There has been a flurry of debate following Michael Wilshaw's comments about behaviour management in schools and I don't want to enter the debate as to whether behaviour in schools actually is a problem or not (for what it is worth, I believe that there is a certain type of teacher and of parent who will always complain that behaviour is deteriorating). Instead, I wanted to reflect on much broader questions about the relationship between students and their schools, and the central issue of what schools are actually for.
On the face of it there seems to be a pretty clear consensus about the purpose of schools: just look at school slogans. Usually heavy on abstract nouns ("achievement", "success", "challenge", "diversity", "tolerance", etc. etc.) they pretty universally present the notion that schools encourage students to learn and prepare them for adult life. Easy.
Except of course, it isn't. It is for instance clear to anyone who has ever had children (or indeed has ever been a child) that children learn best when they are enjoying what they are doing. However most schools (even those with the imperative "enjoy" in their slogan) do not put much of a premium on students actually having fun, at least not in lessons. Schools see a clear duty to take learning seriously, and to transmit that seriousness to their students. How could they otherwise, with the Damoclean sword of league tables hanging over them?
Similarly, it is clear that the best way to develop life skills and interpersonal relationships is to be given the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them. Yet the schools that Mr Wilshaw admires are those that give students no opportunities whatever to do this. Effective behaviour management, according to his prescription, involves intervening immediately a student does anything like swinging on a chair or talking to a neighbour.
One would think that students would learn best (both in terms of academic learning and social skills) from teachers whom they saw as human beings and to whom they could relate in a natural, unstructured and responsive way. Yet the most "successful" teachers are generally those who lay down and rigidly enforce non-negotiable codes of conduct for their students. Once I was walking behind two students on a corridor and one (unaware of my presence) said, "Mrs ___ is a really good teacher. She never listens to you." This sounds absurd, but what he meant by it was that the teacher in question never listened when you tried to make up excuses for why you had not done your homework.
I struggled with this issue throughout my career as a teacher. A part of me wanted to relate to each student as an individual- to afford them trust and give them responsibility for their own decisions. Yet another part of me recognised that that simply made me a soft touch, so that eventually none of my students would ever do their homework. It is a shame though. Fear of the consequences of not doing Mrs ____'s homework is certainly an effective motivator, but to what extent does it lead to real learning?
In a similar way, students who learn to walk in silence on the left of the corridor and stand up when a teacher enters the room are certainly receiving a training of sorts in appropriate modes of behaviour, whereas the classrooms of the liberal and "nice" teachers are always where the fights break out, but to what extent is behaviour training internalised as a mode of interaction with the world? It is certainly possible to create a school ethos in which students are universally quiet, submissive and polite, but are we sure that that will make for better members of adult society?
I am genuinely not sure. One argument would be that people adopt habits of being around other people that can stick with them and inform their entire lives. Another argument is that "repressive" school regimes simply store up resentment and hatred which are never addressed within the school system. Certainly my experience is that the incidence of bullying is in direct proportion with the rigidity of school codes of conduct and discipline.
I would never argue for a Summerhill approach to schooling. I believe that schools are important social institutions, and to some extent should model the functioning of society as a whole. So I strongly believe that schools have to have codes of discipline and clear statements of acceptable behaviour, with structures of rewards and sanctions to reinforce them. I also believe that students have to perceive a clear authority structure, and know who makes the decisions and where they fit into that process. I think schools do have both to teach and to model ideas of citizenship with all that that implies and that students need to learn to thrive within an environment of constrained freedoms.
The problem, as I have argued in a previous post, is that what schools often seem to tell us instead (and tell their students too) is that as a society we really do not like our children. Take the crimes identified by Michael Wilshaw of "talking to your neighbour" and "swinging on your chair". These are entirely normal behaviours of children who are enjoying being in the company of others and enjoying what they are doing. And yet they are to be eliminated if PROPER learning is to be carried through.
Next time you are working with a group of colleagues on a particular problem, imagine that as soon as you started discussing it in an animated fashion, or someone told a joke, your boss glared at you and told you to be quiet and get on with your work. How long do you think you would stay in that job? And how successful would that company be? Yet this is how we are to treat our school children, apparently.
Surely there is something wrong with that.
Saturday 27 September 2014
Monday 22 September 2014
The lessons of history
Just a short post today. I was listening to Start the Week this morning and there was an interesting item on the unification of Germany. In it, one of the contributors referred to a sense that for Germans history can be defined as that which must never be allowed to happen again.
This got me reflecting on our own nation's attitudes to the past, which had already been thrown into sharp relief by the Scottish Independence debate. In that context, the Yes campaign became pretty clearly identified with the future and the No campaign with the past. The strongest emotional arguments on the Yes side were all to do with moving forward and embracing change, whilst the No campaign's emotional trump cards were about appealing to a sense of shared history.
Because it seems that, in direct contrast with the Germans, the British have a pervasive sense of the past as a better, nobler time, and by definition of the future as something tricky and threatening. I have written on this subject before (here for instance) but the simple comment I heard this morning really pointed up the weaknesses implicit in the British attitude to the past. Whilst Germany today no doubt still has negative aspects (some attitudes to the Turkish immigrant population for instance) the country does seem ot have a much more positive and forward-looking ethos generally. Economically successful, yet embracing renewable technologies and environmental concerns wholeheartedly; a significant player diplomatically on the world stage whilst avoiding military adventurism; with a young people who seem creative, alive and thoughtful it is a world away from both the brainwashed, militarised dictatorship of the Third Reich and the traumatised and divided wasteland of the post-War years. Because they see history as something to learn from- as containing lessons one ignores at ones peril.
So how about the British? Do we learn from the lessons of our own history or do we bathe in the comforting warm fug of nostalgia? It is clear what 45% of Scots think. What about the rest of us?
This got me reflecting on our own nation's attitudes to the past, which had already been thrown into sharp relief by the Scottish Independence debate. In that context, the Yes campaign became pretty clearly identified with the future and the No campaign with the past. The strongest emotional arguments on the Yes side were all to do with moving forward and embracing change, whilst the No campaign's emotional trump cards were about appealing to a sense of shared history.
Because it seems that, in direct contrast with the Germans, the British have a pervasive sense of the past as a better, nobler time, and by definition of the future as something tricky and threatening. I have written on this subject before (here for instance) but the simple comment I heard this morning really pointed up the weaknesses implicit in the British attitude to the past. Whilst Germany today no doubt still has negative aspects (some attitudes to the Turkish immigrant population for instance) the country does seem ot have a much more positive and forward-looking ethos generally. Economically successful, yet embracing renewable technologies and environmental concerns wholeheartedly; a significant player diplomatically on the world stage whilst avoiding military adventurism; with a young people who seem creative, alive and thoughtful it is a world away from both the brainwashed, militarised dictatorship of the Third Reich and the traumatised and divided wasteland of the post-War years. Because they see history as something to learn from- as containing lessons one ignores at ones peril.
So how about the British? Do we learn from the lessons of our own history or do we bathe in the comforting warm fug of nostalgia? It is clear what 45% of Scots think. What about the rest of us?
Tuesday 9 September 2014
The changing balance of power between the genders
As the father of an only daughter but also as a teacher and head teacher I have always been very engaged with issues about post-feminist gender roles and gender equality. The area is full of paradoxes: gender equality is absolute in terms of UK employment law and yet women's average pay still lags way behind that of men; women are far more likely to be the victims of domestic abuse yet young men are the ones most likely to kill themselves; in every field of life successful women are becoming more prominent and yet only a tiny proportion of the biggest companies are led by women and the BBC have only just started addressing the massive gender imbalance that exists in terms of the profile of women onscreen.
There are those who believe that the cause of feminism has been won and others who feel (with some justification) that the 'new ladism' approach that began in the 90s represented a massive retrograde step. Some see the emergence of the ladette, and the increasing social acceptibility of heavy drinking by young women as proof of their equality of status and others decry it as nothing more than an excuse for loutish and sexually exploitative behaviour by young men to continue. Within school one can see both the seemingly unstoppable rise of girls and young women in terms of achievement and also their vulnerability to messages about body image and sexual availability.
In the area of writing, with which I am now most personally concerned, the picture is potentially a very interesting one indeed. The Forbes list of top-selling authors has just 6 of the top 15 as women, but what is interesting is that almost without exception the men are long established and now fading stars. At the other end of the market it is notable that almost every site anywhere that appeals to aspiring authors is illustrated with photos of young women and I get a strong sense that the massive expansion of interest in writing as a career is fuelled very largely by women. There are two very different genres of novel that are reserved for women authors- chic-lit and women's literary fiction- with nothing comparable for men.
This is hardly surprising in a way. A recent Associated Press poll found that in the US women read on average nine books a year and men five and the imbalance is probably far greater for adolescents I have taught. However I do not believe that it is simply an issue of women being more interested in fiction than men. I actually think that this rise of women in the world of novels is an illustration of a fundamental change that will turn our notions of the power balance between the genders upside down.
Whether it is something inherent in the difference between men and women or merely the result of social conditioning, there does seem to be a broad difference in the skills and attributes more commonly associated with men and women. Women in general seem better at what might be considered the 'soft' skills- of empathy, communication, emotional intelligence and the ability to build and maintain networks of friends and associates, whereas men have always been considered better equipped with the 'harder' attributes of competitiveness, problem-solving, independence and ambition.
For a long time there has been a belief that women too should lay claim to these masculine attributes- hence the power-dressing of the 80s and even the emergence of the ladette. Hardly surprising, because it has long been felt that these were the attributes that brought success. The language and iconography of big business has always presumed this: why else would the word "thrusting" ever be used to describe a successful executive?
But what if all that were to change? What if, in today's social media dominated world it were interconnectedness rather than thrusting individuality that led to success? What if the 'soft' skills turned out to be the only ones that really matter in the 21st century?
Take the aforementioned exponential rise in female aspirant novelists and compare it with more masculine hobbies, like football. Most 'hobby' novelists will never be published and most Sunday footballers will never play for any real team, but the difference is that the women are acquiring and practising the hugely empowering skill of writing, whereas the men are merely offsetting a small proportion of the deleterious health effects of the post-match session.
There is no question that women today still suffer unacceptable levels of sexual discrimination. The overt sexualisation of young women in the media is an appalling thing, as are the absurd and demeaning pressures on women as regards body image and ageing. However more and more I am beginning to see these as the last lashings out by the wounded beast of male hegemony and I really don't think they can last long.
The 21st century, it seems increasingly clear to me, will be the century in which generations of gender power imbalance will be reversed. And we men had better get used to it. And in preparation, we could at least start reading more fiction.
