Friday, March 25th, 2011

Warwick Mansell

I have been interested in two debates in English education for several years now.

One starts along the lines: “Standards are not high enough. We need to hold our schools to account properly so that they improve exam results for all young people, who so desperately need better grades. We also need to use results data to target our efforts to help pupils do better.”

The other says: “Schooling driven by performance indicators is creating a whole host of negative consequences, which go to the heart of pupils’ educational experiences.”

I often feel like these debates take place almost in parallel, with very little acknowledgement of how they are inextricably linked, and little attempt at communication between the two. Frequently, it seems as if people accept the force of either argument, without realising that they are so closely related as to be almost two sides of the same coin.

This has been going through my head again in recent weeks, as I come across yet more evidence supporting the second of those statements. As always, it’s not necessary to look very hard for this stuff; it just keeps coming.

Exhibit one was a report on history teaching in English schools by Ofsted.  

Now, it’s important to get the context right here: the Ofsted report went out under a press release headline: “History a successful subject”, and offered plenty of support for the way the subject is taught.

For example, it said “history teaching was good or better in most primary schools” among those inspected in this programme from 2007 to 2010, and that “history was successful in most of the secondary schools visited because it was well taught, notably in examination classes at GCSE and A level”.

In secondary schools, it said: “the large majority of…history teachers were very well-qualified. In the large majority of the schools visited, the quality of the provision also reflected the strong leadership of the history departments”.

It added: “The subject knowledge of the specialist history teachers in the secondary schools visited was almost always good, often it was outstanding and, occasionally, it was encyclopaedic. Inspectors found so much good and outstanding teaching because the teachers knew their subject well.”

These central findings might have been lost on readers of some media coverage when the report came out.

So we are talking about a generally successful subject, taught by enthusiastic  professionals. However, within that generally positive context, there were several instances offering more evidence underlying the dangers of “Education by Numbers” – ie exam-results oriented practice being adopted which, the report would suggest, is bad for underlying learning. 

First, probably the starkest negative finding in the report related to exam-endorsed textbooks. Ofsted said:

“In recent years, more textbooks have been written specifically for the examination course specification, both at GCSE and A level. The textbooks, often written by the chief examiners for the courses, are generally endorsed by examination boards and gain the status of a ‘set text’. The history teachers in the schools visited were well practised in supplementing these with additional materials as necessary. However, it was clear that, at A level, the mushrooming of course-endorsed and linked textbooks was having a negative impact. They stultified teachers’ thinking and restricted students’ progress. The weaker students relied on the textbook as being sufficient preparation for the external examinations and were less willing to read beyond the ‘set textbook’. Their written and oral work revealed how their understanding of the topics they studied was narrowed. It also meant that students were not as well prepared to meet the challenges of higher education where independent learning and extensive reading were required.”

Damning stuff, I thought. To put this in almost-punchy soundbite terms: “Exam-endorsed textbooks – in the way they are sometimes used – are stultifying teachers’ thinking; restricting students’ progress; narrowing their understanding”.

Second, the report offered more evidence of pupils being steered away from history because of “league table” (I put it in quotes here because this is often a shorthand, I think, for wider hyper-accountability/results pressures) concerns. It said: “In some of the schools visited the students were restricted in their subject options at GCSE and some had been steered towards subjects which were seen to be less demanding than history.”

It continued: “Entry level…is intended for students who find GCSE too demanding. However, the declining number of students taking this examination reflects not only a lack of confidence that entry level meets the needs of those for whom it was intended, but also decisions by curriculum leaders to avoid a course that does not contribute significantly towards their school’s attainment profile”. [my italics].

Ah, OK, so this could be summarised: “Pupils steered towards certain subjects because of a school’s need to improve its figures”.

Third, the report offers criticisms of the move towards completing key stage 3 in two years, rather than three. I think this is related to the themes of “Education by Numbers” because I believe some of the calculation of schools in making this move is to increase the time they have to focus on raising GCSE performance. That, of course, can be seen as a rational move to make, from the individual pupil’s point of view, if it helps secure better grades. But hyper-accountability/ “league table” calculations are also likely to be a factor. This means, of course, that a child not going on to study history GCSE will stop at 13, rather than 14. And Ofsted’s criticism of this is on educational grounds, although admittedly from a subject-specific point of  view, that of a specialist history inspector.

Among the quotes on the report on this are: “The national curriculum orders and programmes of study in Key Stage 3 have led to much high-quality teaching and learning in history. However, in one in five of the secondary schools visited, curriculum changes, such as the introduction of a two-year Key Stage 3 that allowed some students to give up history before the age of 14, and thematic approaches to the curriculum, were associated with teaching and learning that was no more than satisfactory.” [I know the use of “no more than” satisfactory will jar, at least to a teacher audience, since my dictionary defines satisfactory as “fulfilling expectations or needs”, but you get the point].

“In 14 of the 58 secondary schools visited…whole-school curriculum changes [including a two-year KS3] were having a negative impact on teaching and learning in history at Key Stage 3.”

 It goes on: “In England, history is currently compulsory for students beyond the age of 14 and those in schools offering a two-year Key Stage 3 course can stop studying history at the age of 13. England is unique in Europe in this respect. In almost all the countries of the European Union, it is compulsory to study history in some form in school until at least the ages of 15 or 16.”

The report also points out that children do not get access to specialist history teachers in primary school, meaning that some will only have specialist teaching in the subject for two years of their school careers.

So that would be: “some pupils are only getting two years’ history teaching in secondary school, and this is not a good thing”.

Fourth, there were problems with teachers’ professional development – because of an over-reliance on exam-specific training – in some schools. “Access to training for history was an increasing concern for all teachers…In 28 of the 64 secondary schools visited in which this aspect was specifically inspected, access to subject training was only satisfactory and in 10 of the schools it was inadequate. In one in every five schools visited, training by the examination board was , and had been for several years, the only type of out-of-school subject-specific professional development for history teachers.”[my italics]

It goes on to say that this training, in schools doing it well, was only one of a number of approaches.

So that would be: “In one in five schools, teachers’ only professional development is geared to teaching towards particular exams”.

Fifth, the inspectors found that, in “a minority” of primary schools, foundation subjects such as history had been “squeezed”. “In year 6 in particular, teachers said to inspectors that the foundation subjects were ‘not a priority’”. Year 6, of course, embraces the run-up to key stage 2 tests.

So I think it’s fair to infer the following statement from this: “Some primary schools neglecting subjects such as history in drive to raise test scores in English, maths and science.” Ofsted points out,  of course, that some schools don’t do that and still get good results, but I don’t think the statement above is unfair.

Ok, that’s probably enough for now, from this document.

Exhibit two is discussions at last week’s Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education. Andrew Hall, director general of the AQA exam board (England’s largest GCSE and A-level board) worried about a sixth issue which I think is related to “Education by Numbers”: pupils being entered early for GCSE subjects.

This is an issue on which Mr Hall has spoken of having concerns before. At the conference, he documented a rise in the number of maths GCSEs taken by “15-year-olds and younger” [I take it this means those in years 10 and below] from 32,908 in 2008 to 83,179 in 2010. The latter figure represented some 11 per cent of the total entry for maths last year, he said.

He said: “That’s an almost three-fold increase in three years. I absolutely expect, from what I’m seeing in entry patterns this year, to see a significant increase again in 2011. Not just in maths; English has seen the same pattern.”

“I think there are some serious causes for concern here…For some students, early entry may be a really good thing. Those students who are particularly strong performers, and who will continue to get good maths education, may benefit. But my question is: what about the others?

“Are the pressures of league tables pressurising teachers to enter students early to bank a grade C, in order then to focus on those who did not get there? Is this going to impact on students post-16? I venture to suggest it will, but we need to get the evidence.”

He added: “This is not just about maths. Across a whole range of specifications, we are seeing students entered early. It may be the result of modularisation.” [More GCSEs have become modular in the last few years].

One audience member, who said he worked with “gifted mathematicians”, said some were put off persisting with the subject if they took it early and then had a gap without maths before entering the sixth form.

