Feed of all NAHT blogshttp://www.naht.org.uk/nahtblogs.rssThe Department for Education's submission to the School Teachers' Review Body on performance pay is one of those documents which manages to be perfectly normal -- boring, even -- for pages on end, before slipping in notions which appear to be deliberately ignoring the elephant in the classroom. Which isn't to say that a fair chunk of it isn't quite reasonable, I'd like to add. The document points out that pupils tend to do better in countries where teaching in a higher-status profession, and that high-quality teaching has a demonstrable effect on pupil performance, particularly children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Performance management which includes incentives to teachers and provides "development opportunities" improve teacher quality, says the report. "Improving the quality of both new and existing teachers is therefore a priority in the drive to raise educational standards in our schools," it adds. The next section of the paper argues that the reform of the current pay system is "fundamental" to driving up teacher quality. " It is, however, the decisions taken by schools, governors and head teachers which have the biggest impact on the supply and demand for teachers. The existing national system of teachers' pay does not routinely support schools to recruit the high-quality teachers they need to meet the needs of their pupils," it says. But then comes the bit which got me scratching my head. " Attracting and retaining the best head teachers is also crucial to achieving improvements in schools. The 2010 School Workforce Census found that 0.1 per cent of head teacher posts were vacant and 2.4 per cent of head teacher posts were filled on a temporary basis." As the document says, half of heads will be eligible to retire in the next ten years, and there is an "urgent need" to address the recruitment and retention of high-quality school leaders. It notes the NAHT research that the re-advertisement rate in the primary sector was 28 per cent in 2010-11, rising even higher in faith schools. "All figures have increased from the previous year, suggesting that more schools are having problems finding new head teachers," it says, continuing: "The current national pay scales mean schools in some parts of the country struggle to recruit and retain good teachers and head teachers. 52 per cent of head teachers in research conducted by ORC International (2011) on behalf of the Office of Manpower Economics (OME) felt that the current allowances do not sufficiently cater for the need to reward high performance." The implication of this is that it is pay -- or the lack of it-- which is deterring good potential head teachers from applying for those jobs. But I've never yet met a school leader who's complained (in anything other than a jokey manner) of being underpaid, or who intends to go for a promotion for a different school purely because of the cash on offer. Teaching per se hasn't been a job that people do for the money, and from what I know I'd say that's the same around the world, regardless of whether the pay is intermittent (as in some developing countries), peanuts, or comparatively good. Teaching's one of those Marmite jobs -- you'll love it or hate it -- and my observation is that's got more to do with retention than pay, although pay might well be a recruitment issue. I'm absolutely not arguing that heads' pay doesn't matter, or that larger pay packets aren't entirely deserved. It does, and they are. But after a weekend at the NAHT conference earlier this month, it seems clear that the deterrent for would-be heads is the increasingly punitive nature of the job, and the unhelpful rhetoric surrounding it. For some heads, it's hardly pay any more: it's danger money. Mr Gove, addressing the conference, was almost effusive in his praise for head teachers. But as heads pointed out, it's all very well doing that in a closed conference hall -- the same message needs to go out in the media, to combat the daily onslaught of less positive publicity. In a world where satisfactory will shortly mean not good enough, where school leaders warn each other about "rogue" inspection teams in the area, where there are fears about "forced" academisation and where one dodgy Ofsted report -- whether fair or not -- means the end of a career, it's hardly surprising that lots of people just don't fancy being heads any more. It's not the pay that's the problem: it's the conditions. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@gmail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=552Wed, 16 May 2012 18:40:34 GMT20120516184034Wed, 16 May 2012 18:40:34 GMT20120516184034Wed, 16 May 2012 18:40:34 GMT201205161864034Show me a union conference where people discuss how happy they are with every aspect of their working lives, and the government's impact upon them, and I'll ask you in which parallel universe it's taking place. Unions are there to focus attention on problems, to work together in their resolution, and to work together to improve things. To outsiders this might be seen as moaning: to insiders, it can be both cathartic to share experiences and genuinely useful to work on widely-experienced problems. So I wouldn't expect a head teachers' conference to be full of uplifting stories about the brilliance of the current education system, particularly at a time of funding cuts and an undermining of the pension. Even though there seem to be more natural optimists among heads than the population in general. But what rather took me aback at the conference in Harrogate at the weekend was the sheer depth of despair and misery when heads talk about the problems they're facing. If you weren't there, you'll have had a bit of a snapshot in the news reports about motions attacking the Chief Inspector for Schools (plain Mr Wilshaw, interestingly, to just about every conference speaker I heard). You may also have heard about the emergency motion of no confidence in Sir Michael, mooted on Saturday afternoon and re-presented on Sunday with an alternative message of “sadness and disappointment” rather than the more inflammatory "no confidence." Heads being heads, they couldn't kick a former colleague that badly -- yet. In a year's time, if matters haven't improved, I wouldn't bet against a motion of no-confidence actually being passed. Feelings were summed up neatly by a pair of delegates kind enough to chat to me over breakfast on the Sunday. One was the head of a school which had been put into special measures by an inspector whose lesson observations were unfair and who cared only about the data. This head told me that there was no member of staff whose lessons were neither satisfactory or good, and yet lesson observations on the first day had included some unsatisfactory ratings. “I did joint observations all the second day once I realised what was happening, and we didn't get any more unsatisfactories,” said the head. A member of the team who was there only during the first day issued a quiet warning in the head's ear about what was likely to happen next. And, subsequently, visiting HMIs on monitoring visits, says the head, are clearly puzzled as to why the school was in special measures at all as it is moving out in record time. This head wasn't the only one to have been, as they put it, "mugged" by this particular inspection team, and a warning has gone round schools in the area. Why would the inspector want to fail schools which were performing reasonably well, I asked. The head shrugged. "Put it this way, it wasn't long after that I had someone in a suit from the DfE come to see me about academy status." Speaker after speaker described bad experiences at the hands of Ofsted, worries about forced academisation, disbelief that the goalposts were being moved once more on inspections, worry at the way in which younger staff are being put off school leadership, and dismay at the way neither the Government nor Ofsted can quite bring themselves to praise the profession's achievements -- or not where it counts. When Michael Gove spoke to the conference late on Saturday morning, beginning with an encomium of praise for head teachers and NAHT leaders Russell Hobby and Kathy James, he was met with a suspicious silence. "We need kind words said outside the hall as well," said Mr Hobby in response to his speech, drawing the warm applause that eluded the education secretary. School leaders being the professional people they are, the conference was not all doom and gloom. For a start, there was the stand-up comedy routine from Lancashire member Les Turner, seconding a motion about the performance of Ofsted teams. "What's the difference between Ofsted and toothache?" he asked. "It is easier to get rid of a toothache. What's the difference between Ofsted and God? "God isn't arrogant enough to think that he is always right. What's the difference between Ofsted and the Black Death? It is easier to recover from The Black Death." The famous -- infamous -- dinner dance featured the usual packed dance floor, interestingly half-cleared by Michael Jackson's Thriller and filled again by a Wham! number. There were clearly a few sore heads round the conference hall next morning. And there's clearly a busy year ahead for president Steve Iredale, who's going to find himself removed from his favourite Black Sheep Ale as he goes about union business all over the country. With ambitious plans to revive branches and create a virtual network for new members, as well as helping colleagues with school improvement, the association has had its say and is getting on with its work for children and schools. But if I were Mr Gove, I'd be listening carefully to what I'd been told on Saturday -- and I might be having a quiet chat with my Chief Inspector. Because if this bunch of people are saying there's something badly wrong in the education system, they deserve to be taken seriously. Perhaps he could tell another of Les Turner's jokes. "What's the difference between Ofsted and NAHT? One cares passionately about school improvement. The other is a tool for the implementation of government policy. I will let you decide which is which." Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=551Tue, 08 May 2012 17:20:31 GMT20120508172031Tue, 08 May 2012 17:20:31 GMT20120508172031Wed, 09 May 2012 08:15:10 GMT201205090881510OK, something different this time. Inspired by various pronouncements in recent weeks, and the odd twitter discussion, I've been imagining a - fictional - scenario in which our schooling system operates against a radically different political and power backdrop. Actually, it is different in only respect: in this fantasy we now have a government for the entire world, which is busy implementing policies for education, in England and elsewhere. I've then imagined a conversation which might ensue between the education minister in this global government and one Michael Gove. The latter would be, as now, education secretary for England. However, instead of wielding his current extensive powers over the characteristics of England's schools, in this fantasy he would have to cede to the world government the final say on how education was organised, since policy is now made worldwide. He would, then, be in a position not wildly different from today's local authority leader in England. As the final element of this scenario, I am imagining Mr Gove as a reasonable, fair-minded person keen to probe the evidence base and implications of the world education minister's ambitious plans. This latter bit may or may not be in accordance with your perception of reality. Here we go, then, with that imagined conversation, which takes place at the headquarters of the World Education Ministry, to which Mr Gove has been summoned to explain England's apparently poor performance in the well-known Organisation for Co-operation and Development's “PISA” tests. World education minister (WEM): Mr Gove, because England's results in PISA are just not good enough, I am going to have to instigate some radical changes in the management of your schools. From now on, I will be targeting the worst performing primary and secondary schools, on measures I am setting unilaterally, for takeover by organisations I appoint. Mr “Reasonable” Gove: But minister, our results are really not that bad. The difference between our scores in PISA and those of comparable large economies such as France, Germany and the US suggest there's no great difference between any of us. Maybe that's a problem or function of the PISA metric, in that really quite different systems actually look quite similar, when you judge matters only by their pupils' average PISA test scores. But, whatever, your policy is bringing in some really fundamental structural change on the basis of a “performance” gap of just a few points for each country in PISA. WEM: This is nonsense. England's results show a trend downwards, while Germany's, for example, are moving the other way, and are now ahead of England's. I have your data here, and it's clear in black and white: you are not doing well enough. Our league tables simply don't lie. Maybe if you'd concentrated on managing your schools better, rather than challenging me with your alternative view and your low expectations, the institutions in your country would be in a better way. I cannot tolerate this acceptance of poor performance in the PISA tests by you any more. RG: But I'm not “tolerating” low performance. We all want our pupils to do well. I'm just questioning the basis on which you are planning such sweeping changes. After all, we would be throwing away quite a lot in simply imposing changes on schools and the communities they serve unilaterally from the (global) centre like this. WEM: Oh? In what way? RG: Well, for a start there's the issue of democracy. You may think you have a solution that will improve these schools in England in terms of their test results, but we have views, too. I am elected Secretary of State for Education in England, but you seem not to want to take my local knowledge of the schools, their history and the culture against which they operate into account. Some would say you're out of touch: you're making decisions from your desk in the ministry without even having visited most of the schools affected. WEM: That's all very well, but I'm a busy man, I can't visit all schools for which I am now responsible and I have their test results here and they aren't good enough. Nor are many of the inspection verdicts my inspectors have provided me on the schools our ministry has targeted for change because their performance is not good enough. These inspection reports say clearly that an unacceptably high number of schools are returning below average levels of performance, compared to others in your country. RG: But that would be the case in any country WEM: (Continuing…) In any case, I simply can't listen to your arguments for the right of national self-determination while your results are so poor. After all, I'm doing this for the children: your country's young people's futures, and particularly those of the poorest, depend on our getting this right. So we have to act and I will use the powers I passed in the World government's Parliament shortly after taking office to ensure that we do. RG: But it's not just about me, as a local politician, wanting some power over the decision-making structure of our schools. It's also that local people themselves: the parents and staff working at the schools which are under threat of takeover, need to feel a sense of empowerment and ownership. There is an important principle at stake, here, which is that, surely, schools which build a positive relationship between parents, pupils and staff are more likely to work effectively. Take this one primary school you're threatening to take over. The strong, supportive relationship between parents and staff seems enviable, and so much so that the whole community has united to oppose the idea of an organisation you appoint to take over the school. Some schools would kill for that level of community support. And yet you're planning to have this school replaced by one of your Rebrand schools, which are funded directly by you and have to sign an agreement with you to operate. There is no direct relationship with the local community through the governing body, with the governors instead reporting to the school's sponsor, who is appointed by you without, seemingly, anyone outside your ministry getting a say if you choose to force through a certain sponsor. WEM: Yes, that's it. RG: Well it seems that you're sacrificing a lot there, in terms of the interaction with the local community. As, in this country, Margaret Thatcher once argued, schools should be fully responsive to the “consumers” of the education they produce – in this case, the parents, through their governance arrangements - and this seems a strange way of doing it: the power in terms of the governance of the school here seems to rest with the “producer”, the sponsor, rather than with its users. And with you, of course. WEM: All we're doing is giving schools the freedom to bring in a sponsor - who will take complete control of the running of the school in agreement with me - and to operate with more flexibility than existing schools. RG: But not all of them want that claimed freedom. WEM: OK, well we're just going to have to force them to be free then. RG: “Force them to be free”?! I really can't say I'm a fan of this idea of top-down enforcement action. Apart from anything else, schools should be nurturing places. Your policies are in danger of turning them into sites of bullying: where teachers and management, who after all surely went into this profession as public servants to improve young people's lives, are in some cases intimidated out of their jobs in the name of raising test scores. I have heard of respected school leaders being seen in tears over being forced out by this policy, after decades of public service. Shouldn't respect for the way we treat others be part of what we teach young people? And aren't your policies in danger of sending an opposite message: that bullying people working in schools into “delivering” better results for their pupils is OK, so long as it gets those results? WEM: I don't share your reservations about our policies for raising standards. Anyway, as more than half of secondary schools in your country are now Rebrand schools, if you criticise what we are doing through this policy, then you're criticising state education. So you're an enemy of state education. RG: Hmm. That's a neat formulation, but it's just another attempt to label your opponents in a particular way, isn't it? For someone who seems to have acquired a reputation for being polite and charming, you seem to go in for this type of approach quite a lot, don't you? Anyway, you don't have an electoral mandate for this. When you went to the world's people in the last World Parliament elections, you said in your manifesto that forcing rebrand status on schools would only be used in the most extreme of cases : when schools had been judged to be failing by your inspectors for more than a year. (Note 1) Now, I see little more than a year after taking office you widened the criteria, to include any school put in a “category” by the inspectorate, or with results which are below the targets you've set. Now the inspection system is even being changed seemingly to put more schools in a “category”. WEM: I can't believe you just said that. You're just showing your naivety now, in believing that political parties should be held to account for what they said in their manifestos. What a ridiculous suggestion. In any case, this stuff is too important for us to hang around for the next election so we can put it in a manifesto. RG: But the lack of a democratic mandate for this stuff is incredibly important, given that what you want to do is, in some cases, to go against the will of communities in imposing a particular Rebrand on a school. The point is: where is the public mandate for what you want to do? It can't just be your own will, can it? Otherwise what kind of overly-centralised society are we living in? And, further to my point on centralisation, how does this square with your avowed support for giving parents choice over their child's education? What do I say to the parent who tells me she chose a particular school because of its ethos before it was a Rebrand school, and now she fears that will be taken away as new management is imposed on the school by you? Is there anything she can do about this? WEM: No, there's not. Nothing at all. There is no way for a parent to challenge my judgement, which is final. In every case, my vision for the school will be the correct way forward, so there's no need for a challenge: after all, I have the data and the inspection judgements I need. RG: Why is this parent being denied this choice? WEM: Her child's school's average test scores are not good enough. RG: But that doesn't mean her own child won't do well at this school, does it? It just means that, on average, perhaps because of its status as an inclusive school, its test scores are below ministry expectations. WEM: Correct. RG: Well where does that leave your parental choice agenda then? WEM: Well, parents can have choice as long as they choose school which tally with the ministry's definition of a good school. RG: And that centres on average assessment - mainly test - results in English and maths, doesn't it? What about all the other aspects of school life, from history and geography to the arts, sport and excursions out of school, which so many parents value? They don't really count, do they? WEM: Well, we'll never put it this way in public, but the reality of the way schools are now judged is that no: they don't really count. In fact, one senior media supporter of my reforms, presiding over a publication which has covered education in all its breadth for more than a century now, has described