Wednesday, April 21st

I will a panellist on a live website debate on the Sats boycott today, hosted by Schoolgate, The Times’s education blog

- Warwick Mansell

Thursday, April 15th

Anyone reading Tuesday’s Tory manifesto would be entitled to think that the party had done a U-turn on an “announcement” last summer that key stage 2 Sats were to be scrapped in favour of tests taken at the start of secondary school. But have they really?

The picture on testing may not to be as black-and-white as the 120-page document suggests. But I’m still not sure.

Last June, Michael Gove, shadow schools secretary, excited a flurry of interest from newspapers and broadcasters after suggesting, on Andrew Marr’s Sunday morning TV show, that Sats as they are currently known would go. (A transcript of the interview is here).

Mr Gove said: “At the moment you have tests which are taken at the end of primary school… and one of the many concerns that people have is that that completely narrows teaching during the final year of primary school and all the focus is on drilling children just for those tests.

“Now we believe that what we should do is move those tests to secondary school. And the reason why is that when we’ve talked to the best comprehensive schools, the one thing they tell us is that they don’t completely trust the SATs tests and they run their own tests anyway to check the literacy level, the reading age of children when they arrive, and also to check their knowledge and overall competence.

“And we thought, why is it the case that you need two sets of tests? If the very best secondary schools are running their own tests and the primary school tests are becoming increasingly discredited, why don’t we move to one simple, unified system of testing at the beginning of secondary school?”.

Later in the interview, Mr Gove referred to this as an “announcement”, and implied that part of the reason he was keen on the idea was that it could cut unnecessary costs, by removing the “duplication” of many children being set one set of tests in year six, and another early in year seven.

This was written up on the BBC’s website as :”The Conservatives have announced proposals to scrap all Sats taken by 11-year-olds in England at the end of their primary schooling.” Other papers, including the Daily Mail and the Independent (I am sure there were others but I can’t find the references at the moment) followed up in a similar vein.

I was surprised, then, to read in this week’s manifesto the following: “We will keep Key Stage 2 tests and league tables. We will reform them to make them more rigorous.”

This then, looks like a clear case of an about-face. Having been tempted to consider reforming the system because of the wealth of evidence thrown its way about some of its negative effects, the party has simply changed its mind.

It appears, also, to be a hardening up of the Conservatives’ position even since this January, when David Cameron released a draft education manifesto which said simply: “We will overhaul the key stage 2 tests.” No contradiction that I can see there, then, with last year’s statement on the Andrew Marr show.

When I put the apparent change of position between last June and now to a Conservative spokesman, this was the response:

 “Michael [Gove] never said that we would abolish external assessed primary tests – he just floated the idea of moving the tests to year 7. We still intend to pilot this idea but needed to affirm clear support for the existing tests in our manifesto because of the upcoming union action.”

This has left me confused, then. First, although Mr Gove could argue that he was just “floating the idea” of year seven tests last year, he did refer to this policy during the interview as an “announcement”, and said that this was what the “party believed it should do”. Nor was there any attempt, as far as I am aware, directly to correct the headlines which followed. (Although party press officers have since seemed quite keen to play down how concrete the idea was).

One could argue that the quote as it stands could be read as saying that tests sat in year 7 could still be called “key stage 2 tests”, and thus that there is no contradiction with what is being said in the manifesto: ie the timing of the tests could change but they would still be “key stage 2 tests”.

But they would not be key stage 2 tests as currently understood.

The second part of the quote is even more intriguing, the spokesman telling me that there were still plans to trial last year’s idea. But of course it begs the question: if that is the case, why was it not spelt out in the manifesto? The final part suggests fear that the party might be seen as soft on the unions, who are soon to announce the results of a ballot on industrial action around the tests, helped to explain this.

If the Tories are still taking seriously the weight of evidence about the side-effects of the current testing regime to investigate other test/accountability methods, then, of course, this should be welcomed. But, whatever their reasons, I am surprised that they are not being more upfront, in the manifesto, about their thinking on an issue which affects every primary school in England.

- Warwick Mansell

Monday, April 12th

Where to start with Gordon Brown’s latest pronouncement on yet another round of schools reform? This was announced on the front page of today’s Guardian as the centrepiece of his party’s election manifesto.

“More than 1,000 mediocre or failing secondary schools will be taken over to drive up standards”, the paper’s coverage began. This is education policy-making-by-numbers: tired, recycled and somehow both depressing and damaging while at the same time being largely vacuous.