To be clear, I don’t think I’m qualified to judge whether early entry is always a good, or a bad, thing for a pupil. I took maths exams a year early myself throughout the latter years of secondary school, but that was a judgement made by my school on its merits, for me, since league tables and other institutional results pressures did not exist in the 1980s.

My concern, which clearly is shared by Mr Hall, is that results pressures for the institution, rather than the long-term learning needs of the pupil, may be playing a large part in decisions. This calls to mind an article I wrote last year in which there was evidence of a school entering pupils for GCSE maths and English early in order to attempt to “bank” a C grade, then removing them from that class if they achieved it in order to concentrate on achieving a C in other subjects. This, a former member of staff at the school told me, simply neglected to consider any need to give the pupil a chance to score higher than the C in the summer exam, since the C grade was all that mattered to the school’s headline statistics.

I also remember a head telling me, a few years back, that modular exams were far better because they afforded the school greater control over the eventual result. She could not, she said, take the risk of any surprises in the form of children underperforming on the big day and thus dragging the school’s published numbers down. And this was from someone highly sceptical about results-driven hyper-accountability. Again, this is not an argument for or against modules, but a suggestion that results considerations for the school are influencing decision-making.

So, Mr Hall’s concern could be summarised: “Results pressures on schools may be helping to push pupils towards being entered for exams early. I’m worried it’s not in all of their long-term interests.”

Mr Hall was also pressed, at the conference by an academic from Southampton University, on two points also mentioned in Ofsted’s history teaching report. Specifically, was he concerned about exam board-endorsed textbooks, and what about teachers only getting professional development through courses run by exam boards targeted at improving pupil performance in particular exams?

On textbooks, Mr Hall seemed, I think, to be acknowledging the issue and suggesting there might be ways of addressing it by seeking to employ senior examiners in-house at the awarding body. (Currently, all examiners, I think, are employed on a freelance basis. Mr Hall seemed to be suggesting that part of the issue was that they needed to supplement this income by publishing textbooks).

 He said: “There is this thing called restraint of trade. Can we prevent someone who is an examiner, off their own bat, writing a textbook?”

He added: “I think there are some issues around the  ways in which awarding bodies choose to engage the people who work as examiners. We are looking at what’s the right mix for us. Do we want to move some of those people into the organisation so that we can reward them more appropriately so that they do not need to do those things?”

On the training courses, he said: “One of the things I believe very strongly, as an organisation, is that we should not just offer help to teachers for our own specifications. We are using our charitable status to try to offer developmental opportunities across a broader spectrum.”

One final exhibit would be last month’s Wolf review of 14-19 vocational education, which suggested that schools were being pushed towards non-GCSE exams because of the worth of some of these qualifications to the institution for league table (ie league table and the rest of the results apparatus) purposes. I’ve blogged about that here.

 A summary of one of Wolf’s concerns might be: “Pupils pushed towards GCSE-equivalent qualifications which might not help them in the long term because of the weight these qualifications are given in league table indicators.”

Right, to sum up, then, I would come back to the original two debates, mentioned at the top of the piece. Because these two competing priorities aren’t often enough, I think, expressed directly against each other, I think it would be interesting to imagine a hypothetical conversation between two people – each supporting either viewpoint mentioned at the top –and using evidence uncovered here.

The conversation, I think, might go something like this:

First person: “You know, we really need results pressures on schools of the current type because, without them, teachers would just let down pupils with poor teaching.

Second person: “But look, you can see evidence here that teaching to exam-endorsed textbooks are damaging at least some pupils’ history lessons and leaving them underprepared for higher education.”

1^st person: “I know, but we need these results pressures in schools.”

2^nd person: “But we have evidence that some pupils are being steered away from taking history, even though they want to take the subject, because of results pressures in schools.”

1: “I know, but we need these results pressures in schools.”

2: “But schools are moving towards a two-year KS3, partly because of the pressure on them to improve their GCSE results, and inspectors of history, [and the Historical Association, as it happens], think this is limiting many pupils’ experience of the subject in a way that does not happen in other countries.”

1: “I know, but we need these results pressures in schools.”

2: “But we know that in one in five schools visited, teachers’ only professional development is offered by exam boards in relation to particular exams.”

1: “I know, but we need these results pressures in schools.”

2: “But we know that in some primary schools, subjects such as history and geography are marginalised in the year leading up to the national tests.”

1: “I know, but we need these results pressures in schools”

2: “But we know that hundreds of thousands of pupils are being entered early for GCSEs, and there are worries that this might be educationally less than ideal, but informed by results calculations on the part of schools.”

1: “I know, but we need these results pressures in schools.”

Results pressures seem to be the rock on which our education system is now built, with any other consideration seemingly having to negotiate its way around them.

OK, I caricature this debate a bit, though not that much. Ministers of both this and the previous government will say that actions proposed through, for example, the Wolf review or Labour’s 2009 assessment inquiry which scrapped KS2 science tests have offered a case-by-case approache to mitigating the problems, and Mr Hall clearly appears to be taking them seriously.

Some will say that the three “exhibits” reported on above are not the only perspectives worth considering, either. (I want to look a bit more closely at what I think are contradictions in Ofsted’s own approaches on some of these issues, but that will have to wait a bit).

As ever, I’m not interested in blaming schools for what might be perceived as the more negative aspects highlighted by Ofsted, Mr Hall and the Wolf review, but just questioning whether this system as a whole – including the signals it sends to teachers about the overwhelming emphasis to be placed upon exam success on the measured indicators – is supporting good learning, or not.

Given the number of issues documented in just a few weeks, I wonder why we still aren’t linking these two debates properly, and looking more fundamentally at the real impact, for good or ill, of statistics-driven schooling.

- Warwick Mansell

Wednesday, March 15^th, 2011.

England’s secondary maths curriculum is likely to become “more challenging” for pupils from 2013, one of the government’s leading civil servants said today.

Jon Coles, who has a key role in the national curriculum review which was launched in January, suggested that while the primary maths curriculum in this country was quite similar to that of “top-performing” countries internationally, this was not the case from the age of 11 onwards.

He set out the thinking behind the review and – perhaps boldly, given that the review is only just over six weeks old – offered a taste of what some conclusions with regard to maths might be during a talk to the annual conference of the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education at the Royal Society in London this morning.

Mr Coles, director general for education standards at the Department for Education, said: “What I think [the review] will mean, from the early evidence beginning to come through in maths, is that it will probably mean some increasing challenge, especially in the secondary phase.

“There’s a great deal of commonality between the national curriculum in primary schools in this country and in the highest-performing jurisdictions.

“There are some differences, in primary, in timing and sequencing [of when things are taught], and we do have one area where we do a great deal more than other countries, which is data handling, in which we are quite unusual in this country.”

However, in general, he said, there were not huge differences between what was taught before the age of 11 here and good practice elsewhere.

But he added: “At secondary level, we will see a pushing up of challenge and expectation. That would be my guess on the basis of what the review has seen so far.”

On the wider thinking behind the review of the curriculum for 5- to 16-year-olds, for first teaching in 2013, Mr Coles set out the idea behind it of trying to learn from what happened in other countries which do well in international studies such as the OECD’s “PISA” tests and TIMSS, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study.

He said: “The review team are looking extremely systematically at what happens in the top-performing jurisdictions in the world.

“Specifically, they are interested in what is put in the curriculum at what age, what is the sequencing, what leads to progression and high performance in these systems, what can we learn from them and what should we transfer into our system?

“The overall aim of the review is to be much less prescriptive…to reassert the balance between the national curriculum and the school curriculum.”

He implied that the idea was to strip down the amount of time taken up by the national curriculum in schools.

He said: “The national curriculum…should be a specification of the core knowledge and principles needed to progress, not a complete specification of everything that schools teach.”

The government would not be specifying how teachers should teach (a move back to the days before Labour entered into the world of prescription over pedagogy with the national literacy and numeracy strategies). And he suggested, I think, that schools would need help adapting to this new world, saying the government would “need to support schools” in doing so.

