Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
TheMismeasurement
of Learning
How tests are damaging childrenand primary education
Reclaiming Schools
The Evidence and the Arguments
In 2016 47% of pupils failed to reach the ‘expected standard’ in the KS2 tests (Reading, Writing, Mathematics). In effect, due to poorly constructed and impossibly difficult tests, nearly half our 11-year-olds left their primary school carrying a ‘failure’ notice.
Twice as many August-born children (the youngest inthe year) failed the phonics check as September-born(the oldest). The same occurred with KS1 SATs. Inother words, many thousands of children were ‘failed’because they were not old enough.
Teachers had worked hard to narrow the attainment gap between pupils on free school meals and other pupils in the years up to 2015. The KS1 attainment gap doubled in 2016.
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
When taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.
Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat.
And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.
3
The system of assessmentimposed on English primaryschools is a failure. In 2016, ithas produced a situation inwhich nearly half of all elevenyear olds were judged not readyfor secondary school. But thiscounter-intuitive outcome is notits only problem. It has becomea notorious example of teachingto the test: it narrows thecurriculum; it prioritises theproduction of test scores abovethe provision of support forchildren’s learning. In somecases, it damages children’ssense of well-being. Theburdens it imposes on teachersare unjustifiably heavy. Theaspirations of teachers and thecapacities of pupils arefrustrated by a system that isnot fit for purpose.
It is essential that the troubles ofprimary education are exposedand debated. That is why theNational Union of Teachers ispleased to publish thiscollection of articles. TheMismeasurement of Learningexplains how primary educationgot into its present state; itdraws from the experiences ofteachers and researchers tomake a detailed analysis of theway that assessment works; itopens the door to thinkingabout alternatives.
In 2016, the concerns ofteachers, and parents, havereached new heights. In an NUTsurvey, more than 90% ofprimary teachers identifiedfundamental problems with theassessment system. Parents,likewise, made a forcefulstatement, by withdrawing theirchildren from school in the weekbefore SATs. Working withmany other organisations, theNUT intends to make the needto transform the whole systemof primary assessment an issuethat policy-makers cannotignore. We hope that TheMismeasurement of Learningprovokes the discussions andthe arguments that are anessential part of this campaign.
Kevin CourtneyGeneral Secretary, National Union of Teachers
Introduction
5
CONTENTS
Introduction by Kevin Courtney, General Secretary NUT
1. What this publication sets out to do: activists and academics togetherJon Berry
2. How testing took centre stageRoger Murphy
3. Campbell’s Law... or how the language of numbers does a disservice to our childrenRichard Pring
4. Testing times and the thirst for data: for what? Alpesh Maisuria
5. Developmentally informed teaching: challenging premature targets in early learningPam Jarvis
6. ‘Datafication’ in the early yearsGuy Roberts-Holmes and Alice Bradbury
7. An old and professional alternative to the present systemMichael Bassey
8. Flawed arguments for phonicsMargaret Clark
9. A focus group discussion with Teesside primary teachers
10. Mathematics: conceptual understanding or counting by the rules?Gawain Little
11. Primary arts are in trouble Pat Thomson
12. Assessment and testing in WalesDavid Egan
13. Everyone’s educational future is always in the making: Learning without LimitsPatrick Yarker
14. Speeding up the treadmill: Primary tests and Secondary examsTerry Wrigley
15. Three assessment mythsJohn Coe
16. ‘Since Christmas I have only taught Literacy and Numeracy’: what the 2016 SATs taught usKen Jones
6
Even though some stridentvoices would have us believeotherwise, there is a place in thebusy lives of teachers for theory.There is also a case for lookingcarefully at evidence. It seemsodd that such an obvious pointeven needs to be re-stated. Butteachers, teacher educatorsand, of course, students andparents, have been faced with abarrage of policy that has beendriven by dogma, ideology andgood old-fashioned prejudicefor over twenty years. Thispamphlet, along with itspredecessor, ReclaimingSchools, attempts to recoversome of that lost ground.
Of those voices which haveattempted to drown outknowledge, expertise andexperience, none has beenmore important and influentialthan that of Michael Gove. Heclaimed in 2011, with absolutelyno evidence whatsoever, thatstudent-teachers founduniversity-based teachereducation ‘too theoretical’. He dubbed academics whoopposed his curriculum plansas ‘the Blob’. This distrust ofknowledge later informed hisBrexit campaign, when heconfidently declared that ‘Britainhas had enough of experts’.
This publication gives space toexperts. Its aim is to equipteachers with some argumentsand research that will help themin their daily arguments withschool managers – or evencolleagues – who seem tobelieve that the regime oftesting and data collection isinevitable or, worse still, the bestway to ‘raise standards’. By
understanding pedagogy andchallenging poorly informedopinion, teachers can go aboutthe business of educating thewhole child more confidently.
Roger Murphy provides thehistorical context for the currentsituation, tracing the way inwhich testing became conflatedwith false notions ofaccountability. This became thebasis for a punitive surveillancesystem which is underminingeducation. Richard Pring takesup the point by looking at theway in which the managerialistlanguage of target-setting anddelivery, adopted from thebusiness world, has distortedteaching and learning. AlpeshMaisuria comments on theinappropriate transfer ofmethods from the naturalsciences into education. Heasks the basic question aboutwhat the real purpose of ourobsession with data collectioncould be, thereby raising theultimate, but often ignored ideaof what education is for!
Pam Jarvis shows how nurseryand kindergarten approaches toyoung children are beingeclipsed and the early years ofeducation are being‘schoolified’ under pressurefrom early testing. Impossibletargets are resulting in a‘tsunami of mental healthproblems’. Guy Roberts-Holmes and Alice Bradburydraw on interviews with nurseryand reception class teachers todemonstrate the ‘datafication’of the early years. They showhow inappropriate pressurefrom Ofsted is wiping out play,and how children are becoming
‘miniature centres ofcalculation’. Michael Basseyoffers a glimpse of the past inthe form of case studyobservations of teachers carriedout in the 1970s. He shows realand inspiring alternatives tocurrent methods, to promotethe all-round development ofevery child.
Margaret Clark brings anexpert’s eye to the myths aboutphonics. She points to the lackof evidence behind theGovernment’s insistence onsynthetic phonics as opposedto a judicious combination ofmethods for teaching reading,and to the deep flaws in the‘phonics check’.
A focus group discussion withseveral Teesside primaryteachers shows the devastatingimpact of the new KS2 tests onchildren in one of England’spoorest areas. This isdemoralising pupils andnarrowing the curriculum intotest preparation. The KS2reading test is analysed to showhow far removed the reading isfrom these children’s lifeexperience. Gawain Littledemonstrates that there aresimilar problems with Maths:method is prized aboveconceptual understanding. Thequestion of curriculumnarrowing is pursued by PatThomson, who points to thevirtual disappearance of artseducation in many schools,whilst celebrating those schoolswhich still prioritise it. One of theconsequences is that childrenmiss out on vital cultural andcreative experiences unlesstheir parents can provide it.
1. What this publication sets out to do: activists and academics together
7
David Egan’s article on Walesshows that there are other,more productive approaches tocurriculum and assessment,beyond the current horizons ofEnglish policy-makers. PatrickYarker introduces the notion of‘learning without limits’, whichchallenges prevailing notions offixed ability and potential inchildren. Terry Wrigley looks atthe way the testing treadmilldominates our children’s lives,from the early years to the endof secondary school. His articlepoints to real alternatives forcurriculum and assessment.John Coe debunks someprevailing myths about thenecessity and benefits ofstandardized tests, showinghow more productive andreliable feedback can beprovided by well-managed andsensitive teacher assessment.He celebrates the parents’actions on 3rd May 2016 as theopening of a new chapter – ademonstration that parents areno longer willing to accept asystem which is damaging theirchildren. Finally, Ken Jonesreports on a survey of 6000teachers, which vividlydemonstrates their sense thatlearning has been diminished,and teachers’ work degraded,by the current system.
This collection of short articlesprovides a sharp critique of thecurrent test regime,demonstrating that it isdestructive of education anddestructive of children. Theauthors celebrate the deepprofessionalism of teachers whoare finding ways to resist, andsustain a faith in the collective
power of teachers and parentsto remove an oppressivesystem of measurement.
Teachers are not opposed toassessment. We all need toknow how children areprogressing and, from time totime, testing their knowledgeand understanding is the rightthing to do. The contributors tothe pamphlet, however, allargue that the emphasis onstandardised, high-stakestesting is seriouslydisproportionate. We argue thatit has had an adverse effect onthe ability of teachers to makeautonomous decisions thatgenuinely enhance learning.What is worse is the time-consuming drudgery thattesting and data–collection cangenerate – time that could bebetter spent either preparingbetter lessons or resources oreven enjoying the benefits ofrest and relaxation, helpingteachers to save their energiesfor the classroom itself.
The academic contributors tothis publication are proud to beassociated with the NationalUnion of Teachers. It is bybringing together informedopinion with a campaigningorganisation that we cancontinue to show the best wayforward for our young people.
Dr Jon Berry, University of Hertfordshire
Further readings andreferences:
Berry, J (2016) Teachersundefeated: How globaleducation reform has failed tocrush the spirit of educators(Trentham Books)
Hutchings, M (2015) Examfactories? The impact ofaccountability measures onchildren and young people.www.teachers.org.uk/files/exam-factories.pdf
The www.reclaimingschools.orgblog for up-to-date analysis ofcurriculum and assessment,along with many othercampaigning issues. An index ofposts concerned with primarytesting can be found athttp://tinyurl.com/jd54cv7
8
Regular national testing of allstate school pupils, which hasbecome such a controversialmatter in recent years, was notin evidence until the late 1980s.How did it come into being? Twokey factors certainly contributed.There was a heightened demandfor accountability in all publicservices, and that wascombined with a political moveto apply the principles ofmarketization to schooleducation.
In the 1970s and 1980s severalLocal Education Authoritiesintroduced a requirement fortheir schools to take somestandardised tests – usually ‘offthe shelf’ commerciallyproduced tests of things like‘cognitive ability’ and ‘generalaptitude’. Finally in 1987 theConservative Party chose tomake the introduction of socalled ‘benchmark tests’ acentral part of its manifestopledge.
These were of course the‘Thatcher years’ and MargaretThatcher undoubtedly played akey role in establishing nationalstandardised tests as part ofthe educational landscape. Thepitch to the electorate wasgreater accountability of schoolsthrough simple and accessibledata, and an opening up of aneducational market with thepromise of more choice forparents and better value formoney for taxpayers. The ‘GreatEducation Reform Act’ of 1988marked the biggest change forschools since the 1944 ButlerAct. This involved a NationalCurriculum; new opportunitiesfor schools to opt out of Local
Education Authority controlinvolving more ‘freedom’ todevelop their own significantfeatures; and the imposition ofnational testing of all pupils at 7,11, 14 and 16. It was a simpleformula blending the carrot ofmuch more professionalfreedom for head teachers andschools with the stick of atightly prescribed curriculumaligned with regular testing forall pupils, to see what progressthey were making againstcentrally prescribed milestones.