culturally enriching activities outside of English and maths in primary schools as “finger painting”. That was very useful for us. Our centralised measurement system needs narrow…sorry focused…priorities to be set for schools. RG: But that does seem to lead to the danger of non-tested subjects being marginalised if results in English and maths are below the ministry's stipulations. And yet one feels that many members of the public, though undoubtedly viewing English and maths as important, would want their child to get as broad an education as possible. I feel that that argument, about the narrowing effect of how schools are being judged as successes or failures as they are targeted for intervention by the ministry, is almost being forgotten now, as the debate moves on to whether or not the ministry's plans for education amount to the dismantling of an education structure which seems to have served us reasonably well since the 1940s. WEM: I haven't got time for this. Hard data - test and exam results - are what matter, and independent research shows that our Rebrand schools get better results than those of your conventional, nationally or locally governed institutions. So we can't hang around: your children's futures depend on my plans. RG: But you only have research evidence on secondary schools. Much of the thrust of your plans to introduce these Rebrand schools is now in the primary sector. Where's the evidence in relation to primary education? WEM: Why do we need that evidence? These schools have been shown to work in the secondary sector, so why would primary schools be any different? RG: Erm…well one reason would be scale: secondary schools are likely to find it easier to “go it alone” in a contract directly with yourself than primaries because they are larger organisations. The secondaries on which much of the research seems to have been based also often came with capital building programmes worth tens of millions of pounds, which it seems to me may have helped their image in the local community and which seem not to be available in your latest incarnation of the scheme. And the point is that no research seems to have been done on primary Rebrand schools. WEM: Well, that's as maybe. Anyway, we do have a handful of primary Rebrand schools which have been open a few years – actually, these are “all through” schools with a primary as well as a secondary section. And, although there's no research evidence on their effectiveness, and their test results aren't always better than the schools which I'm targeting for takeover, my schools Commissar has experience of one or two and they really are very good, I can assure you. RG: That's not much of an evidence base, is it? You're making sweeping changes to the relationship between schools and their local communities, in some cases going directly against the will of their communities, and you're not even able to point to robust research showing this is the best way to go? That's a very strange way of going about things, isn't it? In an ideal world, even less radical reform would be subject to careful piloting and independent scrutiny before implementation. Instead, we seem to have a fundamental policy change being implemented nationally on the basis that “this is what the World Education Minister wants”. WEM: No, that's not the case at all. Anyway, all this talk of the benefits of careful research smacks of “education establishment” thinking. We can't rely on that. I know much of this “establishment” sits within institutions – universities – which are seen as the apex of the education system, towards which many of our pupils are aiming, and towards which we want them to aim, but… it is the low standards and expectations of this often university-based “education establishment” which have condemned generations of poor children to underachievement. We need a different approach. RG: Err, OK…But on that note, I notice there's now a section of the World Education Ministry's website called “Rebrand schools work”. Not “Rebrand schools” and then a patient explanation for the public of what they are, and a fair-minded overview of what research says about them, but that particular message. That's a very strange way for an education ministry to behave, isn't it, given that we are talking about the Ministry of Education here? After all, aren't you supposed to be a showcase and example for learning, including research, in all its glory? And isn't a central point of learning through investigation that you have to try to inquire after both sides of an argument? One of our A-level or undergraduate students, doing an investigation into whether Rebrand schools actually do work, would rightly be marked down if they reached such a simplistic conclusion, so why are you encouraging this approach on your own website? WEM: Well that's politics. RG: But I thought your Rebrand schools initiative was about taking politics out of education. WEM: Erm. Anyway, moving back to the research, on secondary education this has shown beyond doubt that our Rebrand schools “work”. RG: Well, the data is pretty equivocal, actually. And even the best piece of research, which does show some positive effect of Rebrand schools in terms of some measures of exam results at Rebrand schools and their neighbours, has been said by its lead author not to be applicable to your current scheme which is greatly expanding the Rebrand programme. WEM: Well we think the findings are applicable and can be extrapolated to apply to our current plans. Anyway, I've a political agenda to force through here and I am going to be judged on the number of Rebrand schools created – my schools Commissar is even said to have a globe outside her office with the number of Rebrand schools around the world dotted all over it - so I really have little time for this. RG (persisting): But this is a very strange way for assessment of the strength of particular education policies to be made, isn't it: not by actually what goes on in schools, but by the number of schools of a particular category? WEM: We live in a strange world. In any case, after this conversation I can only conclude, Mr Gove, that you are an enemy of reform. I am the politician for change, and for high standards for our children, as all my newly restructured schools demonstrate only too clearly. You are on the side of accepting things as they are, and of the status quo, which as we know has been failing children – poor children especially – for generations. Why should anyone listen to you? RG: You know, it's interesting, that phrase “enemy of reform”. You must know, as World Education Minister, that many countries around the world are reforming their education systems, but they are not all doing it in the same way. In fact, some seem to be reforming in exactly opposite directions to our own. For example, while we seem to be heading towards a more traditionally-oriented curriculum, jurisdictions such as Hong Kong and Singapore seem keen to put the emphasis on creativity. Reports are heard of teachers from China – which had the top-performing jurisdiction in the whole of PISA last time out – arriving in England to look at what they can learn from how our schools are run. And while some countries go in for politicians pushing reform by essentially talking down the existing system – this week there was talk of “paying bad teachers less” – in others such as Canada, Finland or even the aforementioned Germany, there is much more talk of working with the profession to build a world class workforce. In relation to Finland, for Heaven's sake, a leading government educationist there has even taken to social networking to tell the world how many teachers want to work there because its schools are such high-status, high-trust places, with basing your entire education system on high-stakes test scores to judge institutions a complete no-no. I know, it will never take off here. In fact, if you are using PISA test scores as a guide, one of the models for the types of reform you want – your plans for a special type of new school – is Sweden and its results in the PISA tests are hardly a model of excellence in recent years, as it is not performing well overall and its system seems to be becoming less equitable. So… “enemy or reform”? “Reform” means very little in this sense when it comes in so many different types. It might just be better if you call me an “unashamed sceptic about your type of reform”. But that sounds too…reasonable…doesn't it, I guess? WEM: Yes, you're just so reasonable, aren't you? But we have no time for reasonableness. Your PISA results simply aren't good enough for anyone to be “reasonable” in their approach to reform. You need to “man up” and accept that things are going to be tough. And if teachers and heads don't like it they can always leave the profession. RG: Right. I am very intrigued by this idea that talking down the profession can be a long-term recipe for success. Can you really expect to attract and retain the best people if all they read in the papers every day is how bad things are in the schools in which they slave away? So often, this seems out of step with reality: surely you're aware that recent reports by our inspectorate, Ofsted, have found that more than 90 per cent of parents surveyed agreed with the statement “I am happy with my child's experience at this school”, with more than 50 per cent strongly agreeing. (Note 2) WEM: Yes, but those are annoying statistics, aren't they? I'm glad they haven't had much coverage or even been featured in your inspectorate's press releases but instead been buried deep in the reports, as they really don't fit the narrative we need to improve schools in your country. For, in order to convince people that our plans need to be implemented, we first have to show them that “something must be done”. You see, it may sound cynical but I've found that increasingly policy-makers adopt the following formulation, as put forward on your own very popular 1980s comedy, Yes Prime Minister. The logic, as quoted there, runs as follows: “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do it.” If we can't convince the public in the first place that “something must be done”, we won't be able to convince them that it is our “something” which must be done. And the whole policy world would be nowhere if there wasn't “something that must be done”. So it's all about persuading people that things are particularly terrible, that “something must be done” and therefore that reform is needed. RG: I'm a bit confused by all of this, but that would be your type of reform, would it? WEM: You read my mind. RG: Coming back specifically to your Rebrand schools, in England in the late 1980s and early 1990s we had a similar scheme, called Grant Maintained status, in which schools were offered the chance to be funded directly through a central ministry – in this case, my department – rather than by a local authority. It proved popular with some schools, which were drawn to it partly by a notion a greater independence from their local authorities, but also in some cases by the seeming extra cash involved. The trouble for my predecessors was that not enough schools opted into this scheme for it ever to be seen as a total success. You seem to have found a way around this, though: simply force schools into Rebrand status. Starting with “underperforming” schools is the natural way of doing this, since who could possibly argue with taking this strong action in these cases? It may seem blatantly undemocratic, but who is really going to oppose it, given that, of the two other main parties in the World Parliament, one launched the Rebrand scheme in its original form when it was in government and the other is now in a coalition administration with you. And those outside of Parliament who do oppose it can be painted as “enemies of reform”, “defenders of low standards” or both. It is really neat, isn't it? WEM: I am glad we are getting to understand each other so well. This blog was partly inspired by the following exchange in the House of Commons last month: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2012-04-16b.8.6 Note 1: For any coalition manifesto mention of the forced academy policy, see http://media.conservatives.s3.amazonaws.com/manifesto/cpmanifesto2010_lowres.pdf (page 51), which says (only) that “any school which has been in special measures for more than a year will be taken over immediately by a successful academy provider”. Note 2: See HMCI annual latest annual report http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/annualreport1011 , page 44. Parents were asked if they agreed with the statement “Overall, I am happy with my child's experience at this school”. 94 per cent agreed, 52 per cent strongly. Sample size: 315,182 parental forms.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=550Thu, 03 May 2012 15:02:21 GMT20120503150221Thu, 03 May 2012 15:02:21 GMT20120503150221Thu, 03 May 2012 15:02:21 GMT201205031530221Six-month sabbaticals for teachers? I bet that's one idea from the new MPs' report on the recruitment and retention of teachers that gets kicked into the long grass: after all, why would a government now expecting teachers to continue with passion and a healthy fear of Ofsted to the age of 68 consider time off for good behaviour? Still, apart from that little fantasy, this is a genuinely interesting report, permeated largely with enormous respect for teachers and their profession, and it deserves to be read carefully by education ministers and policymakers. There are, I'd say, a few judicious nudges about government pet projects, such as the idea of limiting teaching bursaries to those with better degrees (they don't quite buy that idea, especially for primary, and suggest that some research needs to be done), and some balance brought to the debate about where teachers should be trained. There is also a second little bombshell in the form of the final recommendation -- a call for performance-related pay, an idea which in previous decades made it as far as the threshold system before expiring quietly. "We strongly recommend that the Department for Education seek to quantify, in a UK context, what scale of variation in teacher value-added equates to in terms of children's later prospects. We further recommend that the Department develop proposals (based on consultation and a close study of systems abroad) for a pay system which rewards those teachers who add the greatest value to pupil performance. We acknowledge the potential political and practical difficulties in introducing such a system, but the comparative impact of an outstanding teacher is so great that we believe such difficulties must be overcome," they say. The MPs don't expand on this, but my guess is that they may feel this is an idea whose time has come thanks to the recent fragmentation of the system as academies do their own thing and free schools pop up, adding further changes, and shouty headlines, claiming Government interest in the suggestion, tend to support that idea. However, the committee are exceptionally keen to dissociate themselves from any claim of teacher-bashing, concluding that "We urge the Government to consider how best it might continue to engage non-education sectors with the fantastic and inspiring work which goes on in many classrooms around the country. We similarly urge the Government to continue championing the work done by teachers up and down the country—not least through shadowing some of them, which the Secretary of State has committed to doing—and to sell the many benefits and rewards of the profession to the brightest and best candidates. "Our inquiry made clear that, whilst the majority of teachers are strong, the comparative impact on society of the best and worst teachers is dramatic. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to state with confidence that raising the quality of teaching yet higher will have profound consequences for pupils' attainment and progress, and subsequently for their adult lives and the contributions they make to society. There is, therefore, a moral imperative to improve teaching even further, and to ensure that there is no place for bad teachers in our system (particularly considering their disproportionate impact on students who are already from disadvantaged backgrounds)." It's not, though, 88 pages of sensation. There are some lower-key recommendations, some of which may irk the current government nearly as much as performance-related play has pleased it. They include some interesting ideas on creating better career progression for the profession, such as exists in countries such as Singapore. It suggests three possible paths of classroom teaching (rising to master teacher); school leadership, and specialists, leading to senior specialist. This, they suggest, might allow specialists providing their skills and training over a number of schools whilst continuing to teach in their home school, a "particularly valuable function in the light of the increasing number of schools outside local authority control," they say. Hopping between streams would be possible, with the right CPD, and the whole thing might be much more attractive in recruitment terms. Continuing professional development itself gets a section devoted to it, concluding: "We are concerned that England lags seriously behind its international competitors in this regard, and recommend that the Government consult on the quality, range, scope and content of a high-level strategy for teachers' CPD, and with an aim of introducing an entitlement for all teaching staff as soon as feasible. The consultation should include proposals for a new system of accrediting CPD, to ensure that opportunities are high-quality and consistent around the country." The sabbatical idea is part of this, and supported by no less a headteacher than Sir Michael Wilshaw, who told the committee: "I have never had a sabbatical so I would strongly support that, because there is an element of burnout and people need to be refreshed. This all comes down to money at the end of the day and whether it can be afforded. I think it has to be, and we have to look at creative ways of doing this—of giving people who are successfully doing very tough jobs time off to refresh themselves. Although I have never taken a sabbatical, when I have noticed someone on my staff suffering because of burnout—a successful person who is not backsliding and wanting more time off—then I have found the money to do that." The committee wants more research into where teacher "wastage" is actually teacher "movement" and deliberate over teacher training, welcoming the idea of testing teacher training applicants for their "interpersonal skills" but suggesting this should go beyond a written test and should include a teaching observation. Assessment panels must they say, include a "high quality" practising head teacher or teacher. They want potential teachers to be able to "taste" the profession with internships for schools and college students. Again, they must actually teach a class during this time. " Applying to do teacher training is a 'high stakes' decision and the purpose of these sessions is to give people a chance to try out their own aptitude before committing. We believe this approach could help both deter some people who are not best suited to teaching and persuade others to consider it." They believe "a diminution of universities' role in teacher training could bring considerable demerits," adding " The evidence has left us in little doubt that partnership between schools and universities is likely to provide the highest-quality initial teacher education, the content of which will involve significant school experience but include theoretical and research elements as well, as in the best systems internationally and in much provision here." And significantly for schools, they recommend that the Government should develop proposals to provide "more adequate" funding to schools providing placements.