OK, I’ll say what I really think: I didn’t like it. Labour’s education manifesto may well have some good bits. It’s just a shame that this policy has grabbed the headlines.

First off, the “tired/recycled” bit. Well, we’ve had at least a decade, now, of stories saying that “failing” schools will be closed, that their heads will be sacked and/or that they will be turned into academies or taken over by other organisations.

The debate instantly gets framed in a negative way, obscuring the fact that surveys consistently show most parents are supportive of their child’s school. This contributes, probably, to an undermining of confidence in the state system if readers take these statements seriously. I wrote about this in 2008. (See: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=2599411)

If this is truly damaging, and happens just so politicians have another “reform” to announce…well, it’s not a great advert for the political process, is it?

To run through some of the policy initiatives with a similar theme: academies, first announced in 2000, have been billed mainly as a project to deal with underperformance/failure in traditional state secondaries; since 2006 the Government has had powers to increase the pressure on local authorities to “intervene” in schools where results are deemed not good enough, on any one of a handful of measures; and since 2008 the National Challenge has promoted a get-tough approach in which schools under a certain level of GCSE performance were effectively named and shamed and told to improve or be closed.

The new aspect now seems to be that parents, local authorities or schools themselves who are unhappy with the way things are going can trigger involvement from the provider of a “chain” of similar schools, who might change the school’s management. Even this is not completely new, Mr Brown and Ed Balls having announced the ability of parents to bring in federations weeks ago.

One can pull this apart in a number of ways. First, although the policy is billed as providing more power to parents, it has to be asked: how many families actually want these powers? Even if they do want them, why is Mr Brown suggesting his own target of more than 1,000 schools being changed in this way? Surely, if the policy is truly to be parent-driven, ministers should not be setting any kind of target: the number will simply follow from how many parents feel a need for this change. The policy raises other questions, such as whether the atmosphere of confrontation between parents and school leaders that these reforms suggest will really lead to improvement: should not the Government – and excuse me if I’m being naive, here – be urging families to support the places where their children are educated?

This policy, the article says, will help persuade the electorate that Mr Brown has the “energy and ideas for a fourth term” and that “his goal is to bring reform right into the mainstream of public services”.

But “reform” to what end?

If we trace the truly fundamental changes in education over the past 25 years, most of them at least had a clear rationale, whether one agreed with it or not. The national curriculum was introduced because it was argued that a framework was needed for what pupils should be taught wherever they were in the country. Local management of schools gave more autonomy to individual institutions. The national literacy and numeracy strategies came in, controversially, because it was said that teaching standards were too variable.

If federations or chains of schools are the next big thing in order to “drive up standards”, I have to ask, why? What will this change achieve?

At least one major study has shown that linking more successful secondaries to the less successful has improved results.

But the study, led by academics at Manchester University, offers no reasons why, as if the improved scores are all the evidence that is needed. In the absence of any explanation, the raised stats simply beg questions about how this improvement is being created.  Do federations improve the content of what is taught? If so, one wonders why we have a national curriculum. If they improve the “how” of teaching, were the national strategies not good enough? If it’s about better management, why do we have a National College for School Leadership (or whatever it’s called these days)? And if it’s about promoting co-operation, should not local authorities be doing this with their local schools?

Or are federations simply seen as a slightly more palatable, for schools, alternative to more drastic changes such as closing an institution?

I think what Mr Brown and his advisers are scratching around for – at least with their rhetoric – is a system which is seen to have parallels with how we behave as consumers buying products in the market. If we don’t like something, we as consumers (parents), can simply choose a rival’s product (different school chain). And the possibility of that choice forces companies (chains: federations of schools or academies) to improve their products (schools). It may also be, to borrow again from the commercial world, that a school’s association with a successful federation’s brand may improve its standing with parents.

It sounds a nice concept, but so often the policies fall down on the details. Yet politicians often seem uninterested in the detail – ie how parents and schools really interact and how the service actually works -  preferring instead to concentrate on ideological/theoretical and largely clichéd notions such as the rhetoric around choice.

As Gordon Brown says in his interview: “The important thing now is we are giving people voice and choice. Voice and choice determines how that service will be more accountable to the public, with  more rights for the individual citizen, with more guarantees for that individual person so that people will see the benefit of voice and choice in the years to come.”

Make any sense to you? Well, I struggled with it.

- Warwick Mansell

Thursday, April 8th

Yes, you read that right. David Blunkett, education secretary from 1997 to 2001, used characteristically blunt language to describe the state of teaching at the start of his period at Sanctuary Buildings, as he saw it, in a recent interview with MPs.

