Too much, too young?

It is a bit rich for Prof Robin Alexander and his cohorts on the self-styled 'biggest review of primary education in 40 years' to accuse politicians of ideological interference in schools when they have just presided over a review which has always has at its core an ideological opposition to national testing. So, nobody can be surprised at its best publicised conclusions, that national tests should be scrapped and 'formal learning' should start later.

Yet for a study apperently groaning under the weight of '4,000 pieces of evidence', it is fascinating that it takes a practitioner to explain what nonsense underlies the suggestion that five year-olds are being subjected to rote learning of the sort that a Victorian would recognise - a claim inevitably treated with reverence on the BBC this morning.

In fact, there is not a great deal of difference between what is taught in pre-school in most other countries with a later starting age and what actually happens here. Nor is there a lot of difference between the extent to which some youngsters are taught well at home and others need schools to make up for a lack of home support (as a conversation with any Helsinki primary teacher will attest).

As Liz Steele, a not untypical English primary headteacher writes in the Times today:

Children starting reception class at 4 or 5 are not made to sit in serried ranks and chant times tables. They play, run around outside and often barely notice the transition from pre-school — except that they stay all day instead of just for the morning. While they are gardening, cooking and role-playing they learn about sounds and how to recognise letters.

But it is not a rigid curriculum, it’s learning through experience. For some pupils — who would otherwise not get these opportunities — the chance to interact is crucial to their development. They thrive and grow by being around adults who are trained in how to engage them and by playing alongside other children. Their speech improves and they are supported in a community rather than being taken to towns and clinics where their background and family are unknown.

If the environment is right, with learning experiences and good role models in the classroom, then it is best for some children to start school as soon as possible. Their breadth of knowledge increases and their basic skills improve. They are initially quite ired but we don’t see children falling asleep in corners and they soon become used to it and are quite lively.

It is not the middle classes who would lose out by the change proposed by the Alexander review, but those from backgrounds where there is too little support and stimulation at home. They are starting to fall behind by age three and will fall much further behind if they are denied the sort of purposefulness that is offered in thousands of primaries like that led by Ms Steele. Indeed the Alexander notion that because some parents won't read with their children at home - the main 'homework' expected in primaries - schools should not expect it to happen is defeatism of the highest order.

"Give us back our schools," is the TES headline to its story about the report. And that just about sums up the reasoning behind the desire to scrap tests. For those who object most to national testing are not a generation of youngsters obessesed by competitive computer games but some of their teachers and rather more of those running the teaching unions, who still haven't got used to the idea that schools are not run for the comfort of the staff but in the interests of the pupils; and as taxpayers we have a right to look occasionally at how they perform. Those who regard this as "Stalinism" clearly forget that when the first tests were taken in 1995, less than half of eleven year olds reached a standard that 70-80% reach today.

The primary purpose of primary schools must be to develop literacy and numeracy to a reasonable level in all their pupils, as well as providing a broad curriculum. I would have no argument with stripping back the compulsory curriculum to enable this to happen, and to allow 50% of the day to be decided at school level provided that children were taught to read, write and do arithmetic. I also happen to agree with the suggestion that there should be more specialist teachers in primary school. One of the benefits of the numeracy strategy was that it provided teachers with an understanding of a subject where many lacked confidence, and for which initial teacher education had left them ill-prepared.

But to imagine that children will be better off with less focus on English and Maths, and no proper independent school-level accountability is bizarre. We tried that before the mid-1990s and it didn't work. The only surprise about the Alexander report is that it took so long for them to reach the conclusions they had intended to reach from the start.

I've also blogged on this subject at Public Finance and John Rentoul has picked up this posting in a strong piece for his blog.

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.

Tested to destruction?

The latest predictable 'findings' from the self-styled primary review gets its desired headlines today. The Independent uses its findings to repeat the canard that our children are 'tested to destruction'. This is simply nonsense. There are no formal national tests sat under proper conditions, and independently marked, before the age of 11. (Those at age seven are internally marked teacher assessments; other tests are sensibly set by teachers, sometimes using optional QCA test papers). After that, the only requirement on schools is that pupils sit tests in English, Maths and Science at age 14 (though many schools do them a year earlier). GCSEs suffered from excess coursework, but teachers objected when QCA sought to get rid of it; so it will survive in a supervised form in most subjects. Beyond that, whether or when pupils sit tests depend on the choices they make. If they do A-levels, their marks are awarded for modules: again this was something for which teachers argued; but they could do the tougher but less tested International Baccalaureate and will soon have Diplomas. In Helsinki, in Finland, the Shangri-La for educationists, children are tested annually. Testing helps do two things: it enables teachers to have an independent check on progress, and that measurement is crucial to the pupil's educational development. And it allows us to know how well - or badly - a school is doing. Those who think that we would know this without testing should remember the reaction in many Home Counties primary schools which had a nice image when the tests revealed the terrible truth to trusting parents. Thankfully the government is not listening to these siren voices; its progress tests, once they get them right, could offer a better measure than the existing tests, but they will be independently set and marked. Equally, the idea that structured lessons before the age of seven or eight is 'damaging' is a fallacious argument that ignores the fact that too many children lack the structure provided in middle class homes; as other research shows, early learning makes a huge difference. When I asked a primary teacher in Helsinki whether all her pupils couldn't read until the age of seven, she laughed and pointed out that the majority of her children were fluent readers by that stage, having been taught by supportive parents at home. Some still needed to learn, but most didn't. The real problem we face in this country is the twenty per cent of pupils who lack fluency at the age of eleven: they need to learn to read through synthetic phonics by the age of six or seven. They do not need well-meaning liberals pushing their progress even further behind.

Testing, testing, testing...

Today is the day when the ideological opponents of testing are attempting to throw their entire armoury at the system which has rescued children from the ideological oddities that characterised primary school teaching for many of the post-Plowden generation. Our friends from the North, at Durham university - the ones who also think homework is bad for you - are out in force rehashing their attack on reading from a few years back. To unravel all the various claims being made, it is worth remembering the following:

* The Literacy Strategy was as much about writing as reading, and writing standards - with teachers encouraged to reintroduce good spelling and correct grammar as part of their mission - have increased by 14 percentage points since 1997.

* Maths is also tested, funny enough. And the NFER study accompanying today's report suggests there has been significant improvement there, which is borne out by international studies, and reflected in the national tests, showing an improvement from 64% in 1997 to 77% this year, a 13 percