Don't lose a primary focus on the basics

I have a column in today's Independent, reiterating the case for testing after last week's disappointing Key Stage 2 results. You can read it here. Here's an extract

The most important feature of the years between 1995 and 2000, when results rose rapidly, was single-minded momentum. Schools were in no doubt that their top priority was the 3Rs. That momentum disappeared as ministers merged the literacy and numeracy strategies into a catch-all primary strategy, and began to give equal emphasis to welfare issues. Of course, primary schools should offer a broad curriculum and care for their pupils' welfare. And they should ensure that pupils who can read get access to plenty of good books.

But the focus of government needs to be clear. After all, those pupils who don't reach level 4 are unlikely to gain five good GCSEs. And without them, they will find it much harder to get a good job or progress to university...... let's not lose sight of why testing and accountability were introduced – too many primary schools assumed that children would acquire the 3Rs through osmosis or their parents. The losers in this lottery were poorer pupils without supportive or fluent parents.

And, given the evidence that rigorous phonics, a sound grasp of grammar and punctuation, and a facility with mental arithmetic are essential building blocks for the 3Rs, governments should not shy away from expecting schools to deliver them. But if government wants schools to do better, it must avoid mixed messages.

Ministers made a big error allowing the abandonment of Labour's literacy and numeracy strategies to be seen as an admission of their failure. And the Tories played a foolish game when they suggested that the Key Stage 2 tests could be replaced by teacher-marked tests in secondary school (they have since indicated that external marking is more likely).

The main reason there has been so little recent progress has been that – with the exception of a renewed focus on phonics – there has been too much muddle over what matters in primary schools. The latest thematic review of the curriculum is in danger of adding to the confusion. But the strategies should not be revived: schools must be held accountable instead for the extent to which they successfully teach the 3Rs, and encouraged to use the best of the available commercial teaching programmes. Ofsted inspections should ensure that children are taught the basics properly, and show how some schools succeed against the odds.

Yet, in the end, the only way that we can know whether individual primary schools are doing their job is through independently set and marked tests. To imagine that our children would be better taught without them is to ignore the lessons of history.

Teaching the 3Rs

The fetish with localism will clearly be fully realised in next week's schools white paper, as the National Strategies are abandoned in literacy and numeracy. In truth, what matters most is that pupils are taught the basics properly, including phonics, and not that they are taught through the strategies which had not been as effectively delivered in recent years as they were when they first started.

But there should still be a role for government in kitemarking quality, whether provided by other schools, local authorities or private providers. Schools should be able to choose from quality providers. Otherwise the danger is that there will be a return to the haphazard teaching of the 3Rs that occurred before the strategies. And ministers must be very clear that the primacy of the basics is not being compromised, and that every pupil will still have an entitlement to learn to read (using phonics), to write clearly, and to learn arithmetic skills.

Let's not go back to 70s primary education

Despite the Today programme's insistence on the term, "independent" is certainly not an apt description of today's report from the self-styled 'largest' review of primary education in 40 years. It is another deeply ideological strike against standards and effective teaching of the 3Rs in our primary schools.

Many of its contributors oppose the very idea of school 'standards' and have an ideological opposition to external testing. They have been permanent critics of the changes of recent decades. And it is only in that light that the review's conclusions can be understood.

Of course, there is no conflict between teaching literacy and numeracy, and the other subjects within the primary curriculum. And the best schools do indeed show how doing them all well provides a good and rounded education. Presenting this as the point of difference is a diversionary Aunt Sally.

However, there is a very real conflict between recognising the need to single literacy and numeracy out for extra time over the other subjects as with the dedicated literacy and numeracy lessons, and making them just another aspect of primary schooling that pupils may or may not pick up along the way.

For far too long, after the Plowden review and a move towards so-called 'progressive' teaching, children were not being taught to read and write properly. Schools too often expected children to pick up reading by looking at books rather than being taught phonetically. Grammar and tables were often not taught, as they were seen as elitist.

The literacy hour started to undo this damage, and Jim Rose's excellent report on phonics pointed the way forward for the future. Part of the 'prescription' of the literacy hour included an expectation that children learn to spell and express themselves correctly. Good teachers pointed the way to synthetic phonics, not government diktat. Equally, many primary teachers lacked confidence in teaching basic arithmetic before the daily numeracy lessons.

But some university schools of education remained wedded to the old ways and were reluctant to accept these changes. After all, they had often failed to teach teachers properly how to teach these subjects. A return to a situation where the teaching of these basics is subsumed again into a process of osmosis would destroy another generation of primary schoolchildren in the same way that the children of the seventies were failed.

Of course, we need to get the balance right, and I argued last week that we can do so with primary testing, but the Primary Review is not about getting the balance right; it is about reversing the changes of the last twenty years and returning our schools to a time when there was no public accountability and the basics were largely subsumed into other lessons.