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=549Tue, 01 May 2012 11:48:58 GMT20120501114858Tue, 01 May 2012 11:48:58 GMT20120501114858Tue, 01 May 2012 11:48:58 GMT2012050111114858Hot on the heels of the 2 reports mentioned last month to do with behaviour and exclusions, (Improving Alternative Provision, Charlie Taylor, The Government's Expert Adviser on Behaviour, and“They never give up on you”, Office of the Children's Commissioner, School Exclusions Inquiry), came 2 more related documents, published in April by the DfE: a second report by Charlie Taylor, this time on Improving attendance at school and Behaviour and discipline in....http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/special-needs-blog/?blogpost=548Tue, 01 May 2012 10:19:07 GMT20120501101907Tue, 01 May 2012 10:19:07 GMT20120501101907Tue, 01 May 2012 10:22:24 GMT2012050110102224No explanation was given as to why the education select committee's questioning of Michael Gove this week started late, but I think he was probably out somewhere doing a little light smiting. He certainly arrived in cheerfully combative mood (so what's new?) entertainingly dented during the last half-hour by the equally combative Labour MP Lisa Nandy, who couldn't work out how a man with a vocal opinion on everything was so positively low-key about the Border Agency's apparent practice of X-raying young refugees to establish their age. When things are going his way, Mr Gove is a man of waving hands (think wiping a table), puppydog eyes and long sentences punctuated by extreme words and images. For today, those included "vendetta" (what some local authorities are apparently doing to free schools and academies) and "voiceless eunuchs" (Directors of Childrens' Services, apparently). When they're not (in this case, when Lisa Nandy was refusing to go away) he gets noticeably more subdued. Either way, though, he doesn't answer most questions with much clarity.So, what did we learn from seven MPs quizzing one Education Secretary? Occasionally, so convoluted were the responses, that it's hard to tell. The MPs' opening gambit was to attempt to pin down Mr Gove on the opinion of the Chief Inspector of Schools that there needed to be some early-warning system of failing schools as local authorities' influence wanes.Ask me what I think Mr Gove actually said, and my opinion is that he didn't agree with Sir Michael but really didn't want to say so. But his answer wasn't as clear cut as that: he waffled, about not wanting to replace one layer of bureaucracy with another, and that the Government's publishing of data would show up any problems. National Leaders of education should be getting involved, as should the national college, he said. Why, even professional organisations "including unions" had come forward with constructive ideas on how they could help. And 3 per cent of converter academies were helping others. It didn't seem a high percentage to me, but Mr G was apparently pleased about it.A question about CPD was answered going off at similar tangents: that there were all sorts of wonderful organisations doing such things and it would be bureaucratic to impose some sort of national organisation. Scribbling frantically to keep up with the ceaseless flow of words, the thought crossed my mind that at least a bit of signposting for schools to find all these wonderful resources might be good. If Mr G didn't think that was too bureaucratic of course.There was a worrying exchange about whether or not it was possible to complain about academies to the YPLA/EFA. In a nutshell, Mr G was convinced that was part of their remit, and they were handling such problems but the committee reckoned there was evidence to the contrary.There was a long and slightly opaque question and answer session about the national curriculum review, from which I drew the information that two of the maths committee members seem to be at odds with the recommendations, and that there is some thought about splitting KS2 in half (but without extra testing. Probably). There also appears to have been discussion about whether or not history or geography should be made compulsory to 16, but Mr G appears to think the Ebacc option has increased uptake of both, and other approaches might be detrimental in other ways.There were also hints that everyone will be expected to have a minimum level of maths, which would mean that post-16s in colleges or apprenticeships might need to continue their studies.Committee chair Graham Stuart wondered whether teaching schools weren't being expected to do an awful lot for the £60k they get. I haven't the will to read my verbatim note of the answer to this, let alone transcribe it, but let's say Mr Gove defended what the schools are being asked to do, at length, and ended with a hint that maybe his interlocutor had a point.There was a completely left-field moment in which Mr G linked good children doing well academically and their chances of indulging in “risky behaviour”.And he has no plans to take up Jamie Oliver's campaign to force academies to adhere to the national school meals standards, because apparently, this is likely to lead to lower standards across the board. There is going to be a report on "the best" which Mr G thinks is likely to inspire other to do better, but for the life of me I don't quite follow the logic of this. Nor did the committee, with one particularly dogged member pointing out that he was worried about the children who were getting the worst, with Mr Gove retorting that it was better to look at those getting the best, so that lessons could be learned.So: bureaucracy and central diktat bad, that's the clear message from Mr Gove.Well, not entirely. The subject of Downhills school came up, where apparently it was right for the Secretary of State to override local parents, governors and the school head, because of the political element to the campaign. Had the terrier-like Lisa Nandy stepped in at this point, we might have untangled the contradictions a little better: but sadly, she didn't. Can I please suggest that it's time for Ofsted to carry out a rigorous inspection of the Secretary for State? Then perhaps we can find out what's really happening.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=547Fri, 27 Apr 2012 09:54:47 GMT20120427095447Fri, 27 Apr 2012 09:54:47 GMT20120427095447Fri, 27 Apr 2012 09:54:47 GMT201204270995447Mossbourne school is up there with Roedean, Eton, Grange Hill and St Trinians -- a very familiar concept but we don't really know all that much about it. Bar, of course, that it is probably the Government's favourite secondary and its last head is now the Chief Inspector of Schools.So when I met someone at a party the other week and happened to discover that her child is in Year 7 at the inner London comp, I'm afraid I pumped her mercilessly for information. At this point, thought, I should insert the caveats that I didn't have a notebook, and I did have a glass of wine -- and her child has only been in the school for two termsYet as they say, the devil is in the detail...and I found the minutiae of Mossbourne frankly fascinating. One phrase in particular was uttered frequently (and smilingly) by my new friend: "It is crazy disciplined." And by her descriptions, it certainly is. When Year 7 arrived, on their first day, staff were on hand to carefully check that each and every pupil was wearing their uniform perfectly with no aberrations or missing items. Anything out of line, and, according to Mrs X, the child was sent home. Subsequently, wardrobe malfunctions, including missing bits of PE kit, earn detention -- no ifs, no buts. Her own 11-year-old had got a detention for losing a minor piece of kit, probably on his way to school. I won't out the child by explaining what it was, but, crumbs, detention for that, I said. Didn't she think it was a bit over the top? "It's how it works, and the kids understand that," she shrugged. Detentions, generally, are on a Saturday morning.Haircuts are regulation, and the girls' uniform skirt is either knee or mid-calf length. My jaw dropped a little: schools round our way appear to be fighting a losing battle against the knicker-skimming skirt, despite various crackdowns. Don't they try and push against the boundaries? No, came the reply: it's compulsory, the school checks uniform all the time, and the children have a real sense of pride in being at Mossbourne.Other rules, as I recall them, included a total ban on mobile phones ("At all?" I squeaked. "At all," she replied) and no talking when moving between lessons. Oh, and no stopping off at shops on the way home from school. Teachers, she said, were stationed on the surrounding streets to strictly enforce that one. My eyebrows were by now somewhere in my hairline: according to my new friend, much of the rationale was to deter gang activity in an area of London notorious for it. (A subsequent Google check has confirmed that not a single Mossbourne pupil was involved in the riots of last summer.)Three mornings a week, the pupils go in half an hour early (at 7.45, I think) for compulsory reading, with every child in a class handed the same book. Many of the Mossbourne pupils are from homes without books, some arrive not reading well enough to thrive, and so everyone takes part in these early morning sessions to ensure everyone's skills are up to scratch.There were, she said, regular tests, the results of which might affect the set a pupil was in for a group of subjects rather than a single one (though she was a little hazy about this), and this was motivating her child to do as well as possible.What on earth did the kids make of all this, I asked. "They're really proud of their school," she said. "They're proud to wear the uniform, and they know that every member of staff at the school cares about them and is doing their best for them." Had she met Sir Michael? "Yes. He's absolutely inspirational," she said, adding that she was also pretty impressed by his replacement.There was a slightly difficult question I wanted to ask: middle-class parents (like my party acquaintance) might well be desperate to get their kids into a school with fabulous results like Mossbourne, but were they as keen on the range and inflexibility of the rules? Clearly, the one is linked to the other -- but equally clearly, there are lots of parents around who fight tooth and nail to get their child into the school of choice but then behave as though its rules should not apply to their little darling.Interestingly, she'd already thought about this one, and explained that as far as she could see some schools in the vicinity had turned themselves into what she called "Mossbourne-lites". In other words, the same kind of ideas but less extreme. "They just don't work in the same way," she said. "As far as I can see, all the Mossbourne parents support the system, even when their child's in detention for doing something daft, because the rules are clear, and they can see it works, and because the school cares about each one. It's kind of tough love."I'm really hoping to bump into this mum again further down the line -- perhaps when her child hits 14, or is sitting GCSEs, to find out how the experience has developed.Lots of food for thought, here, though, including the nagging question of whether our frontline politicians who so love this school would fight to get their own children into it. It clearly works -- but would it work as a universal model for all secondaries? .http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=546Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:23:29 GMT20120423102329Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:23:29 GMT20120423102329Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:23:29 GMT2012042310102329I have a confession to make, which may have become obvious by now to regular readers of this blog: I have a love-hate affair with school league tables and data. On the one hand, regular readers of this blog will need no reminding that I am…erm…sceptical about the degree to which our education regime has been geared towards the priorities of raising statistical indicators of school-by-school performance as, effectively in the way our system works, its raison d'etre. On the other hand, I do find myself spending a fair amount of time poring over Government documents and spreadsheets in an effort to understand the numbers, and their implications for schools. This can shed important light on what is going on beyond and behind the headline measures. As successive governments have released more data, this has become an increasingly time-consuming business, one definitely not for the faint-hearted as anyone who has tried to make sense of some of the latest datasets which have just emerged from the DfE will know, and I've only just managed to take a slightly more detailed look on the latest set of data, which were released over the winter. I'm afraid, for those of you readers who work in primary schools, that most of my efforts so far have been focused on the secondary tables, simply because the smaller number of schools makes them slightly more digestible initially. However, I think the analysis which follows does have important implications in part for primaries, so hopefully you will all read on. OK, so I just thought I'd list, in bold, a few first findings from this analysis. I'm sure that more study of these data will yield more insights, but here goes for an initial, if characteristically lengthy, stab: 1. The upper echelons of the Government's “progress measures”, listing for each school what proportion of pupils make the “expected” two levels' progress in English, and in maths, are dominated by schools with low numbers of disadvantaged (free school meals) pupils and, in particular, grammar schools. So, I crunched the numbers and then I ranked schools nationwide on the proportion of their pupils making the “expected” two levels' progress in English. The top 44 schools – all on 100 per cent of pupils achieving that progress measure - were all selective, with the exception of one which is listed as “comprehensive” – Colston's Girls' School in Bristol, but which seems to be an anomaly: it is an academy (which became so under Labour) which is a former private school which, as far as I can see, was selective at the time last year's GCSE candidates entered the school, or at least that seems to be the case to judge by these candidates' key stage 2 scores. (See below). I counted only another 10 schools listed as “comprehensives” in the top 97 schools of this list of those with the highest numbers of pupils achieving the Government's progress measures, all on 98 per cent or higher achieving the Government indicator. For progress in maths, the figures are similar, with only one non-selective school in the top 45 schools – all with 100 per cent of their pupils making two levels' progress - and only a further 10 comps ranked in places 56 to 117, which covers schools on 97-99 per cent of pupils achieving on that indicator. So what? Grammar school supporters might argue that this indicator just “proves” that grammar schools are better than comprehensives, since more of their pupils make progress than those in non-selective schools. Well, I'd suggest there'd be two reasons for thinking that blanket claim might not be the right way to read these figures. The first concerns this particular indicator itself. I've had a look at the way it is constructed, and it seems to me that the nature of this measure will make it easier for highly selective institutions to gain “perfect” (100 per cent of pupils achieving the measure) or near-perfect scores. In other words, my suspicion is that this progress measure favours selective schools, at the top end of the rankings, at least. The reason is not hard to discern if we look at those rules for how it is constructed. The measure “expects” pupils to be making what are said to be two levels' progress in English, and in maths. So, a child achieving a level 2 at key stage 2 is “expected” to get an E at GCSE; a child with a level 3 is expected to get a D; one with a level 4 is expected to get a C; and for one with a level five, the expectation is a B grade. (See http://bit.ly/HWjltQ figure 1 for full details on the rules). Interestingly, comparing the results for key stage 2 tests in 2006 with the GCSE grades achieved by these same pupils in 2011 in English and maths indicates a rough match in terms of numbers, in terms of the higher achieving children: around a third of pupils achieved level fives in these subjects in 2006, and around a third went on to get a B or higher in 2011 GCSEs in English, with comparable figures for maths. The key thing about this progress measure, I think, though is that any child is deemed to have met it if they achieve a B or higher at GCSE, as the Government document above makes clear. This is quite a broad measure of success, however: in English, a child only needed to come in the top 37 per cent of candidates across England to gain a B grade last year, while in maths, they would have needed to have come in the top 32 per cent. My hunch is that many grammar schools have far more selective intakes than this – I have heard claims of one grammar school in north London selecting only the top 1 per cent of primary children– so a target that such schools must help their pupils achieve at least a B grade seems not to be very stretching. To put it another way, will a school where all its pupils achieve B grades have stretched all of them at least to Government expectations? This measure would suggest so, but we can't be sure unless we know more about the starting points of pupils beyond the fact that they were “at least level five”. The vagueness of the baseline measure, then, in lumping all pupils in a very broad bunch of reasonably high prior attainers when many selective schools actually select from towards the top end of that bunch, favours most grammar schools, I strongly suspect. By contrast, lower down the achievement spectrum this seems a more exacting measure. To achieve a level four in their 2006 KS2 English Sats, a pupil had to be in the top 79 per cent on achievement nationally. To gain a C grade, and thus to be deemed to have made the “expected” two levels' progress, they had to be in the top 65 per cent nationally at GCSE last year. So schools are expected to move at least some pupils up the achievement profile to meet Government expectations. In maths, some 76 per cent of pupils achieved a level four or higher in 2006 but only 59 per cent got a C grade or better. Compare this to the rough correspondence between level fives or higher and B grades or better and you can see that the measure gets more demanding for the level fours at KS2. The pattern is repeated again for the level 3s, particularly in maths, where 93 per cent achieved this mark or better at KS2, but only 76 per cent got a D or better at GCSE. Again, if you admit pupils, say, on the 90th percentile of achievement at KS2, you will need to move them up to at least around the 76th percentile to achieve this measure at the lower end of the prior achievement spectrum, wheras for children on level 5, you might just have to keep them, at worst, roughly where they were nationally at KS2 by the time they reach GCSE. OK, I suspect that's enough detail about the mechanics of this measure. The other, much bigger but perhaps not surprising, point to make is that schools with fewer numbers of pupils on free school meals tend to do better on these “progress” measures than those with more. Because grammar schools tend, on average, to have relatively few pupils claiming free lunches – of those for which the Government's league tables data list a figure for FSM, as far as I can see none has above-average numbers of pupils claiming free meals – this may also favour them on this measure. But let's leave aside the specific point about grammar schools here. Again, I looked at those schools which are deemed by the Government to be making “most progress” in English, and in maths, and found that the higher echelons of these rankings are dominated by institutions with below-average numbers of pupils on free school meals. Of the top 265 schools in England, ranked according to the proportions of their pupils making two levels' progress, only 17 had above-average numbers of pupils claiming free school meals. In maths, only seven of the top 200 schools for progress had above average FSM numbers. For both indicators, there are a handful of schools in this top listing with well above the national average of FSM claimants; but it is only a handful. A scatter plot of the relationship between the proportion of pupils claiming free school meals in each institution and the proportion of pupils making “expected” progress underscores this relationship: overall, as FSM stats for schools go down, generally their pupils make more progress on this indicator. Why does any of this matter? Well, these progress measures seem to have been sold to the profession as a fairer way of assessing the contribution schools make to their pupils' results than “raw scores” attainment indicators, the latter rightly and more obviously having been argued to favour schools with a more advantaged pupil intake. If the aim is to provide somehow “objective” measures of the quality of the school, rather than the characteristics of its intake, then we shouldn't use raw scores indicators because doing so we would not be comparing like with like. So , as stated, these progress indicators have been given prominence by the coalition government. They are the first-listed indicators in at least one of the school-by-school secondary league tables that are produced by the DfE for 2011 results. And they are a key element in the “floor standards” system whereby schools are put under pressure to improve their results, or face closure. For example, in 2010 the new coalition Government said that its new floor standard from 2011 would be 35 per cent of pupils in each school gaining five A*-Cs at GCSE including English and maths, although schools would not be counted as being under this “floor” if they could demonstrate that their pupils were making “above average progress from key stage 2 to key stage four” ( See http://bit.ly/kBtXok ) This latter clause was seen as a way of being fairer to schools – particularly perhaps secondary moderns – than simply judging their futures entirely on “raw scores”. Indeed, Michael Gove seemed to be telling local authorities in 2010 that he wanted to adopt an approach to floor standards based on this idea of taking context into account. In a letter to them, he wrote: “I want to avoid the errors of the past [under Labour, was the claim] which meant that some [schools] felt unfairly stigmatised”. (See http://bit.ly/HLyLxL). But, as discussed, it seems as if this progress measure is also skewed in favour of schools with more affluent intakes. Not only do they do better in terms of raw attainment; they also tend in general to see their pupils make more progress. I make this not just as a theoretical point. It is possible to check how many schools last year who were below the Government's floor standard in terms of raw results – that 35 per cent GCSE figure – escaped from being put in this category overall because they had better than average progress scores for their pupils in English and maths. The figures seem to show, by my calculations, that 129 secondaries had raw figures below that 35 per cent GCSE benchmark. How many of these had above average (Note one) progress in English, and in maths? I make it four of these 129 schools with above average progress in English, and two schools in maths. That's a tiny proportion who are being “saved” by these progress measures. For me, this is not a surprise. It seems reasonable to assume – all other things being equal - that a school admitting pupils mainly from more affluent backgrounds will get better results, both in terms of progress over a given period and in terms of “raw” results at any given point, than