A Scottish tale of broken promises, localism and wishful thinking

A delicious cautionary tale from North of the border, as Scottish education minister Fiona Hyslop is demoted for the failure of the SNP's class size policy. Local authorities were given cash to employ more teachers to cut primary class sizes for younger pupils to 18. But being good localists, the SNP let them spend the money as they wished. They even drew up a vacuous agreement with the Scottish local authorities' association, COSLA.

Funny enough, the councils had other plans for the cash. The result: a fall in teacher numbers of 1,348 over the last year, more embarrassment for Alex Salmond and Ms Hyslop forced to spend more time visiting art galleries. To be fair, the average class size in primaries did fall - from 23.2 to 23.1 but as the BBC reported, 13.2% of P1-P3 pupils were in class sizes of 18 or fewer, a figure which was unchanged from 2008.

When Labour cut infant class sizes to 30 or below in its first term, it did so by a combination of legal sanction and intensive monitoring of every authority with large class sizes. Ministers knew exactly which schools were not meeting the pledge. Money was directly targeted to those schools. Even then, the need to allow flexibility on in-year entry means that up to 20,000 infants (compared with 450,000 in 1997) will find themselves in an over-large class in any given year. This approach may seem unduly centralist - but it was the only way that politicians could keep a promise so specific. And the literacy and numeracy strategies were probably rather more important to standards.

As the 2010 election approaches, voters should ask politicians south of the border when they promise simultaneously to free schools and impose more traditional teaching and rules on all pupils, how exactly they plan to square the circle?

A poor prescription from Clegg

The Liberal Democrats apparently spent a decade working out their education reforms, published today. But the result is a series of proposals that could lessen chances for poorer pupils, rather than increase them.

They have proposed abolishing most of the accountability in the system that ensures that pupils have a minimum entitlement and that spurs improvement. It is all very well sniffing about the 600 pages in the national curriculum, but this covers eleven years of a child's education, across a range of subjects. Perhaps someone could ask them what precisely they propose to drop? Tearing it up for its own sake will hardly give the entitlement to poorer children the Liberal leader Nick Clegg says he wants. That, after all, is why we have a curriculum.

Equally, one must be sceptical about plans to give all schools the same freedoms as academies: a big benefit of academies at the moment are that they focus on schools in inner city areas where results are poor. Taking away that incentive will make it harder to effect improvement in those schools, changes that academies are delivering in the vast majority of cases. There is no sign in the Lib Dem paper that they have any plans of their own to improve failing schools. (Charities can already set up schools and enter competitions for new schools under Labour legislation).

The Liberal Democrats may be on stronger ground in focusing their class size pledge on 5-7 year olds. After all, there is little evidence that lower class sizes make much difference for older children. But it is questionable that this is the best use of resources, given that most infant classes have adult:pupil ratios near or below 15 anyway, with the help of teaching assistants and one-to-one tuition. The most useful thing they could do at this age is to focus on phonics, as Labour is doing as a result of the 2005 Rose Review, and ensure pupils can read. But on this they are curiously silent, presumably on the grounds that schools should have the "freedom" not to teach children to read.

In truth, this policy paper is not all that radically different from traditional Lib Dem education policies. There is little interest in outcomes, and a big focus on inputs, including an underfunded pupil premium or voucher for poorer youngsters (not in itself a bad thing, but ignoring the extent to which money is already heavily skewed towards disadvantaged pupils - and the impact of moving towards a national funding formula on schools outside the inner cities). At the same time, they deliberately ignore all the evidence that assets are crucial to improving social mobility, by abandoning Labour's innovative child trust fund.

In the end, without clear accountability and clear expectations about outcomes, their talk of improvements rings hollow. And, with the axing of trust funds, so does their talk of improving social mobility.

This blog posting was originally written for Labourlist and has been picked up by Iain Dale.

The real message from the OECD report

Today's newspapers are full of tales of educational woe drawn from the latest OECD survey, Education at a Glance. For the Times, it vindicates their eccentric campaign to stop government efforts to create a level playing field for poorer toddlers, though the report actually says of the UK in this respect:

90% of children 4 and under (as a percentage of the population aged 3 to 4) are participating in pre-primary programmes (OECD average 70%). This is all the more impressive [my italics] as the rate increased from 51% in 1998 to 90% in 2006.

It is true that class sizes are a little skewed in the UK, though teaching assistant numbers are relatively high, and there is no evidence that a difference of one or two students in older primary classes has any impact on standards, despite right wing think tank Civitas's wish to divert masses of government funding to the project.

But what the papers neglect is a more worrying trend in the UK: our undergraduate population is growing at a relatively slower rate than other OECD countries, despite a strong level of vocational degree entry.

