Making Progress

This is a little blog I write for Osiris. It appears here a month or so after being submitted.

Okay, so you’ve got used to the idea that levels have been consigned to the dustbin of history. On the one hand you feel smugly pleased to have made the leap of faith and put your trust in the concept of consolidation before progression, but on the other hand you feel strangely naked without the comfort blanket of APP to wrap round you. For, with the loss of levels, we also lost all that work we had done in making APP work.

I’ve always loved the use of the three letter abbreviation, TLA, to describe a three letter abbreviation. It’s got a kind of US English madness to it. So, despite the loss of APP, we can still appeal to another TLA to see us through this mire of assessment; AFL.  AFL is where it’s at with this business of tracking pupil progress.

Levelling off

Right now, primary teachers are feeling like one of those cartoon characters, running frantically in the air when there is nothing beneath them. There we were, comfortable with levels, knowing what they meant, when suddenly, bosh! The ground falls away.  Some schools have bravely embraced the new opportunities offered by life without levels, indeed folk like Dame Alison Peacock will claim that, at Wroxham School, they never used them anyway. However, it’s unfamiliar territory and even Dame Alison will agree that, while there were levels, Wroxham had ‘a metric’ running in the background for statutory reporting purposes.

Quite a lot of schools are taking the understandable view that it is better to be second in rather than a pioneer, while they stagger on with levels and wait, Micawber-like, for something to turn up. In the meantime a disturbing proportion of schools are clinging to levels because they are a safety blanket – you know where you are with levels!  However – and this is a conversation I have quite frequently with headteachers – how do you work with levels, when there are no levels? The answer is that levels simply do not fit.  Where will these levels come from?

You can’t, seriously, simply carry on using the old national curriculum levels – this is a new national curriculum; it’s different. The levels don’t work. And you can’t, honestly, re-jig the levels, or massage the curriculum, into some kind of levelled wonderland; where lies the consistency? Is your Level 3 the same as the old one? Is your Level 3 the same as my Level 3?  We need to renew our thinking.

Renewing our thinking means understanding the principles that underlie this sea-change that we are experiencing. While there may have been some legitimate sneering that the Expert Panel arrived at a curriculum before they arrived at its aims, the important message is that assessing by a system of levels has never really been a true measure of a child’s achievement. As Tim Oates, Chair of the Expert Panel, has made clear, a level was a variable measure. It could be that a child was Level 4 because he happened to score highly on some low-value test items, picked up a few correct high-value items and emerged with a level 4 score. Or, it might be that Level 4 meant that, on a particular day, a piece of work sort of fitted into a set of criteria. It might not have hit them all, but it was a best fit. And best fits don’t work – ask any craftsman cabinet-maker.  Finally, Level 4 might mean that the child was ‘just-in’ to the band. It didn’t mean that this was a secure measure but a claim could be made that the criteria for Level 3 were no longer adequate and that there were signs that Level 4 might possibly be a better judgement; it certainly suited our purpose for it to be, even though, once the results were in, the child might slip back. But we could always blame it on summer learning loss.

So, get used to it; levels don’t work. The message of the new approach is twofold: fewer things at greater depth and consolidation before progression. This should mean that we free up space to make sure that pupils, in Tim Oates’ words, ‘nail the concepts’. We have to get used to changing our thinking from progress at any price to progress through deep learning. As we drift towards the last national tests to be ‘levelled’ we have the chance to consign what is really a flawed concept (however much we love it) to history. I, for one will not be sorry to banish that dreadful term ‘uplevelling’ from the vocabulary of education.  This, of course calls for a different, and maybe radical, approach to recording progress. But that’s for another day.

A knowledge led curriculum?

Education is a fast moving business at the moment and Education monkey has been too busy swinging from school to school to get on and write stuff for this blog. However, it's the beginning of a new school year so why not grasp the nettle?

The Monkey has been doing a lot of reading over the summer, triggered by the revision of the National Curriculum. Among the most interesting material has been Trusting Knowledge by Dr Jo Saxton and Annaleise Briggs. This apologia for a knowledge-based curriculum explores several arguments circulating around the notion and welcomes the introduction of a national curriculum that includes specified knowledge. Saxton takes on super-teacher, Phil Beadle over his comments that the Secretary of State wants to return us to a Victorian curriculum. However, her argument - that this is an educational decision and not a political one - has much merit. The we turn to another little volume, Seven Myths about Education, by Daisy Christoldoulou, where she unpicks these seven 'myths' about teaching process skills rather than knowledge:-

1. Facts prevent understanding
2. Teacher-led instruction is passive
3. The 21st century fundamentally changes everything
4. You can always just look it up
5. We should teach transferable skills
6. Projects and activities are the best way to learn
7. Teaching knowledge is indoctrination

Now, while Christodoulou rather over-polarises the argument, the case that she makes for teaching knowledge will find an echo with any teacher who has always felt that simply having pupils 'find out' from an arranged set of resources lack rigour and rarely leads to deep understanding.  Much of Christodoulou's case is founded in the work of American educationalist, ED Hirsch, whose concept of 'Cultural Capital' underpins much of the collective view of the Review Body.

Add into the mix the notion of generating in our pupils a positive mindset that makes them hungry to learn (see  Mindset by Dr Carol S Dweck) and then read Matthew Syed's Bounce, which sets out the thesis that we can accomplish great things without being talented but merely by repeated and diligent practice.  The sum of all this is that there is a strong case for the kind of curriculum that is proposed from 2014.