those with lots of children in relative poverty. For affluence will often serve as a statistical proxy for general levels of parental support, such as access to “cultural capital” – books and a belief in education as powerful at home, for example - while wealth can also buy advantage such as private tutoring for the better-off. Why would that not be reflected both in terms of better GCSE results but also in terms of a better rate of progress over a given period, again all other things being equal? Perhaps, with measures such as the pupil premium which are targeted specifically at schools to help them improve results for FSM pupils, we will see this start to change. But it is early days for the pupil premium yet, we have had lots of Labour initiatives also targeted at disadvantage and the difference in extra funding the pupil premium will make in the face of very tight budgets overall has yet to be seen. As it is, it is hard to avoid the impression that these “progress measures” are still weighted against schools in disadvantaged areas, and that this can leave these schools fighting an uphill battle to avoid the impression that they are underperforming. This, as we have seen with the forced academies policy, can have very big implications for these schools. Although some will say that putting increased pressure on these schools is the way to go in the drive to raise standards for disadvantaged pupils – which is another debate entirely and which I do not have space to discuss here - it seems to me to be unfair, if what we are seeking is a level playing field for all schools. In fact, a feeling that progress or (unadjusted) value added measures were still unfair to schools serving disadvantaged intakes was the main reason the previous government introduced contextual value added data. The idea behind this, I think, was an acceptance of the ideas above. It was unfair to compare, say a boys' comprehensive serving a disadvantaged area and a girls' grammar school in a leafy district and expect both to see their pupils achieving the same rates of progress, it was felt. So CVA was introduced with the idea being that school results were assessed with just about every factor that the Government could get hold of taken into account. Progress figures for each pupil in a school were compared not to a general national average, but compared to what similar pupils across the country achieved, with the totals for each pupil then summed to present an overall figure for each school. So, results for a boys' school, for example, were not compared to the results of all pupils –boy or girl – because this would be unfair to this particular school, since boys generally tend to do worse at GCSE than girls. Instead, they were compared to what might be expected of a school with only boys – and indeed, with boys with exactly the characteristics of those in this particular school. In this way, was the argument, the Government on this measure would take into account every possible background characteristic it could get hold of for each pupil before seeking to make a judgement on a school's overall effectiveness, as measured by exam results. It then aimed not to be giving any school any advantage or disadvantage based on its pupils' background characteristics. That seemed a fair principle to me. But I was sceptical about the use of CVA in practice, being worried in particular that too much emphasis was at one stage placed on it as the final word in school quality, while I was also concerned that the weighting given to particular qualifications in a Government formula could skew CVA results ( a concern I have with the remaining value-added measures; see below). In any case, as far as I can see CVA now no longer features in league table data that parents can find routinely on the DfE's website on each school. Instead, we have gone back to another, unadjusted, value added measure. What does this tell us? 2. The Government's current (non-contextual) value-added data seem to produce “winning” value-added schools which are very heavily dependent on non-GCSE qualifications for their “GCSE*” results. (*stands for “and equivalent”). I would issue a warning here: for those not familiar with the complex world of secondary league table/results calculations, what follows may sound somewhat confusing. Again, I ranked all secondary schools on the Government's current value added measure, which seeks to judge each pupil's performance across their “best” eight GCSEs and/or vocational equivalent exams, to compare those results to each pupil's test scores at KS2, and then to compute overall scores for each school by summing up each pupil's results. Importantly, non-GCSE equivalent qualifications used in this measure can still count as “worth” multiple GCSEs for league table purposes. (Note two). For the top 50 schools on this measure, the average number of all qualifications obtained by each of their pupils was 14, where a qualification could mean one GCSE or another course which is counted as worth several GCSEs for the tables' purposes. Yet the average number of entries per pupil within GCSEs only was only seven for these schools, suggesting that non-GCSEs accounted for a large proportion of their scores. For some schools at or near the top of the VA rankings, this gap between the number of entries in GCSEs or equivalents or GCSEs alone is extraordinary. For example, at Skegness Academy in Lincolnshire, a non-selective school in a town with a grammar school which is ranked second on value-added in England with a score of 1,076 against a national average of 1,000, the total number of qualifications entered per pupil stands at 12. Remove the non-GCSEs, and it's only 2.4. In other words, pupils here were entered for only 2.4 GCSEs (I guess, then, just English and maths for most of them), with the rest being made up of non-GCSE qualifications. At another school in the top 10 for value added, Barnfield West Academy in Luton, there was an even greater gap, with the tables showing pupils entered for a staggering 15.4 qualifications each overall, but only 4.3 each when non-GCSEs were excluded. This, I say in passing, can make for very confusing headline indicators on such schools. The central government measure of secondary school performance is the proportion of pupils gaining five or more GCSEs at A*-C, or vocational equivalent, including English and maths. Journalists and the public often abbreviate this to say “five or more GCSEs at A*-C including English and maths”, but to do so in these cases would be very misleading: in these two schools, pupils on average were not even entered for five GCSEs. Even Ofsted inspectors appear not to be seeing – or presenting for readers of Ofsted reports – the full picture. I looked up the latest report on Skegness Academy, published last autumn (See the latest report listed here: http://bit.ly/J6lvny). This said: “All year 11 students gained five GCSEs at C or above.” I found this puzzling, given that the average number of GCSEs entered seemed to be only 2.4. In fact, the tables show that this relates to the numbers here achieving five or more GCSEs at C or above or vocational equivalent. The figure doing so in GCSEs only, including English and maths, was only one per cent. Hmm: quite a difference there. Based on the figures in the league tables, then, the statement in this Ofsted report is untrue, since most pupils at this school did not leave year 11 with five GCSEs. It only makes sense if the phrase “or vocational equivalent” is added. Nowhere in this inspection report does it mention that on average pupils were entered here for well under five GCSEs. In fact, the inspector simply concludes: “The academy has made outstanding progress towards raising standards.” This gap between the numbers of qualifications counted overall and achieved only through GCSEs seems to decline slightly for schools lower down the value-added rankings, suggesting to me that non-GCSEs help schools do well on this VA measure. 3. As the above analysis suggests, some schools – with academies heavily represented – are not actually entering pupils for as many as five GCSEs, even though the five GCSEs at A*-C including English and maths – or equivalent- has been the focal point of league tables and school improvement efforts since 2006. In fact, 138 schools, or roughly one in every 22 secondaries, had their pupils entered for fewer than five GCSEs on average last year. Skegness Academy had the lowest proportion of entries in GCSEs alone, at 2.4 per pupil, while academies overall had 26 of the lowest 50 schools in terms of average numbers of GCSEs entered: all of these 50, and all of the 26 academies, had pupils entered for four GCSEs or fewer on average. (By contrast, at the other end of these tables, a handful of mainly grammar schools seem to have entered pupils for 13 or more GCSEs – actual GCSEs – on average, which seems a huge number.) It might seem harsh to be focusing on this one school, Skegness Academy – which other Government figures discussed below suggest has a very low entry profile in terms of the prior achievements of its pupils, and which is a non-selective school in a town which also has a high-achieving grammar - or on academies more generally in these cases, given that these schools will often have very challenging intakes. However, the point is that the debate in England has been around measuring the proportion of pupils achieving five or more good GCSEs, including in English and maths, with the possible use of “equivalent”, less well-known, qualifications seemingly only mentioned in the small print. The fact that some schools are not even entering many of their pupils for five GCSEs should at least be acknowledged and debated. Sometimes, also, to put it mildly there is a sense of the Government making more allowances for the challenges facing schools if they happen to come under the banner marked “academy”, which has long seemed to me unfair on other schools. In any case, it is hard to see how a government which has argued against the over-valuation of non-GCSEs in league tables, and yet sees academies as the way forward for all schools, has not found itself able to comment on or analyse these academy figures. 4. Schools listed as “comprehensive” in these tables can have intakes which are skewed towards one end or the other of the prior achievement profile, at least as measured by the relatively crude data on view here. Again, at first glance this might be another one to file under “that's not really very surprising”. But I think this does merit a bit of extra analysis, especially as I think some of the schools towards the top end of the list of comprehensives admitting mainly pupils with high prior achievement - as measured by Sats results – operate “fair banding” admissions systems. These are supposed to ensure that schools have a broadly comprehensive intake by ability. OK, so this measure is fairly simple. Indeed, perhaps too simple (Note three), but I'll go on. For each secondary school, the Government now classes each GCSE pupil by the test results they gained at key stage two. Each pupil is then placed in a category: either “high”, “middle” or “low”. Now “high” means they scored level five in their KS2 Sats; “middle” means they scored level four; and “low” means below level four. I must confess, I'm not sure at the moment how this is computed given that there are three subjects and a pupil could be at different levels in different subjects, but let's leave that aside for the moment. Now four schools, though listed as comprehensives in these tables, had none of these “low” prior achievement pupils. Four of the 10 comprehensives with the lowest number of these “low” Sats achievers are academies which were set up under Labour (Note four). This illustrates the fact that while Labour's academies programme was rightly seen mainly to have been targeted at secondary schools in disadvantaged areas with low exam results, there were exceptions. For example, the tables show that at Colston's Girls' School, in Bristol, a former selective independent school which converted to academy status under Labour in 2008, there were no 2011 GCSE pupils who were classed as low prior attainers, while 61 per cent had high prior attainment. The Priory LSST Academy, which also converted to academy status under Labour, had one per cent low prior attainers and 70 per cent high – figures which are in line with a handful of the least selective grammar schools in England – while Kingshurst Academy in Solihull, a former City Technology College which converted to academy status under Labour, had one per cent low and 54 per cent high prior attainers. The prior attainment profiles of present and former City Technology Colleges were particularly interesting, I thought. (And I note now that the Local Schools Network also had a discussion about this a while back; see comments under this piece: http://bit.ly/y2ggeU) Set up under the Conservatives in the late 80s and early 90s, as far as I am aware these have operated banding systems, designed to ensure comprehensive intakes. But these figures suggest that “comprehensive” might be stretching things, in terms of prior ability as measured, admittedly crudely, in this way. Aside from Kingshurst, the CTCs or former CTCs of Thomas Telford School, in Telford; Brooke Weston CTC, in Corby, Northamptonshire; Dixons City Academy, in Bradford; Harris City Academy Crystal Palace, in south London; the BRIT School, in Croydon, south London; Emmanuel College, in Gateshead; and Haberdasher's Aske's Hatcham College in New Cross, south London all admit six per cent or fewer low prior attainers, and in all cases at least 46 per cent high attainers. If they are still operating banding systems designed to produce a comprehensive intake, how is this possible, I wonder? Ok, well that's it for now. I reserve the right to come back to you with more league table meanderings, possibly more in relation to the primary data if I have the time - and strength - over the coming weeks. But we shall see. Finally…what is to be learnt from all of this? Well, as ever, the message should be: treat league table data very cautiously indeed. It is good that it is possible, if you have the time and patience, to skim beneath the surface of the published headline stats. But the alternative pictures that can sometimes be painted from those generally depicted by the tables and, importantly, ministers and inspectors as they interpret them, can be disturbing. Yet we still skew our schools system overwhelmingly towards maximising performance on indicators whose interpretation can change dramatically as extra data emerges, or as complicated results formulae change. It's the wrong way to go. - Findings in this piece are based on league table information which can be accessed from here: http://bit.ly/vmCOQo Note one: The Government defines above average as “above the median” of school progress measures: ie if you rank all schools on the proportion of their pupils achieving this progress measure, this is the proportion of pupils doing so in the middle-ranked school. Note two: The Government is going to scrap this system so that no non-GCSE can count for more than one GCSE in the tables, but has yet to do so. Note three: this measure is criticised here http://bit.ly/Jwpjhr Note four: We should be cautious about including one of these four academies on this list: Steiner Academy Hereford, which is listed as having zero low prior attaining pupils, had only a tiny number of pupils with any prior results at KS2 at all, so very few “prior attainers” in any category.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=545Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:22:34 GMT20120418102234Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:22:34 GMT20120418102234Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:24:23 GMT2012041810102423Though the image of Michael Gove stroking a white cat and cackling "Mwah-ha-ha!" is a superficially attractive one for story-hungry journalists and conference delegates, I don't subscribe to the general Easter view of him as some real-life Dr Evil. Most disliked education secretary in living memory? In my experience they all are at the time (with the possible exception of Estelle Morris) especially in the Easter conference season. But I do think the implications of his reforms are now becoming clear. In a couple of years he's set in motion enough individual and apparently unconnected changes to the education system to perhaps completely transform the English system by the end of this Parliament. And as the Guardian has pointed out in its leader column, the Education Secretary was fly enough to get his legislation through Parliament and onto the statute books without the sort of fights experienced during the NHS legislation. So let's put together a little list of what's happened or is on its way: academy schools (which will form the majority of secondary schools by September); Free Schools popping up, often in places where there are already surplus places; fast-track capability procedures; more detailed league tables; less support from many effectively-emasculated local authorities; effective privatisation of many back-office and school improvement services; the expansion of grammar schools as "satellites"; no compulsory NPQH; no-notice Ofsted inspections; a new funding regime which may force small schools into new unions; a new curriculum (shrouded in mystery, according to my colleague Warwick Mansell), de-modularised GCSEs; the Ebacc; diminished numbers of non-academic qualifications; A-Levels reformed in a way which suits the Russell Group universities; financial support for fewer 16+ students; and vastly-increased fees to attend university. And yes, I know this list is far from exhaustive: there's the new SEN criteria, changes to teacher training, discipline advice, and so much more. But the point is that even my basic list, taken as an educational whole, has the most enormous implications (good as well as bad, I'd hasten to add). And yet discussion of these changes has been and continues to be minimal, with talk of the ensuing bigger picture almost non-existent. Forecasting the future is notoriously difficult, but to take just one example, the changes to GCSE and A Level look likely to create exams which will be harder to pass. The Government would no doubt argue that these exams need to be rigorous for us to compete around the world, and that other changes it is making will enable pupils to pass such exams -- but how is this actually going to work? At the moment the implications are only just becoming clear to the providers -- schools, exam boards, governing bodies, unions. For now, Daily Mail-reading parents will probably applaud the educational reforms in general terms -- until it affects their own children. But what then? How are parents going to react (particularly those whose children will be in the first cohort of the new system) when their children get fewer or worse exam passes than older siblings? As I asked last week, how will employers relate "new" GCSE and A Level grades compared with "old" ones? Will anything be there to mark the academic achievement of children who would struggle under the new system, but for whom many vocational qualifications have been removed? Jobs requiring few or no qualifications have vanished as a result of globalisation, let's not forget. I guess the Government's free market argument is that fewer pupils will fail, as the new generation of free and academy schools will get better results for their pupils, or themselves lose out to rivals. But in the immediate aftermath of exam changes, what would happen to schools which initially drop down the league tables as a result, perhaps even under the GCSE floor targets? Suppose they are already academies: what happens to those when they fall below the floor and are given "notice to improve" by Sir Michael Wilshaw's crack troops? Is that when academy chains become the new local authorities, and bring in their breadth of experience and broader funding to help the schools for whom the goalposts have moved once too often? And in this brave new world, how is good practice to be shared? As Dr Sue Robinson told me a few weeks ago, the current model of a self-improving school system relies on the free-flow of information -- and willing people -- between schools, a situation made increasingly less likely as the number of self-standing and chain-owned academies increases. And what's going to happen to primary schools, which in the main are not becoming academies but may find LA services dwindling in some areas? I think my major concern is that the system is being atomised, which is why it is hard to predict where all these changes are going to lead us. The only individual or organisation with a finger in all these newly-separate educational pies is the Education Secretary and the DfE: any sort of collective responsibility or opinion is being written out of the picture. Take last week's announcement on A Levels, for instance: the ball is now largely in the court of 24 leading universities, though we are promised that parents, teachers and employers will be consulted. I emphasise that I am arguing from a point of strict neutrality here: not that the changes are good or bad. It is simply that some of them (like exam reform) are so major that they deserve more and wider discussion, and as part of a bigger educational picture, rather than a series of cherry-picked solo announcements.