During the ensuingimplementation process severalbattles were fought over‘national benchmark testing’.This was a particular shock forprimary schools, which sincethe demise of the Eleven Plusexam had been largely sparedthe burden of preparing pupilsfor external tests. KennethBaker, who was the Secretaryof State for Education at thistime, set up a Task Group onAssessment and Testing (TGAT)giving it just three months todevelop a practical approach tointroducing the nationalassessments. This group,chaired by Professor PaulBlack, was acutely aware of thedangers of crude national tests“which could be remote fromteachers, the curriculum, andregular classroom teaching”(Murphy, 1988). TGAT came upwith some imaginativeproposals including StandardAssessment Tasks (SATs),involving teacher assessmentsof standard classroom learningtasks (rather than tests).Ironically ‘SATs’ has beenretained as a shorthand for thenational testing approach that
emerged in opposition to theTGAT recommendations.
Where did it all go wrong? Aleaked letter from MargaretThatcher to Kenneth Baker, afew weeks after he and manyothers had warmly welcomedthe TGAT proposals, was asignificant factor. A rowbetween Thatcher and Bakerwas reported widely innewspaper front page stories inwhich Thatcher insisted that theTGAT proposals were “toocomplicated, too costly, and toofar removed from the traditionalexternally devised written teststhat she was hoping for”(Murphy, 1988). The rest as theysay is history. National Testing in‘core subjects’ started in 1990with tests for all 7 year olds andhas remained with us with somemodifications for the last 27years.
Some may still believe thatnational testing in the yearsfrom 1990-2016 has been agood thing. However themajority of people working ineducation have becomeincreasingly concerned aboutthe harsh backwash effects of atest-driven accountabilitysystem, which has disruptedthe broader aims of the NationalCurriculum. The system hasalso proved unwieldy at apractical level (with the USEducational Testing Servicedramatically losing its contractfor delivering the tests aftercomputer problems in 2008).Moreover the issue ofdemonstrating comparableassessment results data overtime has caused majorproblems for Secretaries of
2. How testing took centre stage
9
State and government quangosover the years. In the last yearthe Gove reforms havecompletely realigned thestandard of the tests.
So, in a nutshell, the Thatchergovernment of 1987 gave usnational testing and no latergovernment has been minded toabolish it. Few people imagined,however, that national testing orGCSE results would provide thefoundation for a punitive and all-embracing surveillance system,involving the publication ofresults, calculations of ‘valueadded’, ‘floor targets’, Ofstedjudgements, naming andshaming, performance reviewsand performance pay forteachers, and forced academies.
Many of us would argue thatthere is nothing intrinsicallywrong with occasionalclassroom-based tests or even,for certain purposes, nationaltesting programmes. However,many would also agree thatsuch tests have limited value,can give a misleading andpartial view of educationalprogress, and, if the scores aregiven too much value andimportance, they can lead todangerously distorted teachingand learning and seriously poorjudgements about pupils,teachers, schools, andlocalities/local authorities/typesof school.
This is how testing took centrestage – surely it is time now tolook for an exit.
Professor Roger MurphyEmeritus Professor ofEducationNottingham University
Further readings andreferences:
Murphy, R (1988) GreatEducation Reform Bill proposalsfor testing – a critique (LocalGovernment Studies, 14 (1), 39-45)
10
October 2016 marks the 40thanniversary of Prime MinisterCallaghan’s Ruskin Collegespeech – the first occasionwhen a Prime Minister hadspoken about standards andcurriculum within our schools.Prior to that, the Minister ofEducation, David Eccles, hadbemoaned that the curriculumwas a ‘secret garden’ and thatthe Minister, therefore, wasunable to monitor the quality ofthe educational system and ofindividual schools within it. TheMinister had neither theknowledge of areas ofweakness, nor the powers todo anything even if he did havethat knowledge. How could thesystem as a whole and theperformance of schools bemade more accountable?
The initial answer involvedsample assessments. Guidancewas taken from the NationalAssessment of EducationalPerformance (NAEP) based inDenver Colorado, and theAssessment of PerformanceUnit (APU) was established toprovide a comprehensiveaccount of the quality ofeducation in six broad areas ofthe curriculum, includingpersonal and socialdevelopment. By adopting amodel of light sampling,stratified and randomised,knowledge of standards and oftheir change over time could beascertained, withoutinterference in the schools. Theassessments of standardscould not themselves becomethe shaper of the curriculum.
That, however, could not satisfy
those in government who wereincreasingly adopting a muchmore managerial approach tothe control of public serviceswhich emerged in the 1980s –including, for example, throughthe creation of a NationalCurriculum with its key stagetesting, All this was explained ina series of Government WhitePapers from HM Treasury andthe Cabinet Office, starting withModern Public Services inBritain: Investing in Reform(1988).
Such a managerial approachintroduced a new language, oneof ‘targets’ and their ‘delivery’,of ‘performance indicators’ andtheir ‘audits’. The aim wasclarified by the Labour 2008Government’s White Paper,21st Century Schools: yourchild, your schools, our future:building a 21st century schoolssystem. As the Children’sMinister declared:
‘It is fundamentally a deepcultural change. It is aboutchanging boundaries ofprofessional behaviour andthinking in a completely differentway.’ (DCSF, 2008)
So, what are the clues to the‘deep cultural change’ whichcreate new ‘boundaries ofprofessional behaviour’?
This ‘deep cultural change’, asoutlined, said nothing abouteducation, but the languagegave the clue. ‘Performance’and ‘performing’ werementioned 121 times,‘outcomes’ 55 times, ‘delivery’57 times. Libraries get nomention in 21st century
schools, and books only one –namely, in the section onInformation Technology. Thefollowing statement sums it upperfectly:
‘It is only the workforce who candeliver our [i.e. theGovernment’s] ambition ofimproved outcomes.’
Such a language of publicmanagement requires targetswhich are sufficiently precise asto be measurable. Therefore,there has arisen the range ofoutcomes to which teachersshould teach and on which theyand their schools will beassessed and judged.
But, as ‘Campbell’s Law’stipulates
‘the more any quantitative socialindicator is used for socialdecision making, the moresubject it will be to corruptionpressures and the more apt itwill be to distort and corrupt thesocial processes it wasintended to monitor.’
The American social scientistand policy analyst DonaldCampbell warned us, in aresearch paper of 1976, of theinevitable problems associatedwith undue weight andemphasis on a single indicatorfor monitoring complex socialphenomena. In effect hewarned us about the high-stakes testing programmeswhich now dominate oureducational system in generaland primary schools inparticular. It is re-iterated bywhat economists refer to asGoodhart’s Law, namely
3. Campbell’s Law… or how the language of numbers does a disserviceto our children
11
‘When a measure becomes atarget, it ceases to become agood measure.’
Such ‘corruption’ lies in‘teaching to the test’, ‘beingselective of pupils who are likelyto do well in the tests’,‘concentrating on subjects inwhich pupils are to be tested’.Warwick Mansell, in his bookEducation By numbers: TheTyranny of Testing gives anaccount of the ‘games teachersplay’ and how the results of thetest scores can affect parentalchoice, head teachers’ pay,teacher promotion, and indeedclosure or forcedacademisation.
Therefore, in opposing theretrograde influence on primaryschool practice of widespreadtesting, it is necessary to beaware of this wider backgroundto the management of publicservices with its own distinctivelanguage drawn from thebusiness world, and thereby toquestion its relevance to what itmeans to teach and to educate.
Professor Richard PringEmeritus Professor, Oxford University.
Further readings andreferences:
Mansell, W (2007) Education byNumbers: the tyranny of testing.(Routledge).
12
The emphasis on tests hasmade teachers and pupilsdepressed, harm themselves,and even turn suicidal. High-stakes testing and an oppressivedata-driven accountabilitysystem de-humanise whatshould be an experience ofenrichment, creativity and fun.Schooling is being reconfiguredfrom being a public service to abusiness, and businessdemands data through testing.
Bad Science
‘Almost half of pupils miss newSats standard’ ran the headlineon the BBC July 2016. But is itthe children and teachers thatare the problem or the SATs andother tests?
The philosophy behind testingin schools is a false applicationof approaches used in some ofthe natural sciences. In thenatural world, throughexperimentation, we canobserve and uncover the fixedlaws of nature. This has allowedscientists to predict with a highlevel of accuracy the outcomeand regularity of what happensin the natural world, for examplethe combination of twohydrogen atoms with an oxygenatom will always result in waterbeing created. This level ofcertainty and predictability doesnot occur in open systems suchas weather and climate, nor is itappropriate when describingand explaining children’slearning in schools.
A positivistic logic has beenmisappropriated and thus wemistakenly expect standard andpredictable responses in tests
from humans. The idea is thatwe provide a standardisededucation for all and expectcomparable outcomes.
The problem is that the socialworld is highly unpredictable. Inthe context of schooling, testsdo not account for themultiplicity of factors that affectengagement and subsequentperformance. Tests only give asurface metric, rather thandeeper understanding of whathas been learnt, why learninghas taken place and how. Inshort, we have a misplacedtrust in the accuracy of datafrom standardised tests.
Standardised tests, high-stakes examinations
The requirement for all studentsto take the same test andperform against the samebenchmarks disregards eachpupil’s individuality and theirparticular ways of coming toand working with knowledge.Teachers, supposedly theexperts, are equallydisempowered and theirautonomy is compromised.
The school’s management isalso negatively affected by theobsession with capturing databy tests. Rather than showingeffective leadership and visionby taking creative andconsidered risks, managers areexpected to bean-count,account, measure everythingand be as conservative andprudent as possible. Theexpectation is that they setfurther targets to be moreconservative and prudent thanthe last time to get more for less
the next time. The insatiabledemand for data throughtesting reduces the schoolingexperience to a coerciveperformance that is didactically-led and reduced to ‘benchmarkknows best’.
Learning through dialogue anddiscussion becomes difficult inthe age of performativity. Childcentred pedagogy isincompatible with the need forcomparable data. Perhaps thefinal death knell was Gove’snotching up of the high stakestesting regime. Failing to reacha benchmark now means thatthe child is stigmatised, theteacher penalised, and theschool sentenced to forcedAcademisation.
Imported from the USA, highstakes examinations mean thatchildren in England, who arealready among the mostfrequently tested in Europe,have the added pressure oftrying to avoid the label ‘failure’.This occurs as early as age 5(the phonics check) and, if ithad not been withdrawnfollowing widespreadopposition, was due to occur asearly as 4 years old throughBaseline testing. Early testingplants seeds of alienation fromlearning at the most importanttime in a child’s life, whenlearning through doing thingsdifferently should ignite curiosity,creativity and exploration.
The classed-room
Proponents claim thatstandardisation negatesinequality because all pupilshave the same experience and
4. Testing times and the thirst for data: for what?
13
expectations of them. This tooconstitutes bad sciencebecause it disregards theindividuality of all children andtheir position in an unequalsociety. The test data issupposed to capture learningbut the tests cannot account forthe crucial impact of the pupils’access to resources of variouskinds (for example toys/books,parental nurturing, activities andexperiences, private tuition,medicine, healthy diet).Resources can also be cultural;tests are imbued with classedcultural norms that expectpupils to know particular waysof English middle class ‘being’(See for example the 2016 KS2Reading test relating to agarden party). The workingclass, especially immigrants, areat a systemic disadvantage andtests track working class pupilson a pathway labelled ‘failing’,despite the fact that many havetravelled a long physical andintellectual journey.
