PQE0090 - Evidence on Purpose and quality of education in England

PQE0090

Written evidence submitted by Wendy Ellyatt

Chief Executive, Save Childhood Movement

What the purpose of education for children of all ages in England should be

I wanted to make this a personal submission that expresses my own deep frustration that the work and recommendations of so many eminent people, each far more qualified than myself in exploring this area, have consistently been dismissed and ignored by successive English Governments. Not only this but the broader, richer and more humane visions that they have espoused have been replaced by an obsession with ‘school accountability’, ‘international benchmarking’ and ‘world class’ educational standards – the latter equated with test scores in a very limited spectrum of human learning.

The Save Childhood Movement is particularly concerned at the lack of evidence-based policymaking and the negation of expert opinion and advice in the early years, but we recognise that it is the downward pressure of the larger schooling system that is creating this situation. It is important for decision-makers to acknowledge that it is the physical, neurological and psychological patterns and mind-sets that are created in the early years that set the foundation for all later development. All young children therefore have the human right to have their natural developmental capacities and potentials fully protected from anything that might compromise them becoming responsible, caring citizens and joyful lifelong learners.

The education of a nation is far too important to be at the mercy of the party political system. We urgently need to seek solutions where we recognise the essential importance of equity for national attainment and where we balance the rights of the individual with the need to create more caring, connected and sustainable societies. The movement, along with an increasing number of other organisations, believes that there is an urgent need to establish an independent guidance body that can inform and evaluate government policymaking and ensure that it 1) better balances academic attainment with measures of wellbeing and 2) is based upon the most up-to-date, scientifically underpinned and developmentally appropriate global evidence and practice. At the very least, for such a critically important subject, we should see much more open and cross-party policymaking.

I would, therefore, like to draw the committee’s attention to the work of the following people and organisations, some of which I have been lucky enough to be involved with, in the hope that you will appreciate the quality and depth that has underpinned their own thinking and recommendations.

Robin Alexander: The Cambridge Primary Review

Help schools tackle educational disadvantage and close the attainment gap.

Child poverty currently affects between 17% and 26% of Britain's children, depending on whether you use the relative or absolute poverty measure, and poverty and social disadvantage impact directly on children's educational progress and attainment. Despite a long succession of government initiatives aimed at tackling the problem, most recently through the pupil premium, the challenges remain severe. There's a great deal that expert and inspirational teachers and school leaders working against the odds can do and have done and we must learn from them. But for their work to achieve its full impact, it must be supported by the country's wider economic, social and educational policies. All too often, such policies pull in different directions.

Give children a real say in their learning.

We must celebrate children's voice and rights in school and the classroom. As the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child points out, children should "have a right to be involved in decisions about their own learning". This influence should extend to pedagogy as well as school councils, for the classroom is where citizenship starts, and we know that discussion, dialogue and argument are very powerful tools for learning.

Primary education should not just be about preparing children for secondary school.

We need to sort out what primary education is for, and ensure that aims driving the curriculum and are not merely cosmetic. To say, as the government does, that the main aim of primary education is to make children 'secondary ready' is to undervalue children's huge potential for development and learning during the primary years. Education is about the here and now as well as the future, but schools should also address the wider condition and needs of children and society in today's complex world. Children leaving primary school should of course be ready for what follows, but what follows year 6 is life, not just year 7.

Make 'breadth and balance' more than a slogan. Take seriously the curriculum beyond the 3Rs.

While primary schools must and do insist on the importance of literacy and numeracy, they should also lay foundations in other areas – in spoken language, science, the arts, the humanities, in physical, emotional and moral development and lived experience. These are in their different ways no less important for children's future learning, choices and lives; they might actually make children more "secondary ready" than the 3Rs alone.

The CPR argues against the old two-tier curriculum – where the basic subjects are covered in depth while the rest of the curriculum is in some schools treated seriously but in others is left to chance, and where the idea of 'standards' is confined to the 3Rs. This approach undermines the cultural and economic worth of the non-core subjects and flies in the face of research that shows how learning in one area enhances learning in others. Without deflecting attention from the importance of literacy, CPRT argues for a primary curriculum whose core includes essential knowledge, skills and experience drawn from all subjects, not just three of them.

Increase the focus on evidence-based pedagogy.

It's only through teaching that the curriculum comes alive for children. And it's only through understanding the art, science and craft of teaching – from research, inspection and shared experience – that teachers can inform and refine their practice. Relying on habit or official pronouncements isn't enough. A greater focus on what evidence tells us about effective teaching and learning will enable teachers to help every child achieve the highest possible standard in all aspects of their education.