Summing up, he said: “The task that the review team are undertaking is to come up with a pretty spare, pretty knowledge-focused national curriculum, based on the best international evidence.”

The timescale looks challenging, I think, with curriculum materials due in schools by September next year.  

But Mr Coles added:  “I think what we will see in this review is trying to get draft Programmes of Study out much earlier in the process than has been the case in previous reviews.

“That’s a good and important thing to do.”

Mr Coles also had some interesting things to say about funding. Asked a question about funding for a particular initiative, he said: “Our budgets are under a great deal of pressure.

“It’s true that the DfE has done rather better than many other departments. But we are experiencing a significant change [from spending under the previous regime, I guess] and what we are trying to do is prioritise front-line budgets.

“The most important thing to do is to prioritise schools and colleges and early years budgets.  Doing that, when this was already 80 per cent of our budget means that it will become 90 per cent of our budget.

“So the rest of our budget has halved. Given that within [that part of] the budget are some very big things, like initial teacher training – which I suspect many of you in this room would advise us not to cut – we do not have lots of pots of money.

“That’s a direct result of what’s being done to reduce the budget deficit.

“In the next few years, do not expect us to come up with pots of money for good new ideas. We will have to prioritise, and respond to good ideas, but I suspect not with new money. That’s the situation that the whole of the public sector is going to face.”

Ok, this has largely been a blog without comment from me, because I thought readers might be interested in these words as they stood. I will just add a final comment on Mr Coles’s speech, however, in relation to what he had to say about progress in maths in this country over the past 10 years or so.

Actually, I wondered what Mr Coles would say on this, as he has been at the department a while. Under Labour, he led the 14-19 programme which introduced the now beleaguered diploma qualification. Could his assessment of how things stand on school standards possibly be as bleak as that of his political boss, Michael Gove, who often seems reluctant to offer any sense that things might have improved in any way since 1997, I wondered.

Well, actually Mr Coles, perhaps unsurprisingly but interestingly, offered a more balanced view of matters with regard to maths education.

He told the conference: “Over the last 10 years, just looking back at the figures, we have an awful lot to look at that suggests progress, and that’s good and positive.”

The number of people coming into maths teaching over the last 10 years had doubled, he said, while the number passing* the subject at GCSE had grown very significantly, the numbers taking maths A-level had grown by 50 per cent since a low-point of participation was reached in 2002, and the take-up of further maths A-level had also increased markedly in recent years.

He said international evidence presented challenges. But even here – and I almost choked on hearing the next bit – there were some chinks of light.

He said: “There are some positives. We are the most improved nation in TIMSS, in the international comparisons.”

I nearly choked because, of course, as I have written here, somehow Mr Gove never seems to find the time to mention England TIMSS results in major speeches setting out why he thinks our schools need radical reform. Last November’s white paper is also free of the statistics on maths which Mr Coles presented.

Of course, he did go on to set out the agenda which has been put forward by the Government, saying: “Actually, PISA does present some very large challenges.  Our 15- and 16-year-olds are doing significantly less well than they are in some other countries.

Shanghai’s performance on the last PISA tests put it two whole years on the PISA scale ahead of us, and that gives us a real challenge.”

He also highlighted a recent report for the Nuffield Foundation which documented the low proportions of young people in England, Wales and Northern Ireland persisting with maths after the age of 16.

But  all Mr Coles offered a more balanced view of the evidence than was presented either by Mr Gove, in launching the recent education bill (Gove: “I would love to be able to celebrate a greater level of achievement, but I am afraid that this is the dreadful inheritance that our children face”), or in the white paper on which it was based. I wonder whether those TIMSS figures will ever get a look-in in official documents and government speeches in future. I’m not holding my breath.

This conference also had plenty to debate about the influence of results pressures in schools, which as you would expect I will be writing about in the coming days.

*[I note that there was no reference to this equating to pupils achieving a C grade or better at GCSE. A C grade is not, of course, formally, the cut-off for a “pass”. GCSEs were introduced with a passing scale of grades A-G. It is surprising that even officials are now saying a C grade is a pass, when this is not how the grading system works. I heard the conference chair, Professor Dame Julia Higgins also equate a C grade with a “pass”, and it featured in the Wolf review earlier this month. I understand why it’s happening, but I still find it strange that we have a technical language which defines a pass in one way, and everyone else now seeming to define it in another.]

- Warwick Mansell

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

Ok, I’ve decided to do something slightly different, here, in the form of a blog largely not written by me, but based on two emails I’ve received in recent months on the vexed and often technical issue of data analysis systems and target-setting.

This may be overly technical for some non-teacher readers of this blog, but I thought I’d put it up here as I get occasional inquiries about the Fischer Family Trust system in particular, and am interested in the implications of how these systems work in the classroom.

What follows are the more-or-less verbatim contents of two emails (reproduced here anonymously but with the authors’ consent) I received re data analysis systems, one from a teacher who seems reasonably positive/pragmatic about the whole experience, and the second who, as you will see, has concerns.

So here is the first teacher, who is a senior leader.

“I have always liked my schools to use two data sources, past performance and CEM Centre (MiDYIS, YELLIS and ALIS), although my current school uses CATs. 

“Raw data informs me as the teacher, but I adjust the targets that I give to students (no student in my GCSE classes is told that they will achieve less than a C, because all can easily achieve that and most can surpass it).  Data, as I tell staff, only provides questions and never answers.  It informs good teaching, but doesn’t make a good teacher.

“I then also tell staff the most important analysis of exam performance is comparing how students did in your class in comparison to other subjects in school. Did they do better with you or elsewhere? Then if they are below the data targets you need to take the mirror test. Do you feel that you did everything to help that student do better (look yourself in the mirror). If you are happy with what you did, move on, but ask ‘can we make adjustments to next years interventions?’

“I do recognise that these sets of data are not perfect and they can only ever be an indicator.  For FFT the worry is because of the inflation or deflation of scores at KS2 because of brilliant or poor teaching. In CEM and CATs students can do worse than they are capable of because of all the factors that can suppress test performance.  However, overall they do produce part of a useful guide and highlight possible underperformance to all staff.

“I’m happy to discuss any of this.  I am no way a zealot, just want all my students to progress so constantly looking for things to improve what I do. I think teachers’ fear of data comes from poor leadership as to how to use it.”

Here is the second email, reproduced verbatim from the start:

“Dear Mr Mansell,

“Thank you very much for your work on testing, hyper-accountability and the many problems in education today. I found your book Education By Numbers to be very thought-provoking, my copy is full of highlights where I was almost shouting out in agreement with many of the points you made.

“I have been teaching maths in the same high school for thirty years, and I find the current obsession with getting the best results for the school very dispiriting.

“I have tried to talk to my head of department and Head Master about improving learning and understanding, but it is a waste of time. They want to meet the targets, so pressure staff and pupils, force pupils to attend extra classes after school or instead of attending morning tutor meetings, but do not consider real educational improvements; too risky?

“Also, the pupils who will never achieve a C are effectively written off by the RAP(raising achievement process)which only targets D to C or C to B, and some troublesome pupils who the FFT say should achieve seem to move on elsewhere so they do not drag the results down.

“The RAP system is being extended to years 7, 8 and 9, not to improve education, but to achieve the magical FFT 5th percentile. Regular testing, split levels i.e. 3a, 3b, 3c etc, when it is doubtful if any teacher can reliably say ‘Jonnie is working at level 3 in algebra’. Levels may be estimated plus or minus one, sublevels are a nonsense, also the use of numbers as labels for ‘levels’ is misleading as the levels are descriptive, categorical data not measurements on a scale.

“One thing that I want to say to you is that the message that is regularly given about 5 or more grade Cs at GCSE being ‘good’ is a disaster for some bright pupils. I have had a few say ‘as long as I get 5 Cs I am doing well’.

“For able pupils C is poor, to get the message across to year 10 and 11 pupils I have bluntly said that for them ‘C means crap’, what they should be getting are 7 or more A*, A, B grades.

“The obsession with grades and levels for the benefit of the institution, instead of a focus on helping pupils to achieve the best for themselves, is a cancer in the education system”.