Underperforming in tests meansthat life chances are restrictedand schooling reproducesinequalities rather than correctsthem. Schooling in this sensebecomes a function of theneoliberal state to filter workersfor a particular position and levelin the economy. Test resultsteach children to ‘know theirplace’, as the Victorians wouldhave said.
Gaming and markets
As part of the neoliberalisationof schooling, a markets rulerationality has entrenched theway that schools are governed.Since testing data is used to
stratify schools as ‘good’ and‘bad’, ‘gaming’ has penetratedschool governance. Teachersand ‘school leaders’ are forcedto choose between what willreap the best advantages inleague tables. Teachers and‘school leaders’ are forced tochoose between offering abroad and balanced curriculuminvolving creative and criticallearning, and squeezing thecurriculum to focus on a narrowband of learning that will gainthe highest scores.
Some creative accounting,admitting fewer working classpupils, immigrants and anincrease in managed exclusionsmight also take place, whichhave become more evidentsince the introduction ofacademies. It seems nocoincidence that academies,with their business-leaningcompetitive approach togovernance, exclude five timesas many pupils, 70% of themregistered with additional needs.Relentless testing is linked tomarket positioning rather thanthe value of learning, or alearning resource useful forchildren.
We need to fight for less testing,especially high stakes exams,which should be abolishedaltogether for younger children.The ultimate struggle is tomaintain the reality of a publicschool that serves the purposeof the common good andcorrecting inequality. These aretesting times.
Dr Alpesh MaisuriaUniversity of East London
Further readings andreferences:
Au, W (2009) Unequal bydesign: High-stakes testing andthe standardization of inequality(Routledge)
Cole-Malott, D-M and Malott, C(2016) Testing and socialstudies in capitalist schooling(Monthly Review)http://tinyurl.com/js2my32
14
Compulsory mass stateschooling was enshrined inlegislation in 1880 to meet therequirements of the industrialrevolution. The starting age offive was arbitrarily fixed by thegovernment of the time, eventhough many experts ineducation and psychology thenand since argued that the‘nursery’ or ‘kindergarten’ stageshould extend to the age ofseven. Young children learnmost effectively through a rangeof discovery and independentplay-based activities in whichthey interact with others,learning about ways in whichthey can manipulate the physicalworld, share and collaborate.This prepares them cognitively,socially and emotionally for moreformal education in the laterstages of development.
In the early twentieth century,Maria Montessori created adevelopmental model thatproposed ‘planes’ ofdevelopment in which children’sabilities to learn and theorisebecome progressively moresophisticated, while Jean Piagetspecified four distinct stages,involving gradual developmenttowards more abstract thought.Contemporary cognitivepsychologist Professor AlisonGopnik presents copiousempirical data to support herview that formal instruction inearly childhood ‘leads childrento narrow in, and to considerjust the specific information ateacher provides. Without ateacher present children look fora much wider range ofinformation and consider a
greater range of options’.Stage-based theories of humancognition have also receivedsupport throughneuropsychology.
Despite a century of empiricaland theoretical advanceshowever, the state educationsystem has never becomesufficiently informed about thehuman developmental process.Additionally, the school startingage has effectively becomeearlier since children are nowexpected to enter school at thebeginning of the school yearwhen they become 5, meaningthat inevitably some are onlyjust turned 4. Children are alsoimmediately subject to statutoryassessment, which means thatformal teaching, particularly inliteracy and numeracy, oftenbegins during the pre-schoolperiod. The Early YearsFoundation Stage (from birth tofive) has 17 goals against whicha summative assessment mustbe made at five; while thephonics check creates severedownward pressure.
The unremitting schedule oftests puts children and teachersunder considerable stress, sincedata from these tests forms thebasis for evaluation of schoolsand potentially for them to beforcibly turned into academies.
So how has this happened?Since the early 1990s, theSecretary of State for Educationhas exerted far-reaching powersand successive postholders,regardless of politicalorientation, have refused toengage in productive discussion
with teachers or childdevelopment experts. Theongoing strategy of theDepartment for Education hasbeen a simplistic insistence thatthe earlier children entereducation and the faster theyare expected to learn, the betterthe outcome will be.
In effect, education is viewed asa ‘data dump’, based on ananalogy which sees teachers asmemory sticks and children ascomputers; there is no attemptto understand the psychologyand biology of humandevelopment and learning.Indeed, former journalistMichael Gove (2010- 2014)announced his entrenchedopinion: that the nation ‘hadhad enough of experts’. Thisphilosophy underpinned his fouryears at the helm of Englisheducation. For example, hecommented in 2013 that thosewho opposed his ‘reforms’ weresimply making excuses for ‘notteaching poor children to addup’. His successor, corporatelawyer Nicky Morgan, respectedprofessional knowledge so littlethat she proposed to scrapQualified Teacher Statusaltogether.
So what has the effect of suchmismanagement been upon theprocess of education and uponthe children themselves?England’s ongoing educationpolicy has created a situationbetween teachers and pupilswhich can most accurately bedescribed as one of mutuallyassured destruction; impossibletargets are set with teachers’ and
5. Developmentally informed teaching: challenging premature targets inearly learning
15
head teachers’ futureemployment prospects andsalary depending upon pupils’performance against these.Teachers are therefore put into aposition where they feelcompelled to drive childrenthrough a ‘too much, too soon’curriculum, inevitably basedlargely in highly pressurised rotelearning, or quit the profession.Not surprisingly, many take thelatter option in order to protecttheir own mental health andintegrity.
Children, however, cannotescape. The result is a tsunami ofmental health problems: adoubling of juvenile depressionbetween the 1980s and 2000s,and an explosion of self harmers,an increasing number of whomhave to be hospitalised. Self-harming is a reaction to beingplaced under impossible mentalpressure, as physical injuryreleases endorphins thatcounteract the stress response. A growing number of youngpeople develop eating disordersand suicidal thoughts, with adoubling of numbers presentingto Accident and Emergencydepartments with psychiatricproblems. Two successiveUNICEF reports on children’swell-being in 2007 and 2013indicated that English childrenhave a very low sense of well-being.
In conclusion, the ‘too much, toosoon’ approach and exposure tooverwhelming competition putschildren at severe risk ofpsychological harm. The entiresystem must be radically
reconsidered, including nurseryeducation to age 7, firmly basedupon independent andcollaborative discovery, toprovide a strong foundation forlater, more formal modes oflearning and for mental healthwithin a society that functions forthe good of all.
Dr Pam JarvisLeeds Trinity University
Further readings andreferences:For a fully referenced version ofthis article, please seeReclaiming Schools, Oct 2016http://tinyurl.com/z7ycrl5
Gray, P (2013) Free to learn(Basic Books)
Jarvis, P, Newman, S andSwiniarski, L (2014) On‘becoming social’: theimportance of collaborative freeplay in childhood (InternationalJournal of Play)http://tinyurl.com/h87pfjx
Robinson, K (2011) School kills creativity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1yl0MFYzXc
16
The nursery and receptionteachers we interviewedexplained how they wereincreasingly subjected to thedemands of data production.They were aware of the pitfalls,cynical about the purposes ofdata, and yet they found theirworking lives constrained byexhaustive demands for theproduction and analysis of data.
“The collection and analysing ofdata is just too overwhelming. Itmakes you constantly think ofhow to improve it and what todo with this group and how toplug this hole and that one.”(Reception teacher, primaryschool).
“We have constant meetingslooking at the data. It hasbecome very clinical andchildren have just becomenumbers…” (Reception teacher)
Interviews with teachers showthe exaggerated emphasisplaced on literacy andnumeracy, rather than thebroader foundations thatchildren need. The constantneed to show progress involvedthe production of ever morecomplex grids, charts, graphsand tables with acronymsrelated to a colour-coded, age-based system of points thechildren can attain.
Teachers contrast high stakes‘compliance’ data with the moreuseful data in the form ofnarrative and formativeassessments based onteachers’ observations.
‘The school’s outstandingstatus must be maintained’
The interviews showed howheads came under pressure,and how this can distort goodpractice.
“I should be in classroomssupporting colleagues but Ispend far too much time lookingat assessment data and it is forproving to OFSTED that we aregreat. But actually I would be farmore effective if I were in classand the children would benefitmore.” (Primary school deputy).
The consequences of notproducing the ‘right’ data forOfsted are severe, so that thedata driven ‘regimes of truth’such as ‘tracking progress’,‘reducing the gap’ and ‘valueadded’ took precedence overher time.
Even enlightened forms ofassessment are subverted anddistorted by this environment.The school’s own ‘in-house’holistic baseline, whichmeasures children’s progressagainst Development Matters inthe Autumn term, is sent to theLocal Authority who data mine itand predict where the childrencould be for their summativeGood Levels of Development(GLD) at the end of Reception.
Data production, exchange,mining and prediction hadbecome central within therelationship between the LA andthe school. Data packs wereused to compare and rank,locally and nationally, with theintention of ‘naming andshaming’.
“We ‘name and shame’ byshowing all the school names.Some schools didn’t have anychildren at ‘working above theexpected level’ so you say ‘wellyour statistical neighbour hasthis % so how come youhaven’t?’” (Local Authorityadvisor).
This is driving formal learningearlier and earlier, with anarrowing of learning to literacyand numeracy.
The impact on teachers,teaching and children
Two responses were noticedamong headteachers. Thuswhilst one head told her earlyyears staff to be more formal intheir teaching, another tried ‘toprotect’ the holistic early yearspedagogy. In this latter school,the nursery teacher confidentlystated that he ‘did the phonics,but then tucked it away to geton with the real business ofbeing with the children’.However, other early yearsteachers felt obliged to cynicallycomply.
“Formal learning is now comingdown from Year 1, throughReception and into the Nurseryclass with the three year oldsthat I teach…. We wereexplicitly asked by ourheadteacher to make nursery‘more formal’ which meansmore direct teaching of mathsand phonics… The philosophyand values of the EYFS arebeing eroded.” (NurseryTeacher).
6. ‘Datafication’ in the early years
17
Ofsted, in its role in the policytransmission process, involvedcriticising the nursery schoolbecause there was ‘not enoughteaching to emphasise thesounds that letters make and toextend children’s understandingof number and mathematicallanguage’ in the early years (adirect quotation from theschool’s inspection report). Theinspector’s report, whichincluded observations of threeyear old children who had beenin school for just two weeks,mentioned ‘phonics’ and‘teaching letter sounds’ seventimes. This was given as thereason for grading the school‘good’ (the most commongrade) rather than ‘outstanding’,which, for private providers, canhave serious financialconsequences.
One primary school Receptionteacher wanted the children toplay with maths constructionequipment but the Headteacher wanted more ‘formalmaths input because sacrificeshad to be made to ensure thatthe school’s outstanding statusbe maintained.’ Here the wealthof research demonstrating thevalue of play based approachesto learning was ‘sacrificed’ atthe altar of ‘outstanding’grading. In another Receptionclass, following pressure fromthe head, the main activityduring both mornings andafternoons was teaching mathsand phonics in both whole classand ability groups.