His comments were made in an evidence session to the House of Commons Children, Schools and Families committee, under its inquiry into the “foundations of the education system”.

The session, in which three other former secretaries of state appeared alongside Mr Blunkett, also saw Charles Clarke, who led the schools department from 2002 to 2004, lament the Government’s rejection of the central recommendation of Sir Mike Tomlinson’s inquiry into 14-19 reform in 2005. Mr Clarke said it was the Labour government’s biggest failure in education at that time.

Mr Blunkett’s statement came under questioning from the Liberal Democrat MP, Annette Brooke, who wanted to know if he had been guilty of “initiative overload”, bombarding schools with too many reforms.

He replied: “I plead guilty to initiative overload, because there seemed to be so much that needed tackling all at once.  Most of the criticisms afterwards are, as ever, that you did not do enough on this or that area, particularly in relation to secondary.

“I suppose that we could have eased off a little bit in relation to what we were doing in demanding changes in teaching, but if we had done that, we would have reduced the change on quality.

“We were demanding the most enormous amount of change from teachers, but frankly it was needed.

“I am a trained teacher. It was just desperately needed. We had a crap teaching profession. We haven’t any more.”

Whether or not one believes that teaching has improved in the last 13 years, this does seem, shall we say, an extraordinarily sweeping statement. Maybe my experiences of education are not representative, but I would struggle to think of a single one of my teachers from the 1970s and 1980s whom I’d describe, genuinely, as “crap”. Many were excellent. And was the profession as a whole “crap”? Well, to put it mildly, I don’t think that’s a very insightful word.

Nevertheless, his fellow interviewees did not demure, Mr Clarke, indeed, appearing to back him up. He said: “Unfortunately, I share David’s view.  The issues that needed to be addressed in 1997 were very deep. I had a school in my constituency that was in the worst five – not per cent, but five – primary schools in the country, where all the teachers, when you went in, said, ‘It’s nothing to do with us – it’s the parents’….it made me weep.”

The session was remarkable for a number of other comments. If some of Mr Clarke’s offerings might not win him many plaudits from teachers  – he suggested the profession was “extremely conservative and inflexible”- his regrets over Tomlinson are widely shared.

He said: “The biggest failure over this period of the Labour government is that we didn’t finally implement the Tomlinson proposals on 14-19. We should have done that just before the 2005 general election, shortly after I left office, for a variety of reasons. Actually, that was largely associated with…people’s attachment to A-levels.”

“People” might include, of course, Tony Blair. Mr Clarke was moved from the Department for Education and Skills to replace Mr Blunkett as Home Secretary in 2004, and there was speculation at the time and afterwards that Tony Blair had been keen to move Mr Clarke and his deputy, David Miliband, in part because of their support for the Tomlinson reforms, which would have seen A-levels and GCSEs subsumed into an overarching diploma system. Instead, A-levels and GCSEs were retained to run alongside the new diploma in a decision overseen by Mr Clarke’s successor, Ruth Kelly.

Mr Clarke was also scathing about work experience, describing it as a “fly-by-night operation: it is not done properly and it is not carried through effectively”. Baroness(Estelle) Morris, another of the interviewees, argued that GCSEs should be abolished, with tests only at 14 and 18.

Mr Clarke also talked about his belief, which I reported  on back in 2003, that supporting the teaching of individual subjects, in secondary schools, was a priority for him. He said: “When I was Secretary of State, I gave responsibilities for subjects to ministers and developed the principle of subject advisers…

“My answer for secondary education, in particular, was to try and enthuse teachers by reference to their subjects…I thought that enthusiasm was far and away the most powerful mechanism [to improve secondary education].”

For what it’s worth, I thought that was a strong argument at the time, and I still think it now. Teachers’ subject associations, in particular, I think, are very much a good thing.

Finally, of course the politicians were quizzed on the effects of high-stakes testing, which has rightly served as one of the central points of the committee’s inter-related investigations on assessment, accountability and the curriculum.

All four were intransigent, arguing that testing was vital. Lord (Kenneth) Baker began this defence by arguing there was nothing wrong with testing, saying that in many parts of the United States, they tested every term and that in his own primary school he had been tested that regularly. The others agreed that “testing” was vital.

