excellently detailed coverage of this in the TES in recent months, with inspectors rightly challenged on the minutiae of how data is to be used to hold schools to account. But, reading the new framework and its accompany guidance to inspectors (http://bit.ly/ngjFLT), I can't help also wondering about the philosophical problems with Ofsted's official approach to education, and why these documents, supposedly talking about a sphere of life which should, surely, be about potential in its broadest sense and enrichment, come across as so frankly dispiriting. Unsurprisingly, perhaps from an inspectorate, part of the problem is the authoritarianism within these papers, I believe. But I think it is also to do with a misplaced sense of certainty and precision, and of a persistently narrow vision as to the purposes of education. I think I need to expand on this, and also to be a bit more specific. And predictably perhaps, I am going to link this discussion to the role of achievement data in inspection verdicts, as Ofsted sees it. What has got me thinking has been the at-face-value welcome pledge by Ofsted and ministers that the new inspection framework is to put more emphasis on the quality of teaching, as observed in the classroom, in judging schools. Launching the new framework on 30th September, the outgoing chief inspector, Miriam Rosen, highlighted the fact that inspection judgements on the quality of teaching and learning in schools would be one of only four main verdicts in each report, the others being pupil achievement; behaviour and safety; and leadership. This focus on a reduced number of inspection criteria – the current framework has three main judgements, and 18 sub-categories of judgement – would allow inspectors, she said, to spend “even more time” in classrooms observing lessons before making their judgements. This has been part of a move, I think, to address one of the criticisms that people including me have been making of the system since 2005: that its reliance on test and teacher assessment data – provided to inspectors before they reach the school – can lead to schools effectively being pre-judged before anyone sets foot in a classroom. Allied to that were worries about inspection judgements having been made on the basis of much less time spent in classrooms than used to be the case pre-2005. (Note 1) I think the move to emphasise judgements on just four aspects, all of which will be easily understandable to the public, looks admirably clear. However, dig a bit deeper beneath the surface of Ofsted's comments, and it becomes apparent that this is still a very data-oriented system. Consider the way the judgements work. The judgement for both “teaching” and “leadership” are both clearly also linked to pupil results. They even risk being defined by them; the extent to which they are will depend on the actions of individual inspectors, I suspect. To consider “teaching” specifically, the evaluation schedule, which provides guidance for inspectors ,s ays that “the judgement on the quality of teaching must take account of evidence of pupils' learning and their progress”. (The highlighting in bold is Ofsted's). The obvious evidence of pupils' learning and progress will be assessment results. There is also a section of the evaluation schedule on “grade descriptors”. This provides guidance to inspectors as to what outstanding, good, satisfactory or inadequate teaching in each school will look like. Against “outstanding”, it says: “Much of the teaching in all key stages is outstanding and never less than consistently good. As a result, almost all pupils are making rapid and sustained progress.” The grade descriptors for teaching continue in a similar vein. For example, against “satisfactory”, the grade descriptor begins: “Teaching results in most pupils, and groups of pupils, currently in the school making progress that is broadly in line with that made by pupils nationally with similar starting points.” Qualitative judgements of teaching quality, then, are expected to be reflected in statistical measures of pupil progress. Against “inadequate”, three of the four bullet points – in illustrating how good teaching should be judged - seem to be referenced against measures of children's achievement: either raw attainment data or progress measured. I would argue, then, that although inspectors are being encouraged to spend more time in the classroom observing lessons before reaching their judgements, a or even the key part of the evidence will continue to be pupils' test and teacher assessment results. Similarly, under leadership, against “outstanding”, the grade descriptor begins: “The pursuit of excellence in all of the school's activities is demonstrated by an uncompromising and highly successful drive to strongly improve achievement, or maintain the highest levels of achievement…” In her speech, Miriam Rosen said: “The new framework will focus on how school leaders are improving achievement for pupils by helping them to overcome specific barriers to learning.” It might seem difficult, then, given the above, for a school without good results to gain a grade of having good leadership. It goes without saying that the judgement for “achievement” will focus on pupil results. This means that for three of the four judgements in each Ofsted report, and for the overall verdict, pupil results are going to be central. Why does this matter? It seems to me that it does for two reasons. First, the suggestion and implication which is clear within the inspection framework and guidance is that teaching quality will always be reflected in good results seems to me to be, while powerful politically, not a reflection of the reality. Remember that, in the guidance to inspectors, it seems to me that there is the suggestion of this one-to-one relationship: good teaching, as observed in the classroom, will be reflected in good outcomes (Note 2) for pupils. Good results will follow good teaching. Or the reverse. Am I over-interpreting what Ofsted is saying, here? I don't think so. Look, again, at those inspection “grade descriptors”. Satisfactory teaching “results in most pupils, and most groups of pupils... making progress which is broadly in line with that made by pupils nationally with similar starting points.” The quality of teaching will simply be captured by the quality of the pupils' results, the inspectorate is saying. I think the faith in this one-to-one relationship is probably mistaken. In the real world, I suspect, children's motivation will rise and fall over a period, some children will be more motivated than others and everyone will have periods when they make leaps forward in their learning and times when they plateau or even slip back. A child with good results might owe them to the good quality of teaching in their school over the immediate period for which they are being assessed, to outside factors such as support from their parents or, in some cases, from tutors, or to the groundwork done by teaching earlier in their schooling. A group of pupils taking national test results might benefit or lose out from lenient or harsh marking, remembering that each set of tests is marked by a single individual. This complex relationship between the quality of input – teaching, in this case – and pupil outcomes was discussed in a fascinating speech I came across a few weeks ago by the assessment specialist Wynne Harlen. This speech (http://bit.ly/qU0kXn) was made way back in 1978, at a seminar on accountability at the British Educational Research Association. Wynne was discussing the merits of systems of accountability based mainly on what I might call “inputs” – looking at the sort of activity or transactions that went on in a school, with the goal of improving pupils' learning – and “outcomes”: the notion of judging schools by their pupils' results. Both had their strengths and weaknesses, she said, but judging schools solely on outcomes, even when outcomes are couched in such general terms as “what children [actually] learn”, could be problematic . She said: “The notion that 'what is happening in a school' the transactions, can be measured by what pupils learn is a simplistic one. It assumes that what is taught well is learned, that what is learned has necessarily been taught in school and that what is not learned has not been taught or not taught well.” In other words, that relationship between good teaching and good outcomes is, inevitably, complex, however much we might like it not to be. (Note 3) The complexity is not reflected in Ofsted' s world, though, where the implication is that good inputs always lead to good outcomes and, perhaps more to the point, good (or bad) outcomes are always a reflection on the quality of the inputs. I think Ofsted's system, if more effectively designed, could actually help us to understand the relationship between quality of input and quality of outcome much better than it does now. It could have separated out inspectors' judgements on the quality of teaching – ie the quality of the input – from pupil results – the quality of the outcomes. In the same way, there could be a separate judgement on leadership, without considering results at all. Such an approach would have to be carefully designed: inspectors would have to reach a judgement on teaching quality by, for example, classroom observation, talking to pupils and looking at the quality of their work without considering the children's assessment results, and give a verdict for “teaching” before having seen the data. “Achievement” would simply be recorded separately, and then these judgements looked at holistically before reaching an overall verdict on the school. Such an approach might be more tricky for “leadership” – many in the system now might argue that the use of data is such an integral part of leading a school that it is in reality difficult to separate the two – but it would be interesting to explore. Coming back to the judgement on “teaching” however, separate judgements for “teaching” and for “achievement” might help us to explore the relationship between input and outcome. Inspectors might even have to explain why they reached different verdicts on the two, which would be no bad thing, in my view. We might find that my suspicion discussed above, that there is not or not close to a one-to-one relationship between good teaching and good outcomes, was not true, of course. But the key thing is that we cannot check. This approach is not possible, because the assumption of a one-to-one relationship between quality of teaching and quality of pupil outcome just continues to underpin Ofsted's systems. Some inspectors might challenge that view: they might argue that, for the teaching judgement, if they saw evidence of good teaching and yet the pupils' results did not back it up, the school could still receive a good verdict on teaching. Yet I wonder, given the fact that numbers can seem to be more “objective” than qualitative judgements, how often this would happen. If you view the path from good teaching to good results as a collaborative venture between teacher and pupil, with many possible slips along the way, including inevitable error margins around any assessment system, I think there is the following implication. There is uncertainty in this process: a teacher might worry that good teaching might not result in good outcomes, through no fault of the teacher. But Ofsted accepts no uncertainty, or complexity in the relationship between teacher input and pupil outcomes, beyond its acknowledgement that a pupil's starting point will influence his or her attainment at any one point. Uncertainty is simply something the teacher has to deal with, rather than the inspection system to accept, manage and possibly investigate. The system is authoritarian, then, and in that sense may feel oppressive, in effectively seeking to deny uncertainty in the link between good teaching and good results, making it a problem with which the teacher, rather than the inspection system, has to grapple. Those questioning this approach can even be made to feel that it is Ofsted, rather than them, who have children's interests at heart. The obvious response from Ofsted is that this tough approach from the inspectorate and others with power over what goes on in schools is entirely appropriate: test and exam results just are important for young people, and we should never shirk from emphasising this fact. The system, then, needs to focus on outcomes achieved by pupils. Yes, there may be uncertainty, but we need teachers to try to negate it: to do all they can to squeeze it out of the system. But England's system has been taking a hard line in emphasising results, almost as ends in themselves, for 15 to 20 years now. The pursuit of results in this way, encouraged by our accountability system over that time, has been of questionable success: although the picture with regard to the evidence of different international testing systems is mixed, rising national test and GCSE scores are often not replicated when alternative ways of measuring our system are used. This is crucial, because the narrowness of focus on particular test and exam measures needs to lead to improvements on other measures to show that underlying skills and understanding have actually risen. Indeed, it is possible to view one of the often-reported anti-educational downsides of England's system – teachers spoonfeeding or guiding pupils towards test answers – as a logical response from many within the profession. It could be seen as the need to take more control over the process of “delivering” results to pupils by squeezing uncertainty out of the process, given that uncertainty itself, in the passage from good teaching to good results, is what the system wants to deny. This narrow focus on maximising outcome measures as ends in themselves, then, needs to be questioned. My second point is that Ofsted's new measurement system continues to reinforce a very narrow view as to the purposes of education. Consider, again, the judgements which are central to the inspectorate's new regime. Pupil results seem to be the key not just to the “achievement” judgement, but to “teaching”; to “leadership” and then to the overall judgement. It is as if the system is telling schools: you need to raise your pupils' results. And you need to raise your pupils' results. And by the way, in case you've forgotten, you need to raise your pupils' results. This intensive focus on assessment scores is reinforced by recent Ofsted pronouncements. In its inspection framework document, it says, simply and without discussion: “The most important role of teaching is to raise pupils' achievement.” No debate there, then, it seems. And, in her speech, Miriam Rosen said: “Our key challenge is to continue to raise pupils' achievement, achieve better rates of progress and secure higher standards of attainment for all pupils.” Well, no-one would advocate lower standards or poorer results, but is this really all that education comes down to? Ofsted seems to be proposing: learning's central purpose is to raise the numbers. I look at this, as someone who has loved learning throughout my life – and has never come close, by the way, to capturing its potential – as something close to tragic. Given the huge scope and breadth of human knowledge and understanding in the 21st century, why do we limit our ambitions of education to watching the percentage of children meeting Government expectations inch upwards, or not? It does not sound to me to be either a great advert for summing up what schooling could represent for children, or for attracting talented people into teaching. I think the inputs – the richness of the learning experience on offer for children, not just the results at the end of it – matter. Ofsted's systems are, of course, not marginal to what goes on in schools, but very powerful drivers. Many schools, I am sure, resist the tendency towards reductionism implicit in its measurement mechanism with its mutually reinforcing judgements but they will do so in spite of it, rather than because of it. There are many calls for a proper debate on what education should be for, and this underscores for me the need for Ofsted's systems to be aligned with what the profession and the public view as schools' overall purpose. Results are a part of that, but we need to ask the extent to which our young people are actually served by their pursuit almost as ends in themselves, which is continuing under this government. I think Ofsted's ultimately life-sapping – because it is so narrow - underlying philosophy (Note 4) compares badly both to alternative visions of education articulated, for example, by inquiries such as the Cambridge Primary Review and the Nuffield Review of 14- to 19 education, and also to frankly more sane inspection reports I read regularly on international schools abroad. The take of the new inspector, Sir Michael Wilshaw, on all of this will be interesting. (Note 1): Probably because Ofsted has been under pressure to cut costs since at least then, I don't think inspectors will be spending as much time in lessons even under the new regime as they did pre-2005, but I may be corrected on that. (Note 2): I should state, here, that when I say “good outcomes”, the inspectorate is not talking solely about “raw” results. Its inspection system now gives at least as much scope for the progress pupils make between key stages, when deciding whether outcomes are good, as to simple measures of a child's attainment against national averages. Yet the underlying point remains: the inspectorate is judging schools on the assumption that good teaching will always be reflected in positive assessment results, following that teaching, from the children. Even measures which include children's starting points will fail to capture uncertainty in this process for teachers, including the differential support pupils are receiving in the home. (Note 3): Wynne Harlen's argument might look almost quaint now, given the often unquestioned “outcome” focus of the current system. But I do think it has some power. If you are trying to measure the quality of an “input” in the process of helping children to make progress in their learning, such as the quality of teaching, then the outcome at the end of the process may give clues as to the quality of the input. However, it would be strange to think that, if you were seeking to judge the quality of the input, all you needed to do was to look the outcome at the end. Or even that you could rely on outcome measures as your main form of “objective” evidence as to the quality of the input. To put it another way, as argued above, a system which did this would assume there would be a perfect or one-to-one relationship between the quality of input at the start of the process and the quality of outcome at the end. Real life being what it is, however, this is unlikely to be the case. Alternatively, advocates of outcomes accountability might argue that, in fact, this does not matter: in education the measured outcome at the end of the process is all that is important, and therefore the system should not really be too worried about trying to ascertain the quality of the “inputs” at all: good teachers and good schools are, by definition, those where pupil outcomes are good, so long as those outcomes are defined appropriately. I think that, despite the fact that the inspectorate is now putting more stress on lesson observation, in the end this must be close to Ofsted's view. (Note 4): I should say that I have one reservation when it comes to this view: I have always had a lot of respect for Ofsted reports on the quality of the teaching of subjects across the country, probably because they talk in detail about the substance of what is being taught, alongside results, rather than being entirely dominated by statistical considerations, as I think is largely the case with individual school reports and with the overall inspection framework.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=498Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:10:42 GMT20111024141042Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:10:42 GMT20111024141042Mon, 24 Oct 2011 16:29:46 GMT201110241642946Spoilt for choice, this week, on what to write about. Should it be Nick Gibb's riveting YouTube video on why schools need to tackle the scourge of persistent truancy? (I know, I should get out more -- but so should quite a few other people. I was the fourth viewer -- when I went back for another look an hour later, the count was up to 53.) Or should it be the new checklist from headteacher Charlie Taylor, the Government's advisor on behaviour? That's an interesting one, too -- as far from the page upon dreary page of pious instruction you got from the last government as you could hope to imagine. It is a very basic list: as Taylor himself says in the introduction, "The checklist may seem too simple, but managing a school or a class is a complex operation and because of this complexity it is easy to fail to get the simple, but essential, things right." He's not even demanding that you follow his list: rather he's suggesting that each school uses his as a basis for its own short and bespoke version. So, heads should model the behaviour they expect from teachers, be visible in the lunch hall and the playground, at the start and end of the school day, and make sure the rest of the SMT are there as well. Heads should know the names of all staff, praise good performance, and take action to deal with poor teaching. They also need to monitor how teachers are doing with behaviour and make sure the praise and the sanctions are doled out as they should be. On first glance you might think that Mr T's list is a statement of the blindingly obvious -- but on second glance, you realise that the blindingly obvious things are also those we sometimes overlook, or become complacent about. (Interestingly, he got the idea from a surgeon whose checklist of team must-dos -- like handwashing -- improved surgery success rates and has led to the development of similar lists across many professions. You may be alarmed to hear that these include air traffic control). "The teachers run through the checklist first thing in the morning and again after lunch to ensure the correct preparations are in place. It serves as a reminder of what needs to be done and ensures consistency across the school," it says. Interestingly, Mr T's checklist also recommends that heads check up on behaviour outside the school. If ever there was a suggestion likely to improve the reputation of a school locally, that would be it, and yet it's a rare school where you see staff beyond the gates with their walkie-talkies, annoying the kids sneaking a not-so-crafty fag in the places every local knows about. In order to make the checklist approach work, a little preliminary thinking is necessary. It would be an interesting exercise if the Government applied these principles to the persistent truants who are effectively missing a month's worth of lessons each year. Quite right to ask schools to tackle absences before they get to this kind of level, but the question for a checklist would be: why aren't these pupils in school? Sickness figures are down a little, which makes me think many parents, worried for their jobs, are sending children in where they might not previously have done -- but what's the motivation for this long tail of underattendance? Are they kids who can't follow the curriculum because they can't read or write well enough? Do they want to be learning something else entirely? Or is poor behaviour making school intolerable? After all, if Mr Taylor's checklists are such a good idea -- and I think they probably are -- then not only should schools be using them in a wider context, but so should the Department for Education. In fact, I plan to write one myself. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@gmail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=497Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:44:50 GMT20111019144450Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:44:50 GMT20111019144450Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:44:50 GMT201110191424450U-turns are done quietly by governments, with the shouting and pointing usually coming from the opposition. Unless everyone's looking the other way, of course. And everyone seems to have been looking the other way last week when three members of the Lords quietly undid a clause in the Education Bill, which seems to be taking forever to wend its way through Parliament. The amendment -- tabled by Government minister Lord Hill, Every Child Matters instigator Lord Laming and Baroness Walmsley, the Lib Dems' spokeswoman on children and families -- simply instructs that clauses 30 and 31 be left out. To misquote Rolf Harris, can you guess what they were yet? These were the clauses which removed the duty of schools to work co-operatively with other frontline services for children. The government's original précis of these clauses said the Bill "allows schools and colleges to decide for themselves locally how to work co-operatively with other organisations such as local authorities... the provisions in the Bill do not prevent schools and colleges from working co-operatively with other front line services for children. "They will be free to develop the type of partnerships which make most sense locally and help them to raise standards for all children." So, schools "deciding for themselves" appears to no longer be a good thing, and given the heavyweight nature of the Coalition peers who overturned these clauses, this appears to be a done deal. Clearly, this wasn't the sort of inconvenient nod to bureaucracy that Mr Gove was going to include in his conference speech last week, but it does beg the question: what on earth could have happened? Some informed opinion suggests that the clauses threatened to create problems for one of the coalition's other big ideas, the reform of SEN provision and its organisation and funding, and that alarmed local politicians (who often have a different view of the world than their MP colleagues) had been lobbying hard for the duty to co-operate to be reprieved. Clearly these clauses are hugely symbolic for a government whose mantra is setting schools free from bureaucracy, and to ditch them is probably rather embarrassing. But what does the change actually mean for schools? Common sense suggests it would make very little difference to most. The vast majority of schools include children with special educational and other needs, which means there are benefits from co-operating with other children's services. And our schools are run and staffed by people who are there because they care about children and their welfare. Presumably even the new Free Schools are covered by the duty to co-operate until the Bill becomes law. Yet this view appears not to be shared by the group representing directors of children's services. Their president, Matt Dunkley, has said the amendment is "immensely helpful," adding that "the removal of the duty to co-operate had, perhaps inadvertently, given some schools the message that they no longer had a role in supporting vulnerable children. This attitude threatened much of the partnership working that had been established in local areas over the last few years." While directors of children's services are clearly going to be keen to play up a rare victory under a government which has effectively shrunk their influence, this is a very specific statement of concern -- the first sentence more so that the second.Could we have we created such an education market that some schools feel able to ditch the most vulnerable pupils in their race to the top of the league tables? If so, what's the effect on the children, and on the vast majority of schools left to pick up the pieces? Or, alternatively, were schools gratefully absconding from partnership working because in some areas they were simply being expected to do too much, at the expense of their "core business" of education?When it drafted the bill, the DfE clearly believed that the vast majority of schools and colleges would co-operate with the spirit of the law, even if the letter had been repealed. It has clearly caved in for a good reason: let's hope it was to ensure that the planned SEN changes work well and efficiently, which seems the likeliest and most pragmatic of explanations. Because if that's not the case, I'm not sure whether to be reassured that the Government has kept this particular regulation in place to protect children and the notion of schools working together, or alarmed that it was felt to be necessary to do so.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=496Wed, 12 Oct 2011 11:01:40 GMT20111012110140Wed, 12 Oct 2011 11:01:40 GMT20111012110140Wed, 12 Oct 2011 11:01:40 GMT2011101211110140“Roll up, roll up: get yer academies and free schools here”. A slightly facetious start to this blog, admittedly, but this is the impression I get when clicking on the Department for Education's homepage. This could be seen as the online focal point for all of England's 22,000 schools; a chance for a government to offer parents an attempt at a genuinely objective, public-spirited guide to our education system for 0-18-year-olds in its entirety; an opportunity for ministers to showcase what we know about how teachers can build children's understanding; or even – who knows? - a gateway to professional development opportunities for teachers and heads. Instead, its main function seems to be as a selling platform for the current pet schemes of politicians: academies and free schools. In that sense, instead of being viewed as the flagship site for our schools, it should be seen as a national embarrassment. On Thursday, I clicked on the home page to find my jaw dropping as, top of the list of press releases and therefore in a prime position on the site – searching for something else on the site, this was the first thing my eye rested on - was a release published on Tuesday proclaiming the benefits of academy status in the light of statistics showing that more than a million pupils are now being educated in academies. This was in line with comments at the Conservative party conference, made by Michael Gove on the same day, that there are now 1,300 academies. The only immediately visible paragraph of this press release, which is still on the homepage as I write, reads as follows: “Nearly 1.2 million children in England now attend academies – schools with the freedom to meet the needs of their pupils, rather than answering to local or national politicians and bureaucrats.” It is hard to know where to begin with this sentence. So, 1,300 schools are now academies. That leaves more than 20,000 state-funded schools in England which are not. On what is to all intents and purposes the official homepage of English state education, then, all these other schools are being denigrated, since, by implication, the DfE is presenting them as not fully “free to meet the needs of their pupils”. This is mindblowing stuff from a department supposedly – at least notionally - charged with supporting all state-funded schools in doing the best for those they educate. The “free from answering to local or national politicians or bureaucrats” slogan, though powerful politically, also strikes me as bizarre to the point of incoherence when it features on the website of the education department. For if ministers and civil servants are genuinely concerned about freeing up schools from the priorities of “bureaucrats” and their political masters, why are they bothering to spend years investigating and implementing a new national curriculum, for example? Surely, by this logic, this is getting in the way of schools' being “free to meet the needs of their pupils”. Why are ministers so keen to insist that schools teach synthetic phonics? Why is at least one minister thought of as such an enthusiast for pushing, within the national curriculum review, for traditional methods of maths teaching to be used in primary schools? These plans are being given high priority by politicians, presumably with the prospect of being implemented by “bureaucrats”, with the result that what goes on in schools which are not academies – still the overwhelming majority at primary level, and currently the majority at secondary – will be heavily influenced by them. The reality is that there will always be a balance to be struck, in state-funded schools of all kinds including academies, between the need of the central state to have at least some oversight over what happens, and the ability of professionals to exercise autonomy. How that balance works will always be subject to debate. Crude caricatures such as the one shown here are as dishonest as they are internally contradictory. There is also, of course, an Alice in Wonderland quality to a press release which proclaims the ability of some schools to break away from the needs of politicians and “bureaucrats”, given that this very release was presumably penned by “bureaucrats” working to a highly political agenda presumably laid down for them by the political masters. But the surreal quality of this website does not stop here. Top left is a statement which begins commendably simply: “The Department for Education is responsible for education and children's services”. Excellent. Unfortunately, the next and only other sentence reads : “Find out about the academies programme [the bold type is, of course, the department's] which provides schools with greater freedoms to innovate and raise standards.” This, then, is the two-paragraph summary of what the education department - funded by your and my taxes, remember – is supposed to do. Top-centre of the homepage, in a large window, currently sits a rotating series of images flanked by a static screenshot, the top one of which is “2011 free schools”: an invitation to click on “a short film about free schools”, which looks like an advertising video, set over soothing music, for this small number of institutions. Immediately below this advertising space is the heading “schools”. The following types of school are listed: academies, free schools, “technical academies” and university technical colleges. All four of these presumably (I have to confess “technical academies” is a new one on me) are types of schools backed heavily by ministers. Visiting Martians might wonder why some schools are felt more worthy of ministers' and public attention than others, but this is the position. For astonishingly, there is no mention, then, under “schools”, for all these other institutions which still make up the overwhelming majority in England, including community, voluntary aided and voluntary controlled institutions. The political spin goes further. On the homepage, on “schools”, and then on “types of schools”, you might think that there would at least be a guide, perhaps for parents wanting information, on England's exceedingly complex array of different varieties of institution. But instead, on this page the first linked document reads “How to Apply to Open a Free School”. To be fair, on this page there is a link to the “directgov” website, which, after another click, does offer a more comprehensive list of types of schools, although bizarrely this offers no mention of free schools. But that's not within the DfE website itself. This would be comical in its politically-skewed crudeness, if it were not so depressing. The department clearly sees its job not as one of providing a neutral or inclusively supportive gateway for information on all schools, but of manipulating opinion – including, presumably, professional opinion - towards a particular political vision as to how schools should be organised. Yesterday, I conducted a brief tour of education department homepages around the world, and it is difficult to find any that is politicised in quite this way. Look at the French education ministry's website (http://bit.ly/pK2ET5) and you will find that, though ministers are prominent on the homepage, single clicks flagged up from there take you to detailed factual information on how the state education system is organised, with separate pages for “schools”, “colleges” and “high schools”. In Germany, education is the responsibility not of the federal government but of individual states. I looked on the website of the largest state, Bavaria, and although its homepage( http://bit.ly/nD1Tss) does feature press releases prominently, a click on “school types” offers information couched in neutral, seemingly informative, terms. The Swedish and Finnish ministries also seem straightforward. Interestingly, in Australia, where education again is still primarily a state responsibility, I clicked on the website of Western Australia (http://bit.ly/eKEZkp ) , which seems to have its own academies-style policy of “independent public schools”. But this is given less prominence on the website than central images of “good news stories” of achievements of pupils and teachers in all types of schools on the homepage. There are a couple of links here to a page on the “independent public school” policy, but the information you find is couched in fairly neutral terms, with none of the denigratory language towards other schools you find on the DfE website. Closer to home, the education websites of the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish governments are also seem to be mainly about providing information on the system as a whole. Arguably, only the American department for education website rivals our own for politicisation but again, the role of the federal government there is different from our own: the states themselves remain responsible for schools. I clicked on one, New Jersey, (http://1.usa.gov/gvbvqy )and found a small box highlighting “governor's reform agenda”, but the main banner headline being the neutral “Choose the Best Education Possible for Your Child” My personal favourite homepage at the moment is the New Zealand education ministry's website (http://bit.ly/9Hhxsx ) which is simple, clean, emphasising the provision of information for parents and with media releases promoting particular policies kept quite discreet, in small type on the right hand side. Of other UK departments, there seems to be a bit of a contrast: while I found departments such as that for Communities and Local Government, and arguably Business, Innovation and Skills, relatively politicised, those for HM Treasury and the Department of Health seem to keep the politics very low-key. I have raised this and the related issue of the sometime politicisation of the Department for Education's twitter feed (which has in the past been guilty of highlighting positive news and highly political comment articles about ministers' reform plans, but strangely not the more critical ones), and sometimes I hear the argument coming back that this is what we should expect: Government departments are necessarily political. The Department for Education press office have tried to tell me that it is the duty of civil servants to promote government policy, and thus that my view – that there should be a concept of the public interest beyond the interest of elected politicians, and that at least one aspect of the public interest is clearly for the department to support the education system as a whole – is in some way strange. Quaint as it may seem, I cling to this view. The fact that almost all of us pay taxes to fund the whole of our education system, including this website, and schools of all types, suggests to me that ministers should treat them in an even-handed way. I don't think it is too much to ask for information to be presented with at least the pretence of even-handedness, rather than skewed information – let's call it as it is: propaganda - being put out as it is now. Once again, I don't think I am being old-fashioned in saying that the purpose of state-funded public service websites should be to help the users of these services and the general public, rather than servicing the needs of ministers. This website just underscores, in fact, despite the politicians' claim to be getting out of the way in the running of schools, just how pervasively politics infects our system. It is not too strong to call it embarrassing. The concept of an education service to be run in the public interest, rather than to serve the requirements of politicians who are always, these days, elected on well under half of the national vote, seems more essential than ever now. Finally, there is some history to all of this. The academies policy, because it has been pushed so hard now by successive governments and has always been, in that sense, a top-down initiative, has never been presented honestly by the education department. Having covered the policy in detail for getting on for 10 years now, the bias in official press releases in favour of academies – and thus to the disadvantage of other schools – has been obvious. It was certainly not unknown, under Labour, for press releases of GCSE exam results to go out highlighting the fact that those of academies were improving, on the headline measures, faster than the national average and that academy results represented improvements compared to the schools the academies replaced. Yet basic statistical caveats – such as the fact that there were no checks on whether the characteristics of the pupil body in academies compared to their predecessor schools had changed – were never included. Under Labour, the department also routinely presented the schools that academies replaced as “failing”. Yet, when we investigated this on the TES back in 2005 ( http://bit.ly/qdNF8p), I found that at that time none of the predecessor schools had, actually, been failing in the strict, Ofsted definition of the term. Again, the department was unhappy, accusing me of pedantry. But the difference between a school with low results and one which is said to be “failing” is important, not least for the staff who once worked in the schools replaced by academies. It suited ministers to ignore any caveats and make these schools look as bad as they could. It would be nice to hope that things would have changed under a new government. But the bias remains: witness Michael Gove's highlighting of the importance of his new English Baccalaureate measure, and how pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds need access to English Bacc subjects, but then failing to mention the poor results on the EBacc of many academies set up under Labour. (http://bit.ly/oAKNtd ) It might be, of course, a bit too much to expect the Education Secretary to preside over a system which is even-handed with evidence when he also talks about the need to respect what international studies tell us about the state of English education, but fails repeatedly to mention results from an international testing study which places our schools' progress during the Labour years in a relatively favourable light. (See http://bit.ly/gam61I) Ironically, of course, all this might be seen as evidence that it is good to separate politicians from education, as the press release implies. Maybe if politicians and civil servants actually worked harder to promote the public interest, rather than their own interests, we would have a better way forward. -If you still have the will for more after the above rant, I've been looking at the recently-published evaluation (http://bit.ly/oyc2pK) carried out for the Government by academics at Sheffield Hallam University, of a pilot of its proposed new phonics check for six-year-olds. This is due to take place for all Year 1 pupils at the end of this academic year. The report, based on a survey of the 300 schools which carried out the pilot, and follow-up case study visits to 20 of them, offered some positive findings which were highlighted, alongside some caveats, in the TES. The stand-out figure for the TES was the fact that almost half of the schools (43 per cent) found that the check had “helped them to identify pupils with phonic decoding issues that they were not previously aware of”. This is important, of course, and, although the rest of the schools (strictly: 55 per cent) appear to have found the check of little use, the fact that a large number felt it would be at least some help may well be significant. However, the possible benefits of this check have to be weighed against the findings in the round, which are far from unequivocal. For example, the study found that “the majority of teachers in case study schools had faced difficulties in judging whether a word had been read correctly or not with some of their pupils”. While three quarters of survey respondents felt that the check accurately assessed phonic decoding ability overall for their pupils, fewer than half said they thought it did so for English as an Additional Language pupils (46 per cent); for those with speech difficulties (35 per cent), with special needs (33 per cent) and with language difficulties (28 per cent). For the check, children are expected to say some real words which are presented to them in writing, and some “pseudo words” or “alien words”. Some but not all of the latter were flagged up in the check for children with a picture of an alien against them, and it seems from the report as if the two types of words were mixed up in terms of the order they were presented to children. The majority – 60 per cent – of the surveyed schools felt that the “pseudo words” caused confusion for at least some children. Although evidence from the survey and case study interviews suggested that for most pupils the experience of the check was “positive” – with many children professing to enjoy the check - around a quarter of those surveyed felt “the experience was negative for pupils with speech and language difficulties, other SEN or weak phonics skills”. Most – more than 80 per cent – did not tell parents the check was taking place, partly for fear of making children anxious. There were also comments from teachers that the timing of the proposed check, in mid- to late-spring, was not ideal, partly because if it were earlier in the year, they could use the information it provided more formatively, to tailor their teaching towards' pupils needs, a fairly basic requirement, you would have thought. These findings suggest, to me, lots of issues to be ironed out with this check before it goes “live” in only just over six months' time, despite the positives of the report, which also included teachers largely finding the training went well. There are a couple of more things to say. First, the schools which took part in this pilot were not experiencing the test being used for accountability purposes. The fear must be that this might create problems, in terms both of anxiety for staff and possibly therefore pupils and washback effects on teaching (teaching to the test). A Government document before the pilot (http://bit.ly/oRBZXJ , page 6) said: "an accurate evaluation of the potential impacts of the phonics screening check will not be possible" during the trial, for this reason, with the impact in this important sense then only being monitored when the check went live. Yet the new Ofsted framework makes clear that the check's results are to be taken account of by inspectors (see http://bit.ly/nFvddG page 7) as part of evidence in relation to pupils' reading. Clearly the potential influence of the accountability structure on this test is the elephant in the room, yet uninvestigated in the pilot. Second is the issue of cost, both in financial terms and in terms of time. Research (see John Hattie's study of education initiatives around the world) suggests most interventions with children have some good effects. But are they cost-effective? This report offers no direct answers, since there is no estimate of the likely overall cost of this test within it as far as I can see. But it appears the time commitment for schools is likely to be larger than the Government was expecting. The report says 99 per cent of survey respondents reported spending more than the two to three minutes per child on the test that the DfE training manual indicated was the expectation. (Tsk: those “bureaucrats”, getting it wrong again…) For 53 per cent, it took more than seven minutes per child, while for one in seven schools, it was more than 10 minutes per child. So, in terms of total time per school spent on the check, the average was 12.5 hours in terms of administering it, while they spent three hours preparing for it. That looks like quite a large time commitment to me: 12.5 hours alone looks like around half the teaching week for the member of staff administering the test, and I think and some schools – most of which used their class teacher to administer the test – raised the issue of having to provide supply cover. Back in the summer, when I wrote an article about the check, the DfE told me they would be able to provide figures on its likely cost after the pilot evaluation was complete. So I asked the press office this week. Given the above, I was very surprised to learn that the likely figure the department now has for costs is that it will be only “in the region of £1-2 million to deliver”. That equates to only £2 to £3 per pupil in England, an amazingly small amount, I think. It appears, though, that this does not include staffing costs to schools: when I asked the press office, I was told this relates to “costs to the DfE”, and no further figures were currently available. The pilot schools were each given £250 towards the cost of “preparation and administration time”. But it appeared some struggled, even with this extra funding. The report concluded: “Many teachers spoke about the financial implications of the phonics reading check where funding was spent on organising supply cover to enable the lead teacher to be away from the classroom.” One teacher said: “The funding wasn't great, it didn't even touch it.” If the check costs £250 per school to administer, that equates to a larger national cost figure, of the order of £4 million, which presumably is in addition to the DfE's in-house costs for developing, monitoring and distributing the checks. The report says it is unlikely that “ringfenced” funding will be provided for this new check, meaning that schools will have to find ways of administering it within existing resources. Many will use teaching assistants to administer it, some teachers predicted. In these straitened times, then, the most relevant question is whether this is the best of school funds and, perhaps most to the point, of staff time, even if there are benefits in terms of information provided for some pupils. The concerns of one survey respondent should be taken seriously. They said: “Overall, the cost of running the phonics check is disproportionate to the outcome…it would be more efficient for the DfE to promote a list of alien words and new activities/resources that teachers can use to strengthen their current phonics teaching and assessment. This would remove the need for a very expensive formal test.” That's only one view, of course, and it's still possible this new check will prove a success; certainly the pilot evaluation was not damning, and £250 per school could still be seen as a relatively small figure. But it is an initiative to watch closely, I think.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=495Mon, 10 Oct 2011 11:33:43 GMT20111010113343Mon, 10 Oct 2011 11:33:43 GMT20111010113343Mon, 10 Oct 2011 11:33:43 GMT2011101011113343Interesting speech from Michael Gove at the Conservative party conference this week, in that he was full of praise for the way things are going -- and resisted the temptation to announce a basketful of new policies. For veterans of these things, that was frankly astonishing. What we had was a quick, self-congratulatory whizz through differences his government has made to education, including (apparently) an 80 per cent rise in the number of students taking physics (not specified at what level), more kids doing history and geography, 40 per cent more academies, and the "best-ever" generation of teachers. Ballots of industrial action over pensions? Not in this speech.The delegates who clapped Mr Gove's achievement in moving teacher training from the "ivory towers" of universities (has he never seen a typical university teacher training building?) therefore remained unaware of three potentially enormous changes coming down the road.Next week sees the closing date of three consultations: one on a common funding formula for schools, one on future capital spending, and one which deals with changes to teacher induction and discipline.I suppose it would have complicated a crowd-pleasing good news story to have talked about these, but for headteachers these will be a major issue compared to physics or teacher-training.In a nutshell, one consultation is about how teacher discipline will work in a post GTCE world, when heads and governors have discretion about which teachers to refer to the Secretary of State and the only sanction is barring from the profession. One is a wide-ranging list of questions on how funding should be allocated to schools and local authorities in future, including the thorny subject of whether the cash that goes to LAs for schools should specify the intended amount for each. And the final one asks interesting questions about how maintenance and capital spending should be funded.For heads managing academies, the likely changes to funding may not make all that much difference. But for the 60 per cent who are not, there could be some interesting implications, particularly in a scenario where an official funding formula says their school should be receiving a certain amount of money but this is not coming through from the LA. You might currently suspect you're underfunded: what do you do if that becomes more overt?Discipline could be even more interesting, for a generation of heads and teachers used to posting cases off to the GTCE to sort out.The Government's revised advice on performance management had the implication, if I remember correctly, that problems would go onto a teacher's record and would be visible if they went for another job. Things have changed a lot since the days of List 99 of banned teachers, which much clearer expectations of teacher performance -- but heads are still going to be left with an awful lot of ethical headaches and managerial struggles. Do you refer to the Secretary of State a good teacher who's done something stupid on a night out, in the knowledge that they may be barred from their job? Might you be economical with the truth if one of your weaker members of staff was applying for a job elsewhere (yippee!) and it was time to write a reference.The GTCE was far from perfect, but usefully removed many of these very tricky decisions from heads. It'll be fascinating to see whether this, or the changes to funding, rate inclusion as success stories into Mr Gove's conference speech next year.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=494Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:16:48 GMT20111005181648Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:16:48 GMT20111005181648Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:16:48 GMT201110051861648The amount of heat being generated by an exam board's suggestion that a the quality of an university applicant's school should be taken into account along with exam results is quite staggering. "Headmasters" in the Daily Telegraph are horrified by the idea, but since we're talking independent school heads here, what else would they be? Michael Gove has weighed in as well with a good kicking for the idea in the Daily Mail (where else, you might ask?). His argument is that we shouldn't make excuses for poor schools and that if Mossbourne and Burlington Danes can do better than schools "in leafy areas" then everyone can do it.It's not a black and white issue, but everyone concerned appears to be treating it that way To be fair, Barnaby Lenon in the Telegraph does point out that a child at a fee-paying school might be weighted down by all sorts of social problems unknown to the exam board, whilst the kid in the bogstandard comp might have been helped by all sorts of tutoring, but that kind of supports his central tenet that this is A Bad Thing.But what both he and Michael Gove seem to be ignoring is the elephant in the room: that a kid in sixth form at Eton is going to be in rather smaller tutor groups, probably with rather better resources, than his eighth cousin twice removed at a state-funded college in Birmingham. As far as I'm aware, even Mossbourne's results don't equal those of Cameron and Clegg's alma mater, and to insist that there'll be a level playing field if every state school ups its game to equal the best independent is surely just plain wrong. Even I can see that, without the benefit of an expensive education.AQA's suggestions may be far from perfect, and there may be all sorts of good reasons why their ideas are unworkable, but to shut down any discussion of them in this way is surely intellectually wrong and simply smacks of fear. There is a debate to be had here, and planting dismissive stories in newspapers whose readers are likeliest to aspire to private schooling is an efficient way of kicking it into touch. But it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=492Fri, 30 Sep 2011 09:35:12 GMT20110930093512Fri, 30 Sep 2011 09:35:12 GMT20110930093512Fri, 30 Sep 2011 09:35:12 GMT201109300993512On Friday, September 16th, a very big claim was made on the front page of the Times Educational Supplement. “Decimate to accelerate: how dealing with the bottom tenth of teachers would improve education out of all recognition” read the headline. Beneath it, puzzlingly, was a diagram of 10 eggs, one of which had cracked open. Inside, one would believe, would be the details on how one seemingly simple reform could do what our education system has arguably never achieved before: moved an established system forward in a – for want of a better phrase - “step change” of improvement. Not only is it debatable whether this has ever been achieved in the English context before; a paper I read recently mentioning international test study evidence suggests it has rarely if ever been achieved anywhere, at least in maths (Note 1). This was quite a scoop, then, for the TES as it relaunched itself as a magazine. Turning to the inside pages, it emerged that the evidence for this bold assertion was a paper just published by the Sutton Trust, the think tank which campaigns for more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to go to the most prestigious universities. The TES feature quoted its most eye-catching conclusions in a bit of detail, before moving on to quote union leaders on whether there really were lots of underperforming teachers in English classrooms, and a general discussion about how easy it is for schools to rid themselves of classroom staff who are not felt up to the job. But nowhere was there a discussion of the validity of the claims in the Sutton Trust research itself. This is surprising, given not just the confidence with which they are put forward in the paper but the in-some-cases revolutionary and certainly controversial pay and conditions proposals the paper makes on the back of the evidence and arguments it marshalls. I want to try, here, to look at that evidence, and then suggest – deep breath - six major problems with it. OK, the central argument argument of the paper - by the London School of Economics academics Richard Murphy and Stephen Machin “advised” by Eric Hanushek, a high-profile American education economist based at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University – is that we could greatly improve the performance of the English education system if we could just raise the game of those teachers who perform the worst. The TES said the study suggested that 64,000 teachers were “not performing as well as they should”, and that replacing or improving the performance of the lowest-performing 10 per cent – some 40,000 – would improve England's position in the main international testing study dramatically. Not only that, but the Sutton Trust paper offered some quantifiable financial returns to improving teacher performance, in terms of future earnings returns to individual pupils. Bringing a “poorly performing teacher” up to the average, and therefore improving the grades of the class he or she taught, would raise the lifetime earnings of a class of 30 by £240,000 to £430,000, as employers rewarded these achievements through higher salaries. Wow: perhaps more than £10,000 each over a lifetime, then. It also quoted evidence suggesting that teachers with better qualifications on entry to the profession – such as better, or higher, degrees – tended to achieve not much better test and exam grades for their pupils than those with less good academic cvs. Finally, it used this evidence to argue for some very radical policy changes, the most interesting of which were making all teachers' salaries much more closely linked to pupil test results, and secondly introducing a system in which all staff would be given the chance to opt for a “high-stakes” pay route, which “rewards high performers with extra pay and opportunities for faster career progression, but penalises under-performance”. Coming across this, I suspected a number of what to this observer look like dodgy assumptions and overblown conclusions. It is a pity that studies like this are not better founded, and that they are not handled, published (Note 2) and disseminated more responsibly, especially given the debate they inevitably provoke, entirely misleadingly I think as will become clear, about the overall quality of the profession. Here are six reasons for scepticism: 1 Very big claims are being made on the back of what are, in fact, small-scale studies, some of them quite old now and at least one –arguably the most influential to this paper's arguments – of which itself warns against the dangers of over-interpretation. The fact that the studies on which its claim are made are small-scale and in the main do not relate to the UK is not made clear in the report for readers. The first bullet point in the Sutton Trust paper's executive summary says: “The difference between a very effective teacher and a poorly performing teacher is large. For example during one year with a very effective maths teacher, pupils gain 40 per cent more in their learning than they would with a poorly performing maths teacher.” Again, this is a very bold claim, also reported in the TES. And at face value, it's persuasive: if the evidence suggests this sort of effect for more effective teachers, who could possibly argue with it? But what's its source? Four studies are referenced in the paper in relation to this paragraph. These seem to be part of a small but, to this observer, still relatively undeveloped field which has sought to quantify teachers' “effectiveness” through value-added test data. The only study which seems to be the basis for the claim about the effects of good maths teachers, seemingly put forward in the report as universally true, is the first one listed in the note to this paragraph: work carried out by Daniel Aaronson and Lisa Barrow – both from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago – and William Sander, from DePaul University in Chicago, which I've now read. This looked at maths test scores of 53,000 American ninth grade pupils in one school district of Chicago in the years 1997-1999. Although the model includes a lot of statistical checking, in essence it compared the results of these ninth-graders with those they achieved in eighth grade, producing “value-added” scores for each child. It had records of who each child's ninth grade teacher was. It then concluded that (Note 3), if you looked at teachers whose pupils had average value-added and then compared them to those with significantly higher scores, teachers with the higher scores would see their pupils making 20 per cent more progress over the year than those at average level. If you compared the teachers with the high VA scores with those with significantly below average scores, you reach the 40 per cent difference quoted here. Three other studies are referenced in the note to this paragraph and elsewhere in the Sutton Trust report, but none of them seem to reach this precise finding. So that's it: one study, not in England but in a part of one US city more than 10 years ago, has been used to justify this seemingly all-embracing claim. Only one of the other papers referenced in the note to this study was carried out in England, and helpfully it also includes a discussion of the three other papers referenced in the note, all of which were carried out in the US and all of which it appears to be critiquing as being imperfect. The English study itself was conducted by Helen Slater of the (UK Government) Treasury and Neil Davies and Simon Burgess from Bristol University. It found that teachers with higher value-added GCSE scores could contribute 33 per cent of a GCSE point in extra achievement to their pupils, based on comparing the GCSE results of 7,305 pupils in just 33 secondary schools in the years 1999 to 2003 with their results at Key Stage 3. No mention of maths specifically there, as far as I can see. And, amazingly, this research also includes the proviso: “there is no presumption that the sample is representative of all English secondary schools”. These don't look exactly like universal findings to me, despite the undoubted statistical expertise of the modelling in the two studies I've read. Yet the paper reports as “fact…the difference between good and bad teachers is very large”, as the basis for its radical and largely unqualified policy proposals. Interestingly, the Chicago study itself says that moves to use its findings to link teachers' pay to performance “would require serious attention to implementation problems…including, but far from limited to, important measurement issues associated with identifying quality[among teachers]. The English GCSE results paper also includes the following warning that the “folly of basing important decisions [ie, on teachers' pay and progression] on the small samples of such data in a single school need always to be borne in mind”. These caveats should be remembered when we come to the policy proposals in this paper. 2 Problems with the value-added model of “teacher effectiveness” itself, and the…highly questionable [ polite phrase] move to make links to England's performance in the OECD's PISA tests. OK, a bit of technical detail is needed here, although I am no statistician myself. All of the above studies, including the Sutton Trust paper itself, define “teacher quality” or “teacher effectiveness” entirely in terms of “value-added” test and exam statistics. Now, of course, I have problems with that, given that most people would say exam results are only a part of what a good education should be about. But leaving that aside, the model itself is interesting, strange and limiting, I think. I think a reasonably scientific way of trying to find a link between “good teaching” and “a teacher who achieves good exam results for his or her pupils” would be to analyse the relationship between two independent variables. For example, it is possible to think of an experiment where, say, observers with no prior knowledge of a group of teachers' results were asked to look at evidence of the quality of their teaching – most obviously, by observing them teach - and to rate them in terms of effectiveness. This could, perhaps, be supplemented by seeking the views of the teacher's pupils on their quality. Perhaps, then, teachers could be grouped into broad bands and defined as “good quality”, slightly less good, and so on. It would then be possible to look at the results achieved by pupils taught by each of these groups of teachers, and then to try to reach conclusions on the strength of the relationship between this first measure of teacher quality and the second, seemingly independent, variable: grades. (Note 4) This model could be subject to debate, but it would seem to me to be capable of identifying some interesting patterns: is our measure of quality captured by results, or not, and if so, why not? But this is not the methodology used in these studies when they seek to reach conclusions about the “quality” of individual teachers. Instead, they define this entirely and self-referentially in terms of test results. Basically, the studies look at a group of pupils' test results at a particular age, before they were taught by a particular teacher. They then compare the results of that teacher's pupils after the teacher has taught them. Some of them seek to take into account extra influences on a pupil's performance in his or her exams, such as social backgrounds. What is remaining, unexplained in the model as a result of other possible factors such as pupil prior achievement or backgrounds, is then said to be the “value-added” to each pupil's grades by the teacher. In other words, teaching quality in these studies is defined as that which doesn't seem to be explained by other factors within the model. A “good teacher”, then, is one who produces good results for which there doesn't seem to be any other explanation, meaning the obvious explanation is good teaching. A “bad teacher” has correspondingly below-average results. Teachers reading this will realise that that probably doesn't work with, for example, single pupils or even single groups of pupils over a single exam year. Any pupil – really, any group of pupils - can over- or under-perform on the day, meaning that a teacher's VA results for that pupil may, in reality, say more about random variation than any qualities within the teaching. And, despite the respect I often have for the work of individual examiners and the expertise within exam boards, I've reported on too many cases of schools with clearly very unusual test and exam marking to be sure that, if a teacher's grades are above- or below-average, it is the teaching rather than the exam marking which explains the difference. Claims of the reliability of the VA model are hardly helped by the finding within the above-quoted Chicago study that, while those teachers who had the highest VA scores tended to remain fairly stable over successive years of this research, those with the lowest scores changed dramatically from year to year. Does “teacher quality” really move around in this way? Finally, the VA model may suffer, I think, because, although these studies look at pupil progress over a particular period of time where the pupil might have one teacher for a particular subject– key stage 4, for example, or grade nine in the Chicago study – it could be argued that the work of teachers earlier in the pupil's school career , and indeed, of the school as a whole, is contributing to this progress. So to what extent is a good, or bad, VA score really the teacher's own, rather than that of his her colleagues? Ironically, the findings that are more robust, I think, in the papers cited by the Sutton Trust report are those which found very little link between a teacher's qualifications, and – indeed – experience after the first few years in the job, with their pupil's exams results. This is a more solid finding because it involves two independent variables. To put it another way, it is possible to check whether pupils taught by a teacher with good qualifications, for example, achieve better grades than those without. It is not possible to check in this way whether “good teachers” as defined in these studies always get “good value-added exam results” – or whether, for example, some uncertainty in the examination process or other factors means this sometimes or often does not happen – because “good teachers” have simply been defined as those who get “good value-added results”. This circularity in the definition is vital when we come to the way the Sutton Trust paper tries to use the findings from the VA studies it cites to make conclusions as to what the impact on England's performance in PISA – the comparative reading, maths and science tests now taken by pupils in most countries – would be if we could just find a way of improving “underperformers”. The Sutton Trust research, it seems to me, just looks at England's results in PISA and then asks how they would improve if the “lowest performing” 10 per cent of teachers, on value added measures, were to improve the quality of their teaching so that their pupils' results improved enough to make these teachers now average performers. “All other things equal” (a clue that there are some underlying assumptions at play here), the paper says that our position in reading would improve over 10 years from 21st to 3rd in reading, and from 22nd to 5th in maths, making England one of PISA's star performers. But because “teacher quality” is defined entirely in terms of test results, this is akin to this country saying: if we could just replace the worst 10 per cent of this country's results with more of its average results, England would be in such a better place. That's a great aspiration, but I'm not sure it takes us very far. It's a bit like saying Manchester Utd would be an even better team if they could just replace their two lowest-scoring players with two who went on to score more goals in games, or that if Lewis Hamilton could just find a way of speed up a bit on his slower laps, he'd be more of a match for Sebastian Vettel. It may be that you believe it is the bottom 10 per cent of teachers, as measured by VA scores, that are holding this country back. But I don' t think this data gives much that is new to say on that front. Yes, it would be better if all pupils were better taught. It might be good if they went on to do better in PISA. No, I don't think this gives us information either on how many are badly taught, or, anything on how we improve the teaching of the “worst” teachers. It's simply an attempt to back an argument by doing a bit of number crunching. There is, of course, another elephant in the room with this PISA claim. If teacher “quality” did indeed improve, on GCSE-based VA measures, that would be reflected – all other things being equal – in improving national GCSE results. As these rose, then, in line with VA improving, so too must the PISA scores, must be the claim. But GCSE results have been rising incrementally for many years (Note 5). As I wrote here, http://bit.ly/pZpBZg) headline GCSE five-plus A*-C rates increased 25 percentage points over the years 2001-2010. PISA data were broadly flat over that period. GCSE results, then, would suggest teachers have become more effective. Yet England's PISA scores, actually, have not risen to reflect this. 3 There's another technical problem, I think, with one of the assumptions behind the PISA data. It assumes that pupils benefit from “an effective” teacher – ie one that has good value-added test scores – not just in a single year when they are taught by that teacher, but potentially for many years afterwards. It seems this assumption is needed to generate the seemingly big predicted improvements in England's PISA results which are central to the paper. It says: “It assumes that…the impacts of good instruction are cumulative over the 10 years of education prior to PISA testing”. In other words, a five-year-old taught by a “good” teacher 10 years before taking the PISA tests at 15 would still be feeling the benefits of that quality when taking the PISA tests. Another “good” teacher as they get older will add to that effect, and so on. Now, don't get me wrong: of course we would all at least hope that good teachers can make a long-term difference; this must be the core assumption of the job. But I'm not sure we can make quite such a big assumption as is made in the Sutton Trust survey: that all of this measured benefit persists over time. I recall seeing research – for which sadly I can't find the reference now - by academics at Durham University's Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring which showed that, I think, while the assessment gains a reception or year 1 teacher makes with children can last throughout primary education, the effect tends to diminish (though not to nothing) over time. In a book published last year Diane Ravitch, (Note 6) the high-profile US educationist and teacher champion who has argued against the simplicity of similar statistical interpretations used in America, cites research which found, she said: “Learning gains do not persist over time. Students forget, gains fade….After two years, unless there is continual reinforcement of learning, only one-eighth of the gain persists”. I don't have any way of checking those stats now. But it seems to me that the Sutton Trust paper's assumption is likely to be, at least, highly contentious and worthy of further investigation. 4 “Blimey, are we nearly there yet?” I hear you ask. Almost. I'm not going to spare too much space going into the Sutton Trust paper's claims of pupils' future financial earnings being boosted by improving the “effectiveness” of their teachers. It should be clear from the above that there are already a large number of probably contentious assumptions behind these precise-sounding numbers. But I would just say a couple of things. First, if a pupil did have the earnings of his or her class boosted over a lifetime of £240,000-£430,000 thanks to the effectiveness of a teacher, it could be argued that's not actually a huge sum. So, to take the higher figure of £430,000, first you have to divide it by 30 to get the claimed financial gain per pupil. That gives you £14,333 over each pupil's working life. That sounds quite significant, but if you assume a working life of 40 years (I've not been able to find what the actual assumption behind this stat is; hands up: maybe I didn't look hard enough), it's only £358, in today's prices, per pupil per year. Better than a poke in the eye, you might say, and perhaps if a pupil had several very “effective” teachers for each GCSE class, then it would mount up. But these are the sorts of numbers we are talking about. The bigger point, however, I think is I would question whether the research on which these figures are based takes into account any effect of improving results not being rewarded so much by employers if there is a general national improvement in results. In other words, results may only be valuable to pupils if they improve faster than competitors in the job market. If grades rise nationally, will the financial returns from any individual's better results continue? It's not clear to me that this paper considers what seems to me to be this potential issue, but, again, I may need to look harder in the references. 