There are those who believe that the cause of feminism has been won and others who feel (with some justification) that the 'new ladism' approach that began in the 90s represented a massive retrograde step. Some see the emergence of the ladette, and the increasing social acceptibility of heavy drinking by young women as proof of their equality of status and others decry it as nothing more than an excuse for loutish and sexually exploitative behaviour by young men to continue. Within school one can see both the seemingly unstoppable rise of girls and young women in terms of achievement and also their vulnerability to messages about body image and sexual availability.
In the area of writing, with which I am now most personally concerned, the picture is potentially a very interesting one indeed. The Forbes list of top-selling authors has just 6 of the top 15 as women, but what is interesting is that almost without exception the men are long established and now fading stars. At the other end of the market it is notable that almost every site anywhere that appeals to aspiring authors is illustrated with photos of young women and I get a strong sense that the massive expansion of interest in writing as a career is fuelled very largely by women. There are two very different genres of novel that are reserved for women authors- chic-lit and women's literary fiction- with nothing comparable for men.
This is hardly surprising in a way. A recent Associated Press poll found that in the US women read on average nine books a year and men five and the imbalance is probably far greater for adolescents I have taught. However I do not believe that it is simply an issue of women being more interested in fiction than men. I actually think that this rise of women in the world of novels is an illustration of a fundamental change that will turn our notions of the power balance between the genders upside down.
Whether it is something inherent in the difference between men and women or merely the result of social conditioning, there does seem to be a broad difference in the skills and attributes more commonly associated with men and women. Women in general seem better at what might be considered the 'soft' skills- of empathy, communication, emotional intelligence and the ability to build and maintain networks of friends and associates, whereas men have always been considered better equipped with the 'harder' attributes of competitiveness, problem-solving, independence and ambition.
For a long time there has been a belief that women too should lay claim to these masculine attributes- hence the power-dressing of the 80s and even the emergence of the ladette. Hardly surprising, because it has long been felt that these were the attributes that brought success. The language and iconography of big business has always presumed this: why else would the word "thrusting" ever be used to describe a successful executive?
But what if all that were to change? What if, in today's social media dominated world it were interconnectedness rather than thrusting individuality that led to success? What if the 'soft' skills turned out to be the only ones that really matter in the 21st century?
Take the aforementioned exponential rise in female aspirant novelists and compare it with more masculine hobbies, like football. Most 'hobby' novelists will never be published and most Sunday footballers will never play for any real team, but the difference is that the women are acquiring and practising the hugely empowering skill of writing, whereas the men are merely offsetting a small proportion of the deleterious health effects of the post-match session.
There is no question that women today still suffer unacceptable levels of sexual discrimination. The overt sexualisation of young women in the media is an appalling thing, as are the absurd and demeaning pressures on women as regards body image and ageing. However more and more I am beginning to see these as the last lashings out by the wounded beast of male hegemony and I really don't think they can last long.
The 21st century, it seems increasingly clear to me, will be the century in which generations of gender power imbalance will be reversed. And we men had better get used to it. And in preparation, we could at least start reading more fiction.
Friday 5 September 2014
The astonishing lack of an evidence base to support education policy
Maybe I am late to the party on this, or maybe it is because I have been out of education for a while that I can look at the situation with fresh eyes. In my last post I commented on the lack of evidence presented to support the government's line on setting by ability. However it turns out that this is far from the only area in which the government seems utterly uninterested in evidence when it comes to education.
To illustrate this point, it is really unclear to me where one should even go to find evidence that the government might be using to inform its policy-making decisions. Ofsted apparently conducts no research other than its 'surveys' of groups of schools and its dataset seems to consist largely of its own inspection reports. This is useful in its way, but hardly rigorous or objective as a means of cross-checking the assumptions that no doubt underlie said inspection reports. There is in fact an enormous wealth of such objective data available: Ofsted has access to a huge amount of achievement, attainment and contextual data for every school they inspect, but there is frustratingly little real analysis of this in any of Ofsted's reports or surveys.
I did eventually track down the "Research and Statistics" page on the DfE website. There are 143 publications about schools by the DoE, which sounds promising. However the very large majority are evaluations of specific trials, or papers about research priorities for the future. In fact I could find fewer than half a dozen that impacted in any way on the massive sweeping changes the government has been carrying out. "The evolving education in England" seems a promising title, but in fact the paper makes clear from the start that it does not contain any analysis of performance, but is simply a "temperature check." Not the sort of evidence I was looking for.
Ah ha! But there is also "Attainment in Academies at Key Stage 4". Finally, some data to support the government's policy of near universal academisation. Except that it doesn't, of course. The analysis in fact shows that outcomes at academies are broadly the same as those in "similar schools", despite the significant boost to funding that these academies received. There are ups and downs- academies for instance do less well by students in receipt of Free School Meals but are improving faster.
OK, so what about "Do Academies make use of their autonomy"? Even more inadequate as evidence to support policy, I'm afraid. It is full of emphatic statements about how marvelous it is for a school to become an academy, but remarkably devoid of evidence to support its claims. Here is an example of a key finding:
"This [autonomy as regards curriculum] is helping them raise standards for their pupils"
and the evidence provided?
"- Two thirds believe these changes have improved attainment"
Note, it says "believe". Not "can demonstrate" or even "have shown."
So what about Free Schools- that other enormous experiment? Well there are 850 documents available by search on the DfE's site, and a further 5 from Ofsted. I have to confess that I gave up after the first three pages of results, but I could see nothing that contained any sort of research or data analysis into their effectiveness. Nothing at all.