This, of course, is a complete red herring. It is not the act of testing itself which is the problem, but what gets done with the results, as all with experience of this system surely realise. Once you put high stakes on the outcomes of these assessments, for schools and other adults, inevitably the danger is that side-effects follow as schools feel under pressure to put their own short-term need to boost test scores ahead of their pupils’ long-term learning requirements. Essentially, the danger is that the relationship between teacher and pupil can be corrupted by the teacher’s need to look good to the outside world. Not to recognise this as a risk is naive. And to try to compare the current system with one in which teachers were not being judged by their pupils’ results is ridiculous.

The committee was told that good teachers did not need to teach to the test. But the fact is that some test-orientated teaching would seem, to me, at least to appear to have a likely pay-off in terms of better short-term results. If not, I struggle to see why the National Strategies has advised schools to go in for teaching test-preparation techniques such as encouraging pupils to tailor the length of their answers to the number of marks available.

The committee itself was unconvinced by the answers it heard, however. Its report, published on Tuesday, said: “We were surprised by the wholehearted support from former secretaries of state for the level of testing that we have now.

“We re-iterate that we are not opposed to the principle of national testing. Where we do have concerns is the use of the same test for a range of purposes that cannot all be met at the same time.

“If pupils’ attainment is used to judge teachers and schools, teachers cannot be expected to be dispassionate assessors of that attainment, and teaching to the test is a likely consequence.

“We therefore have reservations – as does Ofsted – about the effects of national testing in concentrating teachers’ efforts upon certain areas of the national curriculum.

“We disagree with the former secretaries of state, and we believe that there is clear evidence that current approaches to testing reduce teachers’ scope to use their skills in innovation and creativity.”

You can read the whole report here and the full transcript of the secretary of states’ evidence session here:

- Warwick Mansell

Thursday, April 8th

Apologies: having re-checked this from the DCSF statement on this subject, it looks like the “intervention” powers I wrote about in last night’s post are no longer in the bill, so the last two pars of that blog are wrong.

- Warwick Mansell

Wednesday, April 7th

It’s bizarre what’s happened to the last education bill of this Parliament today, with the scrapping of changes including the Rose primary curriculum reforms, compulsory sex education classes and the proposed school report card.

The trigger was the failure of the Government and the Conservatives to reach agreement on the bill, with the Tories opposed to much of it. With time running out in the run-up to the election, in the so-called “wash-up” period, it appears the Conservatives had the whip hand and therefore their opposition to reforms including the Rose review seems to have won the day. It’s almost as if the government has changed already.

I’m not going to comment too much on individual policies in this bill, although I have reservations about the school report card in particular: rating institutions on single grades or numbers always seemed dangerously simplistic to me.

But it does strike me as very strange that vast amounts of time, energy and resources can be expended on the development of policies which seem never, now, likely to see the light of day. (The Rose Primary Review began way back in January 2008). If the Conservatives had come in next month and decided to do their own thing, well fair enough in a sense. I just find it strange this has happened in this way before we’ve even had an election.

The Conservatives say the Government should have known that these policies were unlikely to be enacted because of the tightness of the Parliamentary calendar and the reluctance of the opposition parties to embrace them. But it is puzzling to me that we can move from a system whereby an elected government – rightly or wrongly – can by and large push its policies through Parliament (so long as the governing party’s MPs remain behind it) to one in which the opposition can dictate their terms in this way, solely because of the timing of an election. If schools have spent time gearing up for these reforms, only for the politicians to tell them they will have to start again, it seems to be to be another bad day for our already hugely over-politicised system for running education. The Parliamentary process deserves some more scrutiny over this.

It is ironic, too, that a centralising measure – new powers of the secretary of state to “intervene” when school results in a particular local authority are deemed too low – appears to be being retained in what survives of the bill as it heads towards Royal Assent. This is so even though the Conservatives sometimes talk enthusiastically about decentralisation.

The new intervention power would see Ed Balls or his successors able to direct a local authority to issue a warning notice to a school which is not doing well enough. (Previously, he had the power to advise an LA to do so but it did not have to take his advice). I have written about these intervention powers before, and suffice to say I’m not a fan of this authoritarian approach. If the secretary of state is seen as the only guardian of high standards – and teachers, school leaders and even local authorities are seen as potentially not up to the job of deciding what are reasonable expectations to have of children – then effectively, trust resides in him to do the right thing by schools, rather than in all these other actors in the business of helping pupils do well. That is, then,  a very centralised structure. If the Tories support it, it shows up again the tension between the authoritarian and liberal strands of their thinking.

- Warwick Mansell

Tuesday, April 6th

At a conference in London last Wednesday held by the New Vision group, the organisation set up by the former National Union of Teachers general secretary Fred Jarvis to lobby ministers on changes to education policy, I heard an interesting anecdote.