In 2000 the UK had, at 37%, the fourth highest graduation rates for tertiary-type A programmes, well above the OECD average which then stood at 28%. Although the graduation rate in the UK had increased to 39% by 2006, the OECD average increased at a much faster rate to 37%, with eleven countries showing now higher graduation rates: Australia, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Sweden. Rates of current participation suggest that more countries are likely to surpass UK graduation rates. The increase in tertiary enrolment between 1995 and 2005, which will influence future graduation rates, was, at 33%, considerably below the OECD average level of 40% and well below increases in the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Korea, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic and Sweden and partner countries Brazil, Chile, Estonia and Israel, that ranged from 44% to 161% during the same period.

Could the fact that this trend is virtually ignored by our papers have anything to do with the years they have spent bemoaning our relatively modest rates of student growth, seeing them as a dimunition of standards rather than a necessary contributor to our global competitiveness?

Why schools should decide on class sizes

I have a column in today's Independent making the case for headteachers to be free to decide on class sizes in their own schools, contrary to teaching union demands for legal limits. You can read the piece here, but these paragraphs sum up my argument:

The NUT might be on stronger ground were they calling for smaller infant class sizes, though ....studies....suggest that further real benefits for this age group require classes of below 15. But the biggest problem with the NUT ultimatum is that it wants the Government, rather than head teachers, to micro-manage schools. It was, after all, schools and their leaders who decided to use the extra money they got from government to employ more support staff.

And it is schools that occasionally opt to use classes of 70 to teach in different ways. Contrary to the more excitable headlines, such classes are usually well-run and are used to enrich students' learning experiences rather than to save money. One such class that I saw in an excellent West Midlands school used a large classroom with computers to set a range of challenges to a mixed age-group; it stretched able students and it allowed very personalised learning, regulated by a teacher supported by a host of teaching assistants. There was no evidence that pupils – or teachers – were losing out; in fact, quite the contrary.

Of course, such classes are not for all – or even most – situations. But they can play a part in a rich teaching and learning programme, just as masterclasses or lectures from university dons may mix several classes together. And the possibilities of broadband technology allow distance learning to widen A-level choices across groups of more than 20 students.

The point is not that these should become standard practice, but that they should not be outlawed in favour of a measure for which there is little beneficial evidence. What matters most is to enable every student to maximise their potential. And for that to happen, head teachers should have the freedom to try approaches that work best for their schools.

As the NUT gathers, it's time for an Easter escape

The start of the NUT conference - with its calls for strikes unless secondary heads are forced into a class size straitjacket and over pay - is always a good cue to escape. (Jim Knight, the schools minister, was absolutely right on Today to dismiss the idea that there should be a class size limit of 20 in secondary schools - with an average of 21, but no evidence that lower class sizes make much difference over the age of seven, this would be a ludicrous straitjacket on headteachers). I still have fond memories of the 1995 conference where the more militant members of the union forced David Blunkett, Estelle Morris and myself into a small office with Doug McAvoy and other NUT leaders - thereafter a 'cupboard' in the lore of education correspondents - while the Trots made an ass of themselves and their union for the benefit of the evening news, and provided David with a wonderful opportunity to highlight New Labour's get-tough approach to failing schools. The current NUT leader Steve Sinnott is a moderate-minded sort, but seemingly remains unable to move the Easter conference and give the ordinary NUT members their voice. Until he does, his union will remain at the margins of real influence, and serve merely to fill space on the Easter news bulletins.

Blogging will be light for the next week, as we head off for some Canaries sun. Happy Easter.

Are classes of 70 ever acceptable?

If I were Jim Knight, I don't think I'd have chosen a teaching union conference to share my enthusiasm for classes of 70 - even the supposedly progressive ATL. But does he have a point? First, despite credulous headlines in the Mail , let's be clear what Knight was talking about and what he was not talking about. The minister was not proposing that students spend all their time, or even the majority of it, in classes of 70. Nor was he suggesting that the Pupil Teacher Ratio - currently 16.5 in secondary schools and falling - should change (indeed there is now one adult to every 11.4 secondary pupils, much better than the 14.5 when Labour came to power). But he was recognising that some schools have experimented with such classes for particular lessons or lectures and that they have found them to work. I've seen them working extremely well (I'll spare the school concerned the attentions of silly reporters) and the challenge of a well-structured large mixed-age class can be particularly valuable for able students; there were a host of teaching assistants on hand to help those who needed it. Equally, a masterclass by a university lecturer or star speaker could be of such a size - or, as often happens, be provided across several settings using broadband. If we don't let schools experiment in such ways, not least with the chance for IT to offer each student different challenges, without being shouted down by teachers who should know better, go-ahead schools have no chance of finding the best ways to engage students in learning.