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=544Thu, 12 Apr 2012 09:43:51 GMT20120412094351Thu, 12 Apr 2012 09:43:51 GMT20120412094351Thu, 12 Apr 2012 09:43:51 GMT201204120994351Are any readers of this blog aware of the detailed work which has been taking place with regard to the new national mathematics curriculum? Are you aware of the involvement in it by the now sadly late mathematics educator Richard Dunne? Well, if anyone here can answer either of these questions with a “yes”, you appear to be in a very select group. Finding out exactly what is going on with England's national curriculum review, and with the maths section in particular, is not a straightforward task. Information does seem to be dribbling out, but to select audiences, some of them paying money for the privilege, while, despite there being a few documents about the review on the government's curriculum website, to this observer excessive secrecy has generally seemed to be the order of the day since this review started. This, I have come to think, is shocking from a government supposedly committed to transparency. Ok, you can read an earlier blog by me here ( http://bit.ly/v2tpL1 )on this subject, but here I also offer a very brief story so far with the national curriculum review under the coalition. It was launched in January 2011 with a brief to follow the government's intention that “the national curriculum be slimmed down so that it properly reflects the body of essential knowledge which all children should learn [lovely phrasing] and does not absorb the overwhelming majority of teaching time in schools”. The review also had to consider whether the current national curriculum subjects – other than what ministers saw as an essential core of English, maths, science and PE – should remain within the statutory and detailed framework. All this was to be done to what looked like an exacting timetable: detailed draft programmes of study in those four central subjects were supposed to be produced by January this year, to be in schools by this September and to begin being taught by September 2013. In the autumn, it became clear that it was going to be tricky to hit this deadline (see that earlier blog: http://bit.ly/v2tpL1), and so, in December, ministers announced that the timetable was being put back, with those new programmes of study for the core subjects now not being taught in schools until September 2014. (Incidentally, this is likely to be the latest start possible before a likely next general election). The official line from the DfE has been that the delay was to allow for more consideration of what was an undoubtedly complex and radical overarching report on the overall structure of the curriculum, produced by four very experienced academic members of the DfE's “expert group” on the subject. There is merit in this point of view, and generally the concept of not rushing matters seems to have gone down well with many teachers and subject groups. But I had also heard rumours of behind-the-scenes disagreements at the DfE over the content of some of the recommended programmes of study in the core subjects, as devised last year. And here the position gets more murky. It seems as if specific groups of invited experts were tasked with working on the detail of the programmes of study in core subjects. But when I asked the DfE last autumn for the details as to who was on these groups, I got no detailed answer. I have recently heard that, in maths, a panel was set up which was well on the way to producing a detailed draft programme of study for the subject as of last August, but which seems to have been stopped in its tracks, presumably after ministers decided it did not fit their plans. Richard Dunne, a maths consultant who appeared in a Channel 4 “Dispatches” documentary about maths standards in 2010, appears to have been given a key role in a re-write of the maths curriculum last autumn. Indeed, Carol Vorderman, the TV presenter who presided over a review of maths for the Conservative party which reported last year and of which Mr Dunne was also a part, told a Westminster Education Forum conference in February that “Richard Dunne…is now working on the national curriculum review”. But what exactly was he doing? And what is the status of the drafts now? There appear to be no answers from the DfE. I understand that Richard Dunne might have been given a - if not the - leading task in formulating the detail of the programme of study, although, again, this has not been confirmed by the department. A very sad light was cast on all of this after Mr Dunne died suddenly earlier this month, a few days after Ms Vorderman had mentioned his work briefly at the conference. But the whole curriculum development situation is odd. If any individual has had a central role in the drawing up of a national curriculum which will structure what millions of children across England are taught, this should be out in the open. If Mr Dunne's was only one position on a panel carrying out detailed work, who else was on the panel? We don't know. Similarly, I know of some detailed programme of study work which has gone on in English, but again, we don't know officially who has been doing it, or even, on the record, of its existence. The secrecy simply invites suspicion that ministers have been pushing a particular, politicised(Note 1), agenda without being open with the public and the profession about it. Richard Dunne appears to have been anything but a classic “education establishment” maths figure – for example, he seems to have had strong views that maths should be taught conceptually first, with “real life” examples used only after these concepts had been firmly mastered by pupils (see http://bit.ly/HMCijv) . He seems also to have worked with Ruth Miskin, the phonics expert who is also very close to this government. (Note 2). I also understand that Mr Dunne, author of the Maths Makes Sense teaching scheme from Oxford University Press, was a very committed and conscientious maths educator, who was passionate about his subject. There was apparently a memorial service for him in Westminster last month, attended by the schools minister Nick Gibb, which attracted many teachers who had greatly appreciated his work in their classrooms as a consultant over the years. One source said he had got “fantastic” responses from pupils. As I've written before, I don't feel qualified to judge as to which of any approach to teaching mathematics is best. But the point is that the identities and views of people shaping this review at a detailed level should be out in the open. There is much more to be said about the current state of the national curriculum review. Officially, there has been very little information on it since the turn of the year. In December, announcing the year's delay, Michael Gove said that programmes of study in all national curriculum subjects would not now be in schools until September 2013, for first teaching in September 2014, and that a detailed timetable for the rest of the review would be available in the new year. In February, the only official update I can find from the DfE on the issue simply re-iterated the broad timelines as to when the new curriculum was being introduced, with no more “detailed timetable” on the development process. Yet quite a lot of information has been provided by officials to attendees at a series of conferences staged in the last few weeks by the Westminster Education Forum. Those attending these events pay to do so, and transcripts of speeches have been produced, although these are only in draft form unchecked by the speakers and are not meant for wide circulation. At a Westminster Education Forum meeting on March 22nd, Marc Cavey, one of six assistant directors of the national curriculum review at the DfE, told attendees that he expected a ministerial announcement on how the government was to respond to the national curriculum's expert group report by early summer. He said: “We are expecting that ministers will announce proposals by the summer. Sometimes in the civil service these timelines can mean different things, but in this case I genuinely think that there will be announcements by the end of May.” He said that the consultation launched as part of the review, and which received more than 6,000 responses, recorded little desire to “drop” any national curriculum subjects; and that more than half of respondents supported the retention of citizenship – the least “popular” subject - in the national curriculum. He also offered some useful charts (see link at the bottom of this blog) setting out how the structure of the new curriculum, as proposed by the expert group, differed from the old one, with the key difference being that languages; design and technology; geography; history; and 'the arts' were recommended to be made compulsory for all pupils to the end of key stage four. (These are, however, only recommendations at this stage, with that ministerial reaction the key as to whether or not they, or any other advice given by the expert group, will be accepted). At the February 21st Westminster Education Forum meeting on the maths curriculum, at which Carol Vorderman also spoke, Stefano Pozzi, another of the six assistant directors at the DfE, said that any national curriculum changes would not necessarily take place in a “big bang”, ie all year groups at once. Instead, it might be that it was introduced first for some year groups, and then in subsequent years for others. He said that part of the reason for the longer launch process for the first four subjects was to ensure that the curriculum changes dovetailed with reforms being introduced to GCSEs, which include a reduction in the emphasis on modular exams. Mr Pozzi then emphasised that an aim of the review was to stress the importance of deep conceptual understanding in maths. He said there needed to be a “continued restatement of the fact that children really don't seem to have well-grounded mathematical concepts that then allow them to solve unfamiliar problems – and that doesn't necessarily mean very complex problems, but just unfamiliar ones.” To his credit – and I do not recall hearing this from a civil servant before - Mr Pozzi then seems to have acknowledged that teaching towards high stakes tests may have been a factor in the above. He said: “And finally a real sense that the national curriculum or indeed the assessment arrangements around it have possibly worked against ensuring that children have a deep understanding in these things because there is pressure to ensure that children can, in some sense, answer the kind of questions that one gets in Key Stage 2 tests.” (Note 3) Incidentally, Carol Vorderman, in her own presentation to the forum, said she was worried about the impact of “league tables”. Mr Pozzi also set out what was “probably the most radical” of the expert group's proposals on the curriculum: the ending of national curriculum levels. He said there were four reasons for this: the levels system emphasised differentiating between pupils [ie labelling pupils as at a particular level when, the review group believes, there should be high expectations for all]; the levels system implied a precision about where a child has got to with their learning which is false [the levels system was never designed to be accurate enough to provide sub-level judgements on each pupil]; it overemphasised pupils moving on to the next topic rather than allowing them the time to build depth of understanding [ie pace of progress]; and it was not well understood by parents. All of the above may seem sensible, even if changing the levels system would be challenging. But Mr Pozzi then ventured into what I guess would be more controversial terrain for many teachers. I may be reading this incorrectly, but he seemed to be suggesting that the levels system might also be deficient because it didn't offer a formal “pass/fail” judgement at the end of key stage two for pupils, although he didn't use exactly that terminology. He said only: “So if your child really does reach level three and they've done really well in reaching [it] at the end of key stage two, to what extent do teachers have honest conversations with parents and indeed secondary teachers…about the fact that the child hasn't met the national standard?” He then questioned whether “we should do something about that”. Finally, he said that Michael Gove had set a “new goal” that, within a decade, most post-16 students should be studying mathematics. “Now that isn't a target'” said Mr Pozzi. “It's a 'he thinks we should' and we are working with him and [with] other ministers to define what this might mean more precisely.” So that's an awful lot of information, actually. It is disappointing that much of the detail of ministerial and civil servant thinking seems only available to people willing to pay to attend these conferences. Information of this kind from public servants, who are funded by taxpayers, should be made public. While, as I've written before, Tim Oates, who headed the expert group, has toured the country talking about the review, which is good, I also understand that the latest round of consultation on the findings of the expert group review has been in front of invited audiences rather than being made open to a wider public. One source, with past links to the now defunct Qualifications and Curriculum Authority whose curriculum development role has now moved in-house to the DfE, put it to me like this: “Many of us are concerned with transparency in the [current] review process. QCA was far from perfect but it knew how to develop and review the curriculum in a way that ensured a very wide range of people were involved.” Another source said he thought the Government had done the sensible thing and postponed the first phase of the review, that the civil servants were doing a competent job in managing the review and that first drafts of programmes of study in maths would be available very imminently. We shall see. A third source reported hearing that : “The DfE is struggling because whereas in the past they had curriculum experts at the QCA and subject experts within the DFE, now civil servants try to stitch together the whims of various experts.” Don't be mistaken: curriculum reform has always been fraught with controversy and behind-the-scenes disagreements. The QCA itself faced a lot of contention among the subject teacher community a few years back, after dispensing with subject expert officers in favour of cross curricular officials. But in my view, there has to be more openness than this with regard to a reform of this significance. All citizens should be seen as having a stake in the national curriculum, with detailed information on the latest developments and thinking provided openly by the government, and certainly free of charge. Full disclosure, not secrecy, should be the order of the day. - I have managed to find one of the presentations described above available publicly on the internet, though it seems not to have been flagged up by the DfE. Marc Cavey's presentation “The future shape of the national curriculum…beyond the core subjects” – which is a really useful short document, I think – is available at the moment here: http://bit.ly/H42KXc Note 1: A particularly controversial proposal within the expert group's report has been the suggestion that the expectations of what children should be expected to know as part of the national curriculum might be set out – for maths but not for other subjects – on a year-by-year basis. For other subjects, expectations of what is to be taught are recommended to be stipulated in two-year blocks. No explicit reason for the differing approach taken in maths was given in the expert report, and the independent Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education, in a formal response (http://bit.ly/HbFmXn) said that this was needlessly limiting schools' room for manoeuvre and “would be counter to the professional advice of the community and would go against the stated principles of evidence-based policy making”. Again, it is unclear what has driven this: there is some suspicion that ministers, influential within the review process, have wanted to specify the development of key concepts such as long division in specific years, despite widespread opposition from maths educators, although one source said it was more about not wanting to trust teachers to set their own priorities for pupils over a longer period than a year, while the official line from the expert group itself seems to be that “high performing” parts of the world such as Singapore and Hong Kong set out yearly expectations for what pupils should be taught in maths. Note 2: Ruth Miskin is listed on the Companies House website as having been a director of a company called Richard Dunne Maths Ltd. Note 3: This contrasts with the official one-time stance of the DfE's predecessor departments, with the Department for Children, Schools and Families once baldly telling the House of Commons schools select committee that the benefits of its national assessment system had been “immense”.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=543Thu, 05 Apr 2012 10:36:56 GMT20120405103656Thu, 05 Apr 2012 10:36:56 GMT20120405103656Thu, 05 Apr 2012 10:39:21 GMT2012040510103921It's been clear for months that something was going to happen about A Levels, to the extent that this factor formed part of the conversations in our household about what our daughter should study post-GCSE. Her choice was unusually wide, since one of our local sixth-form colleges does the International Baccalaureate, and after a lot of thought and asking of questions (and talking to hugely enthusiastic teachers and students), that was what she chose. While I still have a few concerns about the offers some university admissions tutors might make on the IB compared with A Level, at least her qualification of choice is removed from the turmoil which may be about to be inflicted on our "gold standard" exam. Because for those students taking it either side of any reconstruction, there are inevitably going to be problems. The clear implication of the documentation on the Ofqual website is that the academics and ministers suggesting change would like to see a return to a more linear and "synoptic" exam structure which would, I assume, be more akin to the old two-year, plenty-of-reading-time-in-year-one-and-big-exams-at-the-end qualification. It's also notable that it is the academics from the universities demanding higher exam scores from applicants who are suggesting this change, rather than those from institutions further down the food chain or employers, who simply want some "good" A-levels, perhaps in maths and sciences, to demonstrate that their would-be staff members have "brains". Well, so far so good. There have been concerns over "grade inflation" for years (since before the introduction of the current A Level, if I recall correctly) and it is sensible to re-evaluate things every so often. But the lack of detail we currently have about what's going on here is, I think, worrying for what is becoming our main school-leaving exam. The Education Secretary is talking about Russell Group universities working with the awarding bodies to have a very real input into exam content and style. Does this mean that different universities might be working with different awarding bodies -- and if so, that taking an A Level in, say, History with input from York University might limit your choice of institutions which would accept you for a degree? If different awarding bodies' examinations are then felt to be slightly easier or harder (as has been the case even when universities ran the exam boards, when I took O and A Levels) then what do schools do? Do they opt for the exam which they feel pupils may pass more easily, thus improving their league table position -- or do they go for the one which may enable pupils to apply to Oxbridge and some of the Russell group with more expectation of success? Which option counts higher on the league tables? Which is better for more of your students? Which do you choose? On the face of it, we seem to be talking about harder A Levels. That's fine -- but needs a proper discussion. The official school leaving age has risen and A-Level is now the mass academic qualification of choice for students staying on beyond GCSE. Splitting it in to As and A2 was a deliberate strategy, to allow many students to get an AS and others to get a higher-level qualification which might have been impossible with a final exam structure. So if this is to stop, what happens to students for whom the new A Level may be just out of reach? Do we want numbers of young people to try, fail, and end up without qualifications at all? Is the plan to create something new for them, or play up the AS again? Is there a plan, or is the market going to decide? And finally -- what will employers and universities make of A Level scores taken before and after the change? Will there be a clear table of equivalences if the new exam turns out to be much harder than the old? Will this include the likelihood that the exams in different subjects will be changed at different times (STEM subjects are apparently the priority) Extra allowances for those taken in the first couple of years of the new regime, before it's all settled down? What's lacking in all this at present is any form of proper public debate or discussion. A Levels have become a mass exam, to which students have increasingly aspired. If that's to change, schools, employers, parents and all universities -- not just the charmed few -- need to be in on the discussion. Further consultation is promised, but for a change of this potential magnitude, this needs to be seriously and properly done -- and probably not at the speed required to get the first students on their new courses by 2014 as per the current suggestion. The Education Secretary's letter to Ofqual is intended to be read as the Government removing politics from the A Level exam, instead letting the best academics choose what's best for everyone. My concern is that the universities are deciding what's best for a relatively small group of students (Miss Brodie's creme de la creme, you could say) rather than the whole cohort. And that makes this a deeply political decision.