Among the speakers was the head of a very successful inner-city comprehensive. He gave a balanced view on the successes and failures of education policy under New Labour. But I was particularly interested in the following section of his speech, when he talked about the priorities he would set for ministers after the election.

He said: “I would like to see a reduction in the obsession with numbers. We interviewed deputy head teachers last week and some of their application forms were almost unreadable. Every second sentence had statistics in it, which made them very hard to read. I could get no sense of what [the applicants'] values were.”

I have, of course, no way of verifying this. But it does seem to fit with a system in which the worth of so many people is now seen almost exclusively in statistical terms. Of course, “values” are important and the mechanisation implied by this structure – and its reduction to the outcomes of results formulae – is ultimately dehumanising. 

Education by numbers indeed.

- Warwick Mansell

Tuesday, March 30th

The Master and his Emissary.

I promised a while back to write something about a “fascinating book”, not directly related to education, I was reading which had some implications, I thought, for what has been going on in schools. So here goes.

The book is “The Master and his Emissary” by Iain McGilchrist. It is, I think, a staggeringly ambitious work, and one I feel slightly daunted even trying to summarise (especially since one of the central concepts is that representation and abstraction of ideas is of itself problematic, but maybe I shouldn’t go there… yet.)

McGilchrist is a former neuroscientist, who has also taught English at Oxford University, where he was a fellow of All Souls College. The book attempts to use knowledge about the way the brain works to present an argument about how we understand the world.

Essentially, and simplifying hugely, the book makes an argument that the two hemispheres of the brain process information in different ways, prizing certain modes of apprehending the world differently.

Its first part looks at what we know about how the brain functions, some of which draws on research involving cases of patients which have lost the use of one hemisphere.

The left hemisphere, which is linked to the right side of the body including the right hand, is essentially very focused in the way it attends to the world. It likes detail, and intricate systems, and abstract theories, and favours mechanisms over living things. By contrast, the right hemisphere takes a broader view of the world, emphasising the brain’s lived experience of what has gone before in trying to understand something as it really is, and avoiding trying to view things in abstract, systematised or representative forms. The right is the hemisphere where – again, simplifying I think – empathy is felt.

Early on in the book, McGilchrist uses an example from the natural world which may help me to explain this better. A bird eating a piece of grit needs to use both hemispheres of its brain. The left provides the focus that its brain must give to the grit as it pecks at it. But the bird also needs to keep part of its attention spread as wide as possible, in being on the look-out for potential predators. This is the right hemisphere’s job. So the bird needs both hemispheres. (Although, interestingly, human patients who lose the use of one hemisphere can compensate, although those without the left seem to cope better than those without the right).

The second part of the book is an amazingly original run through the history of western thought, ranging from philosophy to literature, art and music asking what each hemisphere has brought to intellectual developments in these fields.

The book’s title is an expression of its arresting thesis: that the right hemisphere – supporting the broader, more holistic way of sensing the world – should, in a better world, be the “master”. It should be the dominant influence on our thoughts. But, in reality, in the modern world, it has become the junior half to the more “focused”, system-building, left. The latter has come to predominate in what has been an ongoing power struggle between the two.

I listened to a discussion of this book on the Today programme before Christmas, and was captivated, because its central argument seemed to me to be very much in line with what I think might have been going on (to bring it back to, perhaps, a slightly more mundane level) with the way public services have been managed in recent decades, and in particular to what has happened in education.

I have often been struck, for example, on how the development of policy can be seen to make sense with reference to its place within a particular system, or structure of thinking, (ie from an almost intentionally narrow perspective) but far less so when one steps back and tries to think about matters from another angle.

I can think of several examples. Arguably, during the research for my book I was confronted with this phenomenon a lot. The argument, which may or may not actually have been voiced against the central line of my thinking, went something like this: “This evidence you have collected may show some of the damage that league tables, or targets, say, are doing to education, as broadly conceived. But league tables and targets are part of an important, politically vital, system for holding schools to account. This should not change.” The system, then, was seen as more important than what might be thought to be wider goals of this particular public service, such as promoting the richest possible education for pupils.