Failure and children’sidentities
Williamson (2014, p12) arguesthat databases reinventteachers and children ‘into datathat can be measured,compared, assessed and actedupon’ and suggests thatchildren become reconfiguredas ‘miniature centres ofcalculation’.There is a sense ofyoung children being reducedto the school’s statistical ‘rawmaterials’ that are mined andexploited for their maximumproductivity gains.
Even very young children arebeing labeled as ‘failing’, andindeed headteachers arerequired to notify parentswhether their child has passedor failed the Year 1 phonics test.One Reception teachermentioned that some of thelower attainers were labelledSpecial Educational Needs(SEN) so as not to harm theteacher’s performance data(Roberts-Holmes, 2015).
The detrimental effects uponchildren’s well-being weredemonstrated by one teacher’scomments:
“I am now pushing informationinto three-year-olds rather thandeveloping meaningfulrelationships. Even in thenursery I now feel that pressure.If a child doesn’t recognize anumber or a letter I go‘aggghhh’ and hold my breath. Ihave to remind myself the childis three and not yet ready for it.”(Reception teacher, primaryschool).
Teachers are struggling to makesense of their deeply held child-centred values espoused by theEYFS principles, curriculum andpedagogies and at the sametime perform to the dataficationrequirements of the schoolreadiness assessment regime.
Guy Roberts-Holmes andAlice Bradbury,Senior Lecturers,UCL Institute of Education
Further readings andreferences:
Bradbury, A and Roberts-Holmes, G (2016) They arechildren… not robots, notmachines (NUT and ATL)http://tinyurl.com/zj6zfg7
Moss, P ed. (2012) EarlyChildhood and CompulsoryEducation :Reconceptualisingthe relationship (Routledge)
Roberts-Holmes, G (2015) The‘datafication’ of early yearspedagogy (Journal of EducationPolicy, 30/3)
TACTYC (2014) Early yearspolicy advice: Play andpedagogyhttp://tinyurl.com/jgd7ndx
Williamson, B (2014)Reassembling children as datadoppelgangers: How databasesare making education machine-readablehttp://tinyurl.com/z8tzjwv
18
Today’s political discussions ofeducation assume thatimposing a fact-heavy nationalcurriculum and rigorous testingwill raise the standard ofeducation. Those of us whowere active in primary schoolsbefore the 1988 Education Actshould speak out anddemonstrate that there wereexcellent teachers guided bytheir professionalism longbefore the politicians made theirforays.
As a young tutor at TrentPolytechnic, Nottingham, inwhat we then called ‘teachereducation’ (not ‘training’),coupled with a research brief, Iset out to encapsulate goodpractice in local primaryschools. The resulting reportNine Hundred Primary SchoolTeachers (1978) described theresults of a massive study ofclassrooms carried out with ateam of 30 research assistants.Lady Plowden, in her Foreword,wrote:
‘This most comprehensivereport on the practices ofprimary education inNottinghamshire gives a greatdeal of information about theday by day work of a largenumber of teachers. … Theredoes not seem to be anydanger of the schools inNottinghamshire moving intothe so-called ‘progressivemethods’ in which ‘children doas they please’. … I believe thata national survey would similarlyshow that throughout thecountry teachers are in generalresponsibly structuringchildren’s experience in theclassroom.’
I also made several detailedcase studies of differentclassroom routines, three ofthem republished in Case StudyResearch in EducationalSettings (1999). These casestudies illustrate:
‘that before the EducationReform Act of 1988 and thesubsequent and continuinginterference of the state inclassrooms, there werededicated and competentteachers fully committed to theneeds of the children in theircare who were quite able towork effectively without officialmonitoring and stateharassment.’
Extracts from one studyillustrate why I was, and still am,polemical about the ‘stateharassment’ of primary schools.The class teacher, Mrs W, aged29, had been teaching for 8years. There were 30 childrenaged 5 to 6 in her class. Sheworked to ‘the integrated day’.It was Monday 3rd February1975.
By 9.15 the children had arrivedin class, taken coats off, somechatted briefly with Mrs W,others looked at the plantswhich had grown from seedssown last week, all answered tothe register, paid their dinnermoney and sat quietly on thecarpet. Mrs W sat on herrocking chair by the carpet, thechildren turned towards her andfor ten minutes they discussedwhat had come from the seeds.
Gerbil and budgie food hadproduced long green shoots likethick grass, but the tomato,apple and orange pips had
produced nothing. A potatokept in the dark was examined;beans in jam jars had madesome shoots and two onionshad produced long roots andthe water smelt strongly.
A couple of minutes were spentrevising work on the calendarand then, at 9.29, Mrs W stoodand within three minutes hadorganised the children’s workfor the morning. Four childrenwould work on Our Book ofFaces; another four would startmaking shapes with clay; the‘big children’ had special workbooks and Michelle got hersthat day.
“I want to hear the boys readtoday. So, Mark and Simon getyour books out first and sit inthe corner. Just sit down untileverybody else is busy. Nowdon’t forget, everybody. You’vegot some writing to do andyou’ve got some number workto do. Best thing is not to leaveit all till the afternoon. Plan yourday and decide when you aregoing to do it. Right, everybodybusy please.”
The children moved quickly.There was a rush for the Wendycorner, but only four stayed –they knew the rule of how many.For 45 minutes the childrenwere all busy, individually or ingroups. In the Wendy cornerthey were playing co-operativelyin response to what looked likegiant’s feet coming through theceiling. Four were cutting facesout of magazines, pasting theminto the book and discussing it.Of the clay children one made acoiled pot, one a ‘footballer’from rolled pieces laid flat, the
7. An old and professional alternative to the present system
19
other two made patterns. Tenchildren sat at the ‘writingtables’, some writing aboutdinosaurs, others about theplants growing from their seeds(at various levels from tracingletters to writing using their ownword books), others wereresponding to number workcards (made by Mrs W) like“You have 6 sweets and you eat3. How many are left?” Anotherfour were building somethingwith bricks, and two were in thereading corner. I missed whatthe others were doing – but I’msure Mrs W knew! During thistime she:
‘heard boys read, responded tochildren who queued for helpwith writing or to showcompleted writing or numberwork (entered in her ‘tick’ book)and moved around the room tohelp here, encouraged there,resolved a quarrel, etc.’
There is not space to describethe rest of the day nor how MrsW organised number work,writing and reading. But this isevidence that her concern wasfor the ‘whole’ child, and thatthis was appropriatelyassessed:
‘Each half-term Mrs W makesnotes on each child’s emotionaland social development andputs in their record scrapbook asample of their written work andnumber work. She also keeps indiary form the major events ofthe half-term: the interests thatarose, how they developed andwhat they led to.’
Rather than destroy all this, thepolitical task should have beento find ways of bringing allteachers to this high level ofprofessional excellence. Thisrequired a recognition that,beyond the traditional 3 Rs,there should be, as Mrs Wknew, concern for theemotional, social, creative andphysical all-round developmentof every child.
Emeritus Professor MichaelBasseyNottingham Trent University
Further readings andreferences:
Anning, A, Cullen, J and Fleer,M (2009) Early childhoodeducation: society and culture(SAGE)
Bassey, M (1978) Nine hundredprimary school teachers (NFER)
Hewitt, D and Tarrant, S (2015)Innovative teaching and learningin primary schools (SAGE)
20
Even in a class where no childcan yet read, there will be widedifferences in theirunderstanding of the criticalfeatures of print. A few childrenentering school can already readsilently and with understanding,but most still need support tomaster written language in thisnew disembedded medium.
Many current discussions inEngland around learning to readappear simplistic, failing to takeaccount of the complexity ofEnglish orthography. The Englishlanguage does not have a one-to-one visual representation of allthe sounds we speak, making ita difficult code for young childrento break. Many words are easyto represent in writing, but someof the commonest words are notphonically regular. Evidencesuggests that the teaching ofboth reading and writing is mosteffective when the teaching issystematic, taking into accountthe linguistic probabilities of theEnglish language and the child’sneeds. There is an importantplace for assessment, providedit is diagnostic and leads tomonitoring of progress andappropriate action.
A hundred key words accountfor about half the total words inwritten English, and many ofthem are phonically irregular.Children need to recognise thewhole word in a variety ofmeaningful contexts, yet thishas a low profile in currentpolicy. It is also essential to beable to decode speedily thewords that appear much lessfrequently, accounting for over90 per cent of the differentwords in written English. It is
with these words that a grasp ofphonics will assist. However, theevidence is that this is betterpractised in context, not inisolation. Time spent in someschools on practising pseudowords for the phonics checkcould surely be better spentstudying other features of realwritten English, especially asmany children are learning toread in a language that is nottheir mother tongue.
The powerful place ofcommercial interests indetermining governmentpolicies, the materialsrecommended, and even thesupplementary funding for theteaching of reading isdisturbing. Since 2010 thegovernment and Ofsted haveinsisted that the method ofteaching reading should besynthetic phonics, claiming thisis backed by research. In fact,systematic reviews of existingevidence support only thefollowing claims:
• There is benefit from theinclusion of phonics withinthe early instruction inlearning to read in English,within a broad programme.
• There is not evidence tosupport phonics in isolationas the one best method.
• There is not evidence forsynthetic phonics ratherthan analytic or a mixture ofapproaches.
Synthetic phonics teaches thesound-symbol relationships inisolation, rather than inferringthese from sets of words or realtexts. Since June 2012 aphonics check of 40 words (20
pseudo words and 20 realwords) has been administeredto all Year 1 children in stateschools in England. The claimwas that this would ‘identifypupils with below expectedprogress in phonic decoding’.Those pupils who failed toachieve the pass mark of 32were to receive intervention,and retake the test the followingyear. DfE made available a largesum of money for matchedfunding from which schoolscould purchase only syntheticsphonics materials and trainingfrom a recommended list ofproviders.
The DfE has ignored two keyissues:
i) The large difference in passrate each year between theoldest and youngestchildren’s results. Indeedtwice as many August-bornchildren (i.e. the youngest)as September-born children(the oldest) are labelledfailures early in their schoolcareer, particularly boys.
ii) Starting the test with 12pseudo words confusesmany children. Childrenwho can already readattempt to make these intoreal words. There arechildren, including someautism spectrum conditionschildren, who refuse toattempt pseudo words, butread all the real wordscorrectly, thus failing thecheck. Some teachers,obeying ambiguousinstructions, stop the testwithout giving children theopportunity to try the realwords.
8. Flawed arguments for phonics
21
The dictates from DfE andOfsted, and the pressure onschools for a high andincreasing pass rate, are havinga major impact on practice inschools as well as impacting onteacher training. This hasremoved the professionalfreedom for teachers to adoptthe approaches they thinkappropriate for individualchildren.