5 Almost finally, I have concerns around the policy prescriptions set out, again very forcefully, in the paper's conclusions. These include the fact that, shockingly I think within the very thin 11 pages of text in this document, no extra empirical evidence seems to be being offered as to whether these policies actually are likely to lead to the improvement in teacher effectiveness the paper says is clearly so vital. The paper says that, because of the evidence it outlines, “major reforms are needed to the performance and pay system for teachers, with assessment based on three core factors: improvement in results in the classroom, reviews by headteachers, and external appraisals”. Because of what the paper has shown, then, we need a sharper system of payment by results, with “previous qualifications, previous experience, or years spent teaching…given far less significance”. As should be obvious from the above, although the findings on there not being strong links between teacher qualifications and the results their pupils achieve are interesting, as a whole the limitations of the evidence outlined above undermine the boldness of this claim. In perhaps the only major concession to sceptics, the paper does, to its credit, acknowledge limitations with making value-added test scores the main judgements of teacher effectiveness, including that this would encourage…ahem: another major elephant here… teaching to the test. Thepaper attempts to get around this by proposing making test scores only one of those three aspects of teacher evaluation. Fair enough, except that, in reality I think, test data is likely to have a major effect on the other two aspects: evaluations by head teachers and in external appraisals, unless this is specifically guarded against in ways which, I think, would be very difficult to imagine (ie the head making an appraisal decision without knowing a teacher's test scores). I have seen heads advised to take teachers' test scores into account in performance appraisals; hence my scepticism here. So this would essentially be a payment-by-results system in which value-added data would play at least a very major, if not the overwhelmingly important part. The paper goes on to suggest a “high-stakes” option, in which teachers would be able to progress very fast up the pay ladder if they could demonstrate consistently good test scores, but be penalised – perhaps, although it is not spelt out clearly here, actually losing money – if their pupils achieved bad scores. It says: “We believe that if teachers were given the option of a more flexible promotion and pay system, it would have the potential to attract and retain more high quality applicants into the profession”. For a sceptical view of whether such moves – and the increased pressure on “underperformers” in particular – would actually improve recruitment and make the profession more enticing for would-be talented teachers of the future, see the debate within the American context (similar calls have been made by Eric Hanushek in the US) here : http://bit.ly/gnfFZD (Note 7) That's another long blog, but it highlights another huge question implicit within the Sutton Trust proposals and associated claims in the US: even if you could identify and get rid of “underperforming” teachers, how can anyone be sure that those replacing them will be any better? This leads on to the larger point: the quotation above is just an assertion. Where is the empirical evidence to suggest what is being advocated here will work? Has it been tried before, and if so, what were the results? As far as I can see, no evidence is presented here. If it hasn't been tried before, would it not be a good idea at least to suggest a trial first? I can think of other questions which could at least be investigated empirically. How quickly, in reality, do teachers in England actually progress up the career ladder? Do many of them feel held back by the current system? Would it put them off entry if they had to enter teaching again, knowing what they know now? Would the system proposed appeal to them, as young teachers? (To me it might seem a bit daunting, but then again, I'm not a young teacher…) I'm not saying that all of the answers that might be generated from teachers would necessarily carry unfavourable implications for this study. It would just be nice to be presented with some evidence, one way or another, if we are really contemplating such a big change. 6 And finally: there is the big picture. And here I'm afraid I'm going to have to come back to the TES interpretation. The article says: “The [Sutton Trust] study suggests that some 64,000 teachers working in England's schools are not performing as well as they should”. It then highlights the report's claim of the benefits of “replacing or improving just the lowest 10 per cent of those working at the chalkface – roughly 40,000” teachers, before asking “If there are 40,000 sloshing around the system, what's to be done about it?” In its puff for the article on page 3, the TES says: “Forget Chris Woodhead's 15,000 underperforming teachers – according to the Sutton Trust, there are 64,000 working in England today and they are stopping our education system from rivalling the best in the world. What should be done about them?” This is a variation of a statistical fallacy I'm finding increasingly often in education. It runs along the following lines: x per cent of schools/teachers/education authorities/whatever have results which are worse than others. Therefore (is the implication your average reader is being invited to draw, I fear), the whole system has problems/is rubbish. But the data is actually self-referential: any system measured in this way will always have a certain number of below-average performers,and that's a function of mathematics, not “low expectations” or anything else. So, actually we're being told nothing about the system as a whole. This fallacy can be very useful to anyone wanting to suggest standards are not high enough. Coming back to this particular example, I have to say this is a strange interpretation of the data. Where does the 64,000 teacher figure come from? This is clear, I think, from the Sutton Trust report. It bases its calculation on the difference in maths performance by pupils taught by a “very effective” and a “poorly performing” teacher (the calculation used in the Chicago study), by looking at the performance of teachers at the 84th percentile, and at the 16th percentile. Those at the 84th percentile are at the boundary of the top 16 per cent “most effective” teachers. Those at the 16th percentile are at the boundary of the bottom 16 per cent “most effective” teachers (ie they are in the 16 per cent “least effective” performers). There are just over 400,000 teachers in England, the paper assumes. And lo and behold, 16 per cent of 400,000 is 64,000. So the key thing here is that the 64,000 lowest “performers” on value-added data in England will be defined entirely relative to other teachers within England. No matter how high teaching standards are overall, there will always be 10 per cent of teachers at the bottom of the value-added pile, and because 16 per cent of 400,000 is 64,000, that number will, all other things being equal, always equate to 64,000. To put it another way, every teacher in England could be a terrible performer, desperately in need of being eased out of the profession. Or none of them might be. This data tells us nothing about which of those statements is true, or more true, since however high overall teacher quality is, the bottom 16 per cent will always be the bottom 16 per cent. Of course, the researchers could have chosen another cut-off point. It's quite likely that, if they wanted to look at the “performance” of teachers at the 49th percentile, they would find all of these had below average VA results (I say only quite likely because of them might actually be at the average). 49 per cent of 400,000 is 196,000. Would this then lead to suggestions that nearly 200,000 teachers are not much good, and “sloshing around the system”? Again, it may be the case that they are not very good, or they may be brilliant, but just with not quite as good results as others. The point is: this data provides absolutely no evidence on overall teacher quality. Similarly, the 40,000 figure quoted in the TES comes from the Sutton Trust's decision to focus hypothetical PISA calculations on the idea of improving the scores of those teachers with the 10 per cent lowest value added measures. And what it shows is…40,000 is 10 per cent of 400,000. That's it. This would be laughable if it weren't so potentially serious. The final, final thing to say about this paper and its interpretation is that it certainly helps feed a narrative that says that, in general, the teaching profession is not very good and that the challenges it faces can be solved easily by getting rid of those who are simply not up to the job. (Note 8) Our state schools, or at least a large proportion of the teachers who work in them, are not very good, is the implication. Is that a harsh interpretation? Well, in an online response to that US blog I linked to above, Hanushek himself seems to take issue with the teaching profession, questioning why good ones would ever worry about an analysis which says that their under-performing peers have to be “dealt with”. He says: “I…do not understand why the vast majority of hardworking and able teachers are willing to be lumped together with the small number of truly ineffective teachers.” A teacher responds: “Because, there, but for the Grace of God, go I….We see through the smokescreen and know that the data is faulty and not a true measure of a teacher's worth”, before claiming that these studies are part of a move to “dismantle” the teaching profession and privatise schools. Do we really want the polarising US education debate in this country? It seems this paper is an attempt to move more in that direction. Whatever the truth of claims about the numbers of “underperformers” and the need to replace or retrain some of them, this debate has to take place on a fair, evidence-based footing. This brief, unjustifiably sweeping paper offers anything but that approach, I'm afraid. I worry both for the state of education research and for the future of the teaching profession in this country if this, really, is the best that we can do. Note 1: A paper presented at the British Educational Research Association's annual conference by academics at King's College, London, includes the following paragraph: “In other countries there is little evidence of great change in mathematical standards over time. In the international tests even though the rank orders may shift slightly over time there are no examples of countries making radical shifts.” Note 2: The Sutton Trust study is said only to be an “interim” paper. Maybe the final version will be better grounded in evidence. If so, I wonder why this version has been publicised now. Note 3: I do simplify here, of course. If you want the full paper, with a lot of statistical analysis, it's here: Note 4: The model would need to use some kind of “value-added” methodology – such as the progress pupils make over a particular period, rather than raw results – so the different results did not largely reflect pupil backgrounds. Note 5: Interestingly, GCSE scores have been going up in recent years despite KS2 data for the same pupils having remained largely flat since 2000. This would suggest KS2-GCSE “value added” measures, if calculated against a baseline of several years back, have gone up nationally. Note 6: “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: how testing and choice are undermining education” by Diane Ravitch. Note 7: Thanks to @tothechalkface on twitter for this reference. Note 8: The TES article appears dismissive of union claims that there are not a large number of bad teachers out there, claiming that in the light of the Sutton Trust report's evidence, that many [unspecified] people find the union response “risible”. But there is actually evidence that many parents are impressed with what happens in their child's school: in a little-reported stat, Ofsted's annual report last year found 93 per cent of parents agreeing with the statement: “I am happy with my child's experience at school”. Another survey (http://bit.ly/p6Ya78) of more than 1,000 parents of 3- to 16-year-olds in July found 92 per cent were either “very satisfied” (55 per cent) or “somewhat satisfied” (37 per cent) with the quality of teaching at their child's school. I know that leaves eight per cent not very satisfied or not at all satisfied, but it is important to get these figures in perspective. The Sutton Trust paper is here: http://bit.ly/ov1EUHhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=491Mon, 26 Sep 2011 10:00:39 GMT20110926100039Mon, 26 Sep 2011 10:00:39 GMT20110926100039Tue, 27 Sep 2011 15:43:51 GMT201109271534351So, was your first reaction on hearing about Nick Clegg's planned summer camps for deprived children:a) brilliant, just what we need?b) daft idea?orc) Haven't I heard that somewhere before? Being terribly elderly, I have to confess to the third reaction. I had this dim memory of hanging round a South London playground sometime in the summer holidays of 1997 as a beaming David Blunkett (the education secretary) told the assembled journalists that this was an example of the new government (elected just weeks before ) hitting the ground running. Or something similar.The kids looked pretty cheerful, their parents were reasonably keen, and everything was relatively positive. Can't find my story online, but others written about the scheme reveal that they were intended as literacy camps to get kids who'd fallen short of Level 4 in their SATs up to speed before they started at secondary.The first year of the scheme saw 50 of the courses being run, partly funded by donations from News International, WH Smith and Alton Towers.As far as I can then remember or work out from the online cuttings, the numbers of literacy camps then grew hugely over the next few summers, taking in numeracy as well. And then, somewhere along the line, the idea expired quietly. I have a vague recollection (but can't prove this with any cuttings) that the gains made by the kids during their two weeks turned out not to be so brilliant in most cases, as the idea only really worked with excellent focused planning and brilliant staff. Anyone out there remember?So I have to admit being slightly underwhelmed by the new summer plan and its chances of success, unless it's really carefully thought out and targeted. While it's an encouragingly non-kneejerk reaction to the riots, it's a big ask to turn round 11-year-olds' attitudes to school and dissuade them from rampaging through JD Sports in a balaclava at midnight in just a fortnight .The very little I know about this scheme suggests that schools getting the pupil premium will lose some of that cash if they don't lay on their own summer school -- but would that be purely for their own, entitled, pupils, or other people's?It's also a little unclear to me precisely how schools are going to entice kids who already aren't keen on school into doing an extra fortnight in the classroom if there's no compulsion to do so. The 1997 schemes included, I think, days out at Alton Towers but the Daily Mail would have a field day if the 2012 intake -- already branded as potential rioters -- were bribed in a similar way.On the upside, there's at least plenty of time to plan, unlike in 1997. And if schools can find ways of running residential and other trips which can open the eyes of inner-city teenagers to life's possibilities if they work hard at school, then it might be a worthy revival of an old scheme. If the Government wanted to be really helpful, it could track down some of the research which came out of the previous programme so schools would have a better idea of what works -- and what doesn't.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=490Wed, 21 Sep 2011 14:46:32 GMT20110921144632Wed, 21 Sep 2011 14:46:32 GMT20110921144632Wed, 21 Sep 2011 14:46:32 GMT201109211424632Hunting around to find a copy of Michael Gove's famous speech which apparently suggests that outstanding schools shouldn't be allowed that status unless their teaching is outstanding, I happened upon what's been called his Gove Compare website.Which, frankly, was much more fun, especially once I'd managed to locate and read said speech which said nothing at all about outstanding schools. It was accompanied by the usual rider that it should be checked against delivery, and I suppose I could have watched the video version of it to do just that... but it doesn't really matter whether he said it or not, since the Ofsted line is clearly being spun.So, I returned to Gove Compare, which appears to be a tarted-up version of the (unusable) spreadsheets the DfE put out earlier as part of the transparency agenda. This very pretty site is apparently aimed at parents, researchers, and people who might want to ask questions about their local schools.Having spent a few happy minutes checking out my local schools, I had a few questions to ask all right. Like -- how often do they update their database? And does anyone check it before it goes live?Here's my example, based on a very tiny sample of five schools in my immediate locality. Well, there should have been five, but the school in which my seven-year-old son is currently being taught apparently doesn't exist at all. There's a question: was I hallucinating when I waved him into his school with around 400 other kids this morning? Where did I leave him, then? Should I turn myself into social services right away?Even this little omission gets more complicated, as my boy's school is the juniors end of what is a newly-merged primary. The infant school is there, resplendent in its glory. But technically, the infants doesn't really exist any more: it's been succeeded by an all-through primary. So even the school that is there, is wrong.In fact, it's doubly wrong, because the lady named as its head retired at Easter. That's six months ago. And the name of the new head (of the school that apparently doesn't exist) was also in the public domain six months ago.But it gets better and better (or worse and worse). Of the other three schools whose details I perused with interest and some local knowledge, the names of TWO of the heads were wrong. To be fair, one of them only officially retired in July, but he'd resigned some time earlier. The other head moved on to a different post at least two years ago, if not three.Perhaps my five schools were a statistical freak, but it doesn't inspire confidence about the rest of the data, does it? There's a nice little rider on the site explaining that the data comes from Edubase and may occasionally not be up to date. What is Edubase? Keep searching, and you find the following explanation: "EduBase is a register of all educational establishments in England and Wales, maintained by the Department for Education. It allows both the general public and government officials to access up to date information."To ensure accuracy, the information you will find on this site is provided by a range of suppliers, from the establishments themselves to Local Education Authorities and specialist agencies."Now I'm really worried. Wonder where I left my son?Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=489Thu, 15 Sep 2011 15:39:09 GMT20110915153909Thu, 15 Sep 2011 15:39:09 GMT20110915153909Thu, 15 Sep 2011 15:39:09 GMT201109151533909It couldn't last, could it? After, in my last blog, suggesting that one particular criticism of league tables – that they explained the large recent fall in pupil numbers taking French and German GCSE – was overblown, I'm back on more familiar territory this week. In the last couple of weeks, I've come across information which somehow offers fresh, and to this already battle-weary observer, highly concerning insights into the way school-by-school results pressures appear to be impacting negatively on pupils. Despite years of trying to track the multiple ramifications of all this stuff, even for me this subject retains its capacity to shock. Exhibit number one was a Government survey of 692 secondary schools about the impact of the English Baccalaureate, the new league table performance measure for English schools. http://bit.ly/pv01oM This poll, conducted for ministers by the National Centre for Social Research, was greeted enthusiastically by the Government, after its results appeared to show a big rise in pupils lined up for entry to Ebacc subjects following the announcement of the new measure last November. Yet, on closer reading I found two statistics which appear to me to be absolutely outrageous, in the evidence they put forward of schools seemingly putting their own need to raise performance statistics - arguably not surprisingly, given the pressures on the leadership of these schools – above pupils' needs. Until someone puts forward an argument to convince me otherwise, I'm coming to believe that what league tables (and other performance pressures) have helped to create is an inherently corrupt system, with dire implications in certain circumstances for individual pupils. The BBC report of this survey (see http://bbc.in/qofBUI ) , a link for which was tweeted by Michael Gove's education adviser Sam Freedman, said it showed the number of pupils who would be taking EBacc subjects would rise from 22 per cent to 47 per cent by 2013. Mr Freedman and Government supporters would argue that this vindicates the decision to introduce the EBacc indicator, which ranks schools on the proportion of pupils achieving A*-Cs in English, maths, two sciences, a language and history or geography. But the first shocking statistic was that the survey found that the proportion of pupils due to take EBacc subjects in 2012, ie at the end of the academic year which has just begun, was 33 per cent. Without wishing to bombard you with too many numbers, that's 33 per cent compared to a figure for pupils taking EBacc subjects in 2011 of – according to the BBC - 22 per cent. That means the numbers taking EBacc subjects, if this survey is correct, will have risen by 50 per cent between 2011 and 2012, seemingly as a result of the EBacc change, since 33 per cent of any number is 50 per cent higher than 22 per cent of that number. Why does this look outrageous? Well, children taking GCSEs next summer are in year 11 now, and would have been in year 10 last year. But the Government only announced the introduction of the EBacc in November. So these numbers, if they have risen as a result of the EBacc announcement, mean tens of thousands of pupils were switched to EBacc subjects months after their key stage 4studies and GCSE courses had started. As has been pointed out to me, this does not necessarily mean that a pupil was stopped from doing a course they had already started, simply because of this new performance table indicator. That will have happened, clearly, in some cases. But it may also be that young people have begun EBacc subjects in addition to those they were already taking. Whatever the precise circumstance in each case, large numbers of pupils appear to have been steered towards starting EBacc subjects months after the normal start of these courses simply because ministers have made sure that results are now to be collected and published at the school level. I had already heard anecdotal tales of some schools choosing to take actions affecting their pupils mid-course following the EBacc announcement (see below). But these statistics suggest these are not isolated instances; they might have affected more than one in 10 of all English teenagers now currently in year 10. Assuming this survey – and the BBC's interpretation of it – is accurate, it is fairly easy to check the numbers. Assuming, very roughly, that there are 600,000 pupils in a year group, and 22 per cent of them took EBacc subjects in 2011, that equates to 132,000 taking the subjects this summer. 33 per cent of 600,000 is 198,000 due to take them in 2012. The difference between the two figures – 66,000 – is the number of additional pupils seemingly now lined up to take EBacc subjects in 2012 compared to the numbers who sat them in 2011 and therefore the number who, given the assumption that without the EBacc announcement only 132,000 would have taken EBacc subjects in 2012, have actually started taking EBacc subjects mid-course. Could this interpretation be wrong? Well, of course we have to take the survey's accuracy for granted. However, it is stated to have been a properly representative poll. It should be pointed out that while the survey report itself does mention the 33 per cent of pupils expected to take EBacc subjects next year, I cannot see any reference within it to the 22 per cent “baseline” number: the proportion of pupils who took Ebacc subjects this year, which seems only to appear in the BBC report. In any case, we won't have a true indication of the final possible impact of the EBacc on subject numbers until next August's GCSE results, which will give definitive data on individual subject entries. Until then, this appears to be the most detailed indication of possible trends. It could also be said that any rise in pupil numbers is not proof of the impact of the EBacc announcement itself. But I can think of no explanation for such a dramatic apparent shift. Meanwhile, anecdotes have reached me of individual school decisions. One, from a parent in February, said: “At my children's school, year 10 students studying photography, art and design, drama have been 'ordered' to switch to history to ensure they gain the EB. They have missed a term's work and have no interest in history having deliberately not chosen it. Some very unsatisfied young people and parents.” Another, sent to me on twitter, also seemingly from a parent, said: “This happened at my son's school. Kids made to pick up lang[uages]/ hum[anities] and finish IT course early”. Another, from a school improvement adviser, said: “[I] know of at least one school where kids have been changed from BTEC Science at [the] end of Year 10 to double science [GCSE] in year 11; in no-one's best interest.” Schools changing their minds mid-course on what is in the “individual's” best interest simply because ministers have made this announcement on a new performance indicator is as scandalous as it is depressing, in my view. Perhaps a school could argue that this new measure will be so important to the child's future that it justifies the clear disruption these kind of moves will cause. But that looks to me a fairly thin defence. Otherwise, this looks a clear case of schools feeling they have to jump, at no notice, more or less whatever the implication for the child, because of ministerial announcements and the likely feedback effects on the institution of low scores on this new measure. That is a very poor place for an education system to find itself, whatever the underlying explanations, again in my view. The second example is, I think, even more shocking evidence of results-driven perversity. The same survey asked schools whether some year nine and 10 pupils would complete some of their GCSEs early. Four out of five (81 per cent) said this was the case. Then the survey asked them whether they would allow pupils a resit if they took a GCSE early and gained a grade C. While 59 per cent said they would always allow pupils a retake, 35 per cent said this would only be allowed “sometimes” and six per cent of schools “did not allow pupils who got a 'C' grade at early entry the chance to retake”. That last statistic is, from my perspective, simply staggering. Six per cent of schools would not allow any pupil who had already achieved a C in a subject the chance to re-take that exam in the hope of obtaining a higher grade. The hypothesis must be that the C grade has become so important for the school that the incentive, from the institutional point of view, is simply to take the pupil off the course once this is achieved, so that they can concentrate on other subjects where it has not yet been attained. I suppose it could be rational for a school, faced with a limited budget, to prioritise resits targeted at the “most important” grade C. oHoHoweHoweverers However, better grades than a C in a subject clearly have currency for young people. It seems to speak to a madness at the heart of our system not only related to results pressures themselves, but to the fact that while the accountability regime has tried to tell us that the C grade is all-important actually GCSE exams themselves were set up with the intention of using the full spectrum of grades, from A (now A*) down to G. There was never any intention that there should be an absolute pass/fail cut off point where a C grade becomes so important that one could sacrifice the chance of higher in one subject in order to try to gain a C in another. Many have countered that the C grade is the crucial cut-off among employers. But even with that argument, I'm afraid I remain to be completely convinced. Teenagers attaining higher than C grades are likely to have more options later in life, and the fact that some schools operate blanket policies hardly suggests individual needs are being put first. An influential report from the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education (http://bit.ly/kkY5YU) this year suggested early entry for maths GCSE – with schools hoping to “bank” the C for the pupil early and then concentrate on other subjects for that individual – was more prevalent in schools on the Labour Government's National Challenge programme: ie those under most pressure to improve headline results. This makes sense, with those schools told they had to improve on the five A*-C grade including English and maths, or face closure. Although that particular scheme has closed, the coalition is persisting with this approach, and raising Labour's floor targets. The third piece of evidence came my way in my role, over the last month, as press officer for the British Educational Research Association's annual conference, which took place in London last week. Several papers, and a keynote speech by the crossbench peer Baroness (Onora) O'Neill, suggested a collision between the demands of test- and exam-driven accountability and what subject experts saw as good teaching in their field. For example, a paper on English teaching which I saw found that most of the teachers surveyed loved literature but that teaching to exams got in the way of cultivating that enthusiasm among their pupils. This is in line with a tendency I have found throughout my years researching and writing on this subject: while political debate and school improvement/management research often focuses on the claimed benefits of a “relentless focus” on raising results, subject experts chart the side-effects and detailed implications for teaching for long-term understanding and engagement; ie the quality of pupils' actual experiences of the subject. Few quantitative researchers, who tend to be in the former camp, seem to want to genuinely engage with the arguments of those in the latter, even though this is at the heart of what it means to be truly educated. But my particular focus here is a paper by Birendra Singh, of London's Institute of Education, which looked in detail at how two secondary schools had reacted to the Labour government's decision, under Ed Balls, to scrap Key Stage 3 science tests in 2008. (Maths and science tests were scrapped at the same time). The paper sets out some trenchant criticisms of the teacher assessment approaches instigated in these two unnamed schools – one rated “outstanding” by Ofsted, and the other “good” – as Sats were abolished. Though obviously tiny in scale, in my mind it has to raise concerns about exactly how teacher assessment is implemented against the background of a high-stakes accountability system, and in a context where schools have become used to externally-marked tests. What also interested me here was that at least one of the schools had reacted to the scrapping of KS3 Sats by starting out on a three-year GCSE course, and thereby reducing Key Stage 3 from three to two years, because all the “league table” pressures were now focused on performance at 16. Mr Singh and a science teacher from one of the schools whom he interviewed clearly have reservations about that, from an educational point of view, in that too little time had been given to embedding the Key Stage 3 programme and, in Mr Singh's words “pupils were too young to appreciate starting GCSE in year 9”. I know there is a debate about the benefits of a two year key stage 3 for pupils. But my concern would be that schools are not taking decisions on this from a neutral perspective, in terms of simply being able to think about the effect for the pupil. They will also be conscious of their own need to improve GCSE results at an institutional level and this, as Mr Singh clearly believes, is not always consistent with building true subject understanding in pupils. The paper also sets out how 40 per cent of pupils in both schools were “pushed” towards BTEC courses in science because they were deemed to be equivalent, in league table terms, to two GCSEs at C grade. All candidates were expected to pass, even though many would not have been expected to gain a C grade in actual GCSEs. In perhaps the most damning passage in this study, teachers are quoted as saying that it did not matter that pupils in lower sets had done badly in science at key stage 3, as they were lined up to take the BTEC course – where all were expected to pass - rather than GCSEs. In other words, that pass result at the end was all that mattered. I include this next bit boldly – perhaps bravely – in a blog for head teachers, but a teacher emailed me a couple of weeks ago to argue that when people look at what has gone on and pin the blame on “league tables” for some of these problems, inadvertently they let school management off the hook. On the issue of the decisions made by schools with regard to pupils' English Baccalaureate choices, she said: “I'm really not sure why everyone is so surprised that schools are moving their children to EBacc subjects mid-stream. After all, head teachers have been allowed to play these kind of games for years under the guise of 'league table pressure'. “Guise sounds like a strong word to use, particularly when we know that league tables are unhelpful in this situation. But we must remember that most of the schools that play these games are not under threat of being put in special measures/closure/or imminent redundancy. They just want to see their schools, not their students, appearing to be very good.” I include this with little comment, other than to say that I make no apology for highlighting incentives which appear to have been created, at a system level, for schools to act in certain ways. Whether one chooses to blame individual heads or the system as a whole, the problem, I think, has been the over-emphasis of school-by-school results as – in the reality of the way those schools and their leaders are judged in the outside world – ends in themselves. Changing this would be a huge undertaking. The Government will say, of course, that it is addressing these concerns by ending modular GCSEs and thereby seemingly removing schools chance to “bank the C” early, and by abolishing multiple GCSE equivalencies for non-GCSE qualifications. But this idea of gearing education to the maximisation of performance indicators for schools will continue to distort behaviour. Instead of league tables being seen for the flawed and blunt instruments that they are, Government policy seems increasingly to be being built around them, while Ofsted inspections still give great weight to institutional indicators almost as ends in themselves and, as mentioned, Labour's “improve your results or else” targets for those at the bottom of the rankings remain alive and well. Four years ago, Martin Stephen , at the time the “high master” of St Paul's School, told me that league tables were a “cancer on the face of education”(http://bit.ly/nw9msM). I think he was probably being too specific: “league table” pressures are actually simply a shorthand, in the state sector at least, for the entire exam-driven measurement and management apparatus which I have called hyper-accountability. That said, I am increasingly convinced that Mr Stephen's seemingly hyperbolic statement is not too far from the reality. I admire school leaders and teachers who resist the reductionist and anti-educational tendencies clearly inherent in making simplistic institution-based indicators the centre around which our schooling must revolve.