Reading Sir Michael Barber’s book, Instruction to Deliver, I was struck in a similar way about his description of the development of a system for the management of public services, including education. The method described and advocated was fairly simple: those at the political centre must decide on the priorities for public services, then set them targets and establish a structure of ranking indicators by which progress towards those goals could be measured. Those working in public services should then be encouraged, cajoled and possibly threatened, towards those goals. While I was struck by the attention to detail involved, the whole thing had an entirely self-referential, or even solipsistic, quality. For example, while Sir Michael argues that public servants should have sleepless nights worrying where the next percentage point increase in test scores was going to come from, there were very few attempts, in his book, to relate the improvements in test scores to real-world classroom experiences for pupils. In other words, did they have any real meaning outside of the system itself? But to ask this question seemed almost beside the point, you might think after reading Instruction to Deliver. To do so, perhaps, might be seen as widening the focus in a very unhelpful way: the whole point of this structure is to set goals, then to narrow down your focus on achieving them.

Systems-builders such as Sir Michael would, I think, also be happier with a structure which assumes a particular form of motivation among public sector workers: that they are the rational self-interested utility-maximisers of classic economic thought. This therefore makes constructing mechanisms to influence what they do simpler than it would be under the messier reality of, for example, behavioural economics which suggests that we are more complex than that, and that altruism is one of our urges.

To use a final, perhaps more trivial, example, I find, in reporting on and observing the exams world, that this sometimes has a surreal, almost Alice in Wonderland quality to it. Qualifications can be given points scores and weighted against others, I think, without anyone really standing back and saying “this may make sense in terms of this particular system”, but does the system as a whole make sense? (I should say that that thought draws on a remark by Cambridge Assessment in evidence, I think, to a recent select committee inquiry into accountability).

I have to confess that, while McGilchrist’s book was a fantastic read, I was slightly disappointed at the end that it did not have more to say about whether or not the modern, tremendously detailed, systems that we are so fond of designing, in all areas of life, actually do more to enslave us to particular ways of thinking than is often recognised.

There is an intriguingly glancing reference to this near the end, in a chapter entitled “The Master Betrayed” which deals with the modern world. In a left hemisphere-dominated world, McGilchrist argues (interestingly using the conditional tense) the “mechanistic” view would dominate.

“Family relationships, or skilled roles within society, such as those of priests, teachers and doctors which transcend what can be quantified or regulated, and in fact depend on a degree of altruism, would become the object of suspicion. The left hemisphere misunderstands the nature of such relationships, as it misunderstands altruism as a version of self-interest, and sees them as a threat to its power.

“…Strenuous efforts would be made to bring families and professions under bureaucratic control, a move that would be made possible, presumably, only by furthering fear and mistrust,” he writes.

McGilchrist adds that, in such a world, “Numbers, which the left hemisphere feels familiar with and is excellent at manipulating (though, it may be remembered, it is less good at understanding what they mean), would come to replace the response to individuals…which the right hemisphere would have distinguished. ‘Either/or’ would tend to be substituted for matters of degree, and a certain inflexibility would result.”  

However, overall, the main villain of the piece seems to be a kind of over-rationality (to be clear, the book is not an attack on science), as epitomised through the thinking of the philosopher Rene Descartes, and, perhaps, the Enlightenment more generally. McGilchrist is, by contrast, fond of the Renaissance and Romanticism.

 I’m not sure I’ve done justice to his book at all here but I would recommend it.

- Warwick Mansell

Monday, March 29th

Sir Richard Sykes’s review of qualifications for the Conservatives received mixed – at best – reviews in Friday’s TES, and I, too, have my reservations, despite my respect for the experience of members of the commission who contributed to the report.

However, I also think that some of its observations about what is wrong with the current regime, which have not received much press attention, should be noted and dwelt upon for a moment. They are, after all (and I would say this, wouldn’t I?), fairly in line with some of the arguments in my book.

Sykes says: “The commission considers the pre-eminent role of schools should be to educate. This may seem too obvious to be stated. However, many of those who gave evidence commented that a prescriptive assessment-driven curriculum, the examination framework and the nature of the measures used and targets set by government have forced teachers to abandon education (in its true sense) for easily measurable proxies. There is an obsession with measurement, setting quantitative targets and compiling league tables, as though what cannot be measured numerically has no value and should have no place in education. Yet the best things in education often cannot readily be measured in this way.”

Amen to the sentiments behind much of that.

Sykes also says: “The volume of external assessment has…grown enormously. For the great majority of pupils nationally it now encompasses the entire curriculum at age 16 and again at age 18. For many there is another full assessment at 17; and widespread external assessment at 15 is imminent. The process has undermined the credibility of teacher and school assessment as well as limiting and undermining teaching.” [my italics]

This is in line with an article I have written for the upcoming first edition of Questa, the magazine of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, which is launched this week. I argue there that the onset of more or less constant examination over the four years of GCSE and A-level, which probably does more to influence pupils’ learning experiences during those years than any other policy, has come about with little or no meaningful debate about whether this is educationally desirable. This, I think, is astonishing.