The phonics check costsaround £260,000 a year toadminister (printing, distribution,collation of resuls), not tomention teachers’ time, andsubstantial payments tocommercial organisations suchas Ruth Miskin Training forpromoting a particular teachingmethod. According to thegovernment’s own evaluation(nfer.ac.uk/publications/YOPC02) the phonics check hasbrought no benefits:
‘There were no improvements inattainment or in progress thatcould be clearly attributed to theintroduction of the check, norany identifiable impact on pupilprogress in literacy for learnerswith different levels of priorattainment.’ (p. 67)
Despite this, the Government iseven considering makingchildren who fail the phonicscheck in Years 1 and 2 retake itin Year 3. The assumption thatthe needs of those who fail toreach the arbitrary pass markon this test may still be met by acontinuing focus on syntheticphonics as the solution to theirproblems seems naive.
So far there is only anecdotalevidence of the effect on youngchildren`s experiences of andattitudes towards literacy. Howwill this greater emphasis onsynthetic phonics in the earlystages, the disconnected natureof much of the tuition, the newemphasis on pseudo words andpreparing for the test, influencechildren’s understanding of thenature of literacy and theirattitude to reading? How does itinfluence parents` ideas on howto help their young children? Weneed evidence from thechildren, including those whopassed the check, those whocould read but failed the check,and those required to re-sit thefollowing year.
Margaret M Clark OBEEmeritus Professor,University of BirminghamVisiting Professor, NewmanUniversity
Further readings andreferences:
Clark, M M (2016) Learning tobe literate: insights fromresearch for policy and practice(Routledge)
Phonics fanatics: politicianswho think they know besthttp://wp.me/p5izk8-jp
The phonics check: what doesit prove? http://wp.me/p5izk8-iI
22
The benefit of focus groupsover individual interviews is thatparticipants can build on oneanother’s experience andunderstandings to form acoherent picture. Here an NUTorganiser and a ReclaimingSchools researcher meet withthree primary teachers inTeesside.
What has been the impact ofthis year’s tests on yourchildren?
T1: It was Easter, just before thetesting, and I saw a Year 2 boycrying, very bright little boy, buthe was in the playgroundcrying. I teach year 6, but I wentto see what the problem was.He said he was going to fail histests because he couldn’t readthe words. He was anabsolutely fantastic reader, hecould tell you all about what hadgone on, but he was going tofail his tests because they weretoo hard, and he was just satrocking and crying in the cornerof the playground. That’s whatthe tests are doing to ourchildren.
T2: On a personal level, myson’s taking his SATs next year.He’s currently in Year 5 and he’salready said to me “I’m going tofail my SATs.” He’s in Year 5, hehasn’t even hit Year 6 yet, andhe’s already thinking about hisSATs and how he’s going to failthem.
T3: I’m in Year 5, teaching lowerability, and we follow a particularsystem the school uses toassess children. They’re tryingto teach the spelling rules youneed to know in Year 5, but
actually some of the words I’venever even come across... likethere was tolerance, tolerant,and tolerancy. I’ve never heardof tolerancy. And these arechildren who can’t spell alwaysand also. I think the demands ofthe new curriculum, certainly onmy Year 5s, who came to me ata very low level, who have gotchild protection issues, whohave been in and out of care,who have had extreme traumain their lives... it’s difficult to getthem to come into theclassroom and sit down and beready to learn in the first place. Ithink Year 6 SATs for them isgoing to be absolutelyhorrendous. I’ve had children intears.
How have the new testsaffected the children’curriculum?
T1: In the lead up to SATs thecurriculum became so narrow. Ihad children absolutely besidethemselves. Our school has got70% free school meals, it’s avery poor area, and thesechildren have to come in andoffload what’s happened tothem the night before they caneven start to learn, so they’realready at a disadvantagementally. We get them ready sothey go into maths. At 11o’clock, they’ve had their breakbut they’d already had guidedreading first. They’d go intoEnglish lesson, and they’d havetheir lunch and they come backand they do an hour’s grammarlesson, and then if they’re reallylucky they’d get to do theirscience rehearsals for thescience assessment, otherwise
it’d be more English. Theywould have one topic lessonper week, one hour per week,because the rest of the time itwas just drilling, drilling, drilling.
The mental strain on thosechildren! They were producingfabulous writing before that. Ithad composition and effect,high level punctuation, it wasamazing what they were writing,the stories were really reallygood. However because we’vegot to get parenthesis in,coordinating conjunctions, andall the rest, all their compositioneffect went out the windowbecause we were trying toshoehorn extra words from thespelling lists that they wouldn’tnormally use, we wereshoehorning all these extrasubordinating conjunctions, sowe’d get them in but it didn’tflow. So yes we’d tick the boxesto say they’d got this, this, thisand this, but their creativity hadgone, and it was just sociallydemoralising.
T3: And you know we’re doingpractice assessments every halfterm, and there are two readingcomprehension papers, aspelling test, a grammar test,then they’re doing a mathspaper, an assessed big write,and because my childrenstruggle with the grammarfeatures at Year 5 they’regetting really poor results. Noneof my children are reachingnational expectations inanything except one or two inPE. The curriculum is settingour children up to fail. Only thevery brightest children are goingto be able to succeed.
9. A focus group discussion with Teesside primary teachers
23
T2: Particularly the creativity...every child has the right toreach their full potential, andthey’re not getting that right.
Is there any one particulartest you found that you hadan issue with?
T1: The KS2 reading test wasaimed far too high. The majorityof them did not complete it. Weare set in our school. We have athree-class intake, so we’ve gota high, a middle and a low, andthen we’ve got other childrenwho are given extra time. Thiswas the high group that I’mtalking about now.
I felt they were being tripped upwith some of the questions. Idon’t think the questions werefair. The text, it’s more wordythan they’ve ever had before.The language that was usedwas way, way beyond a level 4A.
The children felt demoralisedwhen they’d finished it,especially because that was thevery first test of the SATs week.So when they got that, theywere in a panic about what thenext lot of tests were going tobe about.
[The group look at the questionpaper.]
T2: The very first words: ‘Mariaand Oliver are attending a partyin the garden of a house thatused to belong to Maria’sfamily.’ A party in the garden ofa house? ‘They sneak away toexplore the grounds.’
None of our children are likely tohave their own home, and ifthey do, it’s not likely to beanything like that. A lot of our
children live on council estates,their parents are on very lowincomes, they don’t the spaceto go and explore like it says inthere. ‘Going away to explore’sounds like it’s a park orsomewhere like that. They don’thave the opportunity, so alreadythat first paragraph is turningthem off the whole passage.
T3: And children in a boat, thepicture, that’s quite antiquatedisn’t it? Swallows and Amazons,isn’t it? How many childrenhave the chance to get into aboat and row to an island?
T1: ‘Maria explained there wasa secret monument on theisland of her ancestors.’ I justdon’t think that represents theirlives at all. Everything in thatpaper is not something thatthey would have experienced.
T2: I taught year 3 last year, andI pulled up a picture book abouta polar bear, and one of my lads– both parents dependent,been in and out of care – calledout “It’s a sheep!” Absolutely noconcept. And we went on aschool trip and we were lookingout the windows, and he wasabsolutely astonished to seecows. And now our school hascut free school trips for our kids.We used to use the fund. If wedon’t give the experiences, theydon’t get them, do they?
T3: Looking at the thirdpassage now, the dodo, itdoesn’t look as if there’sanything that the children canrelate to. ‘Discovery is helpingto rehabilitate the image of thismuch ridiculed bird.’ Thatquestion really threw thechildren.
T: The question, ‘What doesrehabilitate the image of thedodo mean?’ And they’re givenfour options: restore a paintingof the dodo, rebuild thereputation of the dodo, repair amodel of the dodo or reviewaccounts of the dodo. That’sway beyond their experienceand their range of expression.
Who do you holdresponsible?
T2: The Government.
T3: Yeah, I think they’re usingour children as guinea pigs andthey’re trying all these newthings out, and they’re notworking. They’re not benefittingour children at all.
T1: They’re using us as politicalpawns. I think they want us tofail. They want the children tofail so they can academise ourschools.
24
‘A high-quality mathematicseducation [should provide] afoundation for understandingthe world, the ability to reasonmathematically, an appreciationof the beauty and power ofmathematics, and a sense ofenjoyment and curiosity aboutthe subject.’
These laudable aims appear inthe preamble to the Mathsprogramme of study of the2014 primary curriculum. Itgoes on to emphasize theimportance of solving problemsand the development ofconceptual understanding (DfE2014).
Sadly none of this is carriedthrough into the maindocument. Where the preambletalks about ‘a highlyinterconnected discipline’, themain body of the document is alist of disparate skills andknowledge. Each is precededby ‘pupils should be taught to’,with few links drawn acrossdifferent areas of mathematicsand no emphasis on explorationor understanding. Significantly,the word ‘understand’ appearsonly twice in the wholedocument.
This fragmentation ofMathematics is reinforced bythe regime of high-stakestesting. Indeed, according toOFSTED (2012), ‘too muchteaching concentrates on theacquisition of disparate skillsthat enable pupils to pass testsand examinations but do notequip them for the next stage ofeducation, work and life.’ Whilstwe might have reason tomistrust OFSTED’s judgements,teachers themselves report the
same thing (Hutchings 2015).
Not only does this test-drivenapproach leave little time forenjoyment, curiosity orappreciating the beauty andpower of mathematics, itundermines the building ofconceptual understandingwhich depends oninterconnections and usingnumber flexibly.
If we fail to emphasise theseinterconnections, we are at riskof our children becoming ‘sofocused on remembering theirdifferent methods, and stackingone new method on top of thenext, that they [are] not thinkingabout the bigger concepts andcompressing the mathematicsthey [are] learning’. (Boaler2009).
The emphasis on setprocedures is heavily reinforcedby the design of the new KS2test, including the replacementof the mental mathsassessment with a writtenarithmetic paper. There is arenewed focus on ‘standard’formal written procedures, withmarks only given for working if‘standard’ methods have beenused (DfE 2014).
For example, if a pupil used astandard ‘long multiplication’method but made a mistake inthe calculation (4x7 shouldequal 28, not 24) and arrived atthe wrong answer, they wouldget one mark out of two.However, the followingcalculation, making the samecalculation error, would receiveno marks because a non-standard method has beenused.
This latter method, no longertaught in many classroomsbecause of the emphasis on‘standard’ methods, is moreintuitive and provides an idealpictorial representation of themental process, helping childrento develop stronger mentalcalculation skills. It also providesa basis for investigation todevelop conceptualunderstanding of themultiplication process.
Along with the scrapping of thecalculator paper and theproposed introduction of atimes tables test, this changesends a very clear signal tochildren that mathematics isabout memorising facts andusing ‘standard’ writtenmethods, with pencil and paper,for computation and not aboutconceptual understanding,mathematical reasoning orsolving problems.
The problem is that the recall offacts so beloved of the Right isitself a function of conceptualunderstanding. ‘Once you reallyunderstand [a process or idea]and have the mental perspectiveto see it as a whole… you canfile it away, recall it quickly andcompletely when you need it,and use it as just one step insome other mental process’(Thurston 1990).