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=542Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:59:29 GMT20120404155929Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:59:29 GMT20120404155929Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:59:49 GMT201204041535949This has been a month where the focus has been on behaviour, particularly in terms of exclusions and alternative provision. We have had Charlie Taylor, the government's behaviour guru, producing a report on alternative provision, while Maggie Atkinson, the Children's Commissioner, delivered her report on exclusions. Improving Alternative Provision, Charlie Taylor, The Government's Expert Adviser on....http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/special-needs-blog/?blogpost=541Tue, 03 Apr 2012 11:32:42 GMT20120403113242Tue, 03 Apr 2012 11:32:42 GMT20120403113242Tue, 03 Apr 2012 11:47:30 GMT2012040311114730Various reports which have landed in my inbox this week have got me thinking, again, about the power of research... and how woefully underused it is when it comes to education policy and implementation. Would you be surprised if I told you that a longitudinal study has just found good early years provision, having educated parents (especially mothers), being in a good school and having regular homework at KS3 all make significant differences to how well pupils are doing at the age of 14? Thought not. And were we surprised by the report into the riots which found those taking part were often worse-educated or had chaotic home lives? No, thought not either. But that doesn't make them a waste of time, does it? We should know, as the Effective Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education Project's latest findings tell us, that social class has a strong influence on academic success but that that children can do better by a whole national curriculum level if they had parents who actively helped their learning before they started school. We should know (rather than assume) that spending two or three hours a week on homework is shown to help pupils do better in English, maths and science, and behave better. And we should know that a high-quality pre-school and the academic effectiveness of the primary school are both visible in children's schooling at the age of 14. Because if we have evidence that these things are true, then policymakers and to a lesser extent schools can build on the findings to improve chances for all children. For instance, if we know that parenting is so important, then the government can justify spending money on parenting programmes (as it has announced it is doing in three pilot schemes this week), But will either of these documents be built on in any significant way to improve what happens to children in our education system, or used in any more than a cherry-picking sense by politicians who want a bit of support for already-formulated policies? It's vital that we commission and pay attention to this sort of research, in order to prove that our suppositions about education are correct. Otherwise, we're building policy on knee-jerk reactions, supposition, and personal experience. You wouldn't want to be treated by a health system which worked on this basis now, would you? Interestingly, one of the Government's favourite sectors, technology, brought out a report this week stressing the major role of evidence in developing teaching and learning in IT, and making a direct comparison with medical research. It went on to suggest the creation of an "information hub" to help guide researchers on good practice and "build banks of trusted research-based evidence to assist practitioners." Evidence-Based Policy Development In Learning Technology also pointed out that we also need the right kind of research -- practical, evidence-based, and "future-proofed, not future proffed," Specialist, yes, but not a million miles away from the suggestion made by shadow education secretary Stephen Twigg a few weeks ago about establishing a "clearing house" to spread the most relevant research and good practice. Last week, I was lucky enough to talk to the chap who helped put together one of the world's most successful education systems, Professor Ben Levin. We've got lots of research telling us how to improve schools, he says. So why don't we do it? Easier not to, he said. People like to carry on doing things the way they always have, he said, adding that we all know we should take exercise but how many of us actually do? So perhaps this week's research didn't tell us anything we didn't already know. But it should encourage us all to make sure we're doing things right -- and to keep on asking those questions. Even if the answers do sometimes seem to be statements of the obvious.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=540Thu, 29 Mar 2012 16:59:03 GMT20120329165903Thu, 29 Mar 2012 16:59:03 GMT20120329165903Thu, 29 Mar 2012 16:59:03 GMT201203291645903Ten days ago, the Times Educational Supplement published a remarkable exclusive (http://bit.ly/xDdJRT) documenting how two “City financiers” are behind an initiative which they hope will lead to their privately-run education group taking over one in 10 schools in England. Yes, you read that right: this start-up organisation has plans to operate 2,000 schools, on a structure which seems to have similarities with that used in private business: the often-quoted “John Lewis model” of profit-sharing among staff was given prominence in the report. Reading this piece, it seemed to me that the group's plans could be seen as the privatisation of those schools which are operated in the way it sets out. Yet the Government argues that there is no possibility of England's schools being privatised. I wanted to analyse here whether this would be privatisation, and then to discuss the implications, which I think would be manifold and profound. OK, so here are the basics of the story, as set out in the paper. The group, Clarendon Academies, has been set up by those two financiers – Nigel a Brassard, “an investment banker”, and Edwin Richards, “a private equity expert” – with an advisory group of governors chaired by the former leading light of the independent schools sector, Martin Stephen, with the long-term target of running those 2,000 schools, across both the primary and secondary sectors. (Note 1) By running this number of schools, it would hope to generate enough “financial surpluses” (presumably through economies of scale) to both “plough back into education” and to offer as bonuses to staff. The article said the cash for those two elements would be split evenly. The piece says nothing about whether those behind the group would be contributing any funding themselves; organisations running academies are overwhelmingly funded by the taxpayer. Staff would be considered part-owners of the business, and could be paid up to 14 per cent of their salaries as a bonus every year. Currently, the government rules out anyone profiting directly from the running of any state-funded school, including academies. However, the group seems to have found a way around this: a not-for-profit charity would sponsor (ie run) its academies, but a separate business would be established to “provide educational services, including all teaching staff”. “It has already been agreed that the sponsor will buy its services from the business,” said the TES piece. Clarendon would not be passing money into the hands of shareholders, but “longer term, their plans include performance bonuses to the directors if educational results improve”. Mr a Brassard is quoted as saying: “If there is a return to me, it will be highly linked to performance and would be because of a step-change in education in this country.” Finally, the idea behind the formation of the group, which seems backed up by what it says on its website, is that it wants to combine the best of the state and independent sectors in this country. Clarendon had been in “lengthy discussions” with the Department for Education over its plans, which it itself had been working on over the last four years, said the TES piece. The first question to ask about all of this is whether it does amount to privatisation. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Sam Freedman, Michael Gove's education adviser, was soon on the case here, appearing on twitter the day the story broke to say that the group would not be taking on anything like this number of schools, and questioning the accuracy of the 2,000 figure. That number is not quoted on Clarendon's website, but David Marley, the article's author, tweeted to say that this is what he had been told in an interview with Clarendon directors to discuss the plans. (Mr Freedman said on twitter on Sunday that “nothing has been approved” officially in terms of the group's plans.) It would seem to me that the firm's profit-sharing and efficiency maximising proposals, if they are based on the idea of generating economies of scale, might only work to their full extent given large numbers of schools, but let's leave the numbers aside for the moment. Regardless of the scale of this, does it amount to privatisation? I think it must do, if a key element of privatisation – about which elements within the coalition are clearly nervous, in terms of how it would be viewed by voters – is that it allows owners or directors of companies to take profits out of the running of state-funded schools. In other words, a portion of your and my taxes will be diverted from the schools run by this group into the pockets of those managing profit-making firms. Academies run by this group and buying services from a company managed by these directors in this way would clearly, it seems to me from this piece, allow that to happen. To spell it out, it seems from this article that such profits would be generated by cutting overheads, with a proportion of the savings then passed on to staff including, one would assume, directors. It also seems that directors could be incentivised by “performance related” bonuses. (The obvious vehicle for that would be test results, of which more later.) I must admit, I was a bit puzzled by the idea in the article that “it has already been agreed that [individual academies, through the sponsor] will buy its services from the [profit-making] business” since there has been some suggestion in the past that this kind of cosy arrangement between academy sponsors and related companies was banned. (Note 2) Notwithstanding this, it seems to me there would be a good case that this would be privatisation by the back door. And what is wrong with privatisation, many will ask. I have to say, here, that I have no dogmatic view: private firms offering services to education contribute to the public good in employing people. People working in private organisations providing education services will often also be serving the public interest. Finally, it has been pointed out to me that it is questionable whether any school has ever been run wholly in the public sector, as private companies have always provided materials going back to the days of slate and chalk. That said, each further incursion of the private sector into public services should be judged on the detail of its possible merits and disadvantages. And, in relation to this project, and greater private involvement in the running of state schools more generally, there are reasons for misgivings. The obvious point to make about private profits being made in the running of taxpayer-funded schools is that by definition a certain amount of money is being taken out of the education system to fund those “profits”. In this case, private individuals – staff including teachers and presumably also including directors – will gain money from efficiency savings in the running of these schools. The money they receive, out of that overall taxpayer pot, will not then be reinvested in education (only a proportion of the profits will). The argument that will come back against that is that without the involvement of an organisation such as Clarendon– ie if these schools had remained conventionally run in the state sector under the auspices of local authorities/individual school governing bodies – then these savings to the public purse would not have been generated. In other words, its supporters would argue, the amount taken out of the system to pay the profits is easily a price worth paying in terms of the overall benefits to the service that accrue. That is to say: it is fair enough to hand a proportion of the benefit of these savings to people involved in the organisation which has found them. However, who is to say that a public sector organisation running schools on this scale – if the public actually thought it was a good idea to run it at this scale, of which more later – would not have found such savings – perhaps spurred by the austerity of the time - itself? If it could do so, then money going away from education in this way would have been wasted, since savings could have been found by a public organisation and then ploughed back towards services for pupils. Leaving that debate aside for the moment, there is another objection. It seems there is a fairly obvious loophole here: what is to stop an organisation simply driving down costs, irrespective of the impact on the quality of the educational experience provided for pupils, with the aim of providing a proportion of that saving to its staff, including, one would expect, its directors? While a public service ethos would suggest this should not happen, a profit-making mentality might allow it to. So how is this particular worry to be guarded against? I guess the firm would say that it would have built-in incentives not to do this: its academic (test) results might suffer if it cut quality (of which more later), and also that it will hardly win more “business” from future schools by prioritising cutting costs over the quality of the service it provides. But there does seem to be a potential issue here about the collision of private interest – the desire of people working for this firm, and those in schools that might become a part of this group, to achieve bonuses – and the public interest of having the best quality service. It is not entirely clear to me, if this model were to take off, how that public interest would be safeguarded. By the way, I have not come across this idea of “profit-sharing” in the independent schools sector in this country, either. The non-profit-making charitable trusts which run most well-known public schools, for example, should be ploughing any savings from “efficiencies” back either into improving facilities for pupils or into keeping their fees down. I'm not sure how fee-paying parents – the equivalent of taxpayers in the state sector – would feel about a proportion of income generated from cost savings going into staff pockets, but I guess someone might know whether there have been examples. Another way of looking at this could be that setting the ideal size of this group of schools at 2,000 might make sense from a private perspective, in that the scheme's backers hope that it would generate economies of scale which could then be passed on to staff in profits. But what would be the public interest? Again, a public interest case could, I guess, be made in that this would generate savings for the taxpayer, too. But it would surely come with downsides: some people would say this is too large a number for support to schools to be individually tailored to need. The very notion of cutting costs would mean some standardisation of service across a very large organisation. OK, some would debate that - indeed, I wonder how large the (very large) Inner London Education Authority once was - but my point is that this private organisation would have an interest in pushing the debate in a particular way, since individuals would have an incentive to cut costs. Perhaps a deeper point is that private interests seem to be able to come to the fore without any sense that this should be subject to public scrutiny, officially and on the record, rather than in private negotiations with ministers. Coming back to Sam Freedman's tweets, on Sunday he told me and others on the social network that the 2,000 school plan “is not going to happen”. But he didn't come back to point to any official statement on this. As far as I know, it has not been discussed in Parliament. Where is the scope for official public scrutiny of these arrangements? It seems to me, as I've written before, ( http://bit.ly/sM3lzx ) that the rules of engagement for academies and their organisations in taxpayer-funded education are now being written on a piecemeal, case-by-case and almost wholly publicly undiscussed basis through individual academy funding agreements, with the Secretary of State seemingly the only arbiter of the public interest. This makes public debate complex and difficult, which may be the intention. How are these arrangements, which have huge implications on how our money is spent, being regulated? To those who might retort that regulation is a burden on business, I would suggest that that potential conflict between private gain and public good discussed above make the need for it very clear. And who is the guardian of the public interest, here? Is it anyone other than Mr Gove? What about Ofsted? Well, if schools run by Clarendon, for example, have test and exam results good enough to generate an “outstanding” verdict, Ofsted will now not be inspecting them in the future. Should it now be inspecting chains of academies, as suggested by the chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw, and should this include supervision of whether their financial arrangements are in the public interest? I wonder if this issue will find its way further into public debate. I need to bring this back to test/exam results now, since the debate around their use is a central unspoken issue behind that TES article, I think. The article said: “Longer term, [Clarendon's] plans include performance bonuses to the directors if educational results improve. 'If there's a return to me, it would be highly linked to performance and would be because of a step-change in education in this country,'said Mr a Brassard”. That looks to me as if it is about incentivising directors financially on the basis of schools' measurable “performance”. The obvious vehicle for that would be test results. (Note 3) It could be that teaching staff could be incentivised in the same way, of course. The TES piece says that teaching staff would be paid a base salary with a bonus, and would seem to suggest that that bonus would be generated from efficiency savings across the company. But the scope for an individual teacher to reduce costs in the organisation would be limited, I'm guessing. I can see a company such as this arguing that incentives should be tied to something over which a teacher has more (though I would argue, still limited) control: test results. Anyway, I think this is a model imported more-or-less wholesale from the financial sector. Test and exam results are akin to banks' profits. An individual banker who generates a certain amount of profit for his bank can argue powerfully for a share of that profit, and I think that that is what is being suggested as unproblematic here. A director who presides over an improvement in test or exam scores should be rewarded for the success of his or her organisation on this measure. Of course, bankers' incentives are hardly uncontroversial even within the financial sector: leaving aside the scale of some of them, claims that they promote risky, short-term behaviour by individuals have been much debated. But the use of results as incentives in this way, of course, carries specific dangers when we are talking about exam data being used to judge teachers and schools. First, there is the question of who should be seen as “owning” improved test results. This extends beyond whether teachers or managers should take responsibility for the rising grades, or which particular teachers should. There is the case of whether individuals should be rewarded when there is a national upward trend in results. For example, over the years 1995 to 2000 there was a dramatic rise in primary Sats scores. If a private organisation such as this had been operating at this time, and if its schools' results had risen in line with national averages, would its directors be entitled to bonuses? There is a case, I think, that they should not, since their schools were simply following a national trend. (Note 4) Again, one could imagine a seemingly unarguably fairer scheme – ie performance in excess of national averages – being created, but who would set the rules? The directors, presumably. Again, who would check that private interests are not to the fore over the allocation of public funds? Second, of course, there is the issue of teaching to the test. Do we want to incentivise company directors on the basis of test results because the public believes score maximisation is the overwhelming goal of education, or simply because test outcomes are easily measurable? Interestingly, Martin Stephen, the chair of Clarendon's advisory board, told me in 2007 that league tables are a “cancer on the face of education”. (Note 5) He said they were accentuating “tick box” teaching for results. (http://bit.ly/nw9msM) Performance pay for directors which was based on test results would, surely, incentivise exactly such behaviour. I wonder, also, if test results could be used as a kind of insurance policy by this organisation against claims that it was cutting costs to support services to these schools too harshly. The directors could say “we can't be doing any harm, as our test results are rising”. But again, this might reflect a narrowing of priorities towards only the maximisation of those test results. Clarendon also lists on its website that its “aim is to raise significantly standards for all age groups in the state sector in England to a level where education is believed to be a good in itself”. “Education as a good in itself” sounds fantastic to me. I'm not sure that can be captured, though, by measurable (presumably test and exam) outcomes linked to performance pay. Third, performance-related pay, though it sounds simple, does not have a great record in education. A Government scheme to reward school staff for their pupils' good Sats results was scrapped in 2003. (See this story: http://bit.ly/yoaIMB ). And while I don't think I'm going to have time to get into a debate about the merits of altruistic and self-interested motivation in teachers, it is fair to say that merit pay schemes on both sides of the Atlantic seem to have had a chequered record. (See http://bit.ly/p3BBG1 ). Those reported aims of Clarendon – to blend the best of the public and independent sectors - seem noble. But, to borrow, again, a phrase from the lawyer David Wolfe (see again my blog on academy law from last December: http://bit.ly/sM3lzx ) this whole business of the private sector taking a share of taxpayer funds to run state schools is a can of worms. Bearing that in mind, I predict that the issue of privatisation and state education is going to keep me busy as a journalist for years to come. Note 1: Clarendon's executive chairman (designate), Peter Martin, has been chief executive of Tribal Group, a business which carries out inspections for Ofsted. He also ran a private healthcare business for Tribal in 2004-7. Note 2: See this story I co-wrote in 2004 http://bit.ly/y04SyS about academies buying services from companies related to their sponsors, which quoted rules saying that “academies, like normal state schools, are expected to obtain at least three quotations before purchases of services”. This would suggest blanket/automatic arrangements with specific firms would be ruled out. Indeed, the Academies Financial Handbook, which provides guidance for academies on issues of purchasing among many others, says that academies should obtain at least three written quotations on any goods or services worth more than £1,000 but less than £10,000; to put any orders over £10,000 through a formal tendering process and that purchases over £93,738 “may fall under EU procurement rules which requires advertising in the Official Journal of the European Union”. (See http://bit.ly/lRsvwr paragraphs 614 and 615). Again, this would appear to rule out purchasing from one particular company on a blanket basis. Note 3: It is a shame that the otherwise excellent TES article does not pin this down a bit more, to be honest; it talks about “educational standards” improving without specifying, as I would guess would be the case, that it would be linked to test and exam performance. Note 4: It strikes me that this example might not be entirely academic. National test results improvements in the 1990s followed a pattern which has been experienced in other countries, in that after a new test is introduced, results rise as teachers become more familiar with it. A new national test is being introduced in England this year, in the form of the national phonics test for six-year-olds. Should organisations be rewarded if, as one would expect, results rise in future years? Note 5: I have increasingly come to believe this quotation is largely accurate, though I would replace “league tables” with “results pressures”, which would include Ofsted and top-down closure threats from ministers on the back of test and exam results.