If the criticism of the Sykes report has focused on its end point, the recommendations for change, I think it is important, then, to acknowledge where it starts. If the over-politicised (another of its points) assessment system is truly undermining teaching, this is the best possible argument that it should change.

Precisely how it should change is, of course, where the more practical problems arise. And I’m not convinced by all of the measures proposed in the report.

For example, the suggestion of a standard university entrance test, similar to the American Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) strikes me as slightly over-the-top. I am no expert on university admissions, but I am not sure that A-levels do such a bad job in helping admissions tutors decide between candidates that such a major reform as this is required. It may be that the introduction of this test, focusing on English and maths, could be used as an incentive to get more young people to study these subjects post-16, as happens in other countries. But, as I say, overall I’m not convinced. Perhaps the National Foundation for Educational Research’s investigation into the possibility of such a test in the English context, which has going on for several years now, will provide more clues as to whether it would be worthwhile.

Perhaps the most significant proposal, however, would see school accountability now centring not on measures such as the proportion of pupils achieving five good GCSEs, including English and maths, but simply on performance in the two subjects of English and maths.

The reduction of the emphasis on GCSE performance in other subjects, to the point of suggesting that pupils might not take the exam in many subjects, is significant and radical, although one should note that semi-official suggestions to downgrade GCSEs – even to the point of removing this examination tier altogether –are not that new. This policy was advocated quite strongly by Professor David Hargreaves during his time as chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and even Estelle Morris, the former education secretary, started floating the idea when she took office in 2001. (See story here).

But to come back to Sykes’s specific proposals on accountability, the report says that moving away from the existing five or more good GCSEs including English and maths indicator, and other compound measures such as the average GCSE points score per pupil, would remove the incentive for schools to encourage “quantity rather than quality” in the accumulation of qualifications.

Although I would agree with that, and the removal of attempts to use statistical measures to try to reduce a school’s overall quality to a single, or a handful, of numbers, the move to accountability based on performance in English and maths does not resolve some of the problems identified elsewhere in the report, principally the “obsession with measurement, setting quantitative targets and compiling league tables”.

Whether one sees the even greater concentration on English and maths – for institutional reasons – that would follow from this change as good or bad may depend on whether one believes that a narrowing of focus to just two subjects and an increase in test-directed learning and other statistical game-playing around these subjects would be a good thing. If the belief is that it would be a positive development, this strikes me as contrary to the spirit of the rest of the report.

If one truly takes seriously the effects on teaching and learning of the politicised culture effected by league tables/targets/Ofsted inspections with which the report begins, I don’t think that a set of politically drawn-up statistical indicators in two subjects as the basis for accountability is going to do the job.

There is not really space here to discuss my thoughts in full on an alternative system of accountability, which are set out in the book. But I’ve come to the conclusion that, if it is felt that publishing school-by-school data is vital, then the best system would be simply to publish subject-by-subject results for each school, with parents then left to decide which they regard as important. I would scrap all composite measures, such as the five A*-C including English and maths score, which just increase the opportunities for schools to “game” the system, and resist the temptation to narrow the measurement down to performance in a couple of subjects. The complexity which would follow might make easy ranking a bit more difficult for the media, the Government and estate agents (what a merry list that is…), which I think would be a good thing.

The report is possibly strongest in arguing for a rebalancing of the relationship between schools and colleges, exam boards, the government and those “end users” of qualifications: universities and employers. Currently, all the major players in this system have an interest in results continuing to rise, whether or not this truly signifies underlying gains in pupils’ understanding, from schools and governments being judged on results to the boards who face a serious risk in losing business if they are seen to be offering harder exams than their competitors. This is unhealthy. Giving universities, for example, a greater say, might address part of that problem, although precisely how this would happen is not spelt out in detail. I think the best possible reform in this area would be to take the Government out of this process by having another measure – such as the performance of pupils in standardised sample tests similar to those used in the international PISA and TIMSS assessments, though not these tests – as the main measure of national education performance.

Overall, this is a complicated subject which probably needs a longer-term, more detailed look than is possible in its 40 pages. But remember the statement with which this report started. It said that “a prescriptive assessment-driven curriculum, the examination framework and the nature of the measures used and targets set by government have forced teachers to abandon education (in its true sense) for easily measurable proxies”. If one agrees with that, then such a look is essential.