So what about PISA then? This is the one piece of objective data that Gove appears to have paid any attention to, repeatedly using its findings to rubbish the entire UK education system he inherited. I have to confess that until today I simply had not looked at the PISA test process or data. In fact their 2012 report makes for interesting, and on the face of it puzzling, reading. The focus in that report is on maths, and whilst "Pupils in England showed greater motivation to learn mathematics than the OECD average and reported a high sense of belonging and satisfaction with school," on the other hand "In mathematics, 19 countries significantly outperformed England."
Why is that then? Why are children who enjoy and are confident in maths not apparently learning it as well as those in other countries? Perhaps looking at the tests themselves might give a clue. Well, yes. Here are some sample questions: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/test/form/ . They are like the worst sort of maths textbooks from when I started in teaching. Textually dense and full of utterly irrelevant details and imagery they wrap up simple mathematical questions in nonsensical "real world problems" in such a way that the student actually has to decode the "real world problem" into an actual problem before they can answer it. This is a skill that is of no relevance outside maths lessons and the UK education system has quite rightly moved on from that approach, so students are less skilled at it than they might be in countries with more old-fashioned approaches.
Which is perhaps why students from countries with much more formal education systems do better in PISA tests. It doesn't really matter if you do not have as high a "sense of belonging and satisfaction", or even if you "enjoy the study of mathematics". If you have spent your entire school life endlessly practising pointless and artificial maths "problems" like those in the PISA tests then eventually you will get quite good at it.
But is that seriously the only evidence Gove had for tearing down decades of good practice, action research and pedagogical innovation in his time as Secretary of State? It was perhaps naive of me to think that the current regime retained some sort of commitment to evidence-based policy making. Clearly they haven't.
To illustrate this point, it is really unclear to me where one should even go to find evidence that the government might be using to inform its policy-making decisions. Ofsted apparently conducts no research other than its 'surveys' of groups of schools and its dataset seems to consist largely of its own inspection reports. This is useful in its way, but hardly rigorous or objective as a means of cross-checking the assumptions that no doubt underlie said inspection reports. There is in fact an enormous wealth of such objective data available: Ofsted has access to a huge amount of achievement, attainment and contextual data for every school they inspect, but there is frustratingly little real analysis of this in any of Ofsted's reports or surveys.
I did eventually track down the "Research and Statistics" page on the DfE website. There are 143 publications about schools by the DoE, which sounds promising. However the very large majority are evaluations of specific trials, or papers about research priorities for the future. In fact I could find fewer than half a dozen that impacted in any way on the massive sweeping changes the government has been carrying out. "The evolving education in England" seems a promising title, but in fact the paper makes clear from the start that it does not contain any analysis of performance, but is simply a "temperature check." Not the sort of evidence I was looking for.
Ah ha! But there is also "Attainment in Academies at Key Stage 4". Finally, some data to support the government's policy of near universal academisation. Except that it doesn't, of course. The analysis in fact shows that outcomes at academies are broadly the same as those in "similar schools", despite the significant boost to funding that these academies received. There are ups and downs- academies for instance do less well by students in receipt of Free School Meals but are improving faster.
OK, so what about "Do Academies make use of their autonomy"? Even more inadequate as evidence to support policy, I'm afraid. It is full of emphatic statements about how marvelous it is for a school to become an academy, but remarkably devoid of evidence to support its claims. Here is an example of a key finding:
"This [autonomy as regards curriculum] is helping them raise standards for their pupils"
and the evidence provided?
"- Two thirds believe these changes have improved attainment"
Note, it says "believe". Not "can demonstrate" or even "have shown."
So what about Free Schools- that other enormous experiment? Well there are 850 documents available by search on the DfE's site, and a further 5 from Ofsted. I have to confess that I gave up after the first three pages of results, but I could see nothing that contained any sort of research or data analysis into their effectiveness. Nothing at all.
So what about PISA then? This is the one piece of objective data that Gove appears to have paid any attention to, repeatedly using its findings to rubbish the entire UK education system he inherited. I have to confess that until today I simply had not looked at the PISA test process or data. In fact their 2012 report makes for interesting, and on the face of it puzzling, reading. The focus in that report is on maths, and whilst "Pupils in England showed greater motivation to learn mathematics than the OECD average and reported a high sense of belonging and satisfaction with school," on the other hand "In mathematics, 19 countries significantly outperformed England."
Why is that then? Why are children who enjoy and are confident in maths not apparently learning it as well as those in other countries? Perhaps looking at the tests themselves might give a clue. Well, yes. Here are some sample questions: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/test/form/ . They are like the worst sort of maths textbooks from when I started in teaching. Textually dense and full of utterly irrelevant details and imagery they wrap up simple mathematical questions in nonsensical "real world problems" in such a way that the student actually has to decode the "real world problem" into an actual problem before they can answer it. This is a skill that is of no relevance outside maths lessons and the UK education system has quite rightly moved on from that approach, so students are less skilled at it than they might be in countries with more old-fashioned approaches.
Which is perhaps why students from countries with much more formal education systems do better in PISA tests. It doesn't really matter if you do not have as high a "sense of belonging and satisfaction", or even if you "enjoy the study of mathematics". If you have spent your entire school life endlessly practising pointless and artificial maths "problems" like those in the PISA tests then eventually you will get quite good at it.