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=539Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:37:58 GMT20120320153758Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:37:58 GMT20120320153758Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:37:58 GMT201203201533758As someone who didn't get their maths GCSE until several years after graduating from university, I'm always interested in stories about how we teach this most important of subjects. Even if my first reaction to the sight of an algebraic x is rising panic. So the chat I had last week with Professor Dave Pratt, Professor of Mathematics Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, and one-time secondary maths teacher, was absolutely fascinating. Not being anything approaching a mathematician, I feel I should apologise in advance for dumbing-down his argument -- but it's well worth checking out. And if anything sounds mad, that'll be my fault, not his. As I understand it, Professor P is arguing that we are still failing to engage most pupils properly with maths because we're not explaining what it actually does and why it's useful. The argument here, he says, isn't about teaching kids to do compound interest on the grounds that they may want to save money later. And I'm sure he doesn't mean those grim SATs questions about Dirk and Dolores popping into a shop to buy healthy fruit with their pocket money. Especially since, as he points out, you can no longer assume that in a society of computerised tills and credit cards that totting up the bill and counting out change are familiar concepts to many pupils. But what you can do, using those same computers, is present maths ideas to pupils in a far less abstract and more accessible way, which is the argument in Professor Pratt's inaugural lecture, Making Mathematics Phenomenal. What he means is that the numbers, signs, letters, graphs and formulae in maths are there to represent ideas. In order to create mathematicians and get pupils truly engaged, he argues that they need to properly understand the underlying principles before going on to learn what I'd describe as the formal rules. For instance, he says, you can ask children to use a basic programming language to create a picture of an animal. To make this happen, they use a procedure. The teacher then asks them to make the animal move, thus introducing variable inputs. Effectively, this is what happens in algebra. "You get pupils asking what x is after they've been learning algebra for years... it's mortifying when that happens," says Professor P. But, he argues, this is the result of teaching the language of maths before the underlying concepts. Refreshingly, he also talks about teaching students and young people about the limits of what maths can do. So, past work has included presenting students with a complete set of information and asking them to make a decision. One of these projects involved presenting students with a map, costings, and a mission to choose the best route for a new town by-pass. Should they go for the cheapest route, which would also involve knocking down the local hospital, or does the decision need to involve more factors than the purely mathematical? "This kind of thing highlights the power of maths, and also its limitations," says the professor. So, if the professor was in charge of maths in a hypothetical school, how might he change the way in which things are taught? He would, he says, concentrate on 12-20 "powerful ideas" and consider how to approach them. Lessons would need to be longer, more like 90 minutes, as pupils worked through ideas rather than rows of calculation. As I said, apologies to all you mathematicians out there who are probably tutting at the fact that much of this is a new concept to me. But I suspect I am in the majority here: and that these ideas are worth sharing as the discussions about the new curriculum continue. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@gmail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=538Mon, 19 Mar 2012 16:36:09 GMT20120319163609Mon, 19 Mar 2012 16:36:09 GMT20120319163609Mon, 19 Mar 2012 16:36:29 GMT201203191643629It seems to be one of the rules of the trade. Chief inspector + reporter = controversy + implicit/explicit criticism of English schools. So far, so true for the current row over Sir Michael Wilshaw's appearance on Newsnight, in which he appears to have used the word "average" instead of "expected" to describe the status of Level 4 at the end of primary schooling. It's even more interesting for old hands like me, who recall the start of SATs testing when Level 4 was indeed the average and treated that way (ie, that not every child was expected to achieve it). For a fascinating analysis of the background, click here. Anyway, the unfortunate thing about all this fuss is that it serves to conceal the true nature of the Ofsted report under discussion, Moving English forward: Action to raise standards in English. You'll probably have seen this reported in the context of inspectors saying that children should be encouraged to read for pleasure. That's just one aspect of a wide-ranging report which amongst other things takes a fascinating swipe at lesson plans. In fact, without a hint of irony the report does quite a bit of complaining about teachers who, er, teach in a way they think inspectors want to see. So too much pace, over-complicated lesson planning and sticking to the plan come what may are all criticised as being NOT what the inspector wants to see. (Do try to keep up at the back, there). Schools also get it in the neck for tackling test or exam work too early. Given the high-stakes nature of testing for English schools these days, it's surprising that Ofsted is surprised about this. Does it expect schools to follow the directions given by the sticks and the carrots of Government policy and inspection frameworks, or not? The answer is, of course, that Ofsted reports themselves can't help but be political, and there is a new message out there. Lesson plans, league tables and pace were the thing under the last Government. They still are under this one, but tempered with additional messages about headteacher freedom, kids reading 50 books a year, and raising floor standards again to keep up with the international competition. (Which reminds me, there's a lovely line in the report about the point of their work not being made sufficiently explicit to KS3 pupils: so are inspectors suggesting teachers explain they have to do spelling and read Bleak House because 13-year-olds in Finland and Singapore are beating them at it? No, thought not.) However, don't let these inconsistencies put you off reading through the report for yourself as there is some really interesting stuff in there, for instance on the use of school libraries, better transition arrangements and the desirability of subject specialists in primary schools, as well as the point that children should be studying fiction in English because they're looking at non-fiction in the rest of the curriculum. Interestingly, while spelling and grammar are covered, there's no mention of specifically teaching children to structure and write essays, a vital skill for A Level if not GCSE but often not explicitly taught in any secondary school subject, as far as I can see. The sections on lesson planning are particularly fascinating: "Inspectors believe that the effectiveness of learning in this and many similar lessons was limited by some common misconceptions about what constitutes good teaching and learning," says the report, adding (in more detail than I include here): "There seems to be a belief that the faster the lesson, the better the learning. While pace is important – a slow lesson is likely to lose pupils' concentration – teachers too often concentrate on the pace of their planned activities rather than the pace of learning...As implied above, some teachers appear to believe that the more activities they can cram into the lesson, the more effective it will be. This is often counterproductive.." Other problems, according to the report, are over-detailed and bureaucratic lesson plans, which can cause "teachers to lose sight of the central focus on pupils' learning," an inflexible approach to planning, and constant review of learning. "Significant periods of time were spent by teachers on getting pupils to articulate their learning, even where this limited their time to complete activities and thereby interrupted their learning! Pupils need time to complete something before they can valuably discuss and evaluate it." But it appears to be the emphasis on the rules that's changing. "These points should not be seen as a plea for teachers to skimp on planning, teach slow-paced lessons, or leave pupils unsupported for long periods. However, given the positive impact of recent guidance and training on lesson methodology, there are good opportunities now for teachers to be more flexible in their approach to teaching and planning lessons. This should include a greater readiness to respond to the unexpected in lessons and to change the direction of lessons as they develop. Teachers should also be encouraged to be creative and adventurous in their teaching, and to vary approaches depending on the nature of the learning planned for the lesson." So, to precis this report (another rare skill in the English curriculum these days): English teaching is mostly good but that's no longer good enough: lots of teachers have been doing what they think we want but actually they were wrong. And the subtext (do I get a Level 7 for this?): next time we write a report and you're all slavishly doing what we say here, there'll be something else you're doing wrong. Wise heads will do as they always do. Read the report, take note of the useful bits, and then do as they think best. In this case, in the full knowledge that English and the rest of the curriculum is currently under full review, and the requirements may be dramatically different anyway in a year's time. Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me on educationhack@gmail.comhttp://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=537Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:08:43 GMT20120315170843Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:08:43 GMT20120315170843Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:08:43 GMT201203151750843Future criminals 'can be spotted at the age of two', or at least that's what was reported by the Daily Telegraph on May 8 (http://tgr.ph/zlnB9D). The story came from the findings of the Government's behaviour Tsar, Charlie Taylor, who has apparently said that nurseries should identify toddlers showing early signs of aggression and crack down on bad behaviour by marking them out for specialist tuition Oh no! As the father of an 18-month old boy, I'm now going to spend the next six months worrying. Arthur bit me yesterday, and smacked me round the head the day before. Granted, he's been a bit poorly, but if having a cough and a cold prompts that kind of aggressive response, what's he going to be like with a steaming hangover at 18? He'll be mugging grannies and dealing heroin before I know it. But hang on, nurseries should identify miscreants among their collections of toddlers? I don't know about you, but I'll be eternally grateful to our nursery (hello Trafalgar, if you're reading this) for teaching Arthur such life skills as how to dance, do high fives and to eat with a spoon. Especially the latter. I really don't think that two year olds in nurseries are the ones most at risk here. Chances are that – for now at least – if parents have a two-year old in nursery, they're reasonably well off (at £70 a day, you need to be) and their children are being looked after admirably. They'll be developing good manners, being educated and having fun in a safe environment. To my mind, the ones most at risk (and always will be) are the children who don't go to nursery, arrive at school never having seen a book, can't eat with a knife and fork and still wear a nappy. Perhaps this will change next year when 40 per cent of two year olds from disadvantaged families are given 15 hours a week of free 'early education' for 38 weeks a year. Maybe then nurseries can assess them for signs of aggression. Or is that just succumbing to stereotypes about lower-income families. It could just be the Telegraph's spin on the story, but putting the responsibility onto nurseries rather than parents; and criticising PRUs for being 'shoddy', seems to me to be just another example of the Government preferring to smack schools around the head rather than do anything that might upset parents. Schools are an easy target after all, they don't vote. As such, you could argue that it's classic bullying behaviour. And how old is this Government now? A quick check on Google tells me that it'll be two years old on May 10. I really hope that Charlie Taylor has his eye on David Cameron. He looks like trouble to me.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/steve-smethurst/?blogpost=536Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:09:09 GMT20120309140909Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:09:09 GMT20120309140909Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:09:09 GMT201203091420909If there was one bit of reading I'd recommend this week to anyone in education, it's the first book by Birmingham head teacher Sue Robinson. School and System Leadership is a fascinating peep beneath the bonnet of how English schools have developed, particularly in the past decade, and what their leaders think about it. More pertinently, it asks some difficult questions about exactly what is currently being created as schools are encouraged to go it alone and the old support and early warning systems are dismantled. Robinson, who is a National Leader of Education and head teacher of Cherry Orchard Primary School and Children's Centre in Birmingham, was so interested in what made her colleagues tick and how the system works that she wrote a doctoral thesis on the subject a couple of years ago. At the time, this attracted a fair bit of publicity and won a national prize. Since then she's interviewed more heads and removed much of the academic reference to turn it into a book. There's an awful lot in there, far more than can be covered in a short blog. But it would be fair to say Robinson is really worried about the children in many English schools in the future, where the current early-warning systems (Ofsted for outstanding schools, regular local authority visits, and so on) have been dismantled, and where good and bad practice alike may be hidden from wider view after years of sharing. Interestingly, she covers some of the same ground as the Commons education committee did only last week when quizzing the Chief Inspector for Schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, suggesting that a head of steam is now beginning to build around particular concerns. "An issue for any government committed to 'a self improving system' is where to draw the line between freedom and control. Government needs to allow enough slack in the system for heads to work and solve the messy 'adaptive challenge' of school improvement, but with sufficient checks and balances to enable all participants in the system to be assured that the schools are progressing and not following an unchecked 'slalom ride' to failure," argues the book. Robinson casts a wider net, however, with concerns about how the system can continue to improve when the current free-flow of information is hindered by increased insularity and chains which operate as closed systems. And she stresses that she is not opposed to what the Government is trying to do. "I wouldn't stop the idea of increasing variety and choice for parents, but what I would do is spend more time looking at the evidence-based research as to what is likely to be initiated by that policy. I think we are looking at fragmentation of the system," she says. "If they are not going to use local authorities I think we need to have some kind of system where intelligence is gathered on what is taking place in all schools in the state system." Robinson stresses, though, that she's talking of early, collaborative help. Robinson is concerned that the Government is blithely assuming that "the market" will solve problems in schools whilst talking about giving power to heads. It is children in quietly failing schools who will lose out, she fears. The book itself is quietly eloquent about her worries for the future. Robinson, like most of the school leaders she has interviewed, is used to working with other schools which need help, whether as some sort of federation or as an NLE, and it is this formal and informal system which has been a driver for school improvement in recent years. But with some schools increasingly going it alone or becoming part of closed academy chains, not only may the early warnings about schools requiring help disappear, but also the ability of many leaders to provide it. Moreover, the current free flow of information around the system is likely to be impeded. "It doesn't necessarily follow however that school structural change leading to more diversity in the system will lead to improvements in outcomes for children or better leadership," she argues, adding: "Innovation can drive or be a lever for school improvement but if the freedom to create new school structures and chains leads to poor quality outcomes for children it will be more difficult to discern as the system fragments." She continues: "If chains of schools become an increasingly large part of the middle tier replacing much of the role of LAs then will who will gather and disseminate the knowledge of effective practice in the system? There is no guarantee that chains will do so beyond their own schools. It needs to be a priority for government as there is a potential that having unleashed innovation they will fail to profit by it if they lack the mechanisms to gather information about it or transfer it. The transfer of knowledge across the system argued as important for school improvement could be lessened not expanded by a more diverse and less managed school system....There is an expectation that schools collaborate across the chain but what will be the drivers and incentives for them to collaborate with schools outside their chain? Will other schools want to collaborate with these potentially closed organisations?" Ofsted inspections need to change, she says, to accommodate the different ways in which federations under a single headteacher actually work. And head teachers, argue the book, could find themselves in tricky situations. "If a head is leading a federation they will have