- Warwick Mansell

Tuesday, March 16^th

Reading more about the debate surrounding Ofsted’s latest inspection system over the past couple of weeks has encouraged me to dig some more into how the inspectorate works. And one observation that I probably should have posted a while back was prompted by an inspection report which was written up in a few newspapers before Christmas.

Harris Academy Crystal Palace was lauded in the press for being the first school in the country to score an “outstanding” verdict in all of Ofsted’s inspection categories. I have not visited the school, and am not in a position to offer a view on how good it is. Certainly a lot of people seem to think this is an excellent school, and it is reportedly vastly oversubscribed.*

 However, what did interest me was to compare the Ofsted report to the comments on the school registered on a newspaper website after one of these articles appeared.

You can read the piece, and the comments which follow, here  So why was it interesting? Well, the comments by, I think, ex-pupils and parents, cast light on its qualities in a way which is not captured at all by the inspector.

The comments centre on a discussion as to how good the school is, whether it improved after it changed from a city technology college to an academy a couple of years ago, and whether its traditional ethos, including uniforms, is a good thing or not.

Most interestingly, the comments, which I have no reason to doubt are not by ex-pupils and at least one parent, reveal that the school divides pupils into two groups in year nine, one following a “yellow route” , and the other, a “green route”. The “yellow route” pupils are judged to be more academic, the comments say.

One ex-pupil, who says the school was “fantastic for me”, adds:  “[The yellow route/green route] divide is damaging on pupils for many reasons such as late development and being surrounded by more disruptive pupils. It is commonly known within the student body that this split symbolises more than a simple divide and in fact becomes friendship groups and to a certain extent a sign of future prospects.”

Another ex-pupil says: “Be warned, this green route/yellow route thing is true, and I have seen it stigmatise talented people to the point where a flood of students in my year group left to go to the Brits school to be encouraged for their creative abilities, because if you’re not good at maths, English or science, expectations are just ‘do what you can to pass’ – keep the stats up, you know.”

A parent who has had four children go through the school says that all followed the “yellow route”, and that provision for them was excellent.

The first ex-pupil also writes: “In addition, I’d like to point out the fact that there is a feeling that Harris is now a business instead of a school and students are often seen as statistics.” A further ex-pupil writes: “A school is a school, not a business where children are hothoused to get the statistics looking good.”

In sum, this is a detailed debate about the merits of the school, with revealing opinions offered for and against.

My point here is to ask: where is this level of detail in the Ofsted report? (You can read it yourself here.)

However one feels about the policy of the yellow route/green route, surely it deserves a mention: it would seem to have a big impact on the experience of a group of pupils going from year nine onwards, and yet it is not covered at all. Also, there seems to be a debate among the pupils about the merits of policies such as the uniform requirement, and the overall characteristics of the school. But again, none of this argument is captured in the inspection report.

Instead, the report simply celebrates the “Harris Way”, without explaining properly what this is.  Some passages of text are repeated verbatim later in the report. And it culminates in a gushing, almost Soviet-sounding conclusion, in the letter to pupils: “We hope that you will work closely with the staff so that there will never be a glitch in the glorious history of your academy.”

In my book, I set out my view that, since 2005, the quality of the information available to parents in Ofsted inspection reports has fallen dramatically. I looked at reports from before that date, which ran to many pages with detailed qualitative information on each school and its curriculum and which had a section comparing the views of inspectors with those of parents and explaining, if they differed, why. Each subject area was covered individually for secondary schools, and there was information on staffing levels, each school’s finances and class sizes.

After 2005, some of the reports looked almost as if they could have been written by a computer, so closely were they tied to exam and test results data, and they were far shorter and shallower, in my view.

This may have changed slightly since last September, when the latest inspection iteration began and since when inspectors have been instructed to place a greater emphasis on classroom observation. But the visits are still a lot shorter than they were before 2005 and, if this inspection is an example (and if the comments are a true reflection of the yellow/green route policy, as the number of them would suggest), I don’t think Ofsted’s reports are getting beneath the statistical surface and finding out what is really going on.

I’d be interested in any other observations about Ofsted reports. Please email me at warwickmansell@gmail.com

*Although questions were raised, for me, about the methods used by Harris as an organisation to improve results on learning of the case of a parent in another Harris school whose daughter was made to take a BTEC in sports science in a move, said this parent, to raise the school’s statistics. See my report on page 50 of a Civitas document on academies.

- Warwick Mansell