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=488Tue, 13 Sep 2011 11:19:32 GMT20110913111932Tue, 13 Sep 2011 11:19:32 GMT20110913111932Tue, 13 Sep 2011 11:19:32 GMT2011091311111932This time of year is all about the big picture: getting everyone back into school, setting the ethos, ensuring everything settles nicely for the year ahead.But the bit that new heads can often struggle with is the details round the edge of the big picture where a little time can make an enormous difference.I was struck by a message on Twitter from Birmingham head Sue Robinson, whose list of accolades demonstrates that she knows a thing or two about the job. Dr Robinson's Tweet talked about the usefulness of her annual chat with her lunchtime supervisors, and how, as usual, they'd given her fresh perspectives on her school.Intrigued, I got in touch to ask more. Much to Dr Robinson's surprise. The pastoral conversations, as she called them, were a routine thing for her: didn't they happen in most schools? I was not at all sure that Sue's agenda-free scheduled 20-minute chats with every member of staff were the norm in most UK schools, so I pressed her for more information. It would, she said, be a more difficult task for a head in larger schools (Cherry Orchard is a two-form entry primary plus children's centre in Birmingham) but other members of the SMT could also initiate the meetings in different set-ups.It's exactly as simple as it sounds. Every summer term, each and every member of staff gets a 20-minute meeting with Sue to talk about anything they want to. These are emphatically not performance management interviews, which are entirely separate.Some staff arrive, chat about how much they're enjoying the job, shake hands, and leave. Others talk about training ambitions, previously-unknown qualifications and skills, or ideas for making school systems run more smoothly. As a result, several members of staff have moved into new roles, and problems have been solved. Lunchtimes run very smoothly, and that has knock-on effects throughout the school.As Sue puts it: “ It's not necessarily going to improve my Level 4 English but it improves the operation of the school, and improves morale, which makes everything better in the long term and encourages people to stay. It's a bit like the butterfly wings and chaos theory. It's all about the ethos of the school.” Susan Young is an education journalisthttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=487Thu, 08 Sep 2011 11:55:45 GMT20110908115545Thu, 08 Sep 2011 11:55:45 GMT20110908115545Thu, 08 Sep 2011 11:55:45 GMT2011090811115545Nice to see that the DfE has finally decided to share its list of September-start Free Schools with the rest of the world in a free and open way. I spent an interesting few days in July trying to collate exactly this information myself, and found extraordinary contrasts between the Government's stated aim of transparency and the ease of finding out exactly how all this public money is being spent. The official list of Free Schools, as it appeared on the DfE's website, turned out not to be exhaustive. Nor did it tie up with the YouTube promotional videos about a select band of new Free Schools which were in the same section of the site. Some schools were on the list, others were just in the selection of videos. A further check using Google turned up yet more schools due to open in September but not mentioned anywhere on the DfE website. Moreover, it was astonishingly difficult to draw together all the relevant information about each school from its own website in a way which you would expect from a government committed to transparency. Two did not even give the name of their headteacher: a lot of delving round on the TES's job ads site revealed the identity of one, but the other remains a mystery to me. I could pick up the phone and ask, but that's hardly the point, is it? The new Free Schools are an interesting bag. Several are straightforward conversions into the state sector, which will no doubt please parents of paying pupils very much indeed. Around four of the schools appear to be fully parent-led, with another couple started that way before being handed over (very gratefully, I should think) to one of the chains to establish. One school talks about banded admissions. What else stands out? Overall, apart from in the faith-based or specialist schools, the main selling points appear to be class size, uniform, longer hours, discipline and promises of higher attainment. It would be fascinating to know how these new schools can afford to run such small classes, in marked contrast to their existing state-run colleagues. On raising standards: The Ark schools go into some detail on how they would, do this, but in some cases this bit of the promise is less fully explained. A notable exception to this is in the only school-sponsored school, Woodpecker Hall, which clearly and in much detail explains how it its founding school works to improve children's attainment in a hugely deprived area, and how it intends to widen its offer to many more families. To be fair, since Cuckoo Hall is already doing this work, it is easier for it to explain precisely what it intends to do than for schools starting from scratch. Faith and specialist schools aside (there's a Montessori opening in Crawley) the overall impression I'm left with is of schools appealing to aspirational parents, rarely in areas of the most pronounced social deprivation, promising something closer to the private school experience in terms of uniform, hours, perceived discipline, and achievements. Oh, and offering lots of wraparound childcare to accommodate working parents. It'll be fascinating to see how they fare, and how they deliver on those promises. It will also be fascinating to see how openly such information is offered.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=486Tue, 30 Aug 2011 16:47:48 GMT20110830164748Tue, 30 Aug 2011 16:47:48 GMT20110830164748Tue, 30 Aug 2011 16:49:04 GMT201108301644904Did I really just write that? I've spent the last seven years trying to chart the effects of results pressures on schools in all their often gory detail. But this week, after reading a couple of articles on this subject, I found myself shaking my head. The stories, in the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, documented a large fall in recent years in the number of pupils taking GCSEs in the group of subjects now collectively tagged as the English Baccalaureate: English, maths, two sciences, a foreign language and either history or geography. A Parliamentary written answer to the Conservative MP Charlotte Leslie revealed that, in 1997, the numbers taking these subjects was 293,000, or 49.9 per cent of the cohort. By last year, it had fallen to 141,000, or 22 per cent of the cohort. Cue a headline, in the Daily Mail, saying “how Labour let down a generation with easy GCSEs”. The suggestion, in both this story and in the Telegraph, was that pupils had been pushed away from these central , or “key” academic disciplines towards “softer” subjects, with league table pressure on schools – the chase for 'easy' ways to boost the figures - implicated in the stories as a factor. Well, from the Government's point of view, this fits with a very convenient narrative: Labour was simply lax, in that its performance measures encouraged schools to move away from the central, academic and “hard” GCSEs it has chosen to highlight in the EBacc, and that new measure is the way to fix this problem. However, this is a very partial reading of the situation. It seems likely that the largest impact on these figures came from the unrelated decision by Labour in 2002 to make the study of languages optional at key stage 4. The fact that pupils were no longer compelled to take a language up to the age of 16 makes it completely unsurprising that the numbers entered for GCSEs in French and German in particular are not what they once were. New GCSE figures show that the numbers entered for French fell by 54 per cent in the years 2002 to 2011, from 338,468 to 154,221, while in German, the fall was very similar, by 51 per cent from 126,216 to 60,887. Over the period, the overall number of pupils taking GCSEs fell by only 3 per cent. Anyone not entered for a modern language will not count in the Parliamentary statistic, so these large reductions effectively place a reducing ceiling on the numbers who would achieve the benchmark that generated this week's headlines. It is very likely that league table calculations on the part of schools will have played some role in the move away from languages over this time, especially as languages are generally perceived as among the most “difficult” GCSEs. But they will have been far from the only influence on schools and it is strange to make these claims without mentioning the fact that pupils once had to take the subjects up to the time of GCSE, and now do not. And not only did we go, over this period, from modern languages being voluntary to being optional at key stage 4, but this was part of an overall move towards broadening out the curriculum by Labour, with the philosophy being to give teenagers more options in the latter years of secondary. Not only did the national curriculum change, then, but, if I recall correctly, Ofsted inspectors expected schools to engage with this agenda of offering pupils a broad range of options. (In fact, I've just come across this Ofsted report http://bit.ly/nvJc8J from as recently as this May praising a school for offering a “good choice of both academic and vocational courses”. More choice, of course, means greater ability for pupils to opt away from “key” subjects). Against this background, it is unsurprising that the numbers taking what are now defined as “key” or “core” fell. Consider again, entry numbers in the six subject areas that make up that seemingly damning statistic. Again, I've done a comparison going back to 2002, to give an idea of trends. Maths numbers over the period rose by nine per cent – possibly more pupils being entered multiple times? – while English figures are down three per cent, in line with the overall reduction in pupil numbers 2002-2011. For science, it is hard to do a direct comparison, because the structure of science GCSEs has changed over the period. But the numbers taking single science GCSEs (physics, chemistry and biology) separately, which is now seen as providing the best preparation for A-level, have trebled over the period. It is possible that the numbers taking only one (generic science) GCSE, or no science GCSEs at all and taking alternative qualifications such as BTECs, have risen. Geography is the other subject in this group to have seen a big fall, at 25 per cent. But religious studies, another humanity but for some reason not counted in either this statistic or in the English Baccalaureate, more than compensated, its entry rising 81 per cent over the period. Meanwhile, history numbers have held more or less constant, with a fall of less than 0.5 per cent. This headline stat, then , seems to have been driven by possible changes in science take-up; possibly by the fall in geography – perhaps only a national problem if you view geography as “key/central/traditional” but not religious studies; and by the modern languages change. That one statistic – bundling up a number of subjects in one indicator – helps to obscure, rather than illuminate, what has been happening; subject-by-subject data at least need to be considered alongside it. Don't get me wrong: many will argue that Labour's decision – in making languages optional and seeking to broaden curriculum options - was the wrong policy , and that what pupils need is to study this “central” core above all else. On the other hand, this change can and has been argued from the reverse position: that it is better to have teenagers beyond the age of 14 choosing which subjects they want to take, rather than forcing particular subjects on them. I make no judgement on that debate here, but would just argue that it wasn't just league tables pushing schools towards this move: it was the entire Government policy drive. And that, in this case, is what any debate about these statistics must reflect. OK, well I've got that off my chest then. But, surprise surprise, I'm not letting league tables completely off the hook. For there are still problems revealed within the latest GCSE data which do seem to reflect badly on the effects of results pressures on schools, of which league table considerations are a sub-set. The number of pupils entered early for maths and English GCSE continues to grow, and there are now widespread claims that some schools are encouraged to take decisions towards early entry because of their own need to maximise results – I reported on a shocking example of this here http://bit.ly/9evGy4- rather than simply considering what is best for the child. In maths, concerns about schools pursuing early entry because of results pressures was documented earlier this year in an influential report from the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education (http://bit.ly/mCEONK) . This is, perhaps, one of the most extreme side-effects of having a system which puts such emphasis on results for each institution. And – although it is not clear that this is having a massive effect on the overall statistic reported on by the Mail and the Telegraph* – some pupils certainly seem to have been pushed towards science BTECs because of their league table value. Alison Wolf's review for the Government earlier this year said that science BTECs, hitherto deemed in the rankings to be worth two or four GCSEs (and another rival qualification, OCR Nationals in the subject) did not prepare pupils to go on and study the subject at A-levels. Yet, according to league table information I have analysed from 2010 GCSE data, last year 12 schools, including seven academies, had not a single pupil entered for any science GCSE. Given that they must take the subject to 16, they will have been entered for alternative science exams. Earlier this year, Ofsted criticised schools pushing whole year groups towards non-GCSEs in science, and that seems right: it seems inconceivable that in a school with more than 100 pupils, none needs to be prepared to go on and take the subject beyond A-level. Results pressures on schools, unsurprisingly given the stakes, again can push them towards some perverse measures in a bid to improve their published data. Of course, the government's response has not been that it is the fundamentals of league tables which need looking at, but the measures by which they are calculated. Its reaction to the perceived problem of low take-up of languages in particular is to change the way schools are measured, by introducing the EBacc. Yet as Russell Hobby said on the publication of the results: “Schools have to be more than exam factories driven by performance incentives.” Amen to that. *Statistics within the Wolf report say there were just over 60,000 entries for the GCSE-equivalent BTEC First science courses last year, or around 10 per cent of the year 11 cohort. Some of these pupils will either have not have taken a modern foreign language, or history/geography, I'm guessing, in which case they would not have counted towards our EBacc Parliamentary figure even if they had taken two GCSE sciences.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=485Fri, 26 Aug 2011 09:36:42 GMT20110826093642Fri, 26 Aug 2011 09:36:42 GMT20110826093642Fri, 26 Aug 2011 09:36:42 GMT201108260993642There's a different undercurrent around this year's GCSE results. No matter how well or badly every individual child has done, the sense of optimism and progression we've been used to during recent years has evaporated. What does the future hold for the class of '11? Or come to that, anyone currently in secondary education or college? Between them, the economy and the coalition government have created a perfect storm for the young. Tuition fees and tightly constrained student numbers will cut off thoughts of the university route for many. The loss of the EMA will probably keep others out of college. Job prospects are pretty grim. And just to top it all off, a bomb has been put under the careers service, such as it was, at a time when kids are sorely going to need some decent advice. It strikes me that no matter what the Government says about the importance of education, and no matter how many Free Schools are created, and no matter what new curriculum emerges, we're entering a time when kids and parents re-assess what's important about education. In fact, pretty much uncharted waters. After more than a decade of mass higher education, when the rhetoric was about upskilling the country to compete with developing economies and increasing numbers of jobs have demanded degrees, large numbers of kids will inevitably look at starting in life with a vast debt and decide it's not for them. The positive economics of a degree worked best when it was a rarity: the financial benefits now are much less clear cut and it would be astonishing if entry levels to many jobs did not drop back once again to A Levels or their equivalent, as they were in the 1980s. But it is unlikely to happen overnight. The knock-on effect of this and the deteriorating jobs market will be felt earlier in school years. If there are few jobs around and university is no longer seen as a viable option, some teenagers may conclude that it's not really worth putting themselves out to work hard at school for uncertain future benefits. Deferred gratification is tough for teenagers who can't see any future at all, and it will be a miracle if the number of NEETs doesn't rise sharply during the life of this government. Most of this is going to fall on the shoulders of schools, many of whom are already working against the odds to enthuse their pupils. Not only will they have to redouble efforts to make kids see the point of working hard, but the qualifications they provide will have to make sense in a very difficult jobs market. While I can see the arguments for the Ebacc, it may well seem increasingly irrelevant to many pupils and their schools, and proper Government enthusiasm needs to be forthcoming for more vocational options. And handing over all face-to-face careers advice to schools at this point is a hell of an ask. The jobs market is in complete turmoil – how on earth can individual schools and their staff interpret what's happening and give the best possible advice to all their pupils? Those doing the advising will have come through a route now consigned to history – school, followed by affordable higher education, a subsidised post-graduate qualification and then employment. Realistically, only a small proportion of teachers have worked their way through unemployment, career changes and portfolio working, and may not be best-placed to help pupils cope with these prospects. The national careers website is likely to give messages which are idealistic rather than pragmatic, or risk Government wrath, so no practical help is likely there. It would be nice to think someone in authority is thinking through all these changes and how assumptions around education are likely to change for the current generation, and might even be thinking about what the best advice would be for schools, pupils and parents. But somehow I think the official line is going to be business as usual, with the unspoken subtext: you're on your own. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@gmail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=484Thu, 25 Aug 2011 11:21:54 GMT20110825112154Thu, 25 Aug 2011 11:21:54 GMT20110825112154Thu, 25 Aug 2011 11:21:54 GMT2011082511112154The post-match analysis of the riots, as we might flippantly describe it, is almost as depressing as the events themselves. If you're on the right, then permissiveness is to blame. On the left, and it's deprivation and threatened youth cuts. Nuance? Forget it. Yet as we're beginning to learn more about the people ending up in court – who perhaps by definition are less likely to be the movers and shakers, but more the opportunists and followers – the more bizarre the whole thing becomes. Twenty per cent are juveniles, with the vast bulk of the others in their 20s. Many of them have jobs or were of previously good character. By no means do even half of them fit the stereotypes you might have of them. The vast majority, it seems, went rioting and looting simply because they could – normal reality had been suspended. But does that mean it could have been any of us rushing into Curry's for a new plasma TV, or is there something subtly different in the way younger people relate to the rest of society? Schools and discipline are clearly going to be on the Government's frontline of restoring order in our cities in the next term and for the next few years, but it strikes me that this is only one tiny piece of the bigger picture in the way we as a society bring up children. The last few years and decades have seen many separate changes which have come together in the past few years to create a very new way of child-rearing. For tens of generations, children may have had more freedom than they do now, but they weren't left to their own devices in the same way. Traditional societies effectively apprenticed children to learn from adults from an early age, and we've socialised children in roughly the same way ever since. In the last century, boys and girls left school at, say, 14, and worked their way up from the bottom in workplaces where they were in the minority and adults taught them how to work and behave. More well-to-do children were also surrounded by adults and expected to behave and develop in particular ways. Adults were everywhere, in large numbers, in the lives of children and teenagers: at church, at Scouts or Guides, at work, or just as part of the community and unafraid to comment on behaviour. And while class sizes have varied over the years (from the enormous to the merely large, in the state sector), schools used to be so much smaller that every member of staff knew your name and was unafraid to bellow it down a corridor for the slightest transgression. But now we have teenagers, who expect to live lives separate to their own families and spend most of their waking hours with friends or out and about. We have schools so enormous that it's easy to be anonymous. We have a consumer culture that tells a very impressionable group of children and young people that they must have the latest things. We have a culture that encourages the separate grouping of children almost from birth, with nurseries and wraparound childcare replacing rearing methods which had much lower adult-child ratios. And then we started demonising adults, gradually seeing them as potential abusers unless proved otherwise. It's become less and less acceptable for children and teenagers to be in small groups with adults, so learning models of adulthood from perhaps Scout leaders or other interested grown ups are disappearing. We seem to have decided it's safer that way. We even encourage teenagers to learn from each other – peer education – thus further subtly undermining the idea that adults know stuff which is of value. It's a small part of a huge picture, but I'm not convinced humans can psychologically adapt to such new child-socialising methods over a mere half-century or so, after millennia where the lives of children and adults were intertwined in a kind of apprenticeship-for-life. We've allowed teenagers to withdraw across a battle-line of trust, where they think the adult world has nothing to teach them, and where a spectre of potential abuse – or accusations of abuse – can hover. Somehow, we've got to make sure we all spend a lot more time together rather than in situations where adults are a distant and tiny minority, and that may mean rethinking both how we do things in school and how we socialise children in other ways. And that doesn't just mean handing out detentions at the drop of a hat. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@gmail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=483Mon, 15 Aug 2011 11:50:52 GMT20110815115052Mon, 15 Aug 2011 11:50:52 GMT20110815115052Mon, 15 Aug 2011 11:50:52 GMT2011081511115052I feel slightly daunted at the start of this blog. I've read some superbly insightful postings* on the implications of this week's disturbances for school, written by teachers, and wonder what I can bring to this particular subject, never having taught. Some have also observed that those commenting on the riots, with all their complex causes, have simply used them as an excuse to re-iterate whatever they think is wrong with a particular aspect of society they are interested in. Here, again, I plead guilty. But that clearly hasn't stopped me writing this blog, so please read on! I should say at the start that, like no doubt many others, I was appalled by the footage of violence and looting, some of which occurred not far from where I live. “Thugs” seems to be the word used by much of the media and political class to describe those carrying out looting, arson and the rest, although it's not one I particularly favour. No, “idiots” was the word going round in my head, instead. What kind of person thinks it's OK to set fire to things, or to steal from any business, let alone a small family-run shop? Commentators and politicians are therefore right to say that these events were not political, in the sense of not being part of an explicitly political protest, especially once events spiralled away from the initial catalyst for them in Tottenham. Much of the looting was simply opportunism and wilful lawlessness. So much is obvious, and of course, there must be consequences for these actions for the individuals concerned. But of course it is also right to seek to probe for deeper causes. While individuals have to be held to account for their actions – and the vast majority of young people were not involved in these disturbances – the question has to be asked as to how we have got to a situation where some think it a good idea to set fire to a building, or to rob. Punishment alone at the end of this process can never be the whole answer. And any attempt to understand will need to look at what has gone on in our education system, as one factor among many affecting the way people behave. In an attempt to go beyond the fairly superficial reaction set out above, I've been re-reading reports (http://bit.ly/reXJrU and http://bit.ly/mTZwf0) generated by an excellent investigation into educational disaffection among young people which was carried out by the Rathbone Trust with the Nuffield foundation's painstaking review of 14-19 education. It reported three years ago. The research looked specifically at the situation facing “NEETs” – 16- to 18-year-olds not in education, employment or training – and featured 36 workshops in which groups of eight to 10 young people discussed their lives. It also included another set of discussion groups for “practitioners” who frequently had contact with them, such as Connexions staff, magistrates, voluntary sector organisations, teachers and college lecturers, youth offending teams and even employers. I know that not all of the participants in this week's disturbances were “NEET”, but the investigation's final report, published in October 2008, contains findings which could be considered prescient, given the events of recent days. It included the account of one 16-year-old from Manchester who, when asked to describe a typical day, said it included: “In the afternoon, I'm out with the boys on the estate. Chilling – terrorising, tipping stuff off bridges.” The report also talked about the gang culture, which it said had featured prominently in workshop discussions in both London and Manchester. It said: “If a young person does not feel a sense of belonging within the family, they tend to seek to belong to other groups which offer them a similar sense of belonging. Whilst for some, positive activities such as youth groups and religion offer alternative means of belonging, others choose a more negative route, with a sense of belonging ensuing from gang membership and involvement in crime. “These young people live in a society where celebrity is lauded and represents a source of aspiration…Particularly when parental and local community role models are not present, crime and the gang culture offer not only a sense of belonging, but a route to local celebrity status through alternative, sub-cultural means.” It added: “The workshops highlighted the range and heterogeneity of the challenges faced by young people but also indicated the problems that they shared. They face multiple barriers to making progress in their lives – poor educational attainment; poverty; low self-confidence and esteem; inner city living and poor labour market experience for boys; and for girls, teenage motherhood and a lack of parental interest in their education; and above all, a feeling of failure. To have any chance of helping these young people meet the learning challenges needed to re-engage with society they have to be acknowledged as a diverse group with diverse needs which must be dealt with in a holistic manner.” Unsurprisingly, there were also some specific problems with many of these young people's engagement with education. The report quotes research from 2007 which found: “It is undoubtedly true that among those who are NEET, there is a substantial majority of young people who, after 11 years of statutory education, are united by their common experience of social and economic disadvantage, low educational attainment, relative underachievement and alienation from the education and training system. The educational reform process that has continued apace in England since the Education Reform Act 1988 has completely failed this group.” You may or may not agree with that final sentence, but the rest of it seems fairly hard to argue against. The report also found: “One of the key findings from our work with young people over the last year is the very pronounced feeling of alienation from schooling so many expressed. Many of the young people certainly have unhappy memories of schooling…However, the reasons for dropping out are far more complex. For many it is not primarily about the school curriculum, or about a lack of vocational learning opportunities, but an inability to cope with the necessary authority structures that must underpin the structure of schooling.” The words “alienation” and “failure” run throughout the report in relation to the feelings of these young people towards education, and I believe they should give anyone concerned with schooling pause for thought. The investigation found: “Some of those who are classified as 'NEET' have carried an ingrained sense of failure with them since secondary, or even primary, school. This sense of failure affects the young people's capacity for self-motivation, and for identifying, realising and implementing their aspirations.” An anti-establishment culture outside of school therefore had its obvious attractions. Among the report's prescriptions are for greater support for frontline staff working with disaffected individuals, many of whom cited an inspirational individual, including sometimes a teacher, as a positive influence. The report - and this is where my particular obsession starts to kick in – also raised the issue of the use of the current system of GCSE A*-C indicators in secondary schools. It said: “The emphasis on academic attainment and on qualifications, and particularly on the five GCSEs at A*-C benchmark, in schooling, has serious implications for those young people who do not succeed with mainstream schooling.” The investigation's interim report had found: “Young people who do not achieve good GCSEs at school must be offered a suitable second chance, which they perceive to be accessible and relevant to their particular situation.” While new measures being used by Ofsted at that time focusing on pupil progress, rather than simply raw attainment, might help, the danger was that schools would simply marginalise those children they felt would could not meet these indicators. I wonder if education policy-making hasn't failed to rise to the undoubted challenge faced by these issues in recent decades. First, we have had a system in which success has been very narrowly measured and accredited, with repeated messages inevitably sent to children as to which of them are meant to be viewed as the successes, and which, the failures. English and maths success in primary school, followed by achievement in traditional academic subjects in secondary, have been stressed so overwhelmingly, including through the accountability system, that it is, perhaps, unsurprising that some children failing on these narrow measures seek to disengage. This is now reflected in the new English Baccalaureate benchmark. The subjects within the Ebacc, including, of course, English and maths, are very important and, of course, we want more pupils to be fully engaged with them. But I do wonder if schools also need to be encouraged to emphasise a wide range of subjects and skills: heresy as this may sound to some, I do think children need to have something to succeed at, and narrowing down the focus in schools reduces the number of dimensions of success. Pupils will and do disengage – especially if secondary schools now react as seems natural by grouping students into “EBacc” and “the rest” - and the reaction of some to say that they simply should not do so is unrealistic. Of course, many will argue that this is hopelessly idealistic and fuzzy-headed. Maths and English in particular are vital for children's futures. And it is patronising to think that certain pupils cannot achieve in these subjects. I would not disagree, but I would say that, thankfully, people can and do succeed in real-world jobs that put the emphasis on, for example, artistic or musical creativity, craft skills, or teamwork. Stories of schools reducing teaching in these subjects because of the EBacc are worrying. To say to children that schools are mainly just about a limited number of “basic” or “traditional” subjects risks narrowing their experiences needlessly. If you have just one measure of success, the danger is that those at the bottom on this measure will disengage. Offer more fields at school in which pupils can genuinely find an interest, passion and some success, and you might engage more young people. The other thing to say about the EBacc is that it seems at least partly predicated on the notion that the definition of a good society will be when more working class children get to “good” universities, including Oxbridge. This is quite a narrowly-defined way of coming at the issue of social justice. For, by definition, only a minority of pupils of any kind can go to the “top” universities. Even if we do manage to get to a system which is fairer for “bright” children from disadvantaged homes on these terms, what about the rest? I worry that the emphasis on particular categories of children is not much of a strategy for the education system as a whole. And the EBacc's introduction, of course, follows no wider debate about what we want for that system as a whole. Consider, again, that narrowly-defined sense of what counts as succeeding at school. I was pondering these issues by email with a group of progressive-minded educationists yesterday. I wondered whether modern results-driven, test- and exam-focused accountability imposed on schools from afar was having an impact, in terms of some of this alienation. This was one response, from a university education academic: “Is there anything any of us can do to get politicians and those who perpetrate and perpetrated the testing culture to try to imagine what it feels like to enter secondary school below level 4, to be put in bottom sets…and to be expected to feel proud and behave well while getting failing grades again and again and again. “[Pupils are] being predicted to fail and then - amazingly - being set in a path to failure in groups with peers who are also lacking resources, lacking the cultural capital of the schooling system, and live impoverished lives. The reality of many classrooms is that students are told their predicted grades and labelled with their levels and go through secondary school, if they attend at all, being treated like, and taught to become, low attaining people. “I am not saying this is the sole or even main cause of the disturbances this week, but feeling worthless at school doesn't help, when school is one of the places which could institutionalise progress and worthwhileness.” Regular readers of this blog will be unsurprised to learn that I think we have lost something in the move to judge schools – and therefore to express what matters in education – in very narrow, statistically-framed and technocratic terms. I think it would be better if schools were not discouraged from thinking of their job more holistically: educating the whole person, and educating all pupils, not just those on which the latest set of performance indicators focus. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, touched on this I think when he said in the House of Lords on Thursday that “our educational philosophy at every level has been more and more dominated by an instrumentalist model that is less and less concerned with the building of virtue, character and citizenship”. Education, he would argue, has a value in itself beyond the qualification generated at the end of the process. And this is partly moral. Education should be about encouraging children to be good contributors to society, yet this is not the way schools are judged. Indeed, I would argue that some actions undoubtedly and not surprisingly pursued in recent years by some schools in the race to generate better grade stats for the institution - such as children being told by their teachers what to write for GCSE coursework – have sent the wrong messages to young people, in a system where what we value in education seems to have to be expressed in a set of numbers. But I can't recently recall an Ofsted report, for example, raising questions about the morality of a particular school “gaming” the system to raise its numbers. The job of the head teacher, in the way success is defined, is simply to raise the statistics. I'm not sure how many teachers would agree with the archbishop's thoughts entirely, and I know, of course, that there is fantastic work going on in schools up and down the country every day. And certainly, some of the educationists in my discussion thought that statistical tracking systems within schools have brought some benefits. But I would say that a system that has become so obsessed with raising grades almost as ends in themselves** might be in danger of losing sight of the big picture of what, surely, really matters in the end: helping all children lead fulfilling, rewarding and, yes, law-abiding lives. *For a range of perspectives, see: http://bit.ly/pHnYsu , http://bit.ly/przfoy , http://bit.ly/1F73Nd. **As I've argued before, the imperative of improving pupils' results makes a lot of sense at the level of each school; the Rathbone investigation recognises the crucial centrality of qualifications to young people. But if, nationally, the system just becomes focused on grades as ends in themselves, the danger is that there is no long-term benefit for young people, for, as grades go up on average nationally, employers and universities simply raise their grade entry demands. Grades are largely, then, carry relative, rather than absolute, currency for young people.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=482Sat, 13 Aug 2011 12:52:24 GMT20110813125224Sat, 13 Aug 2011 12:52:24 GMT20110813125224Sat, 13 Aug 2011 12:53:41 GMT2011081312125341As the clean-up of London begins after its third awful night of mob rule, you can see that what's happened here -- and in other cities -- isn't going to be put back in its box quickly. It's only three weeks till the start of term: what on earth are schools going to be dealing with on their return? Particularly if the violence continues. Younger children are likely to be traumatised in many areas. They'll have been woken by the sounds of the riot, or by parents preparing to get out of their homes for fear of what may happen next. They will know other families who have been affected. A walk to the local shop will perhaps involve going past looted shops, burned-out cars or devastated buildings. For children who are among the poorest in society, their sense of safety may be almost destroyed by stories of gangs breaking into occupied houses. The television news pictures are hard enough to see: what if it was your friend or your gran who was affected? Among this group of kids, schools may find themselves with kids manifesting various stress disorders. Schools are used to their role as a haven, but managing to be a haven in the middle of a divided community is something entirely new in mainland UK. What primaries face is going to be a walk in the park compared with what secondary schools may be facing. First reports suggest that many of the rioters and looters were in their early teens: one arrested boy is 11. There's a fair chance, then, that secondary schools in the affected boroughs will have among their pupils both kids who took part in the riot, and those whose families were badly affected by it. The rioting kids may not be keen to advertise their involvement to adults, but may be boasting about it to the other kids as part of the hardman act. So what on earth do you do if you begin to suspect that a couple of your pupils were involved in the burning and looting, but have so far not been picked up for it? Do you tip the police off? Talk to the parents? Talk to social services? If you do any of this, what are the consequences? What do you do about the tensions and the fear between the kids who were the victims, and those who helped put that fear into them, and are perhaps still doing so? What do you say in school assemblies and tutor group time about the riots, when you know perfectly well that among your audience are kids who are swaggering about their involvement once your back is turned? What do you do when your locality split down racial lines during the riots, as in one area where the Turkish community turned out to defend their neighbourhood? What do you do about kids whom you suspect got carried along with the stream of events and now desperately regret their actions? And again, what do you do to reassure the victims and help them rebuild their strength and trust? For some kids, the notion that schools are their main place of safety is going to become even more important in the coming months. Schools will find themselves on the front line in many of our city districts within a month: they're going to need all the support they can get in dealing with this new reality, whilst remembering their core purpose -- to help these kids do the best they can in life without using violent affray to get new trainers. And schools in these areas are going to need all the support they can get. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@gmail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=481Tue, 09 Aug 2011 10:20:48 GMT20110809102048Tue, 09 Aug 2011 10:20:48 GMT20110809102048Tue, 09 Aug 2011 11:35:29 GMT2011080911113529Transparency is the name of the game in Government at the moment, covering everything from teachers' pay through to exams taken and passed and what the inspectors thought. There's so much transparency washing round out there that it's hard to believe that any member of the public is going to spend much time wading through it, unless they've got a serious axe to grind. No problem with that, though: schools and governments with nothing to hide shouldn't tuck things away as a default position. However, we could do with a bit more transparency in some areas. I'm thinking of this week's SATS results, which as usual are being used for a bit of political point scoring. As in: yes, results are better this year BUT a third of children are still leaving primary school without reaching the expected level. Personally, I think results could be a lot better BUT I'd like a bit more background information. For instance, the KS2 results came just days after we heard about the plight of children who arrive at school without having any concept of their own name -- what realistic chance would those kids, for instance, have of catching up with their peers by the age of 11, without years of intensive 1-1 tuition? I'd like to know what proportion of the cohort each year are really capable of reaching the expected level at the right age: how many have English as an additional language, or a special educational need, or a disruptive family background which might make such an achievement highly unlikely? I'd like to know how realistic the expected level is, especially given that once upon a time it was the average level -- which is an entirely different thing. Is 100 per cent of the cohort the only result any Government will accept -- which may be impossible -- or is there a more realistic target? However, whether average or expected, if 11-year-olds need Level 4 achievements in order to function in the secondary school environment, then every stop needs to be pulled out to help them. And this is where a bit more transparency would be useful. How many of the children who don't achieve Level 4 have EAL? How long have they been in their current school? How long have they been in the UK? What about the Level 5 achievers? How many of them are eligible for free school meals? How many of them have parents with university degrees? How large are the classes in the schools with higher and smaller numbers of high achievers? It's interesting that many of the new free schools are promoting their smaller class sizes. And -- this would be an interesting one -- what proportion of the kids at different levels learned to read using phonics, compared to other methods? None of this information would be to excuse schools from doing their jobs, which is to create the best possible outcomes for all pupils. But it would give us all a bit more context to work in. We could learn more about schools which are doing brilliantly against the odds, and perhaps use their experience and methods to help that group of kids who fall short of Level 4 across the board. Perhaps we might even consider holding back for an extra year of primary those children who aren't going to make the grade in time, giving them the best possible start for their secondary schooling. In the light of all this, we might then be able to applaud the achievement of schools where half the cohort are not only new to their classrooms, but new to the UK, doing a brilliant job with their pupils, but aiming at an impossible target. In a country where the wrong sort of weather and inconvenient royal weddings can be blamed for a flatlining economy, the reasons children don't meet an expected target are surely also up for discussion?http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=480Thu, 04 Aug 2011 10:42:16 GMT20110804104216Thu, 04 Aug 2011 10:42:16 GMT20110804104216Thu, 04 Aug 2011 10:42:16 GMT2011080410104216Did exam boards break their industry's code of practice in allowing through a higher than usual number of errors in this year's GCSEs and A-levels? This question is being asked by England's qualifications regulator as part of its investigation into the blunders in question-setting which have been subject to much debate during this summer's assessments. Meanwhile, the Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors is calling for the errors to be a trigger for fundamental reform of the way GCSE and A-level papers are designed, with questions subject to extensive “pre-testing”. The errors – 10 of them are listed by Ofqual on its website – reportedly ranged from a printing mistake by AQA leading to some schools receiving GCSE maths papers which included questions from a previous version of the exam to an OCR maths AS level paper which featured an impossible question worth 11 per cent of the marks on the paper. This week, an Ofqual spokesman re-iterated to me that exam boards should have been checking all papers in detail before any candidate sat them. Perhaps more revealingly, he also drew my attention to paragraph 3.14 of the code of practice for GCSEs and A-levels, which states that question papers and mark schemes for all exams must be checked by a “scrutineer”. The boards, says the code, are required to check “the final drafts of the question papers…to ensure that the questions can be answered in the time allowed and that there are no errors or omissions”. The boards should also “work through” question papers “where appropriate” – in other words have someone working for them sit the paper or part of the paper in advance, and also double-check the mark schemes. Crucially, perhaps, the code also says the “scrutineer” should prepare a report on this process. “[This] report will be sent to the chief examiner, who must then approve any necessary changes to the question papers/tasks and provisional mark schemes,” says the code. If this process was followed thoroughly, it would appear that mistakes should not happen. So how did the errors get through? If reports are available to Ofqual, it would appear to be possible to find a paper trail and pin down responsibility. Certainly, Ofqual is suggesting it will be holding the boards to account for the extent to which they followed the code. The boards themselves have all said they are sorry for the mistakes : all three of England's GCSE and A-level boards, as well as Northern Ireland's Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment, had at least one reported error this summer. I asked England's three boards if they had followed the code of practice in all cases. AQA, which has five listed mistakes, said: “It is AQA's policy and intent to follow the Code of Practice. This is one of the areas that Ofqual will be focussing on as part of their inquiry and we are currently conducting our own internal inquiry to determine whether all procedures were followed correctly, including the role of the scrutineer.” OCR, with three errors, said the boards were “all carrying out our own internal investigations to determine whether all procedures were followed correctly and we will share this information”. It added: “OCR recognises that errors in exam papers are unacceptable. That's why we are working hard to ensure that no student suffers as a result of any errors identified in our papers.” Edexcel, with one error, said an internal review it had carried out had already established that its processes “were in line with the regulator's code of practice”. It added: “Regrettably, this year an error was missed in the checking and we are taking actions to make sure that no student will be disadvantaged as a result”. There will be many who will argue that the fact that mistakes can occur is a reflection of the pressure on the exams system, with the boards now jointly setting 60,000 questions across 5,000 papers. However, Ofqual's stance will be that the code of practice rules should have stopped errors getting through. The Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors is an organisation which has been around since January 2006 but which may become freer to speak its mind now that, since March this year, it no longer receives any funding from government. It has entered the debate with a call for all GCSEs and A-levels to be pre-tested. The comparison it draws is with our Sats tests. Sats, for all the criticisms levelled at them, have, as far as I can remember, remained free of the type of errors in questions seen this year in the secondary assessments The CIEA, which has 17,000 members, points to the pre-testing system for national tests, whereby every year's papers are subject not just to checks of the kind described above, but to pre-testing by samples of pupils not taking the assessments for “real”. This is meant both to help the test administrators in maintaining standards from year to year and to iron out any problems with questions. Some Sats writing questions in particular have, of course, been criticised for failing to engage pupils, but, to re-iterate, I cannot remember any that have been misprinted or have been technically impossible to answer. Graham Herbert, the CIEA's interim director, says: “The national curriculum tests are, if you want to use the phrase, stress-tested. General Qualifications [GCSEs and A-levels] tend not to be in this way. We think they ought to be.” Mr Herbert argues that exams systems in the United States, Australia and New Zealand include such pre-testing, and that it used to be more of a feature of our system until at least the mid-1990s. Pre-testing in this way would have stopped most if not all of this year's errors, he says. However, the boards appear unimpressed. None was able to point me towards pre-testing of this kind going on for GCSEs and A-levels.The Joint Council for Qualifications, the boards' umbrella body, responded with a statement. Dr Jim Sinclair, its director, said: “JCQ awarding bodies believe that the pre-testing of questions for use in GCSE and A level examinations would create unnecessary risks and have a negative impact on students, teachers and the reliability of the examination system. “It could have an adverse effect on student performance in actual high stakes exams, call into question the security of exam papers, and place a huge burden on schools and colleges.” The JCQ said that pre-testing through setting pupils trial papers could demotivate them when it came to the real assessments, by adding to the number of exams they had to take. There was a risk that questions set and tested in advance could be passed on to fellow students when the “real” exams came to be taken. It would be difficult to keep changing the questions to be pre-tested as examination specifications constantly changed. And the sheer number of exams – the 5,000 different papers at GCSE and A-level compared to a handful of different Sats papers every year in reading, writing and maths – meant pre-testing would create both those “huge burdens” on students and on the system as a whole. Awarding bodies were also working hard to minimise costs, and this idea “moves in the other direction”, said the JCQ. This position appears in line with that of Ofqual, a spokesman saying: "While Ofqual does not require pre-testing for General Qualifications, if an awarding organisation wanted to introduce it and had the means to deliver it while maintaining standards and protecting the security of the exams, it would be acceptable. "However, there are significant practical considerations [along the lines of those outlined by the JCQ above] that make this development unlikely.” Mr Herbert, however, disagrees. It would not be too onerous for schools, he says, since only three to four pupils a year in each would be required to sit an additional paper. Saying it would be too expensive was “not an option when the public pays for a valid and reliable service”, he said. He added: “In the professional test development community, pre-testing is the norm. No professional test developer would use a test as soon as it had been written. It is the school exam system of the UK that is out of step with the rest of the world and it is perhaps time that we made an effort to catch up with the US, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore and so on.” With Ofqual due to present an interim report on its investigation's findings by the end of October , and a further statement around A-level and GCSE results time, you should expect media interest around this subject to continue for a while yet.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=478Fri, 29 Jul 2011 16:16:54 GMT20110729161654Fri, 29 Jul 2011 16:16:54 GMT20110729161654Fri, 29 Jul 2011 16:16:54 GMT201107291641654I don't read many official reports in a playpark, but it's the summer holidays and we working mothers must take their pleasures where they can. So I learned what the Commons Education Committee thought of the introduction of the Ebac (or Ebacc – Mr Gove clearly trusts us enough to come up with our own nickname for his baby without official guidance) whilst surrounded by kids for whom five GCSEs is in the infinite future. Talk about damning with faint praise: that committee sure knows how to praise with one hand and take away with the other. My inaccurate précis would be that while they've got no great beef with the idea and might even think it's quite good, it's been fatally undermined by being announced at great speed and without consultation. And it may not actually benefit anyone very much, even though the underlying rationale – to make sure as many kids as possible get GCSEs which broaden rather than narrow their options – is not a bad one. They urge Mr Gove to remedy some of this in his review of the not-a-qualification, but you just know (and so do they, from the tone of the report) that this just isn't going to happen. And watching small children assert themselves on a sunny day, you can see that sometimes in politics it is going to seem better to do something decisive and quick, rather than go through a consultation in which the outcome either pleases nobody because it's so watered down, or listen to everyone and then do what you wanted to do anyway. Which makes me think of the mutterings earlier this week about the length of the summer holidays, which to my mind is one of those fixtures in the news calendars. The difference between this and the Ebac(c) is that this isn't an area where Mr Gove can just issue an edict and sit back: it's down to each individual LA to decide on their dates, and, increasingly, non-LA schools. I have to confess to being a Luddite on this one. As far as I recall (and remember, I'm sitting in a play park and am thus excused from checking) there is no good research evidence to support major learning loss from the UK summer holiday, which these days weighs in at a paltry five and a half or six weeks as a result of local authorities deciding to trim it quietly. Such evidence as does exist, I think, comes from the US where the summer lasts for up to three months and many of the poorest kids won't be moving beyond their ghettoes. Here, we're being bombarded with arguments about learning loss, childcare problems and cheaper holidays. On the childcare front, I don't quite see how it's more difficult to get children looked after for a total of 13 weeks if it includes a longer break as well as shorter ones but perhaps I'm being dim -- or just middle class, as the Guardian's editorial on Monday suggested. I'm also less than convinced that if we end up with two shorter summer holidays it would be cheaper for families to go away. People whose business is tourism do notice when it's school holidays. All of them. Not just the big summer one. Ask any parent or teacher, and they'll point how accurately those price rises in the brochure mirror every single school break. And what about families with relations abroad? The days are mostly gone where minority ethnic kids were taken out of school for weeks on end to see Granny and Grandad and the rest of the extended family, with those visits crammed into the summer holidays. Cut the summer holiday, and those families are not going to be happy. I don't see European countries with good education outcomes and lots of working families rushing to scrap their long holidays (nor even Northern Ireland) , and it seems yet another symptom to me of the punitive idea that since adults spend most of their waking hours banged up doing what they're told, that children should learn to do the same (partly to enable their parents to work, work, work). Many parents notice a change in their children during the summer holiday. To start with, the kids are utterly shattered and wail that they're bored. Old-fashioned parents like me tell them they've got to learn to entertain themselves, switch the telly off, and get away from wall-to-wall Wii. And gradually, they get it. As the weeks wear on, your once wacky, inventive children creep back into sight, entertaining themselves, having fun, remembering how to be themselves, and learning about resilience, boredom avoidance and all sorts of other stuff. And then we send them back to school to have every minute of the day regimented once more. I know it isn't going to be like this for all children, and that for many school is the place of security and certainty. But it would be an interesting exercise for someone to do some proper research into the benefits and problems associated with the five-week holiday to inform the regular July "debate".http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=477Fri, 29 Jul 2011 10:33:02 GMT20110729103302Fri, 29 Jul 2011 10:33:02 GMT20110729103302Fri, 29 Jul 2011 10:33:02 GMT2011072910103302As the daily news bulletins get more and more surreal, I've found myself turning for sanity to the calmer world of education. Fat chance of sanity here either, just now. The latest outbreak of madness must be the boundlessly barmy marking of this year's SATs tests, swiftly marshalled by the NAHT before despairing heads went off on holiday. Over three quarters of the schools which took part reported problems with this year's marks, particularly in the writing test. Some schools are sending back all of the papers, with a formal complaint. Others found wine stains on the papers, crossings-out, marks added up wrongly and a wholesale downgrading of kids who should have got Level 5s. These problems have caused their own scandals in previous years -- with the exception of last summer, when I'm guessing the low numbers of schools actually taking SATs meant there wasn't a shortage of markers -- but this week is probably an excellent time to bury bad news and it will be interesting to see whether this one can resist the spades. If SATs marking were schools, you have to think Ofsted would be along in a moment to rate it as failing and put the whole organisation into special measures. But the thing about government -- any government -- is that it sees what it wants to see, and rubbish test marking -- which may have huge ramifications for some schools -- isn't high on the priority list. Something even more surreal, though, is the way the Free Schools movement is developing. As part of a recent job, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr Rob Higham about a paper he had yet to write for an academic leadership conference to create a press release. Dr Higham had spent a lot of time tracking down Free School proposers, and had discovered the intriguing fact that just over a fifth of them were headed by a teacher who was proposing to become the new head. As he rather sweetly put it: “Interestingly, nearly all the lead teacher-proposers appear to aspire to become the free school's head teacher from usually a teacher or middle leader level. For most it would represent very rapid promotion.” Interesting tale, I thought, and turned it into a press release (which you can read here). But what I didn't fully realise until almost ten days later was that Free School heads, like those of academies, are exempt from having done the NPQH. While I'm sure that the DfE will be scrutinising all these applications very carefully, this seems a bit of an open goal. Why does someone leading a community school with oodles of back-up from their local authority, established systems and all that need to have done the National College course, while someone who is spending public money on starting up something from scratch is allowed to do so with no specific qualifications in the job? I just don't see the advantage to the Government in allowing different rules on headship qualifications for new academies/free schools and state sector institutions. They are all accountable for the public money they spend, and if the NPQH is a qualification worth having, then everyone in publically-funded education should have it. Granulating it a bit further, I could -- at a push -- see the argument that academies which had earned that status through being awarded "outstanding" status might be exempt from certain rules and regulations. But new free schools haven't earned anything apart from kudos for a good plan before they actually open. Again, pushing it a bit further, perhaps the thinking is to encourage specialists such as Montessori teachers to bring their schools into the mainstream. But I'd still hazard that every head needs the same skills, and if the NPQH is required for the head of a teeny weeny village primary, then why not another publicly-funded school of similar size? If this is about the Government's drive to cut bureaucracy, then it seems odd to apply it only to free schools and academies, unless the aim is to provide another carrot for the creation of these schools. It will be interesting to see how many proposals with an un-NPQH'd head actually make it off the drawing board. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@gmail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=476Tue, 19 Jul 2011 13:52:52 GMT20110719135252Tue, 19 Jul 2011 13:52:52 GMT20110719135252Tue, 19 Jul 2011 13:52:52 GMT201107191315252Yet more test data to be released, new targets for coasting schools, “zero tolerance” of public sector failure… …And “supporting dedicated public sector staff who want to make a difference” An important speech made by David Cameron on public service “reform” on Monday has struggled for attention this week, with Mr Cameron criticised for delivering it just as MPs were debating the latest tortuous, and riveting, developments in the phone hacking saga. Mr Cameron was launching the Government's “Open Public Services” white paper, which has reportedly been delayed for several months amid disagreements within the coalition over some of its more radical elements. The paper also got an underwhelmed write-up in the Guardian, in this report by the former education editor Polly Curtis: http://bit.ly/qrxlCa However, I think the report contains quite a few policy suggestions which will interest readers of this blog. I wanted to list a few, many of which are being proposed under the drive for more “transparency” about what goes on in the public sector, before commenting on some contradictions contained within the proposals. First, then, the proposals, some or all of which, I'm guessing, might be greeted with a sense of weariness among head teachers. So, in no particular order, here we go: -It appears the individual test and exam results of entire year groups of pupils in England are to be released, on an anonymous basis, to the public. This is the “national pupil database”, in which the achievements of more than 600,000 children in particular cohorts are collected, alongside many other background characteristics of each child, by the Government. So far, this database has been seen mainly by civil servants and by academic researchers, who have to sign agreements before accessing the data. The files on offer are potentially very powerful, allowing any individual to analyse the statistics in any way they want. But these datasets are also huge: data files on any one (anonymised) pupil run to hundreds of columns – and remember, there are more than half a million pupils in each year group – making them too complicated for conventional spreadsheets to handle. Making them available in raw form to the public directly, then, probably will be of little use. However, external organisations, including, probably, journalists, will want to use these files to present data in new ways. It appears these data will allow yet more school-by-school ranking information to be produced. I think this is not possible with the current national pupil database, because of fears that some pupils (in small schools) could be identified, so it will be interesting to see how that issue is tackled. Ministers were quoted in the Daily Telegraph (http://tgr.ph/pIYKjp) as viewing the national pupil database, reportedly to be made available from next June, as the “jewel in the crown” of their entire public sector data-release project. Mr Cameron said: “With our new plans, you'll be able to drill down into the performance of individual schools, checking their exam results by subject area, absence rates and the quality of teaching. Our aim is to provide similar information on performance right across our public services.” The report adds: “We will look to strengthen datasets in due course: from January 2012 we will bring together for the first time school spending data, school performance data, pupil cohort data and Ofsted judgements in a parent-friendly portal, searchable by postcode; from this date we will also publish data on the attainment of pupils eligible for the Pupil Premium.” -The report raises the possibility of a new set of targets for schools it describes as “coasting”. It says: “We will…explore how best to raise standards in coasting schools (eg introducing year-on-year improvement standards)”. I'm already getting into the contradictions now, but I wonder quite how this will match up to the proposals in the Bew report for schools to be judged on more than a single year's data. - Still on the data front, the white paper makes non service-specific mentions of “satisfaction surveys”, saying: “We will ensure that key data about public services, user satisfaction and the performance of all providers from all sectors is in the public domain.” This, then, would presumably mean, in the schools sector, parent – and pupil? – satisfaction survey results being published. A whole new set of league tables? - And a “payment by results” system could be introduced for early years providers. The paper says: “The forthcoming Foundation Years Policy Statement sets out plans to trial arrangements to pay Sure Start children's centres in part for the results they achieve”. I wonder how closely such a trial will look at possible unintended consequences. - Perhaps less controversially, the report also proposes that “Academy and foundation trust [the latter in the health sector] meetings be open to the public, to which my response was: “why weren't they already open?” A review of the “effectiveness and accountability of existing autonomous structures, for example academies and executive agencies”, is also proposed. - Potential changes in the background which could also affect schools and their staff include a suggestion that councils will be given the power to retain the taxes they collect from local businesses (will this be a potential boost to the funding of public services in some authorities, I wonder, or used to cut local taxes?) and an upcoming review of employment law which seems to be addressing, in part, claims from private providers that strict “TUPE” rules guaranteeing the pay and conditions of staff transferring from state to private providers are a “barrier” to private sector involvement. (Page 44 of the white paper, for those interested). Now, those contradictions. First, the white paper claims to be “replacing bureaucratic accountability with democratic accountability”. It is quite clear, I think, what this means; just unclear how to square it both with other aspects of the white paper itself and with what is going on in reality, at least in some schools. The intention is to replace “top-down accountability” where institutions (schools, in our case) mainly worry about performing to satisfy politicians, civil servants, inspectors and local authority advisers – for example, by implication, through performance targets - with “bottom-up accountability”, where institutions are focused mainly on meeting the needs of users of public services (pupils and parents). This is certainly defensible as an ideal, I think. Yet the coalition's floor targets, in which primary and secondary schools are set centralised baselines for test and exam performance and threatened with closure if they fail to improve, are a clear example of “bureaucratic”, or centrally imposed, accountability. Many will also see intervention by Ofsted as another form of “bureaucratic” accountability. And, indeed, the report itself says, quoting a TES survey from last year, that “42 per cent of heads in both primary and secondary schools named interference from local and central government and Ofsted as a barrier to them running their schools”. Yet, while schools with better results are having the requirements of both Ofsted and Labour's targets regime relaxed, there is no sense in the paper of this happening for those at the bottom of the league tables. Indeed, I would argue that, for these schools, “bureaucratic” accountability remains much more of a reality than “democratic”. The paper justifies the idea of intervening from the centre in these cases on the grounds that there is “no point in a parent having a choice of school if standards in those schools are low – that is no choice at all”. This is to substitute bureaucratic accountability, based on a judgement at the centre as to what counts as an underperforming school, for democratic accountability. Again, it is defensible – a speaker at an event I attended this morning suggested some parents in disadvantaged areas simply could not hold schools to account as effectively as others, so there was a need for someone at the centre to do that - but consideration of its effectiveness needs to include a detailed understanding of the effects on children's learning experiences of results pressures in the affected schools. And it does go against the philosophy that the way to promote improvement is, effectively, to make the relationship between the school and its community the key element of accountability. Second, the paper talks about the importance of allowing “individuals to exercise choice across a diverse range of providers”. Yet, in the education field, the Secretary of State is getting the power to force on “underperforming” schools just one type of status: becoming an academy. A truer commitment to this diversity would embrace a range of responses, with schools and local people given the chance to decide which solution works for them. The paper also talks about moves to “enhance the role of local councillors” and bolster the position of local authorities – “strong local government is at the heart of our reforms” though the academies policy downgrades the role of local government. There are other contentious points. The paper also says that “people with have more choice, especially in education”. But this just begs the question: choice in what sense? If I am a parent, will I see new schools opening in my area, broadening my choice? Perhaps so, given the policy of free schools, the government could reply, even though few are going to open in the early years. But then the question is: will free schools really be funded, in the long term, in addition to the existing schools in an area? If so, that looks an expensive policy. Or are free schools meant to replace existing maintained schools? If so, it will be a different kind of choice, rather than more choice. One could argue, of course, that the advent of more academies will open up a kind of choice, as each of them takes advantage of its freedom to modify its curriculum in different ways. But, in the secondary sector at least where most academies are being created, specialist schools under Labour already had the freedom to emphasise different aspects of their provision. And the accountability regime will limit teachers' freedom by encouraging teaching towards the performance metrics. Finally, the paper talks, in ways that will no doubt be welcomed in many schools, about reducing bureaucracy. It says: “The Government does not believe the centre should micro-manage public service delivery and we want to support all those dedicated public sector staff who want to make a difference.” Not only that, but it even mentions the Prime Minister's well-documented plans to try to measure personal well-being, and even the effect of its own policies on people's happiness – I'm not joking - is to be considered. It says: “For the first time, the Office for National Statistics will be measuring levels of national wellbeing and we are developing methods to better understand how wellbeing is affected by our policies.” Satirists will no doubt hereby rejoice. There is even a line promising that those “on the front line of public service delivery” are to be invited to “identify areas where central government can get out of the way”. “These suggestions should be online for everyone to see, and to select the best,” ventures the paper, a tad bravely in my view. I wonder, though, about how those floor targets will affect the “wellbeing” of school leaders and others working (and learning?) in schools at risk of not hitting their floor targets. The paper, while pledging to support “dedicated public sector staff”, also promises that its reforms will embody a “zero tolerance” approach to failure and “drive provider complacency out of the system”. That doesn't look very supportive to me. And, in education, any notion that over recent years schools have ever been allowed to be “complacent” about results, given the already multi-faceted pressures on them to raise grades and scores, is ridiculous. So what is it to be: a more trusting, less interventionist approach to public services, or one founded on the belief that “provider complacency” is, somehow, the greatest danger? The reality is that the way it feels on the frontline may depend on which part of the system you work in, but there is certainly a tension there. One way of reading this paper is that it is an attempt to enforce the ideology of the market on parts of the public sector which have so far proved resistant to it, with acknowledgements in places that this approach can have limitations. The paper, though having an ideological feel overall, is right to acknowledge, implicitly, that market systems have their strengths and weaknesses. But in general this document makes for a simplistic read, in places, and a confusing one in others. Given that the paper itself is to be followed by a period of consultation; many of the ideas are subject to further review; and the coalition is fast developing a track record for changing its mind, the real likely final impact of this document on public services must remain an open question. A consultation period is following the publication of this white paper, and the Government says it wants to hear the views of public servants. Go to www.openpublicservices.cabinetoffice.gov.uk for your chance to respond. The white paper itself is at: http://bit.ly/nFzcLVhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=475Thu, 14 Jul 2011 15:07:56 GMT20110714150756Thu, 14 Jul 2011 15:07:56 GMT20110714150756Thu, 14 Jul 2011 15:09:20 GMT201107141530920The first hundred teaching schools are apparently going to be announced imminently, which is why it was so interesting to hear a well-informed conference speech outlining the details at the weekend. Maggie Farrar from the National College gave the Belmas educational leadership conference a fascinating insight into how they see the teaching schools developing as part of a “self improving school system” as opposed to mini teacher-training outlets. It was an extraordinary vision that she gave, which would transform the role of heads, teacher development and school improvement, and probably compensate to some extent for the effective disappearance of local authorities in many areas. The College sees school leaders at the heart of the raising of standards, working with local partners to improve practice, peer learning and provide both ITT and CPD. They will also be talent spotting potential new leaders and providing support for other schools. “Will this lead to an atomisation of the system?” she asked. Not on her watch: there's no place here for the hero head. “We don't want teaching schools to be hermetically sealed from the rest of the system. They'll be working together and with other clusters across the country,” said Farrar. Even more interestingly, schools are strongly discouraged from going it alone. “No teaching school can do it alone. If they think they can it is highly likely that they will not become a teaching school, or they will be de-designated,” she warned. So the clusters will usually involve a training school or two (there have been applications for training school job shares, often from primaries) plus several strategic partner schools and a higher education institution. Although the current applicants were obliged to have outstanding status, said Farrar, there were many schools which had outstanding aspects and the system should be able to recognise and make use of those. The system leader view of heads is one which has been growing for a few years, but Maggie Farrar's speech suggests a strong push into a new role. “Are we asking too much of our leaders?” she suggested, going on to explain what their role would be in a self improving system with other strategies such as national, local and specialist leaders for education, which would see them strongly working in partnership with others. She quoted her boss, Steve Munby, as saying this was a “once in a lifetime opportunity for leaders to seize the agenda.” What could go wrong? Farrar's answers included empire building, school leaders motivated by ego rather than a desire for the greater good, and schools not wanting to be involved. “What we have to do with this is keep it rooted in common sense, not over complicate it and not make it overly bureaucratic.” There would be opportunities and challenges. Challenges would include distributing leadership across the whole country, finding ways of sharing good practice across the system, and to create schools good at enabling adult learning, all at a time of much reduced resources. Exactly how the model developed would be determined by the first hundred schools, she said. Farrar had one final concern, as drawn out by a question. “One of the things I am worrying about is they were somehow seen as the top of the pyramid… that we are straight away getting into a competing mentality and it's very hard to get away from that. But I am very worried that we'll get a hierarchical pyramid model. It's meant to be collective.” Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=474Tue, 12 Jul 2011 10:11:00 GMT20110712101100Tue, 12 Jul 2011 10:11:00 GMT20110712101100Tue, 12 Jul 2011 10:20:16 GMT2011071210102016On a day when journalism has become the story, it's fascinating to see that one education tale has made it onto the news agenda: the Sutton Trust's research showing that four public schools and one state sixth-form college sent more teenagers to Oxbridge than 2000 state schools.More than all the pious talk of widening access to university, this bit of research with a point demonstrates that Oxbridge admission is a walk in the park for some kids and scaling the north face of the Eiger for others.The Sutton Trust, founded 14 years ago by Sir Peter Lampl, is a fantastic example of how a combination of research and campaigning together can raise the profile of issues which the British media finds deeply unsexy to the point where they get serious coverage.The Sutton Trust's raison d'etre is to promote social mobility through education, and it has succeeded in getting the problem onto the agenda, even if not an awful lot is then being done about it. The public might vaguely envisage their own sons and daughters getting into a medieval college: it comes as a bit of a shock to realise that many of the old Brideshead stereotypes about Oxbridge students are actually true.Contrast that with some pretty interesting research papers which have been, basically, dumped on the DfE's website this week. One at least is very pertinent to the Sutton Trust research, comparing the educational experience of kids from different socio-economic backgrounds who did better than expected or worse than expected in school.In a nutshell, having interested parents who play with you, talk to you and perhaps cook with you before you go to school makes the most enormous difference to the fate of children from lower-income households.But then there are extra chances. A good early years setting is particularly beneficial to boys, giving them a boost to become resilient learners later. And there's another window of opportunity in early secondary school, if the school decides to run catch-up classes. This is even better if there are adults around – and friends, too – who take an interest in the kids and encourage them to do well.I agree it's not rocket science but it demonstrates yet again the value of pre-school and that it's not too late to reverse problems, even in secondary school. It also demonstrates the value of the best Sure Start programmes, which encouraged parents from less well-off backgrounds to interact with their toddlers and support their learning. You could argue that this kind of knowledge ought to help more kids realise their university potential than pointing out the un-levelness of the current playing field, though again the Sutton Trust is excellent at that end of the argument as well.The other thing that caught my eye on the DfE site was another bit of research about excellent Year 5 teachers as opposed to – well, less than excellent ones. Hallmarks of such teaching included the use of plenaries, a light but firm disciplinary touch with humour and a willingness to veer off the lesson plan if it was obvious the kids weren't getting it. Fairly obvious, you might think, and I mentioned it to a teacher friend. She snorted. “I was failed in an observation for doing just that – they obviously weren't properly understanding what I said so I went on a different tack. Not good practice, apparently.”Perhaps the DfE didn't particularly want to publicise either of these bits of research, nor the ones accompanying them. Recent governments, of whatever political colour, tend to like getting on with their own pet projects without the inconvenience of waiting for research results which might be less clear cut than the spinners would like. But, somehow, all this useful information has to get out there and inform what people do, or we'll still be needing the Sutton Trust's campaigning zeal in 50 years time. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=472Fri, 08 Jul 2011 12:18:29 GMT20110708121829Fri, 08 Jul 2011 12:18:29 GMT20110708121829Fri, 08 Jul 2011 14:18:34 GMT201107081421834I have a confession to make. Ten days ago, I made a decision that journalists sometimes make, but one I try to avoid if possible. Pressed for time, I read only to about two thirds of the way through a major report, on a subject of great interest to me and on which I knew I would, in time, be writing in detail. I reasoned that with the report's executive summary and much of its main text behind me, this would be enough, for now, especially as my main purpose at that point was simply to update people on twitter as to its central findings. Well, I think that I made a mistake now, and have learnt a lesson. For the report was the final verdict by Lord Bew and his committee on what Key Stage 2 assessment should look like in the future, and buried near the end – it is not flagged up in the executive summary – is a remarkable set of suggestions for new tests. It seems I was not the only journalist to miss it: nowhere has this been reported, as far as I am aware. Anyway, when I was alerted* to the need to read right to the end, I was staggered to discover what Bew was proposing. Having spent more than 50 pages up to this point discussing the merits of detailed changes to the current system of tests and teacher assessment, and advocating some rebalancing in favour of the latter, out of the blue, on page 66, the report offers a new idea for the “longer term”. This would appear to be a re-engineering of the Sats system. But it seems to have been put forward not in response to widespread criticisms of the backwash effects of test-based accountability, as you might suppose; indeed, this worry is barely considered here. No, in fact the reasons are likely to remain a mystery to any readers of this report, I fear, since they are offered with really very little explanation. What the Bew report proposes is that, in time, there should be two new sets of tests: one a pass/fail assessment of the “basics” of literacy and numeracy, which all pupils would be expected to pass, with the exception of some children with special needs. The test could be taken in either year 4, 5 or 6: whenever the child was ready. The second set, which look to be more akin to the current Sats, would be taken at the end of year 6 “to allow pupils to demonstrate the extent of their knowledge and therefore to measure pupils' progress during the key stage”. Teachers and heads who are critical of our current high-stakes testing system might think, here, that this proposal might not be the end of the world, for surely Bew would not think of loading accountability measures onto these new assessments without thinking, or explaining, very carefully the consequences, intended or otherwise, of using assessment data in this way? Well, in fact this appears to be exactly what has happened with this proposal. It appears the tests would be used in school-by-school accountability, or as a measure of the “quality” of the school, as this brief section of the report concludes as follows: “We feel the combination of these statutory assessments could ensure that all pupils reach a minimum standard of attainment while also allowing pupils to demonstrate the progress they have made – which would indicate the quality of the school's contribution to their education. It could provide a safety net in that all pupils should achieve a basic minimum, but would not impose a low ceiling on the able.” The report says it recognises that teaching to the test might be a problem under this new approach, but then seems to offer no suggestion as to how it would be avoided. (Indeed, the idea that these tests should act as a “safety net” suggests support for assessment-led education, or assessment having a large influence over teaching and the curriculum, a view which I think is implicit in the rest of the report). This is despite teaching to the test being probably the most influential criticism levelled at the Sats regime and one which any report, to have any credibility in seriously engaging with this subject, should be taking extremely seriously. The report also offers no analysis of previous attempts at introducing “mastery” tests assessing “basic” subject knowledge, which have a chequered history in English education. So there you have it: a new set of tests is proposed by Bew, if only not in the immediate future. (This idea is not a formal recommendation of the report). One wonders where the suggestion came from, while I also wonder, no doubt groundlessly, whether Lord Bew's committee is giving the public a sneak preview of a possible suggestion to come out of the national curriculum inquiry. If so, my guess is that the teaching profession will want to know exactly how this model would be an improvement on current arrangements. - I have already mentioned this on twitter, but it is just worth mentioning here that the Bew report features a punctuation mistake. This mistake occurs, believe it or not, in the section of the report which is putting forward a recommendation for a new test of punctuation, and, indeed, after the word “punctuation”. The full quote runs as follows: “We recognise there are some elements of writing (in particular spelling, punctuation grammar and vocabulary) where there are clear 'right or 'wrong' answers, which lend themselves to externally-marked testing.” Did you spot the missing comma? File under “you could not make this up”. *The tip-off came from contacts at the Cambridge Primary Review network. If you're interested to read my more general thoughts on the final Bew report, you can do so here: http://bit.ly/mstmBAhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=471Tue, 05 Jul 2011 09:45:22 GMT20110705094522Tue, 05 Jul 2011 09:45:22 GMT20110705094522Tue, 05 Jul 2011 09:45:22 GMT201107050994522There is something almost provocative about the timing of the latest consultation from the Department for Education. Here we are, in the week that teachers are striking in protest at Government plans for their pension scheme, a situation further inflamed by Mr Gove's televised suggestion that parents might be able to volunteer to help keen schools running, and the DfE goes ahead with its plans for initial teacher training. The introduction (accompanied by a photo of Mr Gove smiling so hard that it's deeply unnerving) contains a few sentences which appear to have come from a parallel universe: “If we want to have an education system that ranks with the best in the world, then we need to attract the best people and we need to give them outstanding training,” it says, continuing: “There are many excellent teachers in this country, but many who could make a huge difference in the lives of children choose other professions… We value our teachers highly, but the current system of funding does not incentivise the best. The system needs to change.” You may be nodding vigorously, but I suspect the profession's ideas of ways in which it would like the system to change in this particular week bear little relationship to Mr G's ideas for improving teacher training. The Government line is clearly business as usual, combined with an element of going on the offensive. It's surely not a coincidence that Mr Gove has been here, there, and everywhere in the past couple of weeks, pronouncing on modular GCSEs and all sorts of other stuff. Given the circumstances, it'll be interesting to see what sort of responses the teacher training consultation actually gets. There's some interesting stuff in there, some of which potentially has wider ramifications for some schools. You may have read the suggestions for an enhanced bursary of up to £20k for graduates of some subjects (those with Firsts get the top whack) but other proposals that the new training schools would get that money passed to them, and could charge for the training they provide, appear significant to me, as would the other suggestion that GTP students might no longer be “extra” members of staff. As universities will be able to charge anywhere from £6k to £9k for a year's tuition, does that mean that a training school could legitimately do the same? The paper doesn't say, but it opens up the interesting prospect of schools potentially competing to undercut universities for the best students – or certainly do very nicely out of them as, effectively, full members of staff. So will barring those with Thirds from Government-funded training, cutting the number of times literacy and numeracy tests can be taken, and new aptitude tests for applicants raise the status of teachers, as the paper suggests? I suspect the problem is deeper-seated than that, and a suggestion from a Government minister that parents could be roped in when teachers walk out over contractual changes can only make the process slower. Susan Young is an educational journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=470Mon, 27 Jun 2011 15:44:09 GMT20110627154409Mon, 27 Jun 2011 15:44:09 GMT20110627154409Mon, 27 Jun 2011 15:44:09 GMT201106271534409You can't quite escape Michael Gove at the moment, as he announces new free schools here and more rigorous exams there. The man's a positive whirlwind of activity at the moment. I was struck by a sentence from today's speech on free schools, in which Mr Gove said “… the highest-performing education systems are those where government knows when to step back. We want a school system in which teachers have more power and in which they are more accountable to parents – not politicians.” Goodness. If he achieves that he'll be doing something not attempted by any Education Secretary in living memory. However, a more rigorous reading of Mr Gove's quote finds that he hasn't set himself up by providing any kind of target for this hands-off aspiration. Unlike the targets he's currently advocating for all schools, of a 50 per cent pass rate for a basic basket of GCSEs. Wiser statisticians than I have already gone into the detail of why this is well-nigh impossible. In fact, while we're on the subject, the 50 per cent GCSE target is surely an example of where schools are being made accountable to politicians rather than parents, but perhaps I am being picky and Mr Gove would say he's merely voicing parental desire here. If so, that really is a carefully worded aspiration. Anyway, there's some really interesting stuff brewing at the moment which I'd like to tackle in no particular order. The first was in the Free Schools speech, in which Mr Gove worries about the woefully low numbers of people with the right maths and science skills available for British employers, especially among those educated in deprived areas. I share his worries, but I also worry that other Government policies may make this problem worse. One of these policies is tuition fees: the participation-widening schemes universities must now have will certainly be targeted on the areas of deprivation where science and maths achievement are low, but are highly unlikely to remove the fear about huge levels of debt from every poor teenager who might well have the talent to study those subjects at degree level. Economics dictate that there will be finite numbers of children who can be helped: what of the rest? England's new level of tuition fees is, let's not forget, the highest in the world for state universities and will be a deterrent for teenagers of all backgrounds, not just the poorest. The second policy with a bearing on this is the Government's aim of reducing immigration to “the tens of thousands”. The easiest way to do this is by cutting the numbers of international students who study at our universities (often, say the vice-chancellors, keeping open science, technology, engineering and maths departments who can't get enough home-grown students). All the Government's rhetoric is about encouraging “the brightest and the best” and that university students will still get their places, but if the supply of students first improving their English here is choked off then those teenagers will go elsewhere for their engineering degree, thus potentially closing yet another course to British recruits. (I'll declare a combination of specialist knowledge plus a bit of an interest here, as I do some work in the English-language teaching sector). The other issue bubbling under in the Gove repertoire is the curriculum, with various hints and nods about “more rigorous” GCSE exams and a more classic subject base (including, according to the Guardian, the study of Newton's previously unknown Law of Thermodynamics: the publication is silent on whether this was their mistake or his). It is hard to shake off the feeling that the curriculum review team is being steered in a particular and very traditional direction by the politicians. There is nothing new in this: in the original, history more recent than 20 years previous was banned from study lest teachers inject any politics into their interpretation. Interestingly, Estelle Morris, a former education secretary and teacher herself, has this week written of her suspicions that Mr Gove is recreating his own schooling. The more rigorous exams business is another warhorse: the original Standards Over Time enquiry, set up to look into this some 15 years ago, couldn't find enough evidence to prove that exams had got easier but was pretty sure that they hadn't. What seemed to be happening, and certainly is now, is that kids are being taught to the test. If exam formats change, then pupils will be drilled to pass the new versions. For schools in more comfortably-off areas, some kids may get a broader education more akin to that enjoyed by the young Michael Gove: but no matter what freedom academies and free schools “officially” have, it is the league table which says whether they have succeeded or failed, and so teaching to the test will remain the order of the day. Is that what we mean by education? Is that how it works in Singapore? What happens to Singaporean school-leavers from the most deprived neighbourhoods? And, crucially, do Singaporean schools instil or benefit from a positive attitude to education in society? Given that this is a country where you can be fined for dropping chewing gum or failing to flush a public loo, schools are clearly operating in a very different atmosphere to those in England. I don't claim to have the answers to any of these questions, but it would be good if there was some wider consideration of them before yet again setting education policy in stone. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=469Mon, 20 Jun 2011 14:10:11 GMT20110620141011Mon, 20 Jun 2011 14:10:11 GMT20110620141011Mon, 20 Jun 2011 14:10:34 GMT201106201421034Well, it's not great timing, is it? If I were Education Secretary (as if) and I were exhorting schools to significantly raise their game on GCSE results, I'd be thinking twice about doing it in the same week that two teacher unions vote to strike over pension reforms. Or would I? If I were really cynical, I'd be wondering about the brilliance of the timing of Mr Gove's speech, and his advance on it to The Guardian's political team (not, note, the education specialists). There are two ways of looking at it. Teachers and probably many heads, also considering voting for industrial action over pension changes, will see it as yet another example of the Government wanting more for less. There are some carrots in Mr Gove's grand plan, including higher pay for good teachers and apparently more autonomy for schools and heads to do things their way – but there are some tree-sized sticks as well. Not least among those is the demand that the children currently in year 7 of secondary school should be the first universal cohort where half get five good GCSEs. Even now, senior staff are frantically analysing every known fact about the year 7s in some schools, working out where the best bets lie. Anyway, from that point of view it seems counter-intuitive to demand more of a profession which is increasingly making clear that it is less than gruntled about the way in which it perceives it is being treated. But take the wider political view, as Mr Gove will have done. The ratio of rabid to reasoned comments about the prospect of striking teachers (even for one day when all the exams are done) at the end of news stories about this is running at about 20-1. For one thing, last time there was a teachers' strike, there were far fewer working mothers than now, and like it or not school has acquired an extra dimension of essential childcare since then. And attitudes towards working mothers (remember Sirallen on the subject of women going off and having babies?) mean many spend their office hours trying to pretend that no, they don't have any of those pesky commitments at home. Having to take off a day to care for the kids is usually inconvenient at best and often really difficult. Add to that the perception that teachers have actually had it quite good (you'll never persuade the general public that 13 weeks' holiday doesn't mean 13 weeks' holiday) and that the pension arrangements are still generous. Even the argument that teachers can't really go on till 68 doesn't cut it with most private sector employees, many of whom expect to be dismissed or demoted long before that age and anticipate a twilight career as shelf-stackers. Mr Gove knows all this, and it's this gallery he's playing to. Suggest that the desired pace of change might look a little unrealistic, perhaps, and the perception is spread that the profession has just had it too good and isn't up to the job. Spinning is alive and thriving. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me via educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=468Thu, 16 Jun 2011 11:46:34 GMT20110616114634Thu, 16 Jun 2011 11:46:34 GMT20110616114634Thu, 16 Jun 2011 11:46:34 GMT2011061611114634There are times, increasingly I find, when I come across the latest policy move by a government or one of its agencies with a sense of bemusement, verging on despair. How can the detail of what is being proposed possibly accord with the rhetoric of the politicians supposedly overseeing its formulation, I wonder? Why do people seem so unable to see the implications of what they are putting forward? Or do they see them, and simply have some deeper plan which they don't want to tell us about? The latest instance arrived on Friday, with a TES front page (http://bit.ly/jQVlLO) revealing, accurately I believe, the detail of how schools look set to be judged under Ofsted's new inspection framework. The story stated that “more than 5,300 schools with below-average test results will be failed by Ofsted from next year, unless they can show they are 'closing the gap', confidential documents reveal”. The basis for this was guidance which has been sent to inspectors carrying out pilot inspections which are trialling Ofsted's new inspection framework, to be introduced in January. This is the “evaluation schedule” under which inspectors are given ground rules against which to decide what grade they give schools. The guidance, as I understand it, advises inspectors to give schools an “inadequate” verdict on achievement if their results accord with the following formula. “Achievement”, says the guidance, “is likely to be inadequate if any of the following apply.” It then lists five possible triggers for that inadequate verdict on achievement. The first of these stipulates that: - The school has below average attainment (ie raw results) and “is showing little sign of improvement or is in decline”. The four other characteristics within the school's results, any of which would trigger an “inadequate” verdict, include underperformance affecting “key subjects” within a school; performance gaps between particular groups of pupils; a lack of progress made by special needs pupils; and “Pupils' communication skills indicate reading, writing and maths capabilities are not sufficient to prepare them for the next stage of education”. This picture of the type of results which would lead to an inadequate verdict on achievement is reinforced by how the guidelines define a satisfactory school. One whose raw scores were below the national average, it says, would have to have results which were “improving steadily and therefore closing the gap on the national average for all pupils”, to be satisfactory. By implication, then, one below national figures which was not closing the gap would be given that damning label: “inadequate”. Achievement is, of course, central to the overall verdict. The guidance advises that a school adjudged satisfactory overall should be at least satisfactory in all the four main inspection categories, of which achievement is one. So a school failing on achievement would fail overall. It is tempting now, to get into a debate about the merits of particular indicators, but instead I would just say, at this stage: “Hold on a minute. How does any of this square with a particular vision of how inspections should operate as set out by critics of Ofsted's system under Labour, especially the Conservatives and the new coalition government?” The immediate key to this has been statements, both by Michael Gove in opposition and by the coalition since it came to power, suggesting that inspections put too much emphasis on test and exam data, and therefore that the system needed to change. In 2008, Mr Gove reportedly told the TES that Ofsted would need more resources, to allow inspectors to spend more time in the classroom to make judgements, because: “One of the problems is that inspections have been too reliant on already published data”. (http://bit.ly/j2QXcL) Last November, the Government published a white paper setting out its thinking behind the new Ofsted framework. It said: “We will ask Ofsted to return to focusing its attention on the core of teaching and learning...[allowing] inspectors to get back to spending more of their time observing lessons, giving a more reliable assessment of the quality of education children are receiving”. This goal seems to accord with the view of Ofsted itself. I wrote an article for the Financial Times in February, in which I said that “Ofsted inspections have, in recent years, focused heavily on statistical indicators of school quality that are largely based on exam performance”. Ofsted's press office then rang me to say I'd got it wrong: inspections are now far more focused on lesson observation, rather than simply judging schools by spreadsheets. To which the obvious answer is: if this guidance continues to reflect the reality of how Ofsted judges schools, inspectors can be told as much as anyone likes about the importance of lesson observation, but in the end it is assessment results which will drive the overall outcome. Hypothetically, even if they spent a year in a school, building up a picture of its strengths and weaknesses, if the inspection criteria against which the school was judged in the end was framed almost entirely by statistical calculations based on test and exam data, we would still have a data-driven inspection system. This, then, remains inspection almost by computer formula, whatever the rhetoric. There are many implications. First, of course, this yet again underscores the view that what matters in schools is test results. I find it interesting that goals for our system which would appear to be benign, such as “ensuring that more pupils make good progress” are usually phrased in a way that omits the words with which that sentence logically should end: “as judged by test and exam results indicators”*.I say logically, because this is the reality of how pupil progress, as well as raw achievement, is judged. Therefore if we want to emphasise pupil progress through test data, we inevitably underscore the notion of narrowly-focused test-driven schooling. Do we want an education system which defines success and failure almost entirely on the basis of test results? Some would argue for this, some in particular alleging its benefits in safeguarding the interests of disadvantaged children. But what staggers me is that there has been almost no debate, at an official level, facilitated by those who preside over this system, about what the country wants to happen in its classrooms. Ofsted has certainly not sought to ask whether test-driven education is really what is needed, as far as I am aware. (Though it has made pronouncements about excessive test preparation in year six, for example, it has failed to link this to the logic of its own inspection regime; it is naive, given the above, simply to advise schools not to go in for excessive test preparation, because this is the incentive of its own structures.) If it believes that the goals of education can be expressed and captured almost entirely through test results, it should come out and say so, given its detailed guidance to inspectors. Second, of course, the detail of the way these indicators are constructed means that a certain level of failure at the school level comes built-in. That is, schools will fail under this system by definition because of the way the indicators have been constructed, no matter how good the system as a whole might become. Our schools could be far and away the best in the world, and still a minority would fail because the indicators used to define success and failure are relative. Consider, again, that definition of what it counts to be “satisfactory”- or not- on achievement. Schools are at risk of an “inadequate” judgement, first, if their raw results are below the national average. To state the obvious, on any indicator, a large proportion of schools will be in that position by definition, no matter how good the schools system is overall, because of the way averages work. They could escape that inadequate verdict, though, if they were “improving steadily” and therefore “closing the gap” on the national average. Again, though, this is a relative measure: if all schools were improving fast, any one school under threat would be at risk of being adjudged “inadequate” if it failed to match this pace. Thus this system has failure built into it by definition and the number of schools adjudged inadequate will say little about the overall quality of education in England. This means that Ofsted's overall pronouncements on the quality of education are compromised. If a large part of its rules as to which category to place schools in are based on relative indicators – how good a particular school's results are, compared to others', ie whether its performance/performance improvement is above or below the national average – it should not use its statistics of school failure rates to make claims on the overall quality of education. To put it another way, a country of tall people, such as the Netherlands, will always have a large proportion of its population of below national average height. But the presence of a large number of shorter-than-national-average people in its population does not mean that it is a nation of short people. I wrote about this several years ago, (http://bit.ly/jzBy0y) and the point remains. Third, for all the work currently going on on a new national curriculum, if accountability for schools continues to work according to test results formulae, this wider work will count for little: tests, exams and statistical calculations by the school as to how to avoid a “failing” label will continue to drive the curriculum. Probably the largest point, though, relates to trust. Mr Gove has sought to make political capital on rhetoric around trusting the profession. Teachers, rather than politicians, know best about what works in the classroom, he has argued. But the inspection framework shows up the reality. This system is relentlessly centralised: Ofsted, working to ministerial guidelines lays down the performance rules. Schools have to perform according to these data-driven metrics. If they do not perform, Ofsted and ministers intervene, with the government if necessary ordering the takeover of schools by private organisations. There is one important new development under the coalition, of course, in that schools defined as successful are freed from the more urgent demands of inspection. But, because the main judgement as to what counts as success is test and exam results, this could be seen as underscoring the centrality of assessment-driven performance metrics. This, then, is absolutely a continuation of Labour's set-up in which the route to success by those at the political centre is seen as defining the quality of our education system statistically and then monitoring schools intensively until, by implication, you force them to improve. This was reinforced this week with news that Mr Gove is to impose new GCSE targets on secondary schools. I would point out, here, that Mr Gove has, of course, repeatedly criticised the failings of England's education system. Yet here is a central component of that system, absolutely fundamental in driving what goes on in schools, whose underlying philosophy is identical to that which existed under Labour. I suppose there will be many who genuinely believe that this is the best route to improving education. The implication is that Ofsted believes that its statistically-orientated inspection systems represent the way to advance the public interest in improving our schools. Even the lingering unfairness of judging schools and teachers over results for which they can only ever have partial control – and in the process, in my view inevitably downgrading the role of the pupil in achieving those results - is over-ridden by the view at the centre that such a structure pushes all within it to ever greater feats of achievement. I don't share that position: do systems really get the best out of people by encouraging them to perform against a rigid set of numerical criteria? Would professionals often use their freedom from narrow statistical scrutiny to forget about the interests of their pupils, an assumption on which results-driven accountability rests? Does it, complete with its use of words such as “inadequate” to describe the work of professionals whose charges do not meet statistical expectations, create the kind of working environment that will attract talented young people to want to join (and stay in) this profession? It is management-by-numbers. Its rigidity narrows priorities and encourages statistical game-playing. (As witnessed by the school in the TES article said to be introducing a particular set of courses simply because of their likely impact on the school's data). One head suggested to me this week that the guarantee of failure contained within Ofsted's systems – ie a proportion of schools will always fail, because of the way the indicators are constructed - is meant by the coalition to “soften up” schools for takeovers by private organisations. I wondered about that, questioning internally whether actually it was more a product of a particular philosophy at Ofsted as to how success should be measured. Wednesday's Guardian front page, suggesting 88 “struggling” schools will be forced by Mr Gove to become academies, underscores the suspicion of the head, I believe, that privatisation of the schools sector is the big agenda here. In any case, whatever your view on whether Ofsted's systems are a force for good or ill, let's not kid ourselves about the nature of what – staggeringly, given the rhetoric about more freedom for the profession and less emphasis on data by inspectors - is still going on. *Ofsted might say, I guess, here, that teacher assessment judgements can play a role in inspectors verdicts. But test and exam scores remain central.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=467Wed, 15 Jun 2011 11:21:20 GMT20110615112120Wed, 15 Jun 2011 11:21:20 GMT20110615112120Wed, 15 Jun 2011 11:21:20 GMT2011061511112120Latin. One of those subjects which the Conservative bits of the Coalition government think is A Good Thing for children to learn in school. Latin is therefore a subject which counts towards an EBacc. But not always, it turns out. Believe it or not, the Coalition has managed to infuriate the small but enthusiastic band of Latin teachers operating in the state sector. Delightful people, not exactly life's natural militants: how on earth, you might ask, have Mr Gove and Mr Gibb managed this? In a nutshell, it's down to what exactly constitutes an iGCSE. The state comps which do offer Latin (a much-praised band by the current government) are doing so on a shoestring, scraping enough curriculum time to offer the subject as an exam option but often doing the whole course in two years flat as an exam option for those kids who really want it. Increasingly, those schools have found the needs of their pupils better met by doing the WJEC certificates – accepted as a GCSE equivalent by universities including Cambridge. Those doing it have found numbers of teenagers wanting to take Latin at KS4 and beyond have more than doubled. The problem is that they're currently not accepted as GCSE or iGCSE equivalents for the EBacc, which means that many of the state schools offering Latin have done a hurried rethink, and are often going over to less-suitable “proper” GCSE courses (sometimes with only a year to go before the exam) unless most of the kids are doing or have done another language, thus making the Latin an extra. One Latin teacher of my acquaintance wrote to the Parliamentary education committee: “As a comprehensive school, we are incredibly proud to be able to offer a course in Latin for our pupils and feel that a study of this level of academia helps to bridge the gap between private and state education; opening doors into further education which may otherwise have been closed. It is clear from personal anecdotes of my current year 11 that the local colleges are impressed by the inclusion of Latin on their application forms and regard it highly. “The decision to move from GCSE Latin to the WJEC certificates was taken by my predecessor as a response to the fact that previously our pupils were compared with private school pupils who had been studying Latin from year 7. This demand to catch-up created an unfair gap and meant that the teaching of the subject was too rushed, skimming the surface as oppose to a stimulating and deep study which must surely be more engaging.” Where the argument gets complicated is in why this Latin course isn't counted as an IGCSE. It seems (and I'd be delighted to hear from anyone who thinks I've got this wrong) that there is actually no such thing as an iGCSE, but that they are Level 1 and 2 certificates, just as the Latin qualification is. What's the difference then, you may ask. No idea. There is a bit of a campaign going on around this subject: the Cambridge Schools Classics Project, which underpins the WJEC certificate (a course so venerable I remember it from my O-Level Latin course centuries ago – and before you accuse me of special pleading, I was hopeless), has also been lobbying the Department for Education along with the teachers. As a result, Lord Hill spoke in Parliament about the issue, saying: “The WJEC certificates in Latin are not currently accredited as either a GCSE or an iGCSE and so were not included in the 2010 performance tables English Baccalaureate measure. In the longer term we will draw up criteria that qualifications will have to meet to be included in the EBacc, which may allow qualifications other than GCSEs or iGCSEs to count towards the EBacc." That was in February. You would think that the campaigners would be pushing at an open door, given that this appears to be the perfect way to get more state schools doing Latin. This is what schools minister Nick Gibb told a conference last November: that learning Latin “equipped me for life. And it is for this reason, that the decimation of the teaching of Latin in the state sector over the last few decades is so alarming.”