But is that seriously the only evidence Gove had for tearing down decades of good practice, action research and pedagogical innovation in his time as Secretary of State? It was perhaps naive of me to think that the current regime retained some sort of commitment to evidence-based policy making. Clearly they haven't.
Thursday 4 September 2014
The old mixed ability/setting debate
The old debate about mixed ability v. setting has been given another airing, with Nicky Morgan denying rumours that the government planned make setting effectively compulsory by ensuring that a school could not be granted an 'outstanding' rating unless it set students by ability. Michael Wilshaw has long been in favour of setting, apparently, and David Cameron is a strong advocate. Interestingly, the plan to make setting compulsory has reportedly been axed not because it is bonkers, but because "it would run counter to the longstanding Conservative commitment to enshrine the independence of academies from policies set by the education department."
All of which suggests that the case for preferring setting to mixed ability teaching has already been made, and it is simply a question of how far the government should or shouldn't go in enforcing its policies on academies. So, given the need for evidence-based policy-making, where is the data that supports this case?
Ah, well. That's the problem, and the point of this post. You would think, wouldn't you, that a government that seems so clear on the correct answer to the setting/mixed ability debate would have some pretty good evidence to support its decision. Well, if they have then it certainly isn't accessible from the DfE website. As I have mentioned in a previous post the DfE website seems to have been stripped of anything much to do with education at all. A search for "mixed ability" or for "setting" reveals nothing at all germane to this issue and there are no links whatever to any other source of evidence or research.
So what about Ofsted? Well, hurrah, there is a research paper there (just one). It is entitled The most able students and has a foreword by Michael Wilshaw himself. It is this paper that is most often cited by those making the case for setting as against mixed ability teaching, but there are actually a number of problems with that. First, the tone is polemical from the start, which is not what one would expect from an objective, academic analysis. The first sentence is "Too many of our most able children and young people are underperforming in our non-selective state secondary schools."
Secondly, there is actually very little in the report that is relevant in any way to the setting/mixed ability debate. In the page and a quarter that contains the twelve key findings only one sentence has any relevance to that question: "School leaders did not evaluate how well mixed-ability group teaching was challenging the most able students." This is not in itself a key finding, but part of the unpacking of the sixth key finding, that "Many students become used to performing at a lower level than they are capable of."
Thirdly, the only evidence adduced for the above (part of a) key finding is lesson observations by Ofsted inspectors and no figures are given to support Mr Wilshaw's statement that "in too many lessons observed by inspectors , teaching is not supporting our highest-attaining students to do well. We know from our inspections that this is particularly the case in mixed ability groups." How many is too many? In my opinion one would be too many, but what does Mr Wilshaw mean? We have no way of knowing.
It is odd, to say the least, that no attainment or achievement evidence is presented to support or challenge the idea that setting is superior to mixed ability in this regard. Ofsted and the DfE have all this data of course. It would have been be easy enough to examine rates of achievement and attainment in subjects and in schools where students are set by ability and compare them with schools and subjects where they are taught in mixed ability groups. So why not make such data readily available? Why not refer to it in Ofsted's 'research'?
Perhaps the explanation is that this data did not make the case that Messrs. Wilshaw and Cameron wanted it to make. It is frustratingly hard these days to get hold of any national achievement data, but the only relevant piece of research I could find on the DfE website is this. It is dated July 2009, but it's the best I could find. It shows that rates of progression for Maths (in which almost all schools set by ability) are actually slightly poorer than those in English (where a larger proportion of schools teach in mixed ability groupings). The most definitive analysis to date that I am aware of is still Ability Grouping in Education from 2001. Its conclusion, broadly, was that neither setting nor mixed ability teaching made any significant difference to academic outcomes for children. Hardly a ringing endorsement for setting by ability.
I suppose I should pin my colours to the mast: as an English teacher and a head teacher I was always more persuaded by the case for mixed ability, not least because it forces teachers to engage with the range of abilities and weaknesses that exists in any group of students, whether set by ability or not. However had anyone presented clear evidence to me that setting by ability raised achievement then I would have been quite prepared to consider changing my position.
Only no one ever did. And no one, it seems, has presented such evidence to Messrs Cameron and Wilshaw either.
Evidence-based policy-making? Yeah, right.
All of which suggests that the case for preferring setting to mixed ability teaching has already been made, and it is simply a question of how far the government should or shouldn't go in enforcing its policies on academies. So, given the need for evidence-based policy-making, where is the data that supports this case?
Ah, well. That's the problem, and the point of this post. You would think, wouldn't you, that a government that seems so clear on the correct answer to the setting/mixed ability debate would have some pretty good evidence to support its decision. Well, if they have then it certainly isn't accessible from the DfE website. As I have mentioned in a previous post the DfE website seems to have been stripped of anything much to do with education at all. A search for "mixed ability" or for "setting" reveals nothing at all germane to this issue and there are no links whatever to any other source of evidence or research.
So what about Ofsted? Well, hurrah, there is a research paper there (just one). It is entitled The most able students and has a foreword by Michael Wilshaw himself. It is this paper that is most often cited by those making the case for setting as against mixed ability teaching, but there are actually a number of problems with that. First, the tone is polemical from the start, which is not what one would expect from an objective, academic analysis. The first sentence is "Too many of our most able children and young people are underperforming in our non-selective state secondary schools."
Secondly, there is actually very little in the report that is relevant in any way to the setting/mixed ability debate. In the page and a quarter that contains the twelve key findings only one sentence has any relevance to that question: "School leaders did not evaluate how well mixed-ability group teaching was challenging the most able students." This is not in itself a key finding, but part of the unpacking of the sixth key finding, that "Many students become used to performing at a lower level than they are capable of."