Ministers and their Tory shadows need to start saying so, and doing so loudly.

This post has been picked up by the Reading Reform Foundation.

A balanced approach to the curriculum

It is never a good idea to pay too much attention to the early media reports of any changes to the curriculum. So nobody should prejudge Sir Jim Rose's excellent primary curriculum review paper published this morning before reading it. For this is not a death notice either for any subject or for academic rigour.

What Sir Jim has done with his characteristic skill is to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable, by showing how the trend for more thematic lessons, already a feature of many primary schools, can be accommodated within a national curriculum that is demanding in its expectations of children in the basics. As the report says:

There was considerable agreement among those consulted on the following points:

• The existing structure of knowledge, skills and understanding within the programmes of study holds good for any changes that are likely to be proposed for shaping curricular content whether taught as subjects or otherwise.

• There is a strong case for adding the development of good attitudes to this three part structure;

• Knowledge, skills, understanding and attitudes might be seen as ‘organisers’ of curricular content that can be interrelated and used to plan valuable crosscurricular study;

• Subject disciplines remain an important but not necessarily exclusive way of organising the content of the primary curriculum; and

• No matter how the curriculum is construed, more and better opportunities should be provided for children to use and apply their learning to enquiry and problem solving for the purpose of increasing their understanding and learning capabilities.

These perspectives helpfully counter a long-standing, worrying tendency in primary education where discussion about the curriculum is often mired by treating as polar opposites, things which should be complementary and together act to benefit children’s learning, for example: Subjects vs cross-curricular studies; Knowledge vs skills; Child initiated learning through play vs teacher directed learning; Formal vs informal classroom organisation; and Summative vs formative assessment.

It is not just that he has identified some obvious trends such as the computer literacy of so many youngsters, who have been ill-served by an ICT curriculum that may be demanding on the teachers but is often boring for tech-savvy children. Nor that he has suggested practical ways to accommodate foreign languages in a supposedly crowded curriculum. But he has done so within
the context of recognising the need for a national curriculum to provide every child with a minimum entitlement, even if it is broken within thematic descriptors rather than more straightforward subjects. As the report notes:

Despite claims of overload and over-prescription, the Review has found almost universal support for the continuation of a National Curriculum. Many of those consulted recalled, unfavourably, the time when far too much of the primary curriculum was ‘do as you please’ and considerably more uneven in breadth, balance and quality than was the case after the introduction of the National Curriculum.

But the real strength of the report is that it seeks successfully to marry the trend towards 'skill-based learning' with the recognition that it must be a means towards acquiring knowledge not a substitute for it. All children should have the entitlement to learn a range of skills and knowledge, and to benefit from a range of cultural and educational experiences, while they are at school. This is what today's report recognises and this is what ministers must now start to evangelise about.

But if this is to work as Sir Jim hopes, the final report needs a very clear set of criteria to accompany the new curriculum, restating, for example, the commitment to phonics as the primary teacher of reading, and setting out the minimum of what all pupils should know as well as what they should be able to do by the age of 11. There must also be from government an unambiguous commitment to externally-set and marked national tests in primary school so that we can properly measure whether or not these new approaches are working.

The 3Rs are more important than creating costumes for a parade

I fear I'm about to say something terribly controversial here. But as the monthly moan from the self-styled Primary Review (memo to excitable Independent subs: their report is no more 'official' than this blog) is treated as 'news', we should remind ourselves of a few home truths.

• First, it is actually more important that children are taught to read, write and add up properly in primary school than that they learn to paint, sing or make costumes for a parade. This is not to say that they shouldn't do all of those things too, but unless children learn the basics they will become truants, criminals and welfare dependents. That was why the national curriculum emphasised English and Maths; it was why national tests were introduced; it was why the literacy and numeracy strategies were based on this fundamental truth; and it is why the government is rightly insisting that phonics are the basis of reading for young children. And measured in this way, primary schools are significantly better (though performance has slowed since 2000 and the further intervention now in place is needed to get them back on track).
• Second, many primary schools were simply not doing this job properly before government 'intervened'. It is no accident that the biggest improvements in results - and in the quality of teaching as measured by Ofsted inspections - occurred between 1995 and 2000 when such intervention was at its strongest.
• Third, before the late nineties, teachers were taught theory rather than how to teach, which meant that the basics were not being taught properly. Many of those at the heart of this 'primary review' failed a generation of schoolchildren who were not taught to read, not taught the rules of grammar, not taught to spell and rarely tested adequately because they didn't teach their teachers how to teach them.
• And finally, those who want to de-emphasise the 3Rs in primary schools will not be failing the middle class kids whose parents will ensure their mastery at least of English, but poorer and working class kids who rely on the school system to teach them the basics above all else. It is time we turned this discussion from whether to give the basics prominence in primary schools to how we can do so most effectively and soonest so that every child can be fluent in the 3Rs and know how to make a decent costume.