“So I thank you for putting on today's conference – about how schools can take advantage of the new freedoms that the Government is giving to teachers, to bring Latin to more state schools…. “One of the overriding objectives of the Government is to close the attainment gap between those from wealthier and poorer backgrounds. The fact that the opportunity to learn Latin is so rare in the state sector is one of a range of factors that has led to the width of that gap.” Apparently the DfE has now said it will make a decision over the summer, almost a year after this problem first emerged. It seems a remarkably difficult process for something which inherently supports the aims of its own ministers, unless the underlying block is a visceral hatred of any qualification other than GCSE and A Level. It'll be fascinated to see how this one pans out.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=466Wed, 08 Jun 2011 11:54:22 GMT20110608115422Wed, 08 Jun 2011 11:54:22 GMT20110608115422Wed, 08 Jun 2011 11:54:41 GMT2011060811115441Admit it, you'd pay good money to see Madonna's former mother-in-law grill schools minister Nick Gibb about sex education. Well, you don't have to. It happened in the House of Lords last week, and you can watch all the salacious details on House of Lords TV. Blimey, those Lords are vicious. Those ladies who make money out of humiliating football stars and high court judges in dark chambers could learn a trick or two from this lot. It's all perfectly courteous… but probing. The committee in front of which Mr Gibb had been summoned was actually the House of Lords enquiry into HIV and Aids. The committee had recently heard that despite the compulsory nature of HIV/Aids education, a quarter of children don't get it (the lessons, that is). The committee wanted to know what was happening to PSHE and SRE in the curriculum review. Mr Gibb didn't really want to tell them anything beyond that the subject had been under review since November, that the remit for a consultation was currently being constructed within the Department for Education, and that it was expected in weeks, or possibly months. Their Lordships and Ladyships were having none of it. Led by former health minister Lord Fowler, they probed and delved as Mr Gibb twirled his spectacles rather desperately and repeated his mantra. It has to be said that it wasn't difficult to pick holes in his arguments. “It doesn't sound as if this review is being given much priority,” barked Lord Fowler. “That's not true… we've only been in office one year when it comes to education policy we're acting with enormous pace,” he said, launching into his list of admissions code, examinations, free schools, academies…. “Why isn't it part of the general review of the national curriculum?” asked Lord Fowler. Mr Gibb had his answer ready. “I think the issues involved in PSHE are different. It isn't a set body of knowledge like history. The process devised for the national curriculum review is not appropriate for PSHE,” he said, divulging than an internal review would be followed by an external one. The Lords version of uproar followed: a hard stare from Lord Fowler, remarks that it all sounded dominated by civil servants, and then the killer comment. “It gives the impression of being done behind closed doors, secretly.” “Well, you know about it. The committee knows about it,” protested Mr Gibb. To no avail, as the committee (many of whose names, sadly, it was impossible to catch) piled in for the kill. “I don't know what you mean about there being no body of knowledge. This is something every child will use in their lives. This is something going to affect them,” remarked one lady member, adding that it was to misunderstand PSHE to talk about it in the same way as geography and history. “That's why don't think that's the right approach. That's why we're initially starting with an internal review….we want to make sure get the remit right before we announce what's in it,” said Mr Gibb. When? “Shortly,” he replied. Another titled lady took over, querying why the mechanism was going to be different to that for the rest of curriculum. “It does give the impression that this is not a set of issues that are very different from history or geography but a set of issues that need to be discussed in a slightly more covert way and whether you wish to see it or not, that's the way it will be seen.” Everything would be transparent, promised the Minister, querying whether anyone really wanted a named figure to head an external review. “They might come up with an inconvenient proposal you might reject,” commented Lord Fowler, a seasoned politician. “It's the responsibility of ministers to balance those views,” said Mr Gibb. The battleground moved on to improved teacher training, peer mentoring and continuing professional development, nice safe ground for the Minister. The peers were having none of it, piling in with surveys showing that the majority of parents and pupils wanted PSHE, and asking how those views were going to be taken on board. Lord May, a former President of the Royal Society, pointed out that “having done an extraordinarily good job with HIV and other diseases in the 80s, not just on HIV but gonorrhoea and syphilis as well – studies suggest young people are less well informed than 20 years ago,” adding that the civil service culture he himself had had experienced was sympathetic with many of Mr Gibb's answers. “You can write a series of Yes Minister,” he added. A lady member suggested that if it was such a sensitive issue it was time to “lance the boil” and get not just parents involved but a national debate. “Let's throw the Daily Mail and the Sun at it,” she said. By this point Mr Gibb was beginning to look like that mythical character he quoted, the PE teacher thrown into a classroom to run a sex ed session. He tried being conciliatory, conceded he might have “overstated the issue of academic specialism” and that he mustn't get “overwhelmed by process.” You've got the idea now. The fight moved on to whether more of the PSHE curriculum (notably sex education) would be enshrined in law, the parental right to withdraw, and whether academies and free schools would be able to get away without teaching the subject. Mr Gibb wanted to talk about children learning resilience to sexual pressure, about concerns over premature sexualisation, to reject calls for things to be put into law and to refer the peers to the as-yet incomplete remit for the review. Baroness Ritchie (Madonna's former mother in law) asked about giving priority to teaching about HIV/Aids. “I think I am nudging,” she beamed. Others asked about timetabling, curriculum, and so it went. Mr Gibb was adamant that laws didn't make things happen. One lady asked a very neat question, which in essence suggested that the English Bacc had been introduced by the Government in just this way to force schools to teach those particular subjects. I'll quote one more joyous volley. Lord Fowler: “Has the Government closed its mind to SRE becoming compulsory in schools?” Mr Gibb: “All these matters will be set out in the remit.” Lord Fowler: “You haven't, otherwise it wouldn't be in the remit?” Mr Gibb: “We haven't published the remit.” Lord Fowler: “Either you are considering or you aren't. You must be able to give mew a reply on whether you are considering it or not.” Lord May: “I am genuinely unclear whether you agree whether it is genuinely important for the country to turn round this trend. When you keep retreating it leaves one with the impression that you are more Sir Humphrey than the driver in charge.” Mr Gibb: “We do regard it as truly important… we are concerned about the fact that 1 in 4 are not taught about HIV, we are concerned about early sexualisation, emotional maturity -- all these issues are very important to the government.” And then he went on to talk about the remit again. I can hardly wait to see it, after all this build-up. Can't help thinking it stands a high chance of being delayed until the Fowler committee has produced its own report and there is zilch chance of him being summoned before them for a second whiplash session.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=465Fri, 03 Jun 2011 10:21:51 GMT20110603102151Fri, 03 Jun 2011 10:21:51 GMT20110603102151Fri, 03 Jun 2011 10:21:51 GMT2011060310102151It is one of the central principles against which the current Government review of primary assessment has been framed. It is a statement which might, to the lay person outside of education, carry strong common-sense appeal. But how well-founded is one of the defining principles of the ongoing Bew review, that evidence from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development shows that “external accountability is a key driver of improvement in education and particularly important for the least advantaged”? I should say at the start that, like the NAHT, I do not dispute the need for schools to be held to account in some form for the quality of education they provide. But I do want to question the evidence used to support a statement in Bew which, I think, carries very big implications for the way schools are organised and monitored in England. The full statement on this is set out in a paragraph explaining the Bew review's remit from Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, in Bew's interim report, published in April. It says there are two broad positions to which Mr Gove has asked the review to adhere. The Bew interim report says: “Firstly, we are mindful that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) concludes that external accountability is a key driver of improvement in education and particularly important for the least advantaged, and so the Government views a system of objectively measuring pupil progress and holding schools to account as vital. Secondly, the Government has made it clear that it wants schools and teachers to be free to set their own direction, trusted to exercise their professional discretion and be accountable for the progress of the children in their care. The Secretary of State has therefore been clear that school autonomy must be accompanied by robust accountability.” So, there we have it. A system of “robust” external accountability is needed, based on OECD evidence. Mr Gove's philosophy has been to talk about handing more freedoms to schools, but then holding them to account (statistically) for their performance, mainly through test and exam results through a mixture of market forces – “high-performing” schools expand, “under-performers” close – and centralised, statist measures – government intervention to close under-performers. Reading the Bew remit, then, one might think that an English-style system of league tables, tough inspections, closure threats to underperformers and so on, with which any school leader will have become nervously familiar over the past 25 years, had received a ringing endorsement from the OECD. This is surprising, given that Mr Gove has frequently highlighted England's disappointing performance in recent rounds of the OECD's tests. But, leaving that initial scepticism aside, looking at the detail of what the OECD says, where is the evidence for the statement in the interim Bew report? Well, turning to the OECD's source of policy conclusions, its well-known PISA reading, maths and science tests of 15-year-olds across the world, in fact I found only very limited backing for the statement used in Bew. It is true that the OECD's latest PISA review does end up backing a form of accountability, and that in some circumstances this can particularly benefit poorer pupils. But you have to question the depth and generalisability of its conclusions, based on the evidence it cites and, crucially, whether PISA really provides any evidence that English-style, high-stakes or “robust” accountability is demonstrably better, as measured by countries' test scores in PISA tests. It seems clear to me that there is no such evidence in the OECD's reports. The source for the OECD's evidence on the different forms of assessment and accountability is Volume IV (http://bit.ly/kxJBXH) of the latest PISA testing study report, which analyses school systems' results in the 2009 PISA reading tests. It was published under the enticing title: “What makes a school successful?” That remit statement in Bew is related to a number of OECD findings within this report, which I now deal with in turn. - First, the OECD's report finds that nations and schools operating “standards-based examinations” tend to do better in PISA than those without. So, this would be an endorsement of our Sats system, then? Well, no, actually. Consider how the OECD report actually defines “standards-based examinations”. These are those where students' performance is “defined relative to an external standard, not relative to other students in a classroom or school”, and where the results “usually have real consequences for the student's progress or certification in the education system”. That looks to me to be an endorsement of having a system – such as, actually, our GCSEs and A-levels – in which pupils are assessed against external standards, rather than relying on teachers conducting in-class assessment without moderation to judge pupils' progress and achievements, as happens in some other countries. But this definition makes no mention of how the results are actually used: for example, if they are used for school-by-school accountability in league tables or school targets. The education I went through in the late 1980s, concluding with A-levels, would satisfy the OECD's definition of a “standards-based” system, actually, even though results were not “high stakes” for schools, but only for pupils. But our Sats would not, I think, since they do not carry large “certification” consequences for pupils. An endorsement of “standards-based examinations” in this sense, then, is not an endorsement of the English high-stakes (for schools) accountability model, but simply could be backing for having externally-marked exams for pupils in secondary school. - Second, amazingly given the remit given to Bew, the OECD report also finds that: “Across school systems, there is no measurable relationship between [the] variable uses of assessment for accountability purposes and the performance of school systems.” To those following this debate, this should be dynamite. OECD seems to be saying that there is no clear advantage (or disadvantage, to be fair) to countries using test data for “high-stakes” purposes (ie publishing results, naming and shaming underperformers, moving in and closing persistent underperformers), in PISA reading results terms, over those that do not. Equally devastatingly, the report says: “Regarding the use of student assessments...high-performing school systems tend to use the data from these assessments differently.” In other words, there is no one model for accountability success, as the remit for Bew would seem to imply. It also highlights some interesting anomalies. Shanghai, which returned the best scores in PISA 2009 of any country or region taking part, sees few schools posting assessment results publicly. In Finland, another high performer, school principals rarely use pupils' assessment results to judge teachers. - Third, the OECD report says that, while the above may be the case, “performance differences between schools with students of different social backgrounds are, on average, lower in countries that use standardised tests”. So, is that saying that England's high-stakes system protects the interests of poorer students? Well, again, I think the answer is no, or not on this evidence, since, as argued above, “standardised tests” has not been defined by the OECD as a necessarily high stakes accountability system, and our Sats would not meet the OECD's definition of “standardised tests”. Given the limitations of these findings in explaining the statement in the remit given to Bew, what, then, is its basis? Remember, then, that the OECD report finds that there is no clear relationship between the different forms of accountability and nations' education performance as measured by PISA reading test scores. But it also includes the following conclusion (deep breath needed): “Within countries where schools are held to account for their results and through posting achievement data publicly, schools that enjoy greater autonomy in resource allocation tend to do better than those with less autonomy.” The OECD argues that giving schools greater control over the resources they spend is a good thing. If countries do that, then the data seems to show that – when comparing schools with less such autonomy within a country against those with greater autonomy – it is better to have an external accountability system which includes public posting of schools' assessment results. But what is the extent of that benefit? Well, according to the OECD's report, it seems to carry a net benefit to pupils, after those pupils' socio-economic backgrounds are taken into account, of 3.2 points on the PISA reading test; ie a gain for a school given autonomy over resource spending and held to account in this way, over one not held to account in this way, of 3.2 points. To put this in context, pupils can score from 0 to more than 700 in the PISA tests, and the international average score is 500. So 3.2 points, in this very carefully-defined scenario, if I have interpreted this finding from the report correctly, looks a staggeringly low figure, given the policy weight which could be placed on this finding. In fact, this looks to be the finding that allowed Mr Gove, in an article for the Times Educational Supplement last December, to write: “PISA tells us that countries do better when they allow schools greater autonomy over how budgets are spent and pupils are taught, and that these freedoms should be combined with transparent assessment and accountability.” Yet look again at what the OECD report said. It concluded that: “The PISA results suggest that some features of autonomy and accountability are associated with better performance. However, this is not a simple relationship under which any policy to increase autonomy, accountability or choice will improve student outcomes.” Not mentioned in detail in the PISA report, either, is another paper from the OECD, a literature review from last November (http://bit.ly/eX1wKJ), which documents downsides of high-stakes test-based accountability to weigh against the gain claimed here, including that it “often creates unintended strategic behaviour”. “There is little evidence of a positive relationship between performance tables and increased student performance,” that report added. We are, then, as far as I can see, talking about a very limited conclusion here. Arguably, in fact, the dominant conclusion from PISA – which backs up what must be self-evident to anyone who has looked at the various accountability systems in detail – is that countries with very different forms of accountability have been successful, as measured by the PISA results. This, in fact, accords with research I have carried out in recent months for the NAHT. This looked at the accountability systems of 10 nations (South Korea, Finland, Japan, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany and the United States), and sought to draw conclusions. It found that only two of these countries, the US and South Korea, had truly “high-stakes” – or what Mr Gove might characterise as “rigorous” - test-based accountability systems, with punishments for underperforming schools, and the latter has only introduced such a system very recently. All others combined various forms of testing with a less punitive form of accountability than England's. There is, then, no inevitability to the English model based on what happens abroad. In conclusion, I do not think the OECD's report allows the easily-generalisable and easily-misinterpreted statement used in the Bew remit. I understand that OECD is now undertaking some more detailed work in this field, which is interesting. (See http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/43/25/46927511.pdf) But the problem with the OECD's PISA study is also that the complexity and sheer number of results and interpretations contained within its reports allows politicians with particular reform ideas themselves to cherry-pick particular findings, confident that the public will find it difficult to query their interpretation. The detailed content and methodology behind the OECD's reports really does need to be subject to greater discussion and debate, given their influence, but perhaps I state the obvious when I say that this is not an easy job. - Bew's final report is expected by the end of June.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=464Fri, 03 Jun 2011 09:54:21 GMT20110603095421Fri, 03 Jun 2011 09:54:21 GMT20110603095421Fri, 03 Jun 2011 09:55:35 GMT201106030995535Ooh, exactly what we all needed on a windy Monday morning: an interview with Michael Gove in which he outlines his Next Big Educational Idea of allowing popular schools to expand their admissions. Let's get the old stuff out of the way first: this idea's been mooted at least twice in the time I've been working in education. And opposition hasn't been rooted entirely in those terribly egalitarian local authorities determined to keep their weaker schools open, either: lots of heads don't want their schools inflated to monster size, and often neither do the parents of the pupils. So this time round changes are being made so that it will be easier for schools that want to expand to do so. That appears to mean maintained schools as well as academies, which could well put some schools on a collision course with their local authority if they wanted to expand against the wishes of their council. If they were outstanding schools (and presumably they'd have to be pretty good, or they wouldn't need to expand to meet demand) that might perhaps be an added impetus to go down the academy route. “Weaker” schools which lost pupils as a result might get some financial protection under the current delegated schools grant arrangements, but don't forget that the Government is also consulting on a national funding formula which could plug the cash straight into schools' bank accounts. That would surely accelerate the decline of less popular schools – but then what? Under the current financial circumstances it's hard to see where the money's coming from for mass building programmes in expanding schools, particularly where extra school places are going to be needed at the primary end of the spectrum during the next decade. So logically, the successful schools would somehow annex the weaker schools, exporting their “brand” to the other site and thus (apparently) meeting parental demand. Sounds familiar – ah, yes, that's what the current breed of academies are allowed to do with their less outstanding neighbours. If that is what happens, that's the point at which things get interesting. Will parents in some areas find that actually they get less choice about schools rather than more, as successful players swallow up the minnows? Will the parent school remain socially segregated from its satellites (which still might be a recipe for unhappy parents whose kids were in the wrong site of the right school) or would classes be mixed up a bit? What if exam results at one site remained stubbornly low – would the league table for the parent school be affected? There are quite a few unknown unknowns in this. How would parents react to getting the school of choice for their child – but at the price of the school having a 10 or 15-form intake? Or that their child is allocated to the site on the other side of town, on the slightly worrying estate? And what of school leaders and governors? Is this a game many will want to play? Or is this the kind of territory successful standalone schools will want to avoid? I do wonder if that's part of the idea. It just doesn't make sense for schools to expand indefinitely (if it was such a brilliant idea, surely Eton would be a Titan by now?) and you just can't leave kids to languish in a doomed school with dwindling funding. Local authorities' school improvement services are now subject to the oversight of a national improvement adviser, who can approve or veto plans. Does that make it more likely that local authorities will be advised to turn over their “vulnerable” schools to either become part of an academy chain or for incorporation into a free school which just happens to be seeking a building? It all makes perfect sense. What remains to be seen is how it would actually work in practice.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=462Mon, 23 May 2011 12:22:51 GMT20110523122251Mon, 23 May 2011 12:22:51 GMT20110523122251Mon, 23 May 2011 12:22:51 GMT2011052312122251One of the current narratives among political journalists is the way in which the Lib Dems have been keen, since the debacle of the local elections, to demonstrate that they can flex their muscles in the coalition government. But any such rebellions have clearly not reached the Department for Education, where the Conservative Michael Gove and the Lib Dem Sarah Teather are said to have had a very friendly relationship from the start. It was quite educational to watch Ms Teather giving evidence on the SEN Green Paper to the House of Commons Education committee this week. Initial impression: that she looked very young and a lot more human than either Messrs Gove or Gibb. Second impression: that she uses phrases like “iterative process” without sounding like a robot, but cunningly without saying very much,either. As usual, the Committee wasasking some pretty useful questions. How would special needs work be monitored in outstanding schools no longer routinely visited by Ofsted? Why could parents not ask for children with special needs to attend independent schools? Why would opening up alternative provision to new providers make it any better? And so on. And, also as usual, the Minister was sticking closely to the Ministerial line. Parents concerned about schools could trigger an Ofsted inspection, she said. And if nothing else was suitable, of course children with SEN could attend an independent school, she said, not quite answering the original question, asked several times. The committee was clearly not entirely convinced by some of the proposals in the Green Paper, and Ms Teather herself trod an interesting line of restrained optimism on how it would work in practice. Of course, there is currently a huge potential hole in the whole thing in the shape of the Health and Social Care Bill, currently “paused” , but which will be crucial in the Green Paper's aims of getting everyone to work together to help children with SEN. If nothing else, MsTeather's low-key appearance before the committee was a useful reminder of how much is currently going on beneath the surface. Not only does the consultation on the Green Paper end next month, but the more hurried first stage look at a National Funding Formula closes next week, with a second stage promised swiftly afterwards. The NFF in itself has the potential to go politically nuclear, with winners and losers scattered round the land. The Government may need a unified formula to cope with academies and free schools, but exactly how brave can it afford to be is going to be an interesting question if the LibDems continue with their newpolicy of muscularity. As if that weren't enough, tenders are now up for grabs on academy building, while it's all gone very quiet on capital cash for maintained schools in the wake of the (late) James Review. Also ominously late, and getting later, is the new draft school admissions code.Finally, there's the Bew review, which many heads feel, after the much-criticised literacy SATs paper last week, can't report a minute too soon.The Education Committee is, I think, in for a busy summer of asking useful questions. Susan Young is an educational journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=460Fri, 20 May 2011 14:23:22 GMT20110520142322Fri, 20 May 2011 14:23:22 GMT20110520142322Fri, 20 May 2011 14:24:13 GMT201105201422413Am I alone in seeing last week's Government response to the Wolf review of vocational education as a bit of a non-event? The two major aspects of the document (http://bit.ly/inhkz0) which earned media coverage both seemed to me to be underwhelming, and I am sceptical about them having long-term influence on what actually goes on in schools and colleges*. Taking these two elements in turn, the media gave some space, first, to yet another performance indicator proposed in the Government response. Introduced into GCSE league tables next year, then, will be a new measure showing, for each school, “variation in performance of low attaining pupils, high attaining pupils and those performing as expected”. In other words, league tables are to be reformed to place more emphasis on low- and high-attainers, as well as the C/D borderline candidates around which the current headline rankings revolve. In addition, average GCSE points score figures, for each school, which do not encourage a focus on the C/D borderline, will continue to be published. This sounds sensible enough, when put in such terms. The Government is right to acknowledge the side-effects of the current system, which it says can incentivise schools to neglect the academically less- and more-successful. As the paper rightly points out: “It is vital that performance indicators do not inadvertently cause schools to concentrate on particular groups of pupils at the expense of others”. “Threshold measures”, centring around a particular level of performance such as a C grade, can incentivise schools to neglect groups such as high-achievers, says the paper. To which the obvious response to ministers and civil servants, when surveying the way performance indicators are shaping up under the coalition, is: if you really think this, why are you pursuing other policies which are running in exactly the direction which you establish as problematic in this paper? Consider, first, that this new indicator will not be a stand-alone measure of school effectiveness, but one among many. As the paper admits, the average points score measure already exists – and did for many years under Labour – and yet the behaviour documented in the paper, which sees many schools focusing on middle-achievers, has continued. And the new measures for high- and low-attainers must find their place amongst a host of others. Under Labour, I've just counted 10 main GCSE indicators used to measure school effectiveness in 2009, from the proportion of pupils achieving five or more A*-Cs at GCSE or vocational equivalent to average points scores and the percentage of pupils gaining a C or better in a language, or two separate sciences. On top of this, Labour published contextual value added and “progress” measures. The coalition has now added to this: January's rankings featured 12 main indicators, including the new English Baccalaureate. Since then, the coalition has published yet more school-by-school data, including individual subject information on each school such as the number of pupils gaining A*-A in each subject in each school. The ability, then, for any new measure really to affect school-by-school decision-making, unless given heavy emphasis either by the media or by politicians in this ecosystem of competing metrics, will be limited. In reality, of course, Labour's measure of the proportion of pupils in each school gaining five or more GCSE A*-Cs (which itself was said by schools minister Nick Gibb, during a confusing appearance before the Education Select Committee last month**, to be the main “accountability” measure used in schools), and which incentivises schools to focus extra attention on C/D borderline pupils, continues to dominate. It is now, under the coalition, the indicator used to set a “floor standard” for secondary school performance. If institutions fall below ministers' statistical goals on this measure, they are liable for intervention and even closure. Arguably the only high-profile rival for schools' attention, given the emphasis given to it by the Government in recent months, has been the English Baccalaureate. And this, remember, is also a “threshold” measure, ranking schools on the proportion of pupils achieving C grades in five subject areas stipulated by ministers. So, here we have a paper supposedly worrying about the dangers of threshold indicators while other policies lay heavy weight on them. Confusing, isn't it? The second aspect of the response which commanded attention was the eye-catching idea that pupils who do not gain C grades at GCSE in English and maths by 16 should persist with the subjects to 18. This is interesting stuff, and, of course, highly worthy of debate. But, leaving aside any arguments as to its merits as an ideal, the immediate thing that strikes me is how it would be policed. It seems, from the paper, to be an intention of ministers that young people should persist with the subjects in this way. But the paper sets out only limited measures, as far as I can see, to make it happen. I have asked the Department for Education for a reaction on this, and had a response saying that businesses value maths and English achievement, so pupils should persist with the subjects. More practically, in terms of a policy change which could influence take-up, it said a review of funding for post-16 programmes was being launched. This would allow only “coherent” programmes of study to receive public cash. These would include English and maths “as appropriate”. Hmm. One other possible policing mechanism is set forward in the paper. And it is...wait for it...another performance measure, this time assessing schools' and colleges' ability to get good English and maths grades out of their post-16 students. Overall, then, this response to Wolf's attempt to bolster the place of vocational education in English education looks to me to be shaping up to have only limited impact. The really powerful potential change, put forward in November's white paper for consideration by the Wolf report and then sent back by Professor Wolf for consideration by ministers, is still yet to be set out in detail. This is how the “equivalence” system – under which non-GCSE qualifications such as General National Vocational Qualifications, BTEC Firsts and OCR Nationals were said for school results purposes to be worth up to four GCSEs – is to be reformed. Coalition ministers have constantly criticised this structure – rightly, given that multiple-GCSE equivalences were a historically curious anomaly which have certainly distorted decision-making in some schools - but we are still waiting to find out how it will change. The latest response says only that ministers are to consult over the summer on which non-GCSE qualifications are still to count in performance tables, and how. So no decision has yet been taken. Among their stipulations are that such courses must include an element of external assessment. This is presumably why Edexcel, which offers the popular BTEC Firsts which are currently entirely assessed through coursework, has already said it wants to include external assessment as an element from now on. (http://bit.ly/fmyEwY) How the equivalences change will have a big effect on numbers taking non-GCSE courses, I think. Overall, this Government response has a lightweight feel, especially given the seriousness of this subject. Clearly contestable implicit claims within it – such as the view that, since pupils with better maths and English GCSEs tend to do better in the workplace, and in further and higher education , so increasing the supply of people with such qualifications will mean that this effect continues – being cited without caveat probably do not help. Nor do hyperbolic assertions such as that it will “transform the lives of young people” (“Really?” I wondered “How many of them? And by how much?”). Lurking behind it, too, I have two other observations. First, Wolf has avoided trying to improve vocational education by getting the Government to launch another major qualification of its own. The Tomlinson review, which led to Labour's diploma, was the high water mark of this approach. Wolf's view – that government has a poor record in this field – may be fair enough but one should be under no illusions that what is being put in its place is less ambitious than that attempted under the previous government. The scale of that ambition, perhaps, is illustrated by the length of this response paper: 22 pages compared to the 93 pages of Labour's 2005 response to Tomlinson. Second is the implicit view that the answer to so many problems in education, as far as this and the previous government is concerned, is to publish another performance indicator. There is further evidence of this in the response paper, which highlights how the Government's recent green paper on special education aims to improve provision. The response paper again emphasises performance metrics as a possible solution to the problems facing SEN education, revealing “plans for new indicators in the performance tables relating to the lowest attaining pupils between Key Stage 1 and 2, and Key Stage 2 and 4 in English and maths”. Reading this stuff, it is difficult to know whether to laugh