- Warwick Mansell

Wednesday, March 2nd

I had an interesting chat yesterday with the Ofsted press office. A press officer called me after I wrote an article for the Financial Times*, which was published on Saturday, on the effects of results pressures in schools.

This included the following paragraph:

“Ofsted inspections have, in recent years, focused heavily on statistical indicators of school quality that are largely based on exam performance.”

Ofsted’s argument was that inspections aren’t now as dependent on test/exam data as is commonly perceived. Particularly since the introduction of the latest version of the Ofsted framework, in September 2009, more emphasis is being placed on lesson observation, it was stressed to me. It is also not the case, as is sometimes thought, that schools are being pre-judged, before inspection visits, on the basis of their results.

I have been promised more information on this from Ofsted, and will update this blog on this subject when I receive it. In the meantime, anyone with thoughts or experiences on the current inspection process is welcome, as ever, to leave a comment or get in touch with me at warwickmansell@gmail.com

By the way, I wrote the FT article for a supplement which included league tables of school results. Another article in the supplement included some comments from a university admissions tutor on familiar themes, to readers of Education by Numbers and this website.

The piece, by Liz Lightfoot, included a quotation from Richard Austen-Baker, a law admissions tutor at the University of Lancaster. He said: “The exam boards compete for customers – teachers and students – and what they want are the best possible grades, especially with the pressure from school league tables.”

Dr Austen Baker added, of exam preparation in schools: “I have been told by teachers that they discourage students from wider reading because there is a danger it might introduce them to material which is not in the syllabus and if they use that in their exams instead of material from the exam specification, they will lose marks.”

Anecdotal stuff, of course, from one individual, but I thought I’d mention it as this website is supposed to be documenting views alongside research evidence of the effects of the current system.

 *I think you’ll need to register with the FT site to read this piece, and the one by Liz Lightfoot.

- Warwick Mansell

Friday, February 25th

Just a quick blog now on two interesting stories in this morning’s TES.

First, Helen Ward wrote a piece about the Government abandoning plans billed as “league tables for five-year-olds”. This proposal, spotted by Helen in the small print of the Department for Education’s draft Business Plan last autumn, said data would have been published on the “achievements of children at the end of the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile, by school”.

Today’s story reveals that the move is being abandoned, following serious opposition including a petition which garnered nearly 1,000 signatures. Those quoted in the piece were all opposed to the Government’s move, with objections including that it would load too much pressure on to young children.

This is very welcome news, of course. Government ideology would say that requiring institutions to publish results, and then encouraging them to compete to raise those scores, inevitability pushes up standards.

However, the widespread concern that, perhaps, the consequence of this would be to push early years providers to over-concentrate on early years foundation profile data, thus ratcheting up pressure on children with the government using the profiles for a purpose for which they were not designed, seems to have won the day.

Many will also have observed that other countries – including the oft-quoted success story that is Finland – don’t try to race ahead with pushing children towards formal goals at an early age at all.

A generalised sense – at least in most of the Government’s rhetoric – that transparency and data production is always a good thing seems to have been trumped, then, by concerns about the implications of this in the early years.

The petition organiser also fears, however, that change along the original Government lines might come back at some stage, so I will be watching for developments.

One thing I wonder, actually, looking back at the business plan, is a section earlier on in the document where the DfE pledges to : “Work with local authorities to develop a plan to increase voluntary and community sector involvement within Sure Start Children’s Centres, improve accountability arrangements, increase the use of evidence-based interventions, and introduce greater payment by results.”

Does “payment by results” mean payment by assessment results, I wonder? I will try to get some more information on this. For a longer blog I wrote on payment-by-result thinking at the top level of the coalition, see this piece.

The second story , by William Stewart, related to a suggestion by Isabel Nisbet, the outgoing chief executive of Ofqual, that computers should replace pen and paper in all exams, with GCSEs and A-levels taken in the traditional manner running the risk of becoming “invalid” for today’s pupils.

These were very interesting comments, and were seized upon enthusiastically by two of England’s three main exam boards. (The other, OCR, sounded more cautious),as well as being followed up elsewhere in the media.

Many would agree with the sentiments behind these comments– it will strike many as anachronous that teenagers still spend up to three hours hunched over a desk scribbling away, when longhand writing has next to no place in today’s workplace.

But the aspirations voiced by Ms Nisbet, whom I respect, by the way, have been around for years now. The question is not whether computerisation in this way would be a good thing in an ideal world, but how detailed practical problems facing anyone who wants to move the system in this way can be overcome.

As the article mentions, back in 2004 Ken Boston as head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority set out a series of detailed milestones which would have seen the system largely computerised by 2009. But none of these were achieved. (See an article I wrote on this here).

I can’t help wondering how much has changed in the intervening two years since I wrote that last piece. I asked the Ofqual press office if Ms Nisbet, or anyone at Ofqual, had any detailed plan as to how her objectives could be achieved, wondering also how exam boards might be helped with computerisation. I was told: “There is not [a plan] as such. It was just Isabel setting out what she thinks should happen in the future.”

I wonder how long we will be waiting.

- Warwick Mansell

Friday, February 16th

I found last Wednesday’s Second Reading debate on the new  Education Bill so hard to watch, I had to switch off in the end. The politicised, partial and sometimes dismissive nature of leadership being given to our education system, by the individual who now seems to be accruing huge powers to shape its future, really struck me as astonishing.

This is especially the case when one is aware of a fuller picture with regard to evidence than was presented at the dispatch box.

I just about got to the end of Michael Gove’s speech, but not beyond, having grown increasingly annoyed about a number of statements he made about various aspects of evidence behind the claimed need for education reform, on which much of the change which is set out in the bill seems to be being based.

Having caught up with the written record of the debate now on Hansard, I wanted to examine a few highly contestable aspects of Mr Gove’s speech quite closely. This is going to involve a fair bit of detail.

- First, there was the suggestion, which Mr Gove and other members of government have made frequently in recent weeks, that change is essential because this country is slipping down the international league tables of education performance.

Mr Gove began by saying that one of the three challenges facing “our country” (it was never specified if this meant England, which is Mr Gove’s responsibility as Education Secretary, or the UK), was “educational decline, relative to competitor nations”.

He then quoted a set of statistics which showed, he said, that “all our children were failed by Labour”. (What: every single one of them? I wondered. That’s quite a remarkable reach, for any political party). Quoting from the well-known OECD Programme for International Student  Assessment (PISA) tests, the latest results of which came out in December, he said “we moved from fourth to 14^th in the world rankings for science, seventh to 17^th in literacy and eighth to 24^th in mathematics by 2007”.

He added: “By 2010, we had moved from fourth to 16^th, from seventh to 25^th and from eighth to 28^th in those subjects.”

These rankings are all correct, the first set relating to tests taken in 2000 and reported in 2001, Mr Gove’s 2007 figures relating to tests taken in 2006 and his 2010 stats based on assessments taken in 2009.

He added: “The only way that we will generate sustainable economic growth is by reforming our education system so that we can keep pace with our economic competitors.”

Ok, well leaving aside the fact that the notion of a direct link between performance in international education tests and a country’s economic output is highly contested  – Mr Gove’s adviser on vocational qualifications reform, Alison Wolf, devoted an entire book to criticising the link between investment in education performance and economic output – the Education Secretary left out a large chunk of the evidence on how England actually fares in international comparisons.

I will return to PISA shortly. But first we have to consider that there is another major international testing study, the results from which Mr Gove did not mention and which presents an entirely different picture, for England, than PISA currently does.

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (better known as TIMSS) is based at Boston College in the US, has been going longer than PISA and while not quite as large in terms of the number of countries taking part, is still very substantial: the last round of TIMSS, in 2007, was taken by the largest number of pupils of any international test (these have been taking place since the 1960s) until it itself was surpassed by the PISA tests of 2009.

The last TIMSS study produced what looked like unalloyed good news for England. TIMSS tests are given in maths and science, to 10- and 14-year-olds. Between 1995 and the last tests in 2007, England’s primary maths performance improved by a greater margin than that of any of the other 15 nations which had pupils taking tests in the two years, including Singapore, Japan, the Netherlands, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Norway.