Similarly, the focus on problemsolving and mathematicalreasoning in the preamble goes
10. Mathematics: conceptual understanding or counting by the rules?
25
almost completely unrealised inthe curriculum itself. Whilstthere are several references toproblem solving, these seem tohave been added almost as anafterthought, with phrases suchas ‘solve problems that involveall of the above’ dropped in atthe end of each section.
In the test, the problems tend tobe over-simplified and requirenumerical answers only.Questions are generally limited toone, or at most two, domainsonly, and only one question (1mark out of 110) on the 2016paper required an explanation inresponse.
For example, contrast the twoproblems below. The first istaken from the 2016 test.
The second uses questioning toencourage the learner to reflecton the structure of the problem.
Both relate to the same area ofmaths, but the second containsfar more cognitive challenge,makes the transferable nature ofthe skills employed moreexplicit, and elicits far moreinformation about a child’sunderstanding of the process.The difficulty is that this problemwould be more suited to an on-going discussion rather than awritten test. This opens up areal question about how weassess Mathematics. Ifassessment is really aboutlearning and understanding, notabout ranking teachers andschools, surely we would bebetter off using a combinationof coursework or controlledassessment with on-goingteacher assessment.
This is not to suggest thatdeveloping deep conceptualunderstanding, mathematicalreasoning and problem solvingis impossible under the currentarrangements: simply that it ismade more difficult. My ownschool spent two yearsdeveloping and implementing acurriculum based on theseprinciples, yet implementationwas hardest in year 2 and years5/6. In the words of onecolleague, ‘I know this is a better way toteach and, as a professional, itis what I want to do. It’s justthat I know they will beassessed at the end of the yearon how they can apply thatnarrow range of skills, not ontheir conceptual understanding,and I will be held accountablefor those result.’
Gawain Little, primary school teacher Oxfordshire
Further readings andreferences:
Boaler, J (2009) The elephant inthe classroom: Helping childrenlearn and love maths (London:Souvenir Press)
DfE (2014) The NationalCurriculum in England:Framework Document
Hutchings, M (2015) ExamFactories? The impact ofaccountability measures onchildren and young people(NUT)www.teachers.org.uk/files/exam-factories.pdf
OFSTED (2012) Mathematics:Made to Measurehttp://tinyurl.com/jrckxwd
Thurston, W (1990)Mathematical education(Notices of the AMS, 37, 844-850)
26
The national curriculumguidelines affirm the value ofcultural education for allchildren. The arts – including artand design, music, dance,drama and media arts, designand technology – are an integralpart of the national curriculumup to age 14. The guidelines forart, craft and design forexample begin by stating thatthese subjects ‘embody someof the highest forms of humancreativity’ and that a ‘high-quality art and design educationshould engage, inspire andchallenge pupils, equippingthem with the knowledge andskills to experiment, invent andcreate their own works of art,craft and design’.
The four domains of culturaleducation – knowledge, thedevelopment of analytic andcritical skills, skills based inparticular arts forms, and thedevelopment of personalcreativity – are to be fosteredthrough a formal schoolprogramme, as well as informalopportunities. Influential artsadvocates John Sorrell, PaulRoberts and Darren Henley(2014) argue that a commitmentto cultural education alsomeans that all children should,for instance, engage withartists, visit a wide range ofcultural institutions, enjoy extra-curricular arts activities andexperience the pleasures ofbeing audience, participant andproducer.
There is research which showsthat cultural education offerseven more than subject-basedlearning. The arts supportchildren to build a wide range of
communication skills, toexercise responsible leadership,to learn and practice team workand to take initiative (Thomsonet al. 2014). Research alsosuggests that primary schoolswith robust cultural educationprogrammes have improvedattendance and established amore positive school ethos;teachers and students alikehave a greater sense of well-being.
There seems every reason forprimary schools to embrace thearts enthusiastically. Culturaleducation is part of what theyare meant to do, and has wellevidenced positive benefits. Yeta comprehensive primarycultural education offer is notthe reality.
The regime of national tests,with their overwhelmingemphasis on particular types ofliteracy acquisition, makes itvery difficult for schools andteachers to offer the broad andbalanced cultural learningexperiences envisaged in thenational curriculum and bycultural education advocates.The most recent survey by theNational Society for Art andDesign Education (2016) forexample showed that
‘89% of primary teacherrespondents in all state schoolsindicated that in the last fiveyears, and in the two termsbefore key stage 2 Nationalcurriculum tests (year 6), thetime allocated for art and designhad reduced.’
In KS2 nearly a third of stateprimary schools devote only anhour a week to art and design.
This is an alarming picture. Itsuggests that in many schoolsacross the country children aremissing out on foundationalcultural learning experiences.This places the onus onparents. But research showsthat lower income parentsstruggle to provide extra-curricular arts activities for theirchildren (Sutton Trust 2014),and that parents with higherqualifications are much morelikely to ensure that theirchildren spend more than threehours a week engaged incultural activities outside ofschool (SQW Consulting 2013).This is clearly an unacceptablesituation – leaving engagementin cultural education to parent’scapacity to pay is a recipe for ageography of cultural inequity.Parents with lower incomedepend on their children’sschool to ensure the entitlementto arts education as describedin the national curriculum.
Some primary schools ofcourse have not reduced theiremphasis on cultural education.They make sure that time forthe arts is not eroded by testpreparation. They employ aprimary arts specialist as part oftheir core staff complement.They use Arts Mark as aframework to manage timespent on creative and culturaleducation, commissioningartists and arts organisations towork in partnership with them.They might employ artsspecialists to provideprogrammes which then releaseteachers for planning time. Theyuse their pupil premium fundingto ensure that children from low
11. Primary arts are in trouble
27
income homes are able toparticipate in extra-curricularactivities and excursions. Theyare in regions or cities wherethere is additional support forcultural and creative education,perhaps one of the 50 CulturalEducation Partnerships recentlyestablished by Arts CouncilEngland.
But cultural education shouldnot be left to accidents ofgeography or the commitmentof individual schools, governorsand teachers, any more than itshould be the gift of parentswho can afford it. Educationpolicy-makers in England mustdo better and do more to ensurethat all children, regardless oftheir situation, are able to‘participate fully in cultural andartistic life’. This means, asArticle 31 of the UN Conventionon the of the Child puts it, thatgovernment must takedeliberate steps to ‘encouragethe provision of appropriate andequal opportunities for cultural,artistic, recreational and leisureactivity’.
The national curriculum issupposed to express thelearning that is important for thenext generation. It is intended tospell out the kinds of learningsthat are fundamental to oursociety and are an entitlementfor all children. Policy-makersmust do more than set outguidelines – they must make theoutcomes achievable. Testingregimes and careless policy arecurrently pushing schools awayfrom ensuring that cultural andcreative education is available toeveryone. This is bothinequitable and unacceptable.
Professor Pat Thomson,University of Nottingham
Further readings andreferences:
For a fully referenced version ofthis article, please see Reclaiming Schools, Oct 2016 http://tinyurl.com/j79lvbp
National Society for Art andDesign Education. (2016)NSEAD Survey Report 2015-2016. www.nsead.org/downloads/survey.pdf
Sorrell, J, Roberts, P, & Henley,D (2014) The virtuous circle:Why creativity and culturecount. (London: Elliott&Thompson)
SQW Consulting & Ipsos MORI (2013) Evaluation of the Find Your Talentprogramme: overview reporthttp://tinyurl.com/zzbcn27
Sutton Trust (2014) Researchbrief: Extra-curricular inequalityhttp://tinyurl.com/zaez4z9
Thomson, P, Coles, R,Hallewell, M, & Keane, J (2014) A critical review of the Creative Partnerships archive:how was cultural valueunderstood, researched andevidenced? (AHRC) http://tinyurl.com/z65h77v
28
Devolution of power to theWelsh Assembly in 1999 hasenabled Wales to set its owneducational direction. In themain this has been a distinctiveand highly progressive journey.We have eschewed themarketization of education; wedon’t have any grammarschools, academies or freeschools; we do have a tinyprivate sector but a very largecomprehensive one, includingmany bilingual schools.
The Learning Countrypublished by the WelshGovernment in 2001 signalledthat schools and teacherswould be at the heart ofeducation policy and thiscontinued to be the case for thenext decade. In relation totesting and assessment thissaw an increasing movetowards respecting teacherprofessionalism through relyingupon teacher assessment.National testing for 7 year oldswas ended in 2000 and for 11and 14 year olds in 2004/05.
In 2010, however, somedisappointing PISA results forWales led the relatively neweducation Minister to turn hisback on this approach.Eventually a Literacy andNumeracy Framework wasintroduced accompanied bynational tests each year inreading and numeracy for pupilsfrom Year 2 to Year 9. This waspart of a heightenedaccountability agenda includingEstyn inspections and regular‘challenge’ processes forschools from their localauthorities.
The combined effect of thischange in policy hasundoubtedly contributednegatively to extremely worrying levels of mental healthissues among young people,low morale and poor recruitmentand retention of teachers.
The impact of this on thedevelopment of our highlyprogressive early yearsprogramme for 3 to 7 year olds,the Foundation Phase, hasbeen particularly concerning.Teachers and those evaluatingthe programme have noticedhow the creative approaches tolearning and pedagogy in placefor 3-5 year olds are beingreplaced by more formalapproaches to teaching literacyand numeracy introduced inYears 1 and 2, because of thefear of the national tests at ageseven. This has affected thequality of outcomes as well asundermined teacherprofessionalism in introducingthe new curriculum.
In 2015 Graham Donaldsonpublished his innovative reporton the curriculum andassessment arrangements inWales. In it he noted that thecurriculum in primary schoolshad become increasinglysubverted by national testingand in secondary schools bynational examinations. This wasone of the reasons why hedesignated the curriculum asnot being ‘fit for purpose’. Inrelation to assessmentarrangements he described thebewildering use of scores, levelsand grades being used, suchthat there was a lack ofcoherence and consistency.
The work now being done indeveloping the new curriculum– led by a group of schoolsdesignated Pioneer Schools – isbased on the greater use ofteacher assessment whereagain testing can be the servantnot the master of student andteacher experience of thecurriculum. He has called forexternal standardised testing tobe kept to a minimum, for moreinnovation in assessment andfor Assessment for Learning(formative assessment) to be atthe heart of the assessmentsystem.
These developments offer hope for the future and alongwith other changes currentlytaking place they mark a returnto respecting theprofessionalism of teachers andtheir wellbeing. As ever the‘proof of the pudding will be inthe eating’. We know from theexperience of Scotland, whichis a strong influence ondevelopments in Wales, thatthese changes take time tobring about and if they are to bedone properly requireconsiderable investment inteacher professional learningand development.
In the meantime, we will soonhave the results of the nextPISA tests. Like all assessmentinformation they will need to belooked at with interest andrespect. It is to be hoped, thatthe Welsh Government will notover-react to these tests as theydid in 2010. We know thatincreasingly the tests arechallenged in relation to theirreliability and that too often theyare used as part of the
12. Assessment and testing in Wales
international movement toincrease accountability andcontrol over schools.