or cry. Another few columns on a league table, then, and all will be right with the world, is the implication. This may fit with a quasi-religious view of public service reform which says that the answer to any problem is more measurement and more transparency, but it is to say the least highly simplistic. For all the occasionally welcome acknowledgements here of the side-effects of specific indicators within the current system – including an admission that league tables should never force institutions to put their own interests ahead of those they educate – the underlying philosophy that says that ranking and measurement systems of some kind are always to be pursued as a centrepiece around which the rest of education policy must revolve remains intact. Yet just how serious some of the implications of the current set-up can be was underscored, for me, by another report last week, by the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education. Staggeringly, this quoted research which found that in around a quarter of schools which entered pupils early for maths GCSE, candidates were stopped from studying the subject further if they obtained a C grade in early exams. With results indicators, for the school, hingeing around C grade success in English and maths, this looks to be a clear case of accountability pressures pushing school needs above those of their pupils. The report highlights the pressures on National Challenge schools, at the bottom of GCSE league tables, to pursue such an approach. This is, if one steps back from the logic of school-by-school ranking for a second, scandalous stuff: if I were a parent or student affected by this policy, I would be outraged to find a pupil prevented from continuing with a course because they were found to have achieved all they needed to, from the school's perspective, in gaining a C grade. Dame Julia Higgins, chair of ACME, said: “It's no longer a case of careful selection of the brightest students being pushed through early – it's whole cohorts now, whether or not it's in their long term interests as individuals. “The pressure on schools to improve their standing in the league tables provides an incentive to act in the school's best interests rather than those of the individual students.” Parts of the curriculum not needed for a C grade may be “skipped” in some schools for the reasons above, says the report. This very strongly-worded document can be read at http://bit.ly/mCEONK . Readers of this blog will need no reminding that the underlying philosophy behind holding schools to account in this way, as implicitly supported by the Government's response to Wolf, is a huge problem for England's education system. * I am concentrating, here, mainly on school provision. The paper also includes sections on apprenticeships, which I haven't written extensively in the past. ** See: http://bit.ly/j1rRKVhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=459Fri, 20 May 2011 10:17:01 GMT20110520101701Fri, 20 May 2011 10:17:01 GMT20110520101701Fri, 20 May 2011 10:17:01 GMT2011052010101701It feels like a bizarre week for education. Year six classrooms are full of kids concentrating and doing their best in tests which may be getting their last outing this year. Year 11s are going on study leave: younger secondary students are revising for mocks. Yet there are insistent questions arising of what it's all for. For starters, you wonder why we're making this particular cohort of 11-year-olds sit tests which may be on their way out, and when the first action of their secondary school is to put them through a morning of CATs tests, usually completely disregarding the SATs results. One plus point of the SATs, though, is at least the parents get to know about them – unlike CATs whose results are treated on a need-to-know basis by schools despite the importance they attach to them. Anyway, I'm digressing. For perhaps two decades now, we've been encouraging kids to aim high, to go to university, to make the best of themselves. The middle-class kids took up the challenge, and those with aspirational parents. Others were encouraged, gradually, by schemes such as AimHigher, which worked to overcome the feeling that university was for other people, and that the scale of debt involved was just too overpowering to consider. And now there are huge swathes of kids and their parents who feel the same way about the prospect of a debt of at least £27,000 for a fairly ordinary university education. When fewer people went and it cost less, the cost-benefit analysis was a bit of a no-brainer. When a degree is less exclusive and much more expensive, the economy is in the doldrums and young people are priced off the housing ladder across most of the country, a lot of them are questioning what they really want to do. Ministers can talk until they are blue in the face of it being a virtual debt, one that some students will never have to pay because they won't earn enough, and that poorer students will be protected, and so on. But those are the same ministers who said that a £9k tuition fee would be the exception rather than the rule: who's going to trust the rest of it? Politics, they say, is all about the narrative. What David Willetts is saying and what everyone is hearing are two entirely different things. I do wonder how much this is going to feed back into schools. The current generation of older teenagers have worked hard and feel the rug has been pulled out from under them at the last minute. Nobody can sensibly advise them on whether a £27k qualification is really worth it as it's entirely new. But with the economy in its current state, there may not be job-related options either. Thousands of bright kids from all over the world brave our visa system every year to improve their prospects by improving their English before taking a university degree here – it would be good if the Government could actually do a bit of research on why they think it's worth the investment, and tell our home-grown students a bit more about the competition. But all we're getting is the right for some students to pay the same as their overseas colleagues, without the subsidy. It isn't hard to guess the institutions where this might be a popular option, nor the institutions from which those students will come. Meanwhile, the Government's education bill is being amended to attempt to crowbar some element of careers education in there for this poor benighted generation, many of whom are finding their exam options changing (sometimes a year into the course) thanks to the Government's Ebacc. For goodness sakes, in the current upheavals a bit of good careers education is the least we can do. And we're expecting them to work hard at school? It would be nice if we were able to dangle a few carrots in front of them, rather than doom and yet more gloom. And quickly. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=455Tue, 10 May 2011 13:25:46 GMT20110510132546Tue, 10 May 2011 13:25:46 GMT20110510132546Tue, 10 May 2011 13:26:09 GMT201105101312609It is, perhaps, the biggest dispute underlying the government's current review of Key Stage 2 assessment. Yet it remains, I think, largely hidden below the surface of last month's interim report from Lord Bew, which summarised the evidence so far. The dispute centres on a question which runs as follows. Is England's system of centralised monitoring, pressure and support for schools, which uses test and exam data as its informational bedrock, a force for good or bad in our education system? Many people, including me, observe the effects of this system and end up heavily sceptical. The interim report states that 62 per cent of the nearly 4,000 respondents to the review's online consultation exercise had “concerns about the way national curriculum test data is used”, and concluded that “few would disagree that the current system of testing, assessment and accountability has led to undesired consequences”. Many were concerned about the extent of test preparation, especially in year six. Yet supporters of test-based monitoring, which reached its apotheosis under New Labour, were also referenced in the report. Their argument is usually sketched out in the following terms. The system of collecting data on pupils' performance in nationally-designed or regulated assessments has been positive, since it ensures that policy-makers can keep tabs on the “best-performing”, and crucially, the “worst performing”, schools. Armed with this information, policy-makers can then supervise a system which intervenes in those schools whose results suggest they need more attention, either through carrots – more support for “underperforming” schools – or sticks – closure threats and “notices to improve” – or a mixture of both carrot and stick – programmes couched in the language of support which nevertheless will be perceived as containing an implicit threat. In evidence summarised in the interim report, Professor Pam Sammons, of Oxford University, argued that the attention placed on schools through test results had led to a “combination of policy attention, resources and considerable support and professional development” being directed at schools causing concern. This had helped to raise standards and to reduce the number of “poorly performing” schools in England. In other words, the centralised performance monitoring system had been, at least in part, a force for good. Sir Michael Barber, the former head of Labour's school Standards and Effectiveness Unit and Tony Blair's public service “Delivery Unit” who is now a senior figure at the management consultants McKinsey, was also supportive of the idea that centrally-collected data collection was valuable, says the Bew report. He “argued that if schools (and government) are to make decisions based on evidence, they need regular assessment and data which are comparable over time. This enables analysis of the performance of different groups of pupils”, it said. Sir Michael has been, in fact, an arch-centraliser. His 2007 book, “Instruction to Deliver”, is essentially an argument that public services can be improved by those at the centre focusing relentlessly on statistical measures of performance. In the book, he writes of the benefits of having "restless, sleepness nights worrying about where the next percentage point [in test result improvements] was coming from"; cites the gains to be made by the school advisers working for the national literacy and numeracy strategies being “single issue fanatics driven by a mission to improve test scores”; and laments that it is “the road back to the 1970s to say each teacher knows best in their own classroom”. Incidentally, Sir Michael has also confessed to “loving” league tables and also, in Instruction to Deliver, bemoans the departure of Chris Woodhead as chief inspector in 2000, writing that “a key lever in the strategy for school improvement – Ofsted – had been weakened”. Conor Ryan, former education adviser to David Blunkett as education secretary and Tony Blair, wrote in 2009: “The only way that we can know whether individual primary schools are doing their job is through independently set and marked tests.” The belief that Whitehall can improve schools thanks to its statistical monitoring system – arguably a form of surveillance through data – was encapsulated a few years ago when it emerged that civil servants had created a system called “the Bridge”, whereby the results of any local authority or school in the country could be called up on a large TV screen at the Department for Children, Schools and Families, and their scores compared to others on many indicators. (See http://bit.ly/jYKF82) I understand that “the Bridge” is no longer in existence. This embodies a view which says that ultimately, nationally-elected politicians and the civil servants working for them are the guardians of the public interest in education. I point out these viewpoints not to rubbish them but to argue that there is a profound difference of opinion as to the benefits of centralised performance monitoring in schools between some influential policy-makers and, I would guess, the majority of school leaders and teachers. Some centralised policies clearly can work. Evidence put forward to the Cambridge Primary Review, for example, suggests that the National Numeracy Strategy – centralised instructions to maths teachers – has been widely perceived as beneficial. There have been powerful arguments in favour of some kind of national curriculum. I also believe that central government has potentially a huge amount to offer if it sought to provide a supportive structure for improving teaching. But there have undoubtedly been major problems with the use of test data for central monitoring. A recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report on the UK pointed out that “the use of [centralised test- and exam-based] benchmarking in England is more widespread than in virtually any other OECD country.” (http://bit.ly/gHMTRe) England is certainly highly unusual in the degree of this kind of centralisation: few, if any, other large countries see central government exerting such direct pressure on schools through statistical monitoring. The OECD's report continued: “Transparent and accurate benchmarking procedures are crucial for measuring student and school performance, but 'high-stake' tests can produce perverse incentives.” The report argues that while England's system is unusually developed in the amount of data it collects, its results on the OECD PISA's tests have not been improving – and the overall evidence for England from international tests is mixed. The OECD's report adds that England's focus on test scores incentivises teaching to the test and “strategic behaviour”, including “negligence of non-cognitive skill formation”. Sir Michael's claim that English education benefits from policy-makers having sleepness nights over single percentage point improvements in test scores always was absurd, when looked at from anything other than a political point of view, since the way national test results are calculated* means they are almost certainly not reliable enough to be sure that, when national scores climb by a percentage point or two, there has been any meaningful change in underlying standards. And the one-dimensionality of this focus, which is no doubt seen as a strength in a policy world desperate for simply measurable improvements to take back to a sceptical public, is undoubtedly a weakness when it gets realised in schools which become one-dimensional in the education they offer to pupils. This, of course, is the pressure created by such a system and it is interesting that Sir Michael's book offers no insights into the overall effects of statistical demands at the level of the classroom. For me, there is another concern underlying England's system. At its worst, it has been a form of institutionalised bullying. Under the targets system, politicians and civil servants set the education system as a whole improvement goals in terms of test and exam results. They then cajoled – bullied, in the worst cases – local authorities into improving on those measures. Local authorities then pressurised and, in some cases I am sure, bullied schools into seeking improvement. This system did produce test score gains, especially in its early phase in the late 1990s, and GCSE results have continued to improve. But I have heard too many stories about the human cost in terms of the working atmosphere in individual schools to be anything other than sceptical about this regime. Certainly, if I were a parent I would not want my child educated in a school under the pressure some of them have been placed for short-term results improvements above all else. Ultimately, of course, many heads have been sceptical about this system, in part because they do not believe the basic premise of the arguments above – that the true source of wisdom about how individual schools should improve resides in a set of spreadsheets overseen from Whitehall. The coalition is retaining some of Labour's apparatus of centralised control, for example through the use of “floor standards”, statistical test and exam targets below which schools will be eligible for intervention including closure if they fail to make gains. It is, though, placing a greater rhetorical emphasis on using test and exam scores to put pressure on schools to improve through parental choice. But this latter approach still retains the idea that true power to set the goals for schools remains outside of their control: in the hands of those designing the tests, exams and statistical metrics by which institutions will be measured; and in the hands of parents choosing schools. Teachers, though, will surely know that the most powerful spur for improvement usually comes from within. My guess is that what is in essence an externally-imposed improvement regime will continue to alienate large sections of the profession. I wonder if the Bew review, impressive in my view so far in the scope of its consideration of different points of view, is going to take these issues on board. *Changing the number of marks needed for a level four at Key Stage 2, for example, by a single mark can change the proportion of pupils achieving level four by a couple of percentage points. Yet those deciding the number of marks needed for particular national curriculum levels have always faced uncertainty in their decisions: a government report on the reliability of the testing system by the former senior Ofsted inspector and government adviser Sir Jim Rose concluded that: “Where such small margins are involved, it becomes obvious that testing is not an exact science. The justification for choosing one 'pass mark' over another can be barely discernible”.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=454Wed, 04 May 2011 13:42:36 GMT20110504134236Wed, 04 May 2011 13:42:36 GMT20110504134236Wed, 04 May 2011 13:44:15 GMT201105041314415Robert Sanders talks to Russell Hobby following a successful conference.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/podcasts/general-secretary-roundup/general-secretary-roundup-34-may-2011/24845Fri, 06 May 2011 09:18:20 GMT20110506091820Tue, 03 May 2011 16:35:46 GMT20110503163546Fri, 06 May 2011 09:18:20 GMT201105060991820Just don't disagree with the new president of the NAHT is all I can say, after watching him receive a giant (and I mean giant) ceremonial gavel from a Dutch colleague as he chaired his inaugural session. It was just one of those joyously loony moments that national conferences always throw up. Journalists moan about them, a bit, but we all love them. You've got a hall full of dedicated people giving up a Bank Holiday weekend to support a really worthy cause, and a fair amount of after-hours jollity when the work of the day is done. What's not to like? And this year's Brighton conference is no different. By the end of the second day, the membership had survived a lockdown in the hall caused by a demonstration of (apparently) 15 different anarchist groups having an early celebration of May Day. Your correspondent was even asked if she was an anarchist whilst trying to enter the Brighton Centre before having got an official badge, which is a first, and one session was extended because nobody in the hall was going to be allowed to go anywhere, let alone enjoy a quick fag break on the seafront. Cheery moments were to be had in the conference hall, the venue of Bing Crosby's last public performance according to one plaque on the stairs. New president Chris Harrison – he of the very big hammer – was greeted with an encomium by his local Director of Children's services which included the anecdote of What Happened When Chris Googled Big Ben for a day trip to London. “Don't try this at home,” said Simon White, with an eloquent shudder. It's not a tale of which Mr Harrison was ashamed, either – he apparently embellished it further in the telling himself. Moments later, Mr Harrison himself promised he was telling us a true tale as he embarked on a shaggy dog story – or perhaps that should be a spotty dog story – about his mother's days as a head teacher, when she took her Dalmation to work. A naughty child was brought to her room: being otherwise occupied, Mrs Harrison senior handed the recalcitrant some felt pens. Some minutes later, she heard some mumbling. What was the problem? “I've looked, and I can't see the shape at all,” replied the small boy. “Mum went round the desk, and saw that Russell had joined all the dots.” What other joys in the hall? There was Sue Street, a London e-learning co-ordinator, in passionate defence of deputy heads as a vital bulwark against the possible mood swings of heads and as the person who implements the vision of heads. An alternative rationale for deputies was provided by Vince Burke, who mused on the time when a student brought a 16-inch shell into school for a sketching lesson, a little problem which he had sorted out in a great hurry. “I loved that one,” he grinned. The conference slogan this year was The Best Job In The World. It was these little asides that proved it. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=451Sun, 01 May 2011 12:44:24 GMT20110501124424Sun, 01 May 2011 12:44:24 GMT20110501124424Sun, 01 May 2011 18:19:55 GMT201105011861955If you're short of entertainment over the next series of bank holidays, may I recommend to you watching a rerun of the light grilling given to education minister Nick Gibb over the English Baccalaureate by MPs. Mr Gibb was invited to give evidence to the education select committee whose line of questioning suggested that they were less than convinced by the manner in which the Ebac was conceived or introduced, or how it will be used in practice. Adding to the faintly surreal nature of the exchanges was an increasingly persistent percussive noise, which sounded a bit like someone menacingly wielding a blunt instrument somewhere just off camera, in the manner of an EastEnders villain. Anyway, what the genial chairman Graham Stuart wanted to know – and a persistent theme of the exchanges – was about the accountability of the new measure. Surely, he said, schools would now be measured on how many pupils got the Ebac, and this would distort the system. “It's not an accountability measure… the long term objective of the government is to publish as much data as possible and enable parents… to find out what they want to find out,” said Mr Gibb two minutes into his evidence. And on several subsequent occasions during a good-humoured but persistent 45 minutes with the MPs. Mr Stuart was unconvinced. “It's not credible to say it's not an accountability measure,” he replied. Floor standards would remain the same, and there would be no intervention for schools which did not score highly on the Ebac, argued Mr Gibb. “Doesn't that suggest a certain naivety about the way the education system works?” asked Mr Stuart, reminding the room of the stories about schools “deconstructing” their existing arrangements and “dismantling” useful programmes such as pupils taking short courses in history and geography as a precursor to A Levels. “It feels like an accountability measure, it looks like an accountability measure and I think it quacks like one as well.” At this point Mr Gibb began to flannel gently, before diving headlong into sheets of statistics demonstrating that the more pupils on free school meals are in a school, the fewer kids will get an Ebac. It was part of the Government's agenda to give children from rich and poor backgrounds the same opportunity, he said. “These are subjects which lead to progression,” he concluded. Mr Stuart was not convinced, agreeing with the end but not the means. He feared that pupils would actually be worse off if a school decided they were incapable of attaining the EBac and would instead give support to those who could.” Mr Gibb replied with another recurring theme, which was that schools should only enter pupils for subjects if it was “appropriate” for them, and that in the past there had been a mindset where exam entries were not in the best interests of the pupils but for the league table position of the schools. The Ebac subjects were “entitlement” subjects, not astrophysics, and most of them were anyway compulsory to 16. Another MP, Ian Mearns, weighed in to ask how it was not an accountability measure when it was published in a league table format and would be read that way by the public and parents. “Well, I think it will be in that sense,” said Mr Gibb. And then a gem of a question: what consultation had there been before the measure was introduced? Mr Gibb talked about the election campaign. So unimpressed was Mr Stuart with the answer that he repeated the question at the end of the session, as the ominous background thumps grew louder and more insistent. There was one further element to add to the mix: Mr Gibb's repeated promises that the Government would provide more and more information (“granularity”) which could be used by parents and interested parties to find out what they wanted to know about schools, and that results for children receiving the pupil premium would also be added in some form to the available information. Round and round and round it all went, with the MPs returning to their thesis that the Ebacc had been brought in without consultation, and that it was an accountability measure which schools were reacting to and Mr Gibb retorting that the idea was to reduce the “perverse incentives” of the previous system, to ensure children of all backgrounds got the chance to take subjects which enabled progression, and that modern foreign languages and history were important. He made a few concessions, including that the Government might look at the issue of short courses in the Ebacc, and hinted that there might be some changes in the next lot of published information. Entertainment value: 10. Revelation value: 8. But is anything going to change as a result of the exchanges? I doubt it. Well worth watching, though. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=450Wed, 27 Apr 2011 15:38:17 GMT20110427153817Wed, 27 Apr 2011 15:38:17 GMT20110427153817Wed, 27 Apr 2011 15:38:17 GMT201104271533817It is one of the paradoxes of national curriculum assessment. More than 20 years after the initial foundations were laid for our current testing system, serious questions are still being asked about what the point of it is. This is not a flippant suggestion: debate about the purposes of high-stakes assessments which dominate many pupils' lives for months if not years is pervasive and, as two recent papers illustrate, ongoing. Lord Bew's interim report on Key Stage 2 assessment, published this month, says it received 4,000 responses to an online consultation exercise; took verbal evidence from 50 stakeholders and also received “many” written submissions. It also says: “Almost all respondents have at some point questioned the purposes of statutory assessment.” It adds: “There seems to be widespread concern that there are too many purposes, which can often conflict with one another. 71 per cent of online consultation respondents [that would be at least 2,800 respondents, then] believe strongly that the current system does not achieve effectively what they perceive to be the most important purpose.” The report then cites evidence that statutory assessments are used for at least 16 purposes, for some of which they are better suited than others. It reports that in 2008, the backbench Children, Schools and Families select committee recommended that the use of national testing for multiple purposes, including for measuring pupil attainment, school and teacher accountability, should stop. All of this sounds unsurprising, to me. The enduring central mystery, for many teachers and parents, I think, about national curriculum tests has been whether they are supposed to be mainly a test of the pupil, or of the school. The largely unstated answer must be that their main use is to evaluate schools and teachers, rather than children, since one could certainly think of assessments which would be of more use, in terms of genuinely helping a child progress, than a one-off series of tests occurring just as the pupil is about to move from one school , and one set of teachers, to another. But this has never, quite, been said officially, as far as I am aware. For secondary exams, the position looks different, with GCSEs, A-levels and other certificates meant (and originally, only meant) to assess individual pupils' mastery of a subject. Does that mean they can generate truly useful data on, for example, national education performance? I am not alone as a sceptic. Now another voice has been added to those urging ministers to define the purposes of all assessments, from Sats tests to secondary exams. In a report discussed at a conference held last month by the exams regulator Ofqual, a group of assessment experts commissioned by Ofqual to investigate assessment reliability had some interesting thoughts. Among the report's 11 recommendations, their first was: “Ofqual should outline the primary purpose of each qualification and Ofqual should regulate against that purpose”. This is very interesting. Backing its view, the report cites a 2010 draft of the “European Framework for Educational Assessment”. This says the goal of an assessment should be specified, and include: “what are the assessment measures”; “what inferences can be drawn from the results”; “who the intended users are”; and “who the intended candidates are”. Professor Jo-Anne Baird, of the University of Bristol, who chaired the group reporting to Ofqual, told the conference that, while the use of secondary exam data as measures of students' achievement was broadly appropriate (both largely valid and largely reliable, to use the jargon), their use in school league table results was neither valid nor reliable. She added: “Measuring school or teacher effectiveness reliably is very different from measuring student achievement reliably. You would collect different data, analyse it differently and so on [if the prime aim of secondary examinations were to measure other things than student achievement]. “Regulation would also involve different activities if these were the purposes of assessment.” Why does this matter? Well, I think over-interpretation of data, often based on assessment results, is a huge problem in the English education system. Clarity from assessment designers, in particular, about what inferences data generated through results can support, and, most importantly, what they cannot, is therefore potentially powerful. I would offer two concrete examples of what can go wrong with the way assessment data has been used recently. The first concerns new school-by-school financial data published by the government in January. This sees column after column of information on the funding and spending of each school followed, ludicrously I think, at the end by a single statistic setting out the school's “raw” test/exam results. The inference the public is being asked to draw, I would suggest, is nonsensical. It is that the “best” schools are those achieving the highest results for the lowest expenditure. But this is ludicrously simplistic: those in better-off areas may well be lower funded because they receive less funding for deprivation, but may well also achieve better results because of their catchment. This provides absolutely no evidence that they are the “best” schools. Assessment data do not support the obvious inference that a member of the public might make.* While it would be difficult for it to be stated in advance that assessment data should not be used for the purpose to which it is apparently intended to be put here, I wonder whether government data releases of this kind might benefit from some external and independent expert scrutiny before publication, to guard against this kind of problem. The second example is more directly related to assessment. I spoke at Ofqual's conference, and talked about a graphical illustration of pupils' progress across key stages, as measured by test results, which was popular among education officials and advisers during the latter years of the Labour government. This considered the test results of pupils at key stage 3 (while these still existed), compared them to those the same children at key stage 2, and used this to generate figures representing the varying degrees of “progress” made by children over the three years between the two sets of tests. Similar exercises were carried out comparing key stage 2 test results with KS1 teacher assessments. Children achieving the same level in both key stages were said, in a presentation I watched by the government's standards adviser Sue Hackman, to “be stuck”. They were represented graphically by a “stick man” figure coloured pink in this case to represent lack of progress. The more stick men in this colour for each school, or across the nation as a whole, the more “stuck” children there were. I argued in my speech that, being conscious of the views of people expert in assessment design, I did not think that test results supported the certainty with which this interpretation was being made. This was because of the degree of error around pupils' performance in both sets of assessments: for many reasons, including a child simply over- or under-performing on the day, we cannot be certain on either occasion that the test score represented their “true” ability. Thus, we should not use test data to make categoric assertions such as that a child with the same set of test results on two occasions had made “no progress” in a particular subject as a whole over a number of years. Having made this comment, the only complaint I got afterwards was from an assessment expert who argued it did not go far enough: national curriculum level judgements at different key stages were defined in different ways, so were not comparable at all, she suggested. A warning as to the comparability of test data over different key stages would have been very beneficial, then, I think, to stop this over-interpretation. So how is this to be resolved? Well, the interim Bew report concludes that: “One of the key early decisions for this review will be to define clearly the purposes of statutory assessment in primary education and what we want to achieve it in the future. The system can then be designed to serve these purposes”. That suggests a complete redesign for our primary assessment system, almost from first principles. That is a very ambitious agenda for change. Whether it can be pulled off, in a time of very tight budgets, and with the review due to produce a final report by June in advance of the associated national curriculum inquiry, must be a question of some doubt. *One could also argue that spending money efficiently is of little direct, primary interest to a member of the public in choosing a school for their child. Why would a parent faced with a choice between an expensive, but effective school and a much less expensive but slightly less effective school choose the latter over the former, I wonder? But that is another subject...)http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=449Tue, 26 Apr 2011 16:35:59 GMT20110426163559Tue, 26 Apr 2011 16:35:59 GMT20110426163559Tue, 26 Apr 2011 16:36:22 GMT201104261643622For years and years and years there's been debate about having a national funding formula for education. The current system is packed with inequities: the way the cash is distributed locally in the first place, as the lowest funded local authorities (they call themselves the F40) will tell you, and then the different ways in which the local authorities choose to pass on money to their schools. The funding system is probably as mad as the capital funding horror uncovered by the James Review (see last week's blog) and often in similar ways. Where James was surprised by the criteria for Building Schools for the Future which prioritised poorly performing schools in deprived areas rather than crumbling buildings, the current funding arrangements can benefit privileged schools in poor areas. As someone who's used the government's transparency information to look at school budgets, I've occasionally been staggered by the largesse some institutions attract and equally staggered by how other cope at all. Yet this consultation has attracted remarkably little publicity, which is rather on the surprising side as the main fact I drew from the government's consultation document on creating a “fair national funding formula” last week is that this time, they really mean business. As the document (sort of) says, the current funding system just gives up with a little whimper with the government's new stuff – free schools, widespread academies – tacked on to it. Not only is it non-sustainable, but as the document sternly points out, it creates “perverse incentives” to set up new schools in some areas but not in others, and new providers would still be sidelined by more timid reform On those grounds alone it's a no-brainer that something will actually happen this time. My interest was even more piqued by the options given in the consultation: that there might be some element of money kept back from schools and going direct to LAs to be spent on “local priorities,” as now. But this wasn't a preferred option. My perhaps cynical interpretation is that changes will be made because the current system is too generous to academies (which is why many are jumping while it lasts, which won't be an unwelcome situation for many in government) and because it doesn't cater for Free Schools. It will also be changed because although local authorities aren't being overtly written out of the picture, their future role is intended as something very different. (Exactly how different may become clear when the interestingly-delayed new admissions code finally sees the light of day.) As the TES says, ironing out the anomalies in the current system is quite likely to see inner-city schools with a more privileged intake as the major losers. The interesting thing will be: what happens then? Those may be the schools attended by the children of those whose votes the Coalition wishes to keep or entice… who may lose out to schools attended by the offspring of natural Labour voters. So what's the game plan? Do they think those schools will magically attract children trailing a Pupil Premium behind them (perhaps with the help of the new admissions code, when it finally appears sometime next month?). Do they think the pupils will fan out into Free Schools, which will (somehow) manage to appease parents without any extra funding? Could they think that the inner cities are a lost cause anyway, and that it's a good idea to please the F40 authorities, which tend to be more rural? To be fair, the current situation is so mad that creating a level playing field will inevitably divide schools into winners and losers, even if that's a reflection only of the unfairness of their previous situation. It could just be that the interests of the two political parties together are conspiring to create a level playing-field. That really would be something to applaud from a coalition. Unfortunately, it's schools that will have to cope with the transition arrangements, at a time when there's precious little cash floating around.