Thirdly, the only evidence adduced for the above (part of a) key finding is lesson observations by Ofsted inspectors and no figures are given to support Mr Wilshaw's statement that "in too many lessons observed by inspectors , teaching is not supporting our highest-attaining students to do well. We know from our inspections that this is particularly the case in mixed ability groups." How many is too many? In my opinion one would be too many, but what does Mr Wilshaw mean? We have no way of knowing.
It is odd, to say the least, that no attainment or achievement evidence is presented to support or challenge the idea that setting is superior to mixed ability in this regard. Ofsted and the DfE have all this data of course. It would have been be easy enough to examine rates of achievement and attainment in subjects and in schools where students are set by ability and compare them with schools and subjects where they are taught in mixed ability groups. So why not make such data readily available? Why not refer to it in Ofsted's 'research'?
Perhaps the explanation is that this data did not make the case that Messrs. Wilshaw and Cameron wanted it to make. It is frustratingly hard these days to get hold of any national achievement data, but the only relevant piece of research I could find on the DfE website is this. It is dated July 2009, but it's the best I could find. It shows that rates of progression for Maths (in which almost all schools set by ability) are actually slightly poorer than those in English (where a larger proportion of schools teach in mixed ability groupings). The most definitive analysis to date that I am aware of is still Ability Grouping in Education from 2001. Its conclusion, broadly, was that neither setting nor mixed ability teaching made any significant difference to academic outcomes for children. Hardly a ringing endorsement for setting by ability.
I suppose I should pin my colours to the mast: as an English teacher and a head teacher I was always more persuaded by the case for mixed ability, not least because it forces teachers to engage with the range of abilities and weaknesses that exists in any group of students, whether set by ability or not. However had anyone presented clear evidence to me that setting by ability raised achievement then I would have been quite prepared to consider changing my position.
Only no one ever did. And no one, it seems, has presented such evidence to Messrs Cameron and Wilshaw either.
Evidence-based policy-making? Yeah, right.
Why does beheading horrify us so much?
As an organisation that is very much aware of the power of the media, Islamic State must be delighted with the level of coverage it has received as a result of the beheading of two US journalists. Newspapers, radio and TV are currently dominated by the issue and it has got the world's leaders into a flat spin. Barack Obama has confessed that the US has "no strategy." David Cameron has not said as much, he has merely exemplified it with everything he has done over the last couple of weeks.
Anyone would think that this was the first cross-border insurgency the world has ever seen. In fact it seems like only yesterday that Kurdish separatists (now loyal allies and staunch defenders of minorities) threatened the stability of the entire Eastern Mediterranean region.
So what has marked out this insurgency, to the extent that anyone simply participating in it has overnight become a key threat to Western security whose passport has to be seized and statehood removed? (Except that that isn't legal of course, so what are we going to do to prevent these green-under-the-bed jihadists from poisoning our country on their return? Damn. Where are those US drone strikes when you need them?)
Not long ago, young 'radicalised' muslims who took themselves off to Syria to fight the Assad regime were seen as misguided ideologues who didn't understand the dangers they faced. Now they are all, to a man, the spawn of satan. Why?
Beheadings. I honestly believe that it is that that has changed public perception so dramatically that a man in black robes holding a knife has become the predominant bogeyman image of the day. It is not as if one has to see the footage either- it is the concept of the thing that carries the force. The simple mention of the word is enough.
Why is that? We are surely accustomed to the notion of violent death. Recently, did not coverage of Gaza innure us to it, to the point where an Israeli air strike only made the news if the death toll was in three figures? And US drone strikes are responsible for violent extra-judicial killings all the time without them making the news at all. In more directly comparable cases we have certainly seen images and heard accounts of pretty horrific terrorist outrages before, but none seemed to carry anything like the emotional force of a single beheading.
For all our apparent exposure to violent death we are, in a sense, insulated from it too. From death itself, come to that. And, slightly paradoxically, representations of death that reach us via our screens increase rather than remove that insulation. We know very well what death looks like, yet know too how different that is from knowing what it feels like. Nothing nowadays forces us to confront death, because it is taken from us and either sanitised by hospitals and funeral directors or dramatised by journalists and film- or games-makers. Yet the reality still haunts us around the margins of our existence. Whenever there is a fatal crash on the motorway police have to factor in major tailbacks on the other carriageway as drivers slow down to look.
Beheading though is an existential act that forces us to confront the reality of death in a way that nothing else can. We can look at the victim of a stabbing or a shooting- even of a bomb attack- and at a level not confront the essential reality of their death (or our mortality). We can't do that with a beheading. I have not seen, and will not see, any footage of either recent incident but (because) I know that I would see another human being who was in one moment alive and in another suddenly and incontrovertibly dead, with the essence of their being (their head) no longer a part of them.
So, in our safe, sanitised and insulated world it is the sudden and inescapable confrontation with the reality of death that has so shaken our "single state of mind that function is smothered in surmise and nothing is but what is not" (to quote Shakespeare). And horrific as the notion of beheading is, maybe that is no bad thing. Because death is horrific. And sudden violent death at the hands of another is something we should react to with horror, whether it be inflicted by means of a jihadist fanatic's knife, a terrorist's bomb or a remotely piloted high-tec US drone
Anyone would think that this was the first cross-border insurgency the world has ever seen. In fact it seems like only yesterday that Kurdish separatists (now loyal allies and staunch defenders of minorities) threatened the stability of the entire Eastern Mediterranean region.
