The Rt Hon David Heath MP Houses of Parliament 17th July 2013 Dear Mr Heath Education - Open letter When we met in Martock some time ago one issue that I raised was the need for your party to become once again the think-tank driving social democratic reform that it was known for in the past - and for this process to begin in good time for the next general election In the light of this, the interview of David Laws this morning on the ‘Today’ programme was profoundly depressing. It seems that he is positioning himself, and your party, for electoral reasons, behind the Conservatives, as the party that speaks up for a people oppressed by incompetent state services that are out of control and need reining in. It’s a populist view that may get votes (for the Tory party) but it won’t do anything to improve education. So here are some thoughts on your recent education reforms. 1 International comparisons Mr Gove justifies his reforms by continually trying to place our education system in a bad light internationally. The international comparison work that I have used much in my career, in curriculum planning in Africa and the Middle East, is in mathematics and science (TIMSS). It started in Sweden decades ago and then taken on by a US institution. It is of enormous value professionally but it is naive in the extreme to use it ‘naked’ as an indicator of quality - as the press here and, it seems, Mr Gove has done. I am saddened that in recent years TIMSS itself has, perhaps unwittingly, encouraged this trend in the wording of their executive summaries which is all that politicians and journalists tend to read. It is no coincidence that the six countries that are ‘ahead of the peleton’ are (with one exception) countries that stream their learners, in some cases very rigidly, from the age of about 10, often into separate schools. The interesting exception is Finland which has a comprehensive system but which also has a comprehensive and expensive system of professional training and support. There are a variety of reasons why a streamed system will tend to yield better results in the international league tables than those that do not. Those countries that have chosen to have a more open and democratic system of education for social reasons must realise that they may very well to obtain lower scores in TIMSS than those that do not and that this has little to do with educational quality . Looking at some depth into the 2011 TIMSS reports I actually see reason for some satisfaction with the England results (the relatively high achievement in ‘applying’ and ‘reasoning’ compared with ‘knowing’ in mathematics and the even improvement over time in meeting international benchmarks in both science and mathematics). What I do not see at all is any justification for major changes educational policy simply because of these results. (footnote -The sampling system used by TIMMS is as rigorous as they can make it but, on their own admission, varies from country to country, particularly in the higher grade tested (grade 8). For example, they only test children who are in school and many often are not, either because they have dropped out (the enrollment ratio in Singapore, for example, it is about 80% in Grade 8) or because some learners may by then be in further vocational education (as in Korea). These will both tend to inflate the TIMSS score as they tend to remove less able learners from the sample. Another issue is that TIMSS tries to test learners of the same age as far as they can and testing only 14 year olds in grade 8 will exclude from the sample net all the 14 year olds who have not yet reached grade 8. These tend to be the slower learners who have been repeating years. This too will tend to inflate the scores.) 2 The revised national curriculum A key element in the National Curriculum reform is one that seems not to have been picked up by the press. It is, in effect, no longer a curriculum but a collection of syllabuses (or in current terminology, Programmes of Study) for each phase, to be taught to all children. In the past the English National Curriculum introduced a very useful and wise concept of classifying each topic by its level of difficulty. This was very helpful to teachers as it gave them an indication of the kind of content that their learners might reasonably be expected to master and it gave them a series of benchmarks by which they could continuously monitor progress. This concept has since been adopted by many other countries in some form or another. It is based on the premise that all children are different and have different learning needs and speeds. This means that considerable differences build up in the degree of subject mastery, particularly in a sequential subject like mathematics where the difference in performance between the highest and lowest achievers at age 13 can be as much as 7 years. This variation has to be recognised by the curriculum but is no longer. This system of attainment levels is now removed; all learners are to be taught the whole programme in each phase and attainment tests will be based on the whole programme. It is interesting to note you do not find this in those countries that have a high performance in science and mathematics. In Singapore, for example, in science and mathematics, as many and 30-40% of children follow the ‘Normal vocational’ programme at the equivalent of Key Stage 4 and there is very little of the new English National Curriculum to be found in it. 3 Testing A curious feature of all the education systems I have worked in is the astonishing strength of the irrational belief that the more you test the better will be the results. Yet this flies in the face of all evidence and indeed, if anything, the opposite seems to be true. Teachers, of course, test all the time (technically its called formative testing) in a natural and integrated way to keep on top of how well understanding is developing. But the kind of attainment testing we now see, and which Mr Laws seemingly wishes to extend almost to the unborn, is unnecessary, destructive, wasteful of teaching time and teacher’s time and, above all, distorts school life by throwing an unhealthy emphasis on that which can be tested at the expense of that which cannot. And, as I am sure you will by now know, schools, particularly the Academies, are becoming increasingly adept at developing strategies to artificially inflate their test results. 4 Why the Pupil Premium wont work The Pupil Premium is a nice eye-catching (vote-catching) idea but it has three probably fatal flaws. Firstly, it assumes, rather patronisingly, that it is the children of the poor that ipso facto are the ones in need of extra help. Secondly it assumes that the schools will spend the extra money on helping those in need whereas the evidence seems to suggest that they will spend it rather on whatever are the best ways of raising their place in league tables. And thirdly it assumes that the help they need is there available to be purchased. This last point is the real killer. The support services once provided by counties is an almost worthless shadow of what it was. Teachers are now alone with almost no professional support or backup. In the days of EPAs (what the Pupil Premium was called in the days when Shirley Williams was in charge) it was services, rather than direct money, that were channeled to needy schools in deprived areas. These services are now all but extinct as are the enormously valuable teacher networks that they stimulated. I do hope that your party will do a bit of work on this before the next election. Please listen to the teachers. We need a careful analysis of the conditions that schools and teachers find themselves in now. We must see an end to the kind of on-the-hoof vote-getting extra-manifesto policy making that we have become used to over the last two or three governments. Policy and strategy development must be carefully thought through and evidence based. One thing that we can learn from international comparisons - from Finland for example - is the value of professionalism, and all it entails, to the system. This is not well-developed here. Teachers have little incentive to hone their skills and do not have to maintain membership of a professional body. The teaching professional support system has been fatally undermined by the decline of the counties and we need new ideas on how to regenerate it to a standard previously offered by the best LEAs Best wishes Andrew Clegg Tadcaster Comprehensive School, Oxford degrees in chemistry Science Teacher in South Yorkshire Teacher trainer in Botswana and Namibia Curriculum adviser to African and Middle Eastern countries Son of Sir Alec Clegg, CEO of West Riding of Yorkshire
Posted on: Wed, 17 Jul 2013 15:02:12 +0000
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