the intelligence, power and authority to monitor, evaluate and put in improvement strategies. However even if they are aware of the vulnerability in neighbouring schools will they publicly acknowledge this and identify issues in schools for which they don't have a direct responsibility? This is a much more interventionist approach for heads than being brokered to find solutions already identified by others. What will be their authority for doing so if the substantive head of a school in difficulties chooses not to access help? The system can't correct unless there is power to do so." When asked, Robinson suggests that there might be some way of using HMI as an early warning system, using inspectors in a collaborative rather than a punitive way. But she is not optimistic that the risks of fragmenting the system have been fully understood. "I think by the time it actually happens, it will be too late." Susan Young is an education journalist. Contact me at educationhack@gmail.com.http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young/?blogpost=535Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:59:19 GMT20120308155919Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:59:19 GMT20120308155919Thu, 08 Mar 2012 16:00:50 GMT201203081640050Why did Jerry Jarvis, the former managing director of Britain's largest exam board (note 1), step down in 2009? An answer of a kind is provided in his new book on the secondary exams system in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, published under the eye-catching title of “Cheats, Choices and Dumbing Down”. Mr Jarvis describes how he ended up leaving the Edexcel board after a difference of views with the regulator, Ofqual, over a technical issue as to how the standards of GCSEs were meant to be held constant while the structure of the exam, in most subjects at least, changed radically. His account offers some important insights, I think, both into the complexity of the way the current system operates and into difficulties Michael Gove might face as he reportedly seeks to make our secondary exams “tougher”. Describing the nature of the dispute between Mr Jarvis and Ofqual will inevitably involve quite a bit of technical discussion on an issue which, it turns out, is not simple, so please bear with me. But the substance of this dispute runs as follows. In September 2009, new GCSE courses began in most subjects which saw the qualification largely change from being one in which pupils sat all their exams at the end of their two years of GCSE study – “linear”, to use the jargon - to one where they were examined in modules, with exams staggered throughout the course if the school or college thought this was appropriate, and with re-sits available during the course itself. For those not familiar with secondary exams, the latter type of qualification structure is described, unsurprisingly perhaps, as modular. Now, it seems that the move from linear to modular for most courses would be expected, all other things being equal, to have led to rising numbers of pupils gaining high grades. This, certainly, is the view of Mr Jarvis, who writes: “Modular exams redistribute workload and revision time as each module is examined soon after studying it. This means it should be fresher in the mind, helping to memorise key facts. It is possible to re-sit modules later (although only one re-sit is generally allowed), and to focus on areas of strength. “Taken together, the move to modular exams should make it easier to achieve higher grades.” He adds: “Unfortunately, when the results of separate exam modules are added together there is a tendency for the total grade to be slightly higher than it would have been in a single exam.” You'll note the “unfortunately” in that sentence, and some may question whether this would create any problem. However, noting this phenomenon, and wanting to ensure that exam “standards” were maintained, Ofqual reacted to the move to mainly modular GCSEs by asking each exam board to compensate by, it seems, making it slightly harder for a pupil to achieve a particular grade on each module. In other words, changes were to be made in grading decisions by the boards so that the change in the structure of GCSEs would not lead to a jump in the number of pupils gaining good results simply as a result of the structural move from linear to modular examining. But, describing how he reacted to Ofqual's position, Mr Jarvis writes: “I could not accept this further manipulation of an already complex assessment process. I would no longer be able to claim publicly that the grades awarded reflected the ability of the students that I was responsible for assessing.” That final statement has, I think, very important ramifications, since Ofqual did not back down after Mr Jarvis's resignation and the means of calculating results in the current, largely modular, GCSE system remain in place for current students. Some of them, then, will be awarded worse grades than their work deserves because of Ofqual's decision, Mr Jarvis would seem to be arguing. But is he right? While I cannot claim to be abreast of all of the technical detail as to how Ofqual's move to adjust marking was made, the regulator's position does have some strength, I think. Consider two students, and imagine examiners were looking at the quality of work each produced in a particular paper: one taken as part of an old-style “linear” course finishing in, say, summer 2010, and another completed in a “modular” exam, taken in January 2011. Now imagine that examiners look at these two exam scripts and believe that these students have produced work of roughly equivalent quality, for that particular paper. So the examiners would be inclined to give them both, say, a B grade for that paper. But the second candidate will, potentially, have a chance to improve that grade in a resit taken in summer 2011, since he or she is taking a modular course, wheras the first will not. The structure of the modular exam making resits within the course possible might, then, give that second student a better chance of a higher grade in their GCSE overall. It could also be argued – and Mr Jarvis seems to be arguing this point - that the chance to spread the workload of exams over a two year course, and being assessed on material when it is fresh – also gives the second candidate taking the modular exam an advantage over the first. If you follow that line of argument, then, it looks as if it might be slightly easier for the second student to achieve a good grade at the end of this process than it would have been for the first. The second student, then, might end up with a better grade than the first not because he or she had produced better quality work, but because the structure of the exam had changed. Would the regulator not be right, then, to react to this by, for example, moving up the number of marks the second candidate needed for a high grade overall to reflect the fact that the change in the structure of the exam, if it had not made this adjustment, would have made obtaining a high grade slightly “easier”? This example seems to be in line with the actual argument between Mr Jarvis and the regulator, as far as I can understand it. And I am, as you might guess from the above, inclined to side with Ofqual on this one. Ofqual makes, in setting out the thinking behind its regulatory approach, what I think is the central point here: the need to be fair to all pupils taking exams from one year to the next. In this case, if two students' work is of similar quality on an individual paper but a change in the structure of the qualification makes it “easier” for one student working at a particular level in 2011 to obtain a good grade than it was for the other in 2010, this is far from ideal, since these two individuals could be competing against each other in the market for a job or for a university place. In other words, the 2011 student might emerge with a better grade than his or her competitor who was examined in 2010. But if this were only because the characteristics of the exam had changed, it looks as if the 2010 candidate would have been disadvantaged and the exam system would not have treated him or her fairly against his or her competitor. In order to be fair to both candidates, then, Ofqual would seem to be justified in trying to understand whether the change in structure has favoured the 2011 student. If it had, and it seems to be the case here, then some “adjustment” would need to be made to reflect this fact. Mr Jarvis's argument – that the same quality of work within an individual paper should get the same mark from one system to the next, even though this might have differing effects on the overall likely grade outcome – seems not to ring true for me, since the overall grade is what matters to the student, the employer and the admissions tutor. How, precisely, Ofqual's adjustments are made in trying to ensure that equality of overall grades for pupils of equal quality from one year to the next is not discussed in Mr Jarvis's book and the details, as ever in this area, are likely to be highly contentious, among experts and occasionally with a wider audience. Indeed, you only need to look back to 2002, when arguably education's biggest controversy of the past decade erupted over attempts to adjust students' marks in the light of a move to the Curriculum 2000 modular system of A-levels, to understand just how fraught this entire process can be. But the principle by which Ofqual took its decision seems reasonable to me. But moving away from these lengthy technical arguments, what are the wider implications of this dispute? Well, I can think of two. First, Michael Gove has talked in recent months of “toughening up” the exams system, and GCSEs in particular. A greater emphasis is to be placed on spelling, grammar and punctuation in exams in English literature, history, geography and religious studies, in changes to be introduced from next January. Last month, Mr Gove was also quoted as saying that more teenagers would “fail” A-levels and GCSEs as changes were introduced including the phasing out of modular exams at GCSE in courses beginning this September, while Ofqual has been told to “benchmark” A-levels against other exams around the world, supposedly ensuring they at least as challenging as those used by our economic competitors. However, Ofqual's approach of maintaining standards from year to year – and specifically the philosophy of being fair to students from one year to the next when there is any change in the characteristics of an exam – might not make this “toughening up” process very easy, and for good reasons to do with treating students fairly from one year to the next. It is not hard to spot why, given the arguments above. If Mr Gove does introduce changes which do make it “tougher” to get a good grade at GCSE or A-level one year than it was the previous year, how can this be justified to individual students? If one achieves, say, an A grade under the current regime but another student, of comparable quality, only gets a B after it has been “toughened up”, there is a strong argument that this would not be fair, because the second student would be disadvantaged in the job or university market simply because the exam had changed. Indeed, if Ofqual is to follow the logic of its argument above, which is set out quite clearly in a briefing note on its website (http://bit.ly/ua8poV), then it would make the following move. If changes to a qualification, such as the greater emphasis on spelling, grammar and punctuation, actually were to make the exam “harder”, then the regulator would need to compensate by lowering the number of marks needed for good grades, otherwise students from one year to the next would not be being treated equably. This is not to argue that exams should never be “toughened up”. But it does suggest genuine reasons why the process could be difficult, if it were still to abide by the principle of being fair to students from one year to the next. If there were to be a major and significant move to make exams harder, the only way to do this fairly, I think, would be to signal what had happened clearly to employers and to universities, perhaps by changing the name of grades so it was transparent that a top grade one year did not mean the same as it did the next. It may be that the change in difficulty level will not be, however, very large, in which case I would guess the issue would be fudged; there are, certainly, no signs of any move towards either renaming grades or a communication plan aimed at employers or universities to suggest that a good grade achieved under this incoming “tougher” regime is worth more than one gained under the present arrangements . But if the change in difficulty level turns out not to be substantial, some of the headlines must be seen as over-the-top. I asked Ofqual how it plans to grapple with this issue in the light of the move to “toughen up” exams. A spokesman told me: “We will be discussing that with the awarding organisations in due course and no decisions have been made yet. But, as with anything, we do appreciate that there will be a need to review our approach.” There should be no need to underline the second implication, at least for those of you who have stuck with this blog until now. Shining through in this debate is the extraordinary complexity of our secondary exams system, a point which Mr Jarvis makes throughout. (He includes one mind-boggling stat: every year, the boards collectively process nearly a quarter of a billion answers to questions as part of the exams process). Less obviously perhaps, the fact that it is so complicated underscores the notion that trying to use this system to get a clear idea of whether education “standards” are rising or falling is fraught with difficulty. Data generated through this process are not “objective” in the sense of offering a categoric answer to this constantly-asked question, since they can turn on tricky judgement calls of the type outlined above, which come down to which side one decides to take in what is a complex and often nuanced and multi-faceted debate. As I have often argued before, the fact that national GCSE and A-level statistics – at least as generated in their current form - can offer no definitive answer to the question as to whether overall education standards are rising or falling is one reason that the annual August debate on this issue will never go away. The results data form part of what looks like a bad scientific experiment: one where changes in the statistics occur while numerous other aspects of the system, including the structure of exams, can also vary from year to year. If we wanted to get more informative answers – and to hold governments to account for the performance of the education system – we would not be using our ever-changing GCSEs and A-levels for national accountability. Mr Jarvis's book offers other interesting insights. Having headed a board which benefited greatly from the rapid increase in the number of schools and colleges offering the BTEC qualifications it sells and which have been deemed to be worth up to four GCSEs for league table purposes, he admits: “If the pass rates are higher in these [and other] alternative qualifications (and they usually are) then students can be switched from GCSE to these alternatives to boost the league table score.” He adds: “League tables significantly influence how teachers teach and demonstrate the classic consequence of the measurement affecting the outcome.” He also suggests, potentially explosively I think, that schools and colleges have been helped in their quest to extract C grades out of their charges by exam boards making questions more “C-friendly”. The focus of governments on increasing the number of pupils with at least five GCSEs at A*-C has “led to a demand for exam questions that were 'C-grade friendly' – including higher tier papers which would identify the top grades but which, crucially, were accessible for the C grade student. “Questions were designed that tested the more difficult content, but which were structured in a way – using sub-sections, for example – that would allow the C grade student to gain some of the marks.” The advent of these “'C-friendly' questions” adds further to the difficulty of judging the extent to which underlying standards of education are rising, a passage near the end of the book suggests. Finally, and much less convincingly, I have to say, he says that because many teachers in both the state and independent sectors are against league tables, “they might be on their way out as government policy develops”. Hmm…I hear a chorus of “if only”, as readers of this blog survey the reams of performance data now emanating from the Department for Education; at one stage in the past year, the TES seemed to carry a story almost every week about a new way in which ministers wanted schools to be ranked. The reality, as evidenced by the emphasis placed on the new English Baccalaureate league table performance measure, is that ministers and civil servants continue to view league table rankings, and other types of results pressure associated with them, as among their main policy levers. “Cheats, choices and dumbing down” is published by Pukka Publications. See http://www.examlinks.co.uk (Note 1: Edexcel, of which Jerry Jarvis was managing director, is the largest board by revenue and staff numbers. Its rival AQA, though, has a larger share of the GCSE and A-level market.) (Note 2: though it seems conflicts of interest may not be unknown in other fields, see this story in this weekend's Mail on Sunday: http://bit.ly/zjnyNn )http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/warwick-mansells-blog/?blogpost=534Tue, 06 Mar 2012 13:56:43 GMT20120306135643Tue, 06 Mar 2012 13:56:43 GMT20120306135643Tue, 06 Mar 2012 13:56:43 GMT201203061315643Mick Brookes, the former General Secretary of the NAHT, used to tell a tale about Billy, a young lad at his primary school in Nottinghamshire. One day Billy stopped to puzzle over the answer to a question on a test. “A teacher is taking her class for a picnic, and so she packs 45 sandwiches. Each child is entitled to three sandwiches, but how many bananas should she take to ensure they have one each?” Clearly, it's a test to see if the children can work out that they need to divide 45 by 3. Not that tricky, really. But Billy answered 17. No points for that one. Yet his teacher knew that he was perfectly capable of dividing 45 by three, and when she quizzed him about it afterwards, he replied: “Well, you know what bananas are like, they get squashed quite easily. So I thought it was safer to take a couple of spares.” He's clearly a boy who should go far. But with no marks available for that kind of creative thinking, would he actually be rewarded for showing initiative? Not with a strict marking criteria. He'd be more likely to end up in the bottom set for maths and destined for unpaid work experience at Tesco. Mick's [possibly apocryphal] anecdote seems timely for a number of reasons. Leaving aside the bigger picture of how schools and school leaders are judged on a narrow set of criteria and box-ticking by Ofsted, this week has seen the launch of a new charity to champion better maths skills (nationalnumeracy.org.uk). National Numeracy's chairman, Chris Humphries, a former chief executive of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, has been quoted as saying: "It is simply inexcusable for anyone to say 'I can't do maths'. It is a peculiarly British disease which we aim to eradicate.” He elaborates by saying: “That point came home to me in 2010 when I was in Singapore for an education conference. Almost 95 per cent of its school leavers get the equivalent of a decent GCSE pass in maths. Here, the figure is nearer 60 per cent. And the benefit is there for all to see. Singapore is strong in electronics, IT, advanced engineering, research and development.” Then, there are the comments by current NAHT General Secretary Russell Hobby this week in which he welcomed criticisms of accountability measures that encourage schools to treat pupils as statistics, not individuals. He said: “All crude quantitative measures, used in isolation, distort behaviour and eventually defeat what they sought to measure in the first place. The higher the stakes, the sooner this happens. School progress needs to be monitored and assessed – no one would dispute that. But it's how we do this in a way that supports what is best for pupils, rather than fuelling simplistic statements that is important.” And, finally, there's the emergence this week of funnyexam.com into the mainstream consciousness. The website features examples of 'comic' responses to questions posed in tests and exams. I'll leave the ethical question of whether such sites should exist or not for another time, but it does throw up many examples of children who, while clearly intelligent, score 0 on tests. First is the one who was asked how you change centimetres to metres? “You take out 'centi'.” And also the one asked to “briefly explain what hard water is.” Their answer? “Ice.” One solution to the problem of factually correct but non-scoring answers is to teach children how to pass tests. Spend time explaining what questions actually want from them, and what will earn them a pass and you should be rewarded with higher test scores. But surely a better long-term solution is to put less reliance on narrow/crude measures and to incorporate some form of teacher assessment, as this will add so much more value to the statistics. It should also lead to less frustration and disengagement among students. And a quick look at funnyexam.com is all it takes to see how disengaged students will vent their frustration with tests…http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/steve-smethurst/?blogpost=533Tue, 06 Mar 2012 09:00:19 GMT20120306090019Tue, 06 Mar 2012 09:00:19 GMT20120306090019Tue, 06 Mar 2012 09:00:19 GMT201203060990019