So what has marked out this insurgency, to the extent that anyone simply participating in it has overnight become a key threat to Western security whose passport has to be seized and statehood removed? (Except that that isn't legal of course, so what are we going to do to prevent these green-under-the-bed jihadists from poisoning our country on their return? Damn. Where are those US drone strikes when you need them?)
Not long ago, young 'radicalised' muslims who took themselves off to Syria to fight the Assad regime were seen as misguided ideologues who didn't understand the dangers they faced. Now they are all, to a man, the spawn of satan. Why?
Beheadings. I honestly believe that it is that that has changed public perception so dramatically that a man in black robes holding a knife has become the predominant bogeyman image of the day. It is not as if one has to see the footage either- it is the concept of the thing that carries the force. The simple mention of the word is enough.
Why is that? We are surely accustomed to the notion of violent death. Recently, did not coverage of Gaza innure us to it, to the point where an Israeli air strike only made the news if the death toll was in three figures? And US drone strikes are responsible for violent extra-judicial killings all the time without them making the news at all. In more directly comparable cases we have certainly seen images and heard accounts of pretty horrific terrorist outrages before, but none seemed to carry anything like the emotional force of a single beheading.
For all our apparent exposure to violent death we are, in a sense, insulated from it too. From death itself, come to that. And, slightly paradoxically, representations of death that reach us via our screens increase rather than remove that insulation. We know very well what death looks like, yet know too how different that is from knowing what it feels like. Nothing nowadays forces us to confront death, because it is taken from us and either sanitised by hospitals and funeral directors or dramatised by journalists and film- or games-makers. Yet the reality still haunts us around the margins of our existence. Whenever there is a fatal crash on the motorway police have to factor in major tailbacks on the other carriageway as drivers slow down to look.
Beheading though is an existential act that forces us to confront the reality of death in a way that nothing else can. We can look at the victim of a stabbing or a shooting- even of a bomb attack- and at a level not confront the essential reality of their death (or our mortality). We can't do that with a beheading. I have not seen, and will not see, any footage of either recent incident but (because) I know that I would see another human being who was in one moment alive and in another suddenly and incontrovertibly dead, with the essence of their being (their head) no longer a part of them.
So, in our safe, sanitised and insulated world it is the sudden and inescapable confrontation with the reality of death that has so shaken our "single state of mind that function is smothered in surmise and nothing is but what is not" (to quote Shakespeare). And horrific as the notion of beheading is, maybe that is no bad thing. Because death is horrific. And sudden violent death at the hands of another is something we should react to with horror, whether it be inflicted by means of a jihadist fanatic's knife, a terrorist's bomb or a remotely piloted high-tec US drone
Monday 1 September 2014
Is learning supposed to be tough?
I am already officially fed up of hearing how tough Gove's new National Curriculum is. There may be a mention of the curriculum changes somewhere which does not include the word 'tough', but if so I have yet to find it.
Leave aside for a minute the important (but so far, it seems, unasked) question of whether learning a string of facts is in fact tougher than acquiring the skills to make use of them. What about the core issue: should toughness be a central criterion for a school curriculum?
On the face of it this seems a no-brainer. We are, as we never cease being reminded, living in an increasingly competitive world and education is one of the key tracks on which the race for global supremacy will be run. The analogy of competitive sport is always there and the implication of that analogy is clear: if you want to race competitively you have to train, and train hard. Toughness is key and a trainer who goes easy on you is doing you no favours at all.
But education is not athletics, and learning is not the same as running in a race.
For a start, athletics is predominantly (not purely of course) about physical prowess. To do well you need your muscles, your heart and your lungs to be capable of operating at peak capacity, and physical systems like the adrenal gland, the central nervous system and the pituitary gland can all facilitate that process. It is what evolution selected them for after all. Tough training feeds into all of the inbuilt mechanisms the body has for getting fitter and stronger, and the body even provides a positive feedback mechanism through endorphin production- the so-called runners' high.
Learning really isn't the same. We use various sports-based analogies (getting match fit for an interview; training for an exam) but the development of mental capacity just isn't a physical process in the same way. Proponents of Brain Gym approaches briefly tried to persuade us it was, until it became clear that the only capacity that Brain Gym activities build is the capacity to do more Brain Gym activities.
So is toughness (another favourite word is 'rigour') the best way to speed up the process of learning? Certainly there is a satisfaction in having worked hard to acquire a new skill or new set of knowledge, and in some circumstances, certainly, an awareness of the difficulty of what you are attempting to master is a strong motivator to put more effort into it. Surely we all remember some occasion when we worked seemingly day and night to get some killer essay finished or to revise for a particularly tough exam. Doesn't that show that toughness spurs us on to feats of learning we would not be capable of otherwise?
But is it just coincidence that that is precisely the sort of learning that goes immediately out of one's head once the essay is handed in or the exam finished? Sure, adrenaline increases the brain's working capacity in the short term, and toughness is a good tool to promote the production of adrenaline. So we can psyche ourselves up to cram in large amounts of fact-based information ready to regurgitate it in response to some 'tough' exam question. But that isn't all that learning is.