So the Wales devolution journeyhas been a mixed one. We haveused the opportunity tostrengthen our public educationsystem and to developprogressive policies such as theFoundation Phase and theWelsh Bac. On the other hand,we have also fallen under theneoliberal-inspired juggernautthat uses testing andaccountability in an attempt toimprove ‘scores on the doors’,with scant respect for thequality of educationexperienced by students andthe professionalism of teachers.Watch this space!
Professor David Egan,Cardiff MetropolitanUniversity
Further readings andreferences:
Donaldson, D (2015) Successfulfutures (Welsh Government) http://tinyurl.com/zlwak4s
Furlong, J (2015) Teachingtomorrow’s teachershttp://tinyurl.com/jzs2klp
30
‘Learning without limits’ is anemergent movement tochallenge the ways in whichassumptions are often madethat children have a fixedamount of ‘ability’ or ‘potential’.It rejects the placement ofyoung children in ‘ability groups’which can so easily become aself-fulfilling prophecy byplacing a ceiling on children’sopportunities to learn. Earlytesting tends to encouragesuch assumptions that ‘ability’and ‘potential’ are measurableand fixed.
A child is more than a level,grade or score. So obvious atruth should not need stating.The need to keep re-stating itreveals how far the policieswhich intensify high-stakestesting and penalise schools fornot meeting imposed examtargets have reconstructed oureducation system. Educationhas been shifted away fromconcern with the child as awhole person towards adisproportionate focus onattainment in particular publictests.
Teachers, whatever theirreservations, are constrained bythe system to acknowledge thechild’s test-score (from phonicsand SATs through to GCSEs) asa proxy for the child’s learning.The given level or grade, areductive abstraction, comes tostand in for the dynamic multi-faceted reality of the learner.
The testing system is built onuntenable assumptions ofsmooth and evenly calibratedlinear progress. This does not
reflect real learning, and isstatistically unreliable. It leads toflawed statements about‘expected progress’ and schooleffectiveness.
The score also works toencourage fixed ability thinkingabout pupils. The view of thechild as having a given amountof ‘ability’ has practicalconsequences. Children areroutinely grouped by ‘ability’ inclassrooms, and then presentedwith differentiated curricula or‘levels of challenge’, responseto which tends to re-confirm thegiven ‘ability’ label. Designationby ‘ability’ can affect the waysteachers respond to individualsor groups of children, and giverise to inequitable treatment.Designation by ‘ability’ is alsolikely to reproduce structuralinequalities of social class,gender and ethnicity.
How the teacher thinks of thelearner significantly affects howthe learner learns. Thinking ofthe child as of a fixed ‘ability’impels what has been called‘prophetic pedagogy’.Prophetic pedagogy knowseverything beforehand andwould banish uncertainty. Itspeaks the language of targetgrades, predicted grades, andnext steps. It purports not onlyto know the proper future foreach child, but to ensure thatjust such a future comes intobeing. Sometimes it even claimsto do this in the name of socialjustice.
What animates fixed abilitythinking, and the propheticpedagogy associated with it, is
the belief that children come inkinds. Each child can, andmust, be categorised as soonas possible into the bright, theaverage, and the less-able, or(as with the renewed clamourfor grammar schools)segregated into ‘academic’ and‘non-academic’. It is assertedthat different kinds of childrenrequire different kinds ofcurriculum, supposedly tailoredto their essentially-differentneeds. Scores play a vital partin this sorting and sifting, forthey enable crude comparisonsand ranking of children. Theradical difference which isenshrined in the name of eachchild is trumped by theequivalence implied in a systemof numbers. Rosa and Rajivboth attain at level 3, so theyare comparable, of a kind.
But children do not come inkinds. Each child is unique: another utterly different from allothers.
A more educationally productiveway of thinking about thelearner would not onlyrecognise the learner as unique,but would see him or her asalways capable of remaking(and not merely receiving)knowledge and culture providedconditions are right. It wouldacknowledge that everyone’seducational future remainsunwritten, unpredictable, opento change, and that the teacherhas power to affect that futurefor the better by actions anddecisions undertaken here andnow.
13. Everyone’s educational future is always in the making: Learning without Limits
It is from this basis thatLearning without Limitsoperates.
It is based on respect for thecomplexity and unpredictabilityof the classroom, and the multi-faceted nature of the teacher’srole. It acknowledges the powerof the teacher to changepatterns of response andachievement. Fixed abilitythinking sees each pupil aslimited to a greater or lesserdegree, and so sets limits onthe teacher’s efficacy too. Thebest that may be hoped under afixed ability regime is that theteacher helps the pupil reachhis or her ‘full potential’. But thepupil doesn’t have potential –some innate, given,unsurpassable entity. The pupilis potential: undeterminedpower, a continuing possibility.Seen this way, the role of theteacher in enabling learningtakes on a different cast.
Learning without Limitsapproaches offer a pedagogy ofprinciple, not of pragmatics andcompliance, for it is principlesthat inform and inspire teachers’work. Teachers opposed to adeterminist or propheticpedagogy, and to fixed abilitythinking, might wish to basetheir practice on three inter-related principles thatcharacterise Learning withoutLimits approaches. These are:
• trust in everybody’scapacity to learn;
• co-agency, or harnessingthe power of the teacher toyoung people’s power aslearners;
• the ethic of ‘everybody’,which requires that choicesare made in the interests ofeverybody, and not just ofsome people.
Fixed ability thinking hasbecome naturalised in oureducation system. It appears asprofessional ‘common sense’rather than as domestication byan ideology. It endures evenwhen learners perform in wayswhich give the lie to theirdesignated ability label.Alternatives to fixed abilitythinking must go beyond ‘mixedability’ grouping (which stillassumes an individual’s fixedinnate ability) to encompass are-consideration of pedagogicprinciples, renewedunderstanding of the power ofthe teacher to affect theeducational future of every child,and a recuperated view of thechild as a learner untrammelledby fixed innate limits.
Dr Patrick YarkerUniversity of East Anglia
Further readings andreferences:
Hart, S, Dixon, A, Drummond,M and McIntyre, D (2004)Learning without Limits (OpenUniversity Press)
Marks, R (2016) Ability groupingin primary schools: Casestudies and critical debates(Norwich: Critical Publishing)
Swann, M, Peacock, A, Hart, S and Drummond, M (2012) Creating learning without limits (Open University Press)http://learningwithoutlimits.educ.cam.ac.uk/
Forum special issue 55(1) Thisway out: teachers and pupilsescaping from fixed-abilityteaching. (All 15 articles can bedownloaded atwww.wwwords.co.uk/forum/content/pdfs/55/issue55_1.asp )
31
32
Schools in England and Walesare dominated by tests andexams to an extraordinarydegree. In one sense this isn’tnew: the upper years ofsecondary school have beendevoted to exam preparation fora century, though for most ofthat time without the anxietiesgenerated by Ofsted and leaguetables.
Hardly any other Europeancountry beyond the British Islesshares this obsession. Mosthave school leaving certificatesbased on coursework, or onlyuse external exams in one ortwo subjects to moderateteacher judgements. Time is notwasted practising past papers,second-guessing potentialexam questions or memorisingcontent “in case it comes up”.
There are many forms ofassessment which distortlearning far less than exams,and which are more authenticand indeed more challenging.Consider for instance RichTasks, a form of authenticassessment developed inQueensland, Australia:challenges carried out for agenuine purpose, presented toa real audience, and drawing onknowledge and skills fromdifferent subjects. Twoexamples:
• Improving Health andWellbring: studentsinvestigate the localsituation through books,statistics and interviews,acquiring medical andscientific knowledge beforepresenting practicalrecommendations.
• National Identity: planning,filming and presenting adocumentary based onresearch and interviewswith people from differentcultural backgrounds.
Even in Britain, beyond theworld of schools, professionalqualifications have a balancebetween exams, portfolios andpractical tasks. The finalchallenge for doctors qualifyingfor General Practice is asimulation in which actorspresent their ‘symptoms’ fordiagnosis. Would educationministers dare to suggest this is‘dumbing down’?
Gove’s reforms, however,attempted to make GCSEs asartificial as possible, reflecting hisprejudice against courseworkand practical tests and his desireto notch up levels of difficulty.Indeed, much of the newgrading and scoring systemseems to be built on the premiseof larger numbers of studentsgetting low grades or failing.
The unrealistic pressures nowplaced on children and youngpeople are undermining thequality of engagement andrelationship that real educationdepends on. We can onlyspeculate what the full impactof the new primary tests will beas children get older.
The purpose is alwaysexpressed in terms of economiccompetitiveness. Even theexpansion of nursery educationis spuriously justified by a‘global race’ for educationalsupremacy. As Gove expressedit when speaking of his changesto secondary school exams:
‘By making GCSEs moredemanding, more fulfilling, andmore stretching we can give ouryoung people the broad, deepand balanced education whichwill equip them to win in theglobal race.’ (11 June 2013)
It is unclear how ‘morestretching’ equates with ‘morefulfilling’, or who exactly will winin this ‘global race’. The rhetoricassumes a benefit to all youngpeople, but in reality only asmall elite are likely to take theprizes. The assumption is thateducational supremacy willsomehow lead to economicsupremacy, a tenuous neoliberalproposition.
Every stage of schooling is seenin terms of readying pupils forthe next stage, with no regardto what is appropriate at aparticular age. The irony is thatspeeding up the treadmill inprimary school is likely toundermine the real foundationsof later development.
Firstly, many pupils areexperiencing a very narrowcurriculum, with little beyondmaths and a distorted version ofEnglish. Children in moredisadvantaged areas suffereven more from this reducedexperience, due to the greaterpressure placed on theirschools.
Secondly, an increasing numberof young children willexperience the stigmatisingimpact of failure. This kicks in asearly as the phonics test in Year1, when parents are toldwhether their child has passedor failed. The elaboratenonsense of the KS2 grammar
14. Speeding up the treadmill: primary tests and secondary exams
33
test represents a final blow: asignal that children areincompetent in their ownlanguage because they cannotlabel the parts!
The 2014 National Curriculumwas designed (if we can usethat word) by aggregatingtargets from the top-scoringcountries in the PISAinternational tests and pushingthem down the years. Englishseven-year-olds are nowexpected to acquire the mathsand science of nine-year-olds inSingapore or Finland. Theresulting frustration could dolasting intellectual andemotional damage.
Finally, as 100 academicsargued in their open letter TooMuch Too Young, the expectedacceleration of learning inprimary schools pressuresteachers to drill children throughthe required knowledge.Experience is bleached out,leaving empty verbiage. Insteadof going through experienceswhich, in conjunction with keyideas, will establish a secureframework of understanding,children are struggling tomemorise a miscellany of inertfacts.
‘The proposed curriculumconsists of endless lists ofspellings, facts and rules. Thismountain of data will notdevelop children’s ability tothink, including problem-solving,critical understanding andcreativity...The learner is largelyignored. Little account is takenof children’s potential interestsand capacities, or that youngchildren need to relate abstract
ideas to their experience, livesand activity.’ (Open letter, 19March 2013)
We should return to the Charter for Primary Educationas a compass to re-orientate us towards a meaningful,sustainable education throughsecondary school and into adult life.