 Its score went from below the international average to comfortably above it in that time, while its ranking improved from 12^th out of 16 countries in 1995 to 7^th out of 36 in 2007.

The other tests in the last round of TIMSS also brought good news. In secondary maths, England was the joint third most improved of 20 countries over the 1995-2007 period, rising from 11^th out of 20 to 7^th out of 49 in the rankings.

In science – which is traditionally England’s strongest subject in international tests – the country was seventh most improved out of 16 in primary (its ranking moving from 6^th out of 20 countries in 1995 to 7^th out of 36 in 2007) and fifth most improved out of 19 in secondary (its ranking improving from seventh to fifth between these two years, even though the number of countries taking part increased from 19 to 49). In these science tests in 2007, English pupils finished ahead of, in primary, countries including the United States, Germany, Australia and Sweden; and in secondary, ahead of these countries plus Russia, Hong Kong and Norway.

It was therefore surprising to hear Mr Gove telling Parliament that “the statistics produced by the OECD [ie PISA] are ungainsayable. I would love to be able to celebrate a greater level of achievement, but I am afraid that this is the dreadful inheritance that our children face”.

Well, if he was looking for some figures to celebrate, he really did not look very hard.

Remarkably, Mr Gove actually mentioned the existence of TIMSS, though not any of the results it has recently generated, towards the end of his speech, in highlighting plans to force schools which are selected to do so by the tests’ sampling systems to take part in future rounds. So omitting to mention England’s results looks doubly serious.

Some may want to dismiss this omission as to expected in a political debate. But it goes further than a non-mention in one debate.  Actually, international evidence is being used as the justification for the government’s entire reform programme. And, again ministers and civil servants are simply ignoring the findings of TIMSS.

Last November’s white paper, setting out the Government’s plans for the education system, began with the following statement, in a forward written jointly by David Cameron and Nick Clegg. It said: “So much of the education debate in this country is backward looking: have standards fallen? Have exams got easier? These debates will continue, but what really matters is how we’re doing compared with our international competitors.”

It is clear that the coalition has not been looking very hard, or very thoroughly, at what it says is a vital question, as it goes on to say: “The truth is, at the moment we are standing still while others race past.”

This selective reading of the international evidence also formed the basis for the Government’s “Impact Assessment” of the education bill, published earlier this month, which sets out the rationale for ministers intervening in the schools system in this way.

It said, on page one: “The Schools White Paper set out how we are falling behind in the international league table of educational performance compared to competitor countries. The most recent PISA survey – the international league tables of school performance – reported that since 2000 we have fallen from fourth to sixteenth in science, seventh from twenty-fifth in literacy, eighth to 28^th in maths.”

Again, there was no mention of the alternative picture reflected by TIMSS. This is also ironic given that TIMSS is a closer test of pure curricular knowledge of the sort about which Mr Gove often enthuses – ie the problems could be seen as more “traditional” – than is PISA, which tests application of reading, maths and science understanding in “real world” scenarios.

To seek to base your reform strategy on international testing evidence, and yet ignore the conclusions of the world’s second largest testing study because they don’t fit the political picture you want to paint is, to sum up, ludicrous.

Returning to the PISA figures themselves, they certainly are not good news for the last Labour government. However, David Blunkett, the former education secretary, rightly pointed out in the bill debate that it was, obviously, misleading for Mr Gove to quote out of context the UK’s sliding raw rankings figures between 2000 and 2009 when the number of countries taking the PISA tests expanded dramatically over that time.

Indeed, the OECD itself has said that comparing the UK’s results directly between 2000 and 2009 is not statistically valid, because of problems with the sampling in 2000, as this blog by “Fullfact” points out, although some general, unofficial comparisons can still be made, I think, by looking at the underlying data for the UK from the two years. There is also a strong case to be made that the differences in average test scores between western countries around which nations obsess, in both PISA and TIMSS, are relatively small, and therefore using such comparisons as your main basis for reform is unwise. If you are going to use them, though, it would be wise to use all the evidence, rather than just some of it.

Finally, Mr Gove said: “How can a country that is now 28th in the world for mathematics [in PISA] expect to be the home of the Microsofts, Googles and the Facebooks of the future?”

As my former TES colleague Helen Ward has pointed out, this might not have been the best example to choose. For the United States, the home of the Microsofts, Googles and Facebooks of the present, actually finished just below the UK in the latest PISA maths tests. (And has a fairly mediocre record in previous PISA rounds, as measured by average test scores).

- Second, Mr Gove told the House of Commons that “Inequality worsened under Labour and the education system exacerbated it”.

I think I have heard the second part of this claim from the Education Secretary before, and it is very fishy.

He went on: “If we look at the gap between children eligible for free school meals and their more fortunate and privileged counterparts, we can see that as those children moved through the eduction system and progressed under Labour the gap between rich and poor widened.

“At age seven, the gap in reading scores between those children who were eligible for free school meals and those who were not was 16 points. At age 11, the gap was 21 points in English and maths. At age 16, the gap was 28 points at GCSE.”

The argument is pretty clear, then. These statistics show that the achievement gap between those children eligible for free school meals and the rest increases over time, as they get older and move through the school system (or at least it did under Labour). And therefore the schools system “exacerbates” the problem of social inequality in achievement.

Leaving aside the question of whether test scores achieved at different ages are directly comparable in the way suggested here, the assertion that schools are actually making the problem worse is highly questionable, and probably actually very insulting to those working within them.

For these figures offer no conclusive evidence to back Mr Gove’s claim. If pupils’ achievements really are moving apart in this way, schools may be to blame in part. Or they may not. To blame them entirely for that situation – as Mr Gove does here – is simply to write off the huge advantages that some better-off children will have at home over their peers eligible for free school meals. (All other things being equal – and this is, of course, a big assumption – one would expect a child who had more resources at home to pull away, educationally, from one who had fewer.)

To put it another way, it may be that the “schools system” is doing all it can to make up for huge differences in parental or cultural support for education, and not succeeding to the degree of wiping these differences out entirely when they are picked up by testing statistics. (Which it would be doing, by implication, if these test score differences did not widen over the school years). This is very far from showing that schools are “exacerbating” inequalities: making them worse, rather than having some effect in counteracting them.

It may be I am wrong, and it really is as bad as Mr Gove makes out. State schools, even though they largely educate children according to the same curricula and with teachers largely trained and inspected to a common template, may actively be making inequality worse, for all teachers’ best efforts.

But the statistics he presents are unconvincing as evidence one way or another.

- Third, Mr Gove talked about the bill enhancing teachers’ professional freedom. He talked about this in relation to giving them more powers over how to discipline pupils but also, more interestingly, in relation to the curriculum.

He said: “I am happy to reassure my honourable friend [the Conservative MP Edward Leigh, who had asked a question which worried about Labour proposing the introduction of compulsory sex education in primary schools] that I will not accept amendments in Committee [the next stage of the bill] that seek to make the curriculum any more prescriptive or intrusive.

“The Bill will enhance professional freedom and autonomy, because we recognise that it is only by doing that we can ensure that our economy and education system are fit for the 21^st century.”

Yet Mr Gove’s curriculum reforms are, rightly or wrongly, certainly not only about enhancing teachers’ freedoms. Indeed, their defining idea is probably that teachers’ latitude over what to teach needs to be reduced, at least in areas deemed by Mr Gove and his advisers to be central. That is, the curriculum under the latter years of Labour gave teachers too much freedom over what to teach, because it was not specific enough in its requirements, is the clear implication of what Mr Gove has said on other occasions and again, here.

This much is clear from another section of Mr Gove’s bill speech. In this, he was attacking staffing arrangements at the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency, which I will go on to talk about. But first, we should just focus on what he said about the curriculum.

He said: “Let us take the QCDA…which has 393 employees. Can any Member of the House tell me how many of those work in the QCDA communications department? ….The answer is 76 out of 393. How can it possibly be an effective use of public money to have 76 people involved in communications at a curriculum quango, when that quango has been responsible for a secondary curriculum that mentions not a single figure in world history apart from William Wilberforce and Olaudah Equiano? How can it be right that we have spent money – so much money – on that curriculum authority, when its geography curriculum mentions not a single country other than the UK, and not a single river, ocean, mountain or city, but finds time to mention the European Union?  How can it be right that we can find money to employ 76 people in communications – 76 spin doctors – when our music curriculum does not mention  a single composer, a single musician, a single conductor or a single piece of music?”

The contradiction should be obvious. If Mr Gove really believed in enhancing teachers’ professional autonomy in every aspect of their working lives, he would not say this. A geography teacher trusted to exercise professional discretion would not need to be told what countries pupils needed to be taught about. Nor would a history teacher need to be told that coverage of World War 2, for example, which is mentioned in Labour’s current secondary curriculum, is likely to include references to Churchill (alongside Hitler and Stalin, of course).

It would be perfectly coherent, in my view, for the Secretary of State to say he thinks teachers should be given professional freedoms in some areas, such as over discipline, or over specific areas of the curriculum, but that in others – particular areas of the national curriculum – there is a public interest in being more prescriptive. This, after all, was largely the rationale behind the introduction of the national curriculum in the first place: that some structure needed to be in place to ensure that pupils in different schools had a common experience in terms of what they were taught. That view has not been uncontested, but it is not illogical.

It is, I think, the true rationale behind Mr Gove’s current curriculum review, which wants to be more prescriptive about the teaching of what it will define as core knowledge and concepts in selected subjects.

However, the party political suggestion that one party is on the side of “freedom” and the other is not, when a central plank of the coalition’s reforms depends to a large extent on this reduction of freedom, just makes the government’s position look ridiculous.

-  Mr Gove suggested there was no alternative but to side with the government on its reform programme, as the rest of the world was heading down this track and therefore not to follow was to risk being left behind.

He said: “We must all recognise that the reforms we are talking about, including the creation of free schools, are the sorts of reforms that we are seeing across the developed world.

“Ministers such as Arne Duncan [US Education Secretary] and John Key in New Zealand and Julia Gillard in Australia, and countries such as Sweden, Singapore, Finland, Hong Kong, Alberta and South Korea all recognise the need to reform their education systems, and we cannot afford to be left behind.”

Well, it’s probably best to take a few of these countries in turn, beginning with the reform movement being led by Mr Duncan for Barack Obama in the US.

It is true that there are several elements of Mr Gove’s plans that have similarities with those going on over the Atlantic; some of the English reforms are borrowing explicitly from American policies.

Mr Duncan is building on the work of George W Bush’s administration, which launched the controversial test-based No Child Left Behind school accountability programme, and he seems likely to receive support this year from the Republicans in Congress.

But despite this bipartisan support, the reforms being spearheaded by Mr Duncan are actually at the head of a hugely polarised debate in the US.  The reform effort centres largely on viewing value-added test scores as the final word on teacher quality, backs test-based performance pay for teachers and sees changes to school structures – charter schools – as a panacea to America’s education problems, which are not the same as England’s, by the way. Failing teachers and failing schools are the dominant note in criticism of state education by reformers in the US at the moment, and the idea is largely that schools would be run better if they operated according to the model used in corporate America.

For a powerful critique of this position, see the book by the former assistant Education Secretary under George Bush (the elder), Diane Ravitch, which I reviewed here. A recent article by three well-known US educationists who are supportive of the reform agenda also makes the point that its advocates need to show a bit more “humility” in the face of mixed evidence for the success of the changes they back, including the seemingly not-much-liked-by-the-US-public No Child Left Behind act.

 Turning to the other countries, well Sweden’s recent lack of progress in the PISA tests Mr Gove now lauds (as well as in TIMSS), is well-known, despite  the country having allowed the creation of a type of  independent state school on which Mr Gove’s “free schools” policy is based. Hong Kong has reportedly indeed launched reforms, but according to a recent TES report these are in the opposite direction from what is due to happen here.

There are elements of the English model in the Australian and New Zealand reform programmes currently taking place. But politicians in both main Australian parties have said they do not support league tables being used to rank schools, while in New Zealand as I understand it a minister could never simply order exactly how a school’s structure should change, a power Mr Gove is suggesting in the bill should be given to him.

Finally, any attempt to link the English system with what happens in Finland is…well highly disingenuous. Whatever one thinks about the two systems, they are hugely different. Finland has fully “bog standard” comprehensive schools before upper secondary begins, with absolutely no setting and streaming. Formal schooling does not start until the age of seven. There is no English-style accountability system, with no inspection system and no published national test data.

The only area in which Mr Gove might realistically be said to be borrowing from the Finnish experience, from my understanding of it, is in relation to, ironically given his statements about enhancing professional freedoms, the prescription within the Finnish national curriculum about what should be taught.

Different countries, then, take differing approaches to reform and there is no inevitability to any one model. They all need to be debated on their individual merits, rather than trying to close down that debate by suggesting that there is a common reform model and that it is inevitable.

- Finally, I want to turn to Mr Gove’s claim about staffing levels at the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency.

You will remember that he presented figures purportedly showing that the QCDA had 393 employees, out of which 76 worked in the communications department. “How can it possibly be an effective use of public money to have 76 people involved in communications at a curriculum quango…How can it be right that we can find money to employ 76 people in communications- 76 spin doctors – but…” etc.

On hearing this, I immediately smelt a rat. From my dealings with the QCDA and its predecessor the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority over the years, I suspected that it was stretching things, to put it mildly, to suggest that all communications staff working in an agency such as this were “spin doctors”, the implication of which is that they were all concerned mainly with bolstering the organisation’s image with the media and thus, as far as a government keen to safeguard the public interest was concerned, were clearly a waste of money.

In fact, there were only ever a handful of people working in the press office at the QCA/QCDA, I remembered. I thought some others were likely to have worked in internal communications, ie helping the organisation to communicate with its staff. But how did Mr Gove, or whoever gave him the information, arrive at the larger figure?

In fact, the “communications” department at the QCDA embraces a far larger number of jobs than could ever be classed as those for “spin doctors”. On Wednesday, I received a statement to this effect from the organisation’s chief executive, Lin Hinnigan.

According to Ms Hinnigan, the figures for people working in the QCDA’s communications department relate not just to those in the press office, but those who could not be called “spin doctors” at all, including those staffing its helpline services which communicate with schools. They also seem to relate to more than one organisation.

Ms Hinnigan’s statement reads: “The figures [used by Mr Gove] show QCDA’s spend and staffing between 2008 and 2010, during which time the organisation was funding the set-up of Ofqual as well as relocating both organisations from London to Coventry.  So the figures represent the total costs of two organisations running across dual sites, recruiting a new workforce and establishing new systems.”

She added: “This figure (76) [used by Mr Gove under the ‘communications’ heading] covered all staff in the communications and QCDA and Ofqual customer services departments, including switchboard and helpline operators; web and publishing editors; people who support schools and local authorities in delivering national curriculum tests, and those who deliver communications to employees.  In April 2010, prior to the announced closure of QCDA, there were 15 staff at QCDA dealing directly with communications, including three in the press office and one in internal communications.  The remaining 11 were people liaising with schools, college and employers to support them in delivering the Diploma; general qualifications and National Curriculum Tests, as well as the consultation around the primary curriculum.”

In other words, many of these QCDA employees have been exercising a “communications” function, but communicating with schools (and others) directly, helping them, rather than with the media. There were, erm, three people working in the QCDA press office at the time Labour handed responsibility for the organisation to Mr Gove.

I know that people at the QCDA have been dismayed, if not enraged, by his comments. It may seem like an intellectual exercise in culling needless “back office” functions to Mr Gove, or of making party-political points, but these are real people who are losing their jobs. (It has been pointed out to me that Mr Gove was reported to have told head teachers before the general election that he would have a new piece of paper for QCDA staff: a P45, which also went down a treat, I understand). They should have been shown more respect.