Assessment should be about more than just test results.

Where assessment and standards are concerned we need a wider practical repertoire and a more sophisticated vocabulary. We must devise approaches that enhance learning as well as test it, that support the curriculum rather than distort it, and that pursue high standards in all areas of learning, not just the core subjects. It's no longer acceptable that tests at a moment in time and in a narrow spectrum of learning are treated as measures of a child's entire educational attainment or of everything that schools aim to provide. Tests have their place, but both assessment and accountability should be about much more than test results.

Schools should connect with the community.

Britain has immense demographic, economic, cultural and linguistic diversity, which creates a vast array of educational circumstances and needs. The best of our schools don't just work closely with their local communities but make the curriculum responsive to local needs and opportunities and live the very idea of community in their everyday work and relationships.

The discourse of educational policy must change, and radically

As recent events have shown, policymakers tend to be interested only in evidence that fits their ideology or prejudice, and they may ignore or even abuse those who provide evidence that doesn't fit the political bill. Deep and lasting improvements in our education system will be achieved only when policymakers are even-handed rather than selective in their use of evidence and when they speak about education in a way that exemplifies the educated mind rather than demeans it.

Key Reading: Towards a New Primary Curriculum
http://cprtrust.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/CURRICULUM_BRIEFING_REVISED_2_11.pdf

John Abbot, Parliamentary Paper, 2009

http://www.21learn.org/wp-content/uploads/parliamentary_paper.pdf

“The basic function of education in all societies and at all times is to prepare the younger generation for the kind of adult life that society values and wishes to perpetuate.”

The grain of the brain is now sufficiently well understood to make it obvious that the present system of schooling, by ascribing greater resources and status to secondary schools over primary schools is, quite literally, upside-down. If those resources were reallocated and an appropriate pedagogy developed this would enable formal schooling to start a dynamic process through which students are progressively weaned from their dependence on teachers and institutions, and given the confidence to manage their own learning, collaborate with colleagues as appropriate, and using a range of resources and learning situations.

Why is schooling split at the age of eleven, and why is it that primary pupils generally enjoy their education, but secondary pupils don’t?

Why, if the early years of education are so important, are secondary schools better financed than primary?

Why does England, a country so dependent upon technology, have difficulties in recruiting teachers of science?

Why, if education is so important, aren’t teachers held in higher regard?

Why, in a country with a fully funded public education system, do some 7% of pupils on average attend independent fee- paying schools?

Why, given the significance in earlier generations of adolescence as a “proving ground” for adulthood, does modern society treat adolescence as a problem, not as an opportunity?

Why, if one of the most significant indicators of future success is the quality of home life in the earliest years, are schools now expected to take on ever more of what until recently were the responsibilities of parents?

Why are those aspects of schooling that children enjoy most called extra-curricular, as if they don’t matter so much and are only informally offered?  
Why are Steiner and Montessori Schools so popular with professional parents?

Why, in a largely secular country, are Faith Schools generally so popular?

The Compass ‘Big Education’ Inquiry

http://www.compassonline.org.uk/education-inquiry/the-final-report

The major fault with the dominant way in which we educate people today is not just the inequity of its results, the jostling competition of parents and providers, the lack of freedom for professionals, the exam treadmill of learners, the fragmentation of the system, or the imposition of relentless change from above. All these and more are real problems, but they are not the central problem.

The big problem is this – how small our education system has become. By small we mean narrow, restrictive and lacking in ambition and imagination. For both learners and teachers the space in the system is claustrophobic and does not allow people to stretch and expand, to push and be pulled, to know a life without limits. Schools have become factories of limited learning to fit with one dominant view of what it means to be human – the worker–consumer in the competitive global economic race at a time when for so many work no longer pays enough to live by – let alone provide work that allows us to flourish. It is small in the sense that too much of it is selfish and self-serving at time when success increasingly comes from collaboration and co- operation. It forces us to look down at short horizons, not up at the vast landscapes of what a good society could be like.

Figure 1 shows the key features of Big Education compared with the old and small system we are still struggling with.
We think that this work offers a distinctive and expansive vision of education at a time of great opportunities and challenges. Economies and societies are changing rapidly because of the impact of globalisation and new technology. Threats abound; global warming, growing inequality, the imposition of austerity economics, and a profound democratic deficit – by which we mean the now commonplace notion that our world feels beyond our control. The challenge is how we bend the modern world to people and the planet – not how we bend humans and the environment to the narrow needs of profit maximisation. In this education is key.