There is absolutely no doubt that the most profound and longest term learning takes place when we are doing something we find rewarding, fulfilling and fun. It's why people always retain far more about things they are interested in than things they have to learn. Many is the pub darts player who was always crap at maths at school, yet can work out a 3-dart finish to a score of 123 in seconds (3 * 19 + 2 * 17 + 2 * 16). Or the football fanatic who could never remember dates in history at school yet can tell you immediately who Southampton beat in the 2003 FA cup semi-final (Watford).
And to what extent does 'toughness' in a school curriculum offer opportunities for students to enjoy their learning? Mr Gove (and now Mrs Morgan) are clearly with Gradgrind on this- it shouldn't..
And all of this is argued from the viewpoint of the successful. Learning, even more than athletics, is also about one's emotional state, and there is nothing more dispiriting, disempowering and inimical to future success than repeated failure. Yet the new 'tough' curriculum seems designed to build in failure and the fear of failure into every step of a child's journey through school. Children are now expected aged nine to know the 12 times table by heart. This seems to have no purpose in this age of ubiquitous smartphones but to make those who can't do it feel inadequate (12 is an interesting choice, by the way. It goes back, of course, to the days when there were 12 pennies in a shilling). My daughter struggled with her times tables all through secondary school, giving up entirely once she saw through my attempts to make them seem important to her. She is now a Cambridge graduate.
There will be many who struggle to remember the kings and queens of England. Why? Because it has utterly no relevance to them, and the only purpose in learning them is because it is difficult to do so- toughness replacing usefulness or relevance in order to convince children that they aren't as clever as they think they are.
And given that the huge issue with so many kids today is that they don't think they are clever at all, that is an insane thing to do.
Leave aside for a minute the important (but so far, it seems, unasked) question of whether learning a string of facts is in fact tougher than acquiring the skills to make use of them. What about the core issue: should toughness be a central criterion for a school curriculum?
On the face of it this seems a no-brainer. We are, as we never cease being reminded, living in an increasingly competitive world and education is one of the key tracks on which the race for global supremacy will be run. The analogy of competitive sport is always there and the implication of that analogy is clear: if you want to race competitively you have to train, and train hard. Toughness is key and a trainer who goes easy on you is doing you no favours at all.
But education is not athletics, and learning is not the same as running in a race.
For a start, athletics is predominantly (not purely of course) about physical prowess. To do well you need your muscles, your heart and your lungs to be capable of operating at peak capacity, and physical systems like the adrenal gland, the central nervous system and the pituitary gland can all facilitate that process. It is what evolution selected them for after all. Tough training feeds into all of the inbuilt mechanisms the body has for getting fitter and stronger, and the body even provides a positive feedback mechanism through endorphin production- the so-called runners' high.
Learning really isn't the same. We use various sports-based analogies (getting match fit for an interview; training for an exam) but the development of mental capacity just isn't a physical process in the same way. Proponents of Brain Gym approaches briefly tried to persuade us it was, until it became clear that the only capacity that Brain Gym activities build is the capacity to do more Brain Gym activities.
So is toughness (another favourite word is 'rigour') the best way to speed up the process of learning? Certainly there is a satisfaction in having worked hard to acquire a new skill or new set of knowledge, and in some circumstances, certainly, an awareness of the difficulty of what you are attempting to master is a strong motivator to put more effort into it. Surely we all remember some occasion when we worked seemingly day and night to get some killer essay finished or to revise for a particularly tough exam. Doesn't that show that toughness spurs us on to feats of learning we would not be capable of otherwise?
But is it just coincidence that that is precisely the sort of learning that goes immediately out of one's head once the essay is handed in or the exam finished? Sure, adrenaline increases the brain's working capacity in the short term, and toughness is a good tool to promote the production of adrenaline. So we can psyche ourselves up to cram in large amounts of fact-based information ready to regurgitate it in response to some 'tough' exam question. But that isn't all that learning is.
There is absolutely no doubt that the most profound and longest term learning takes place when we are doing something we find rewarding, fulfilling and fun. It's why people always retain far more about things they are interested in than things they have to learn. Many is the pub darts player who was always crap at maths at school, yet can work out a 3-dart finish to a score of 123 in seconds (3 * 19 + 2 * 17 + 2 * 16). Or the football fanatic who could never remember dates in history at school yet can tell you immediately who Southampton beat in the 2003 FA cup semi-final (Watford).
And to what extent does 'toughness' in a school curriculum offer opportunities for students to enjoy their learning? Mr Gove (and now Mrs Morgan) are clearly with Gradgrind on this- it shouldn't..
And all of this is argued from the viewpoint of the successful. Learning, even more than athletics, is also about one's emotional state, and there is nothing more dispiriting, disempowering and inimical to future success than repeated failure. Yet the new 'tough' curriculum seems designed to build in failure and the fear of failure into every step of a child's journey through school. Children are now expected aged nine to know the 12 times table by heart. This seems to have no purpose in this age of ubiquitous smartphones but to make those who can't do it feel inadequate (12 is an interesting choice, by the way. It goes back, of course, to the days when there were 12 pennies in a shilling). My daughter struggled with her times tables all through secondary school, giving up entirely once she saw through my attempts to make them seem important to her. She is now a Cambridge graduate.
There will be many who struggle to remember the kings and queens of England. Why? Because it has utterly no relevance to them, and the only purpose in learning them is because it is difficult to do so- toughness replacing usefulness or relevance in order to convince children that they aren't as clever as they think they are.
And given that the huge issue with so many kids today is that they don't think they are clever at all, that is an insane thing to do.
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