By the way, I have searched for a comparison between the QCDA and Mr Gove’s own department in terms of how much they spend on “back office” functions. In a sense these comparisons are slightly moot, as you could term all of the work carried out by both organisations as “back office”: none is frontline in the sense that it involves direct interaction with pupils, and so might be said to be vulnerable to politicians seeking cuts. So trying to label certain functions as “back office” within the Department for Education or the QCDA, and certain others as not, seems slightly perilous. However, the Labour government did do this, just before the election last year, the Cabinet Office producing a document called “Benchmarking the Back Office”. This found that the QCDA actually spent considerably less on the strictly “back office” functions it charted for all organisations of finance, human resources and procurement than did the Department for Children, Schools and Families. It also lost an average of 3.2 days per employee per year to sickness absence, compared to a figure of 7.9 per cent for the DCSF. There was only one area where it was more expensive than the DCSF on the categories listed as non-frontline in this document: the cost per square metre of its office space, which was just over double that of the DCSF. It is unclear from this document whether this related to the QCA/QCDA’s former home in Green Park, west London, or to its current base in Coventry.

That is it, on the specific points. It should also be said that, during the session in the House of Commons, Mr Gove also responded on occasion dismissively to questions about the bill from his political opponents. In some ways this is surprising, as he is known to be courteous in private.

Some might observe all of this and see it as the natural rough-and-tumble of the Parliamentary process. Politicians being not entirely straight with evidence is hardly news, you might say.

But the position the Secretary of State takes to such evidence, and to presiding over this debate with a sense of fairness, does matter, and particularly at this time.

It is true that, in some aspects of education, this government is taking a more hands-off position than was the case in the most controlling of the Labour years. For example, there are now no national teaching strategies, much of the targets regime is being dismantled, and the inspections system is being loosened dramatically for schools said to be doing well.

However, in other areas this is a very centralising bill, vesting yet more powers with the Secretary of State. Examples of powers given to the Secretary of State in this and recent bills include the ability simply to order schools to become academies, and to be the ultimate arbiter as to whether a local community would benefit or not from having a free school or academy set up in its midst, whatever local people think.

Labour has protested that the bill gives Mr Gove 50 more powers, but the reality is that power over what happens in English education has been becoming increasingly centralised over a period dating back 30 years, under both parties. For an example of how it increased under New Labour, see this article I wrote a couple of years ago here. It often seems as though, in the way successive education bills have been written in recent times, that those drafting legislation are of the view that “the Secretary of State” is now synonymous with “the guardian of the public interest”. Because he has some kind of very indirect democratic legitimacy – through being appointed as Secretary of State by the leader of the largest party following a general election – the Education Secretary is seen to be the holder of the public will, nationally and locally, in relation to many aspects of our schools system.

The demise of agencies such as the QCDA – for all its problematic history – will also concentrate power more directly in the hands of the person who is head of the Department for Education, which will take on its work: Mr Gove.

This degree of unfettered power is exceedingly rare, in other countries.

Especially given the huge power he now wields, the Secretary of State needs to act fairly, in the national interest, rather than simply pushing forward a particular party political agenda which often seems to have the prime aim of making the other side look bad.

Schools, parents and pupils deserve much, much better than this.

- Warwick Mansell

Wednesday, 16^th February

Two papers published this week by respected science education organisations make radical suggestions for fundamental changes to England’s exams system. Both make comments of relevance to the arguments in Education by Numbers.

First, buried in a letter to Michael Gove by the Campaign for Science and Engineering – which asks some seriously probing questions about the education white paper, suggesting problems with it – is a very interesting recommendation for dealing with a regularly-made criticism of the English education system.

This is the allegation that competition between exam boards can force down standards. The criticism is well-known, and runs as follows:

Awarding bodies have to compete for schools’ and colleges’ business.

Schools and colleges are motivated, especially under the modern system of hyper-accountability, to get the best results for their students.

This can therefore have the effect of lowering standards, because each board cannot be seen to be offering tougher exams than their competitors, for fear of losing business to their competitors.

The Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE) letter backs up this criticism, saying: “Examination boards currently compete against each other to offer examinations to schools. They are therefore incentivised to offer schools attractive packages. Schools, via league tables and other mechanisms, are incentivised to achieve the best examination results for their pupils. If one way for schools to achieve this is to choose a more attractive examination package, they may well do so. Over time this may lead to degradation in standards.”

I have written about this a fair bit over the years, including in chapter 13 of my book. For a particularly vivid example, I think, of the possible downsides of the current system, consider a discussion on a history teachers’ website I wrote about in the Guardian a couple of years ago, in which teachers discussed switching boards in a search for more predictable exams.

Although many people would agree that this is a problem, one obvious alternative which is often mooted as a solution – the replacement of the boards with a single “national” body – also has downsides, it seems to me.

While this would get around the problem mentioned above, in that competition between boards would be eliminated, it also would negate some benefits of the current scenario. First, having spoken to teachers aggrieved on occasion by their treatment at the hands of a board after having been left highly dissatisfied with seemingly erratic marking systems, I know that many professionals value the chance to take their custom elsewhere when things go wrong.

Second, and more positively for the boards, there is certainly a case that competition between awarding bodies may have both spurred innovation and given schools a wide range of syllabuses from which to choose.

Third, I think one national awarding body would run the risk of being seen as too close to the government, especially given that the same government still insists on having its education policy judged by results in national exams.

But the CaSE letter was original in making the case not for today’s system of competition between boards for the business of schools and colleges for each subject; nor for a single examination board; but for a kind of “third way”.

The CaSE letter argues that “One suggestion…is for Ofqual to award different exam boards multi-year contracts to set the exams in specific subjects. This would mean that all pupils in a given year group sit the same exam for a certain subject, improving comparability of qualifications, whilst ensuring that exam boards are kept efficient through competing against each other for contracts.”

This is a very interesting idea, in that it would mean that only one board would set exams in any one subject at any time. There would be no incentive for any awarding body to even give a hint that teachers should choose to opt for it for particular subject simply because it is likely to give their students a better chance in exams, because there would be no choice for the teacher at individual subject level.

I can see problems with this suggestion. First, at a more practical level, it would mean markers having to move from one board to the next every time the contract changes. More substantively, though, of course, this would mean a reduction in choice for schools and colleges. While it would remove the chance of teachers opting between boards on the search for better results, it would also cut out the traditional search for better syllabuses for their pupils.

Politically, it would also require a major reduction in market freedoms which many will doubt this government would want to countenance.

Against that, though this would go against the tradition in the English system which has favoured many boards offering many types of qualification, perhaps it makes more sense to the public to have only one version of what a GCSE in each subject is, rather than several.

The idea is also interesting in that it seems to be swimming with a recent tide which says the huge amount of choice over curriculum and exams options in the English system, which may be peculiar to it, is a problem.

Mr Gove’s controversial introduction of the English Baccalaureate GCSE performance measure is an attempt to discourage schools and pupils from taking advantage of that choice by opting away from the traditional academic subjects defined as important in this measure.

But the second paper published this week makes a similar point. The document, the fourth and final “state of the nation” investigation into science education by the Royal Society, calls for radical changes to A-levels predicated on the idea that too few students are opting for science subjects post-16.

Only 17 per cent of UK 16- to 18-year-olds took science A-levels in 2009, the latest figures which it analysed, the investigation found. It was particularly exercised by the fact that 17 per cent of schools and colleges in England had not a single student opting for physics A-level.

The number and complexity of options within the qualifications system might help to explain why students are not choosing science subjects beyond the age of 16, even though such subjects will be demonstrably valuable to pupils in university entry and in the labour market, the report suggests.

In a very powerful section of the report, the society argues that exam data itself is not particularly useful in trying to understand what is going on in the English education system.

It says:  “The methodology we adopted for our investigation has shown that annually published results reporting the number of entries to, and broad attainment in, individual subjects in public examinations are neither a reliable indicator of, nor a sharp enough tool for, understanding the performance of a nation’s education system.”

Data without background qualitative understanding can be misleading, is the implication.  