Education should help us to compete together against our greatest problems rather than compete against each other. To achieve this ambition education needs to be broad, balanced, deep, specialised, long and diffuse – formal education should merge with informal and everyday practices. This multi-dimensional and expansive vision is what we call ‘Big Education’.

We hope that this report will provide a springboard to another phase of research and action. Already those involved in the inquiry are in dialogue with teachers’ professional associations and unions, political parties, local authorities and other civil society stakeholders to build a sustainable consensus for profound education change. However, the kind of education transformation we envisage is slow, deliberative and deeply consensual. Teachers, in particular, have suffered turbulence and political micro-management for too long. Education reform is not just about a change of ‘policy content’; it also involves a change in ‘policy style’.

We recognise the case for urgent action now to put our schools on a better footing and attempt to inform and influence any incoming new government. But we also appreciate the need to prepare intellectually for the long haul of building a radical new national consensus around the purpose and practice of a very different education system.

Pasi Sahlberg - Washington Post article April 17th, 2012 – What the USA Can’t Learn from Finland about Educational Reform

Although this makes a comparison between Finland and the USA many of the issues discussed are equally relevant to the current situation in the UK.

First of all, although Finland can show the United States what equal opportunity looks like, Americans cannot achieve equity without first implementing fundamental changes in their school system. The following three issues require particular attention:
Funding of schools: Finnish schools are funded based on a formula guaranteeing equal allocation of resources to each school regardless of location or wealth of its community.

Well-being of children: All children in Finland have, by law, access to childcare, comprehensive health care, and pre-school in their own communities. Every school must have a welfare team to advance child happiness in school.
Education as a human right: All education from preschool to university is free of charge for anybody living in Finland. This makes higher education affordable and accessible for all.

As long as these conditions don’t exist, the Finnish equality-based model bears little relevance in the United States.

Second, school autonomy and teacher professionalism are often mentioned as the dominant factors explaining strong educational performance in Finland. The school is the main author of curricula. And the teacher is the sole authority monitoring the progress of students.
In Finland, there is a strong sense of trust in schools and teachers to carry out these responsibilities. There is no external inspection of schools or standardized testing of all pupils in Finland. For our national analysis of educational performance, we rely on testing only a small sample of students. The United States really cannot leave curriculum design and student assessment in the hands of schools and teachers unless there is similar public confidence in schools and teachers. To get there, a more coherent national system of teacher education is one major step.
Finland is home to such a coherent national system of teacher education. And unlike in the United States, teaching is one of the top career choices among young Finns. Teachers in Finland are highly regarded professionals — akin to medical doctors and lawyers. There are eight universities educating teachers in Finland, and all their programs have the same high academic standards. Furthermore, a research-based master’s degree is the minimum requirement to teach in Finland.
Third, many education visitors to Finland expect to find schools filled with Finnish pedagogical innovation and state-of-the-art technology. Instead, they see teachers teaching and pupils learning as they would in any typical good school in the United States. Some observers call this “pedagogical conservatism” or “informal and relaxed” because there does not appear to be much going on in classrooms.
The irony of Finnish educational success is that it derives heavily from classroom innovation and school improvement research in the United States. Cooperative learning and portfolio assessment are examples of American classroom-based innovations that have been implemented in large scale in the Finnish school system.
In the United States, education is mostly viewed as a private effort leading to individual good. The performances of individual students and teachers are therefore in the center of the on-going school reform debate. By contrast, in Finland, education is viewed primarily as a public effort serving a public purpose. As a consequence, education reforms in Finland are judged more in terms of how equitable the system is for different learners. This helps to explain the difference between the American obsession with standardized testing and the Finnish fixation on each school’s ability to cope with individual differences and social inequality. The former is driven by excellence, the latter by equity.
Quality and equity in education must be conceived as concomitant. Based on its global data, the OECD recently drew precisely this conclusion: “The highest-performing education systems across the OECD countries are those that combine quality with equity.”
What Finland can show to others is how equity and equal opportunity in education look like. However, school reformers in the United States need to be careful when considering equity-based reform ideas to be imported from Finland. Many elements of Finnish successful school system are interwoven in the surrounding welfare state. Simply a transfer of these solutions would add another chapter to already exhausting volume of failed education reforms.