What Christodoulou, Saxton and Briggs have in common is a link with Civitas, the right-wing think tank that is, with Policy Exchange, being a significant influence on education policy. However, that does not necessarily make their work ideologically unsound and the Monkey, for one, is strangely persuaded of the validity of this thinking.

In the next Monkey Business we will look at how we got here in the first place.

RE and Academies - the DfE replies

Well, full marks to the team at DfE for attempting to address concerns about Religious Education. Following their bland "REisastatutorysubject" mantra, Leona Smith of the Public Communications Unit has provided a much fuller response to the concerns expressed in this blog about the position of RE in Academies and the apparent lack of monitoring by Ofsted.  Her reply certainly explains the legal position clearly, although those who are expressing the concerns know perfectly well what the position is. However, it is at least reassuring to hear this re-statement of it. Here is Leona Smith's response:-

All academies have to provide RE under the terms of their funding agreement (FA) with the Secretary of State. The FA for non-faith academies states that they must arrange for RE to be taught to all pupils in accordance with the requirements for agreed syllabuses in the maintained sector. Academies are not required to follow a locally agreed syllabus, but can choose to do so. Where they choose to design their own RE syllabus they must ensure that it meets with the requirements of a locally agreed syllabus. Any academy which fails to teach RE is in breach of its FA, and where there is evidence for this; the Education Funding Agency can enforce compliance of the FA.

Ofsted does not inspect individual curriculum subjects, but is required to report on whether the curriculum offered by the school is broad and balanced and promotes the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils. If, during an inspection, inspectors see practice that does not conform to statutory requirements, they will delve more deeply and will report their findings. Where an investigation reveals that statutory requirements are not being met and this is a contributory factor in explaining why pupils are not achieving as well as they should, it will be considered for inclusion in the inspection report as a key point for improvement.

The trouble is - and remains - that, however the statutory position is re-stated, the law is breached and Osfted does not follow it up. Which is why, somewhere along the line, policy-makers need to have the courage to instruct Ofsted to ensure statutory compliance.  And, as stated previously, the revision of the National Curriculum looks very much as if Spiritual and Moral development will be sacrificed for personal, environmental and economic.

I may be wrong but, sadly, reassuring though she is, Ms Smith does not convince me. Suppose we start reporting schools where RE is not meeting statutory requirements to Ofsted or the Funding Agencyå?  Maybe what is also needed is an FoI request to academies about the state of their RE.  I've got a lot of writing to do this summer but, just maybe, I might construct such a survey. It will be reported here.

The National Curriculum and RE

The publication of the draft framework for the national curriculum marks yet another step in this government's determination to secularise the curriculum while pretending to protest that it isn't.

Before we even begin thinking about Religious Education let's consider the aims and purposes of the National Curriculum. As we all know, the current Ofsted framework provides for the specific inspection of SMSC - Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural development - however, the sharp-eyed will have spotted that, for the first time since the inception of the National Curriculum, both spiritual and moral have disappeared. Cynics might suggest that this is symptomatic of a political culture that eschews both spirituality and morality. This is, after all, the zeitgeist.

The new curriculum aims are now fivefold: economic, cultural, social, personal and environmental. So, with one clean sweep, the only parts of a school's curriculum that enable students to explore deep questions and test deeply held personal values are consigned to the scrapheap.   Justify this, as the case is made, in terms of comparability with high performing jurisdictions, and you still sweep away something that has been fundamental to British education since 1870. How does this align with injunction in the new Teachers' Standards not to undermine traditional British values?

So, what of RE? Well, those of us who have been defending the diminishing island of RE against the swelling flood of secularisation have got pretty sick of Nick Gibb's protestations that RE does not need protection because it's a statutory subject. He must know that this is utter nonsense and enough people have pointed this out to him for it to be taken seriously. Like many ministers, Gibb suffers from selective deafness. And RE seems to make ministers deaf. Why else does there have to be an all-party group of MPs, formed to promote the case for RE? And you can bet your bottom dollar that the whole of the DfE suddenly goes deaf.

If proof were needed of the increasingly perilous position of RE look no further than the draft revised framework for the National Curriculum. There you will find that RE becomes part of the basic curriculum, along with sex education and, for the time being, work-related learning.  The framework reinforces the statutory nature of RE but the detail makes clear that, while schools should implement the statutory programmes of study for the national curriculum, they are able to determine the specific nature of the basic provision for themselves. Which is why, in respect of RE, an increasing number of secondary schools and a worrying proportion of primaries simply do not deliver the expectations of their SACRE determined agreed syllabus at all.   With impunity. The RE lobby has long been pressing for Ofsted to police this statutory requirement only to be met by the bland Gibb doctrine.

Now, inject the wildcard that the non-maintained sector which, for the purposes of this discussion, includes Academies and Free Schools, will not be subject to the statutory national curriculum. So,  weak as it is in proposed legislation, the place of RE will be left unprotected in these new constituencies. It may be in their Funding Agreement, for the moment, but that is almost as laughable as the relatively recently repealed requirement for a Hansom cab to carry a bale of hay!

The proposed Framework is supposed to contribute to further debate but we all know the futility of consultation with an administration whose response is,' yes, but we're going to do it anyway'.

This is a government with a modernising agenda that is self-defeating. Real, deep societal change will not happen if we take away the very mechanisms that underpin it.