Although the paper does not, as far as I can see, go into any great detail about how this alternative would work, it suggests that A-levels be changed so that students study a broader range of subjects in the sixth form, including sciences. This A-level system could even be called a baccalaureate.

Pressure seems to be building for a post-16 Bac, as I mentioned in an article for the Guardian before Christmas.

Yet we have, of course, been here before in terms of suggestions that study should be widened post-16. As the Royal Society paper acknowledges, the introduction of AS levels in the Curriculum 2000 reforms was supposed to widen the choice of subjects taken by students, with the half-way house AS exams supposedly giving young people who favoured arts to try a science course, and vice versa.

It did not seem to work out like that, however, as people tended to concentrate on what they were good at.

The Tomlinson diploma plans also started out amidst talk that England could have a baccalaureate system in which students would have to take a broader range of subjects. It did not happen.

 Although the Royal Society would seem to be an influential body, and the investigation was painstaking, this notion of free choice, amid the huge array of options now available for young people from the age of 14, seems very powerful in our system.

Both papers are well worth a read. CaSE’s is here.

The Royal Society paper is here.

- Warwick Mansell

Tuesday, February 8th

Right, I am interested in the impact of the Government’s new “English Baccalaureate” performance measure in schools, which was introduced in last month’s GCSE league tables.

I wrote a piece in the Guardian  on this last month, amid widespread predictions that there would be a big effect on the curriculum offerings of at least some schools.

The TES also covered the story that week, but there was some speculation (see TES analysis here ), that the true impact might be limited, with schools continuing to focus much of their energy on the established (mouthful of an) indicator measuring the proportion of children achieving five or more A*-Cs including English and maths, or vocational equivalent.

However, since then, the TES has carried stories here  and here predicting major changes to school curricula because of the publication of this new indicator. The Guardian  also had a piece this week on this. Disturbingly, I think, the first of those TES stories included claims in relation to an anonymous school which was said to be getting pupils to abandon GCSE courses they had already started, in favour of subjects within the EBacc, simply because of the new measure.

I put a message on twitter describing that as “scandalous”. If schools are taking pupils out of courses mid-way through, it does look as if their own need for good results statistics is being put ahead of doing the right thing for the individual. I had a couple of interesting responses from people responding on twitter. One said: “I know several [schools] talking about changes for 2012 [GCSE] entries.”

Another said: “I’ve been working with some schools this week & they say many are trying to get kids through GCSE in 5 months so they count.” Another said: “School already have. Need more backbone.”

We’ll get a very good picture in the end on the EBacc’s effect, of course, when exams results data start to come through, starting this summer if there is truly to be any impact from schools trying to rush pupils through courses in…five months, but then from 2012 and 13 as the new indicator starts to bed in. In any case, watch this space for more on the EBacc.

- Warwick Mansell

Saturday, January 29th

I think my headline more or less says it all, really. An unnamed school in East Yorkshire is said in the TES to be asking students who had already started GCSEs to switch subjects because of the new English Baccalaureate measure, included in the first time in league tables earlier this month. Scandalous, if true: the only reason a school would do this would be to look good in a league table. This underscores the mad logic of the rankings system, encouraging schools to put their own interests above those of their pupils. 

 See http://bit.ly/evWT2s

- Warwick Mansell

Tuesday, November 23^rd

OK, this is just a chance to round up a few articles which have touched on the effects of results pressures on schools in the last couple of months.

I have gone back over national coverage since the start of October to highlight claims of alleged side-effects caused by accountability pressures, in line with the goal of this site to try to document as many of these effects as possible.

Accountability pressures are likely to change following tomorrow’s white paper. Negative effects, however, are unfortunately unlikely to go away.

In no particular order, then, here are these reports:

-An article in the Guardian on November 12^th, cited a Civitas report saying that pressures on schools to climb league tables meant some low-achieving pupils were more likely to be transferred away from a school into off-site provision.

“Conversely, the incentives for schools to hang on to intelligent students, no matter how bad their behaviour, is strong. This is hardly a just state of affairs, but the fundamental source of the problem is the pressure on schools to achieve high examination results,” said the report.

-A piece in the Telegraph on October 14^th included a claim from the historian Sean Lang that schools were forcing “less academic” children to drop the subject in favour of vocational options “which are worth more points in league tables”.

This reminded me of a study last year which, as reported in the TES, found that pupils were being steered away from the subject because of league table pressures. If you click on the TES link above, do have a look at the third comment for detailed claims of what this poster says can go on.

-Isabel Nisbet, the chief executive of the exams regulator Ofqual, was quoted in the TES on October 29^th as calling for targets based on the proportion of pupils achieving C grades or better at GCSE to be scrapped. Her suggestion was backed by Brian Lightman, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders.

The TES report mentions criticism that the targets have led to too much focus being placed on children at the C/D borderline.

It is debatable whether Ms Nisbet will get her wish in tomorrow’s white paper. Targets, at least in the New Labour form, seem to have had their day, in that this month’s Department for Education business plan did not feature any of the statistical indicators which the past government set itself and then sought to get schools to achieve.

However, there will a new “English baccalaureate” measure, effectively ranking schools in league tables on the proportion of their pupils achieving five GCSEs at C or better including English, maths, a language, a humanities subject and a science. This will still encourage schools to focus extra resources on pupils on the threshold of  achieving this measure.

-Also in the TES, on October 15^th, the head of England’s largest GCSE board was quoted as saying that entering pupils early for GCSEs in an attempt to help them secure a C grade could damage the depth of their learning.

This followed a warning from the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education (ACME), reported in September by the TES, citing the rise in the number of 15-year-olds entered early for the subject, with numbers growing by 250 per cent in two years.

Achieving C grades in maths and English has been made central to results accountability in recent years, with pressures including the fact that league table indicators now centre on them and that schools with poor scores on this measure have faced closure threats from ministers.

In a letter to Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, Professor Dame Julia Higgins, chair of ACME, wrote: “Learners gaining an early qualification is not necessarily a sign of success.

“Our concern is that the achievement of the C grade is overriding all other educational objectives, and as such the mathematical understanding of learners is secondary to targets and league tables.”

Brian Lightman, of ASCL, is quoted in the same piece as saying that pupils can be entered early for legitimate reasons, and I would agree, having been put through maths exams early myself in the 1980s, long before league tables arrived.

However, it seems unlikely that some schools are not “gaming” the system – predictably given the results pressures on them – by taking the decision to “bank” a C grade early for some pupils who can then move on to focus on other subjects which are important to the school.

I have had testimony that this happened in the unnamed school featured in my piece for the Guardian back in September. My source there claimed that pupils were put in for exams in maths and English early, and then pulled out of lessons in that subject as soon as they had gained a C, even if they might need a higher grade in that subject for their further study, in order to concentrate on subjects which were still important for the school’s published figures. Absolutely scandalous, if true, and a seemingly blatant example of how this system can encourage schools to put their own interests to look good ahead of pupils’ long-term needs.

-There was a claim in the Telegraph from Gillian Low, president of the Girls’ School Association, that an exams culture in schools was fuelling teenage mental health problems. The last government, she said, had burdened schools with “endless testing”

- A first person feature article last Tuesday in Education Guardian, documenting a teacher’s encounters with badly-behaved pupils as he taught in what were said to be some of the country’s most challenging schools, said results pressures could be partly to blame for teachers leaving the profession.

The author wrote that one welcome move would be the “removal  of the league table culture – where schools are unfairly ranked by a cold system of results-based numbers”.  

-Katharine Birbalsingh, the teacher who spoke at the Conservative Party conference at the start of October, also condemned league tables. In her speech, as reported by the Telegraph, she said:”League tables have all of us pursuing targets and grades instead of teaching properly.”

-With all the emphasis on exam results as the main measure of school success, perhaps the most arresting finding of all came in an Ofqual study, covered in both the TES and the Daily Mail, which sought to gauge employers’ attitudes to qualifications.

Only 14 per cent agreed with the statement: “We select candidates for interview primarily based on their exam results.”

Yet the effectiveness of schools and their teachers is, of course, judged primarily on their pupils’ exam results.

- Warwick Mansell