‘Successful learning anddevelopment takes time. Goodprimary teachers... pay heed tochildren’s existing knowledgeand understanding and culturalbackgrounds. Learning nevertakes place in a vacuum.Learning in symbolic forms(abstract language,mathematical symbols, scientificrules etc.) should build uponand work with the child’sexperience, use of the senses,and creative and experimentalactivity... Children have the rightto a broad and balancedcurriculum that allows them todevelop their talents in allareas.’
Assessment needs to reflectthis.
Dr Terry WrigleyVisiting Professor,Northumbria University
Further readings andreferences:
https://primarycharter.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/primary-charter.pdf
Further analysis of curriculumand assessment can be found athttps://reclaimingschools.org/curriculum/ with frequentupdates in the blog.
34
On the 3rd May 2016 a newchapter was opened in the storyof state education. On that day,up and down the country,thousands of parents and carerskept their children out of school.They had not been prompted byteachers, it was entirelyspontaneous and needed nomore than a Facebook page togenerate action. The messagesent loud and clear to thegovernment was enough isenough, stop the incessanttesting which is hurting ourchildren and find another way ofassessing their progress.
Beyond question the educationof our children will never be thesame again because in ademocracy governments haveto listen to such strongexpressions of concern. It willalso strengthen teachers’resolve to resist and end thissystem. The Secretary of Statefor Education will never admit itbut it was not simply acoincidence that within weeksof the parents’ strike the nexttest lined up for imposition onthe schools, this time ofmultiplication tables, was quietlyadjourned.
As we join parents in attackingthe testing blight upon children’slearning we have to expose thethree myths about assessmentassiduously promoted bygovernment. These are sofrequently advanced as truthsthat even Guardian readers arepersuaded – and perhaps toomany teachers as well.
Harder tests raise standards ofachievement. Not so: theabsolute reverse is true. When
you pitch the level of difficulty sofar above the heads of thechildren that half of them fail,you separate assessment fromthe act of learning itself. In thisway you distort school life andreduce it to mere preparationfor the next test. True standardsof achievement are lowered bysuch testing. Hard pressedteachers, fearful of the future oftheir schools and perhaps theirown jobs, ditch their initialtraining and their professionalknowledge of what is best fortheir pupils and coach them tomeet the demands of the tests.
This coaching is not goodteaching because thetechniques are quickly forgottenonce the test is over. Nowonder secondary schoolsdon’t trust SAT’s results!
In fact this myth is a cover forthe political intention to narrowdown the work of primaryschools so that only elementaryteaching is provided. This iswhy national testing is confinedto English and mathematics: theconcern is merely to preparechildren with the ‘basics’ inreadiness for secondaryeducation. It diminishes primaryeducation, and turns the clockback to Victorian times.
Test results are accurate as ameasure of progress throughprimary school. This is largelynonsense. In good schoolschildren learn so much beyondthe core skills and we need tojudge progress over the wholefield of children’s development .For too many schools coachingfor improved test performanceprovides results which indicate
only that there is progress indealing with tests. Furthermorethe results are expressed infigures, a score, and figuresimply a level of accuracy whichis spurious since assessmentcan only be approximate.
A test is only a snapshot ofperformance at a particularmoment, and the snapshot is ofwhat is inherently measureable.Testing reveals only limitedaspects of human developmentbecause performance in a testcannot show how farknowledge and skill areembedded in the individual anddrawn upon in real activity. For amore accurate measure ofeducational progress, we mustturn away from the performancesnapshot and trust thejudgements of those closest tothe children – teachers workingin partnership with parents.
Teacher assessments can’t betrusted. This particular mythreflects the more general lack oftrust in the professionevidenced by politicians as theyuse children’s test results as ameans of holding schoolsaccountable. In fact we cantrust teacher assessments agood deal more than we cantrust the scores achieved in‘one shot’ tests of childrencoached to perform and then,inevitably, forget.
Of course we have to becautious in one importantrespect. The closer we are tothe children – and thatcloseness is one of thestrengths of primary teaching –the greater the danger that ourassessment of progress will be
15. Three assessment myths
coloured by the relationship wehave with them. We must guardagainst bias which might wellbe unconscious on our part. Wehave two effective ways ofdealing with this professionally.Our assessments can bereinforced and evidenced byportfolios of children’s workbegun in the early years andcarried forward with the childrenthrough the primary years. Asyou turn the pages of theportfolio you can see real andincontrovertible evidence ofprogress laid out before you.Secondly, we must share and ifnecessary review ourassessments with colleagueswho can discuss the child andthe evidence of their growth andlearning with greater objectivity.
In conclusion, from now on wemust work with parents andcarers as they recoil from thedamage done to their children’slives by the current testingregime. With them we will find abetter way, kinder and moreaccurate as we judge children’sprogress. We do not share thearrogance of politicians and willalways be aware of theimpossibility of absoluteaccuracy when we assess andbe appropriately modest andrespectful of the young lives wejudge. We choose to teachyoung children and arefortunate in receiving all thehuman rewards which suchwork brings, yet when weassess we have to reach intothe mind of the child and seehim or her more dispassionately.It is indeed a formidableprofessional challenge and wewill not fail.
John CoeNational Association forPrimary Education
Further readings andreferences:
Alexander, R et al (2010)Children, their World, theirEducation: the final report andrecommendations of theCambridge Primary Review,Chapters 16 and 17 (Routledge)
Sahlberg, P (2015) FinnishLessons (Teachers’ CollegePress)
35
36
It’s by now a 25-year story:teachers’ work has becomemore intense. Their autonomyhas diminished. Pedagogy,curriculum and assessment aredetermined centrally, andunderpinned by a system ofaccountability that isincreasingly precise anddemanding.
In 2016 the introduction of anew primary assessmentsystem has meant that all thesetendencies have taken a sharpupward turn, and schools havebeen pushed towards whatmany teachers see as abreaking point. In May, at theend of the SATs week for KeyStage 2 pupils, the NUT askedits members in primary schoolsto complete a survey on theirexperience of primaryassessment. The results wereimmediate and striking. In just afew days, more than 6000teachers replied, includingnearly a thousand who identifiedthemselves as heads and seniorleaders. As well as answers totick-box questions, theysupplied more than 5000 write-in comments – a vast andpassionate spreadsheet ofexperience.
The survey scores indicated ahigh level of agreement aboutkey features of the new systemand the manner of itsintroduction. 97% disagreed orstrongly disagreed with thestatement that primaryassessment arrangements havebeen well managed by the DfE.Their ‘write-in’ comments werestrongly worded. “Shambles” or“shambolic” were used more
than 100 times. “Chaos”,“fiasco”, “farce” and “disgrace”were frequently employedterms. Ever-changing andcontradictory guidelines, latecommunications, leaked testpapers, and very high demandson teacher workload were allrepeatedly mentioned.
Teachers’ concerns wentbeyond the question ofmanagement. 97% of themagreed or strongly agreed thatpreparation for the SATs hadhad a negative impact onchildren’s access to a broadand balanced curriculum.Respondents report a situationin which the time taken toprepare children for tests inMaths and English, or toprovide work for teacherassessment in these subjects,has squeezed out othersubjects and activities. “SinceChristmas, I have only taughtliteracy and numeracy,” wroteone teacher. Another wrote,“When asked their favouritesubject [my pupils] say Englishor Maths because they don’tknow anything else.”
91% of teachers agreed orstrongly agreed that the‘Expected Standard” stipulatedby the DfE in its guidance toschools was beyond the reachof the majority of students – aview that was confirmed on 5thJuly, when the DfE publishedfigures showing that 47% ofpupils had not met theexpected standard in reading,writing and maths. In theseconditions, teachers feared theirpupils would become furtherdemotivated: “Even bright kids
feel like they’re failures”, andchildren with SEN were being“cut adrift as they arebombarded with SATspreparation. Self-confidence;demoralising; self-esteem; whatfuture?”
On the back of thesejudgments, it is not surprisingthat 90% thought that the newsystem was having a negativeimpact on children’s schoolexperience. As one teacherwrote, ‘many of the childrenwho previously enjoyed schoolnow detest education. This is acrime and a shame because, inits incompetence, theGovernment is willingly andknowingly making children hatelearning with a passion, ratherthan harbour an environment oflifelong learning.’
As for teachers, the pressuresof a performance-driven systemwere felt almost everywhere.86% agreed or strongly agreedthat changes to primaryassessment had led to asignificant increase in theirworkload. Some reported aworking week of over 70 hours;others said that “workingbeyond midnight” wasconsidered the norm. Behindthis driven state of being lay afear of failure: “I am worried thatmy results will not be goodenough and will trigger anOfsted. It will be another way toplace blame on the teachersand try to convert more schoolinto academies.”
The depth of teachers’ concernis unmistakeable. Along withtheir pupils, they are paying the
16. ‘Since Christmas, I have only taught Literacy and Numeracy’: what the 2016 SATs taught us
price of policies which in thename of raising standards,actually decrease the quality ofeducation, and degrade theeducational environment.Ministers, and members ofthink-tanks and workinggroups, like to think of reform asa process that is now ‘owned’by schools which are ready toinnovate and self-improve todeliver a better education. Inreality, schools are constrained,and damaged, by anassessment system which isever more demanding, and evermore unjustifiable.
The problems of the systemwere foretold in the 1990s; fewcould have imagined they wouldreach such an acute and criticalstate. If the Government areincapable of untangling themess, only concerted actionfrom parents and teachers willstop further damage to childrenand their education.
A version of this article waspublished on the website of theBritish Educational ResearchAssociation, August 2016.
Ken JonesSenior Policy Officer, NUTEmeritus Professor,Goldsmiths, University ofLondon
Further readings andreferences:
Ball, S. (2013) The EducationDebate (Policy)
Jones, K. (2015) Education inBritain (Polity)
Lawn, M. (1996) Modern Times:work, professionalism andcitizenship in teaching(Routledge)
37
38
Artsmark framework: http://www.artsmark.org.uk/media/585
Charter for Primary Education: https://primarycharter.wordpress.com/
UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: http://www.unicef.org.uk/Documents/Publication-pdfs/UNCRC_PRESS200910web.pdf
Arts Council England Cultural Education Challenge: http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/children-and-young-people/cultural-education-challenge
Learning without Limits: http://learningwithoutlimits.educ.cam.ac.uk/
Rich Tasks assessment (Queensland, Australia): http://www.fairtest.org/queensland-australia-rich-tasks-assessment-program
Useful links contained in the articles
Artwork reproduced with kind permission from a campaign by NUT members in the northern regioncalled ‘Keeping Schools Creative’ https://twitter.com/SchoolsCreative
This pamphlet is the work of Reclaiming Schools, a network ofacademics and researchers supporting the NUT’s campaigns. Their website www.reclaimingschools.org provides further
evidence and regular analysis.
Resources and news about the NUT’s primary assessment campaign are available at
www.teachers.org.uk/campaigns/primary-assessment
Designed and published by the Communications Department of The National Union of Teachers – www.teachers.org.ukOrigination by Paragraphics – www.paragraphics.co.uk Printed by College Hill Press – www.collegehillpress.co.uk – 10827/11/16
www.teachers.org.uk/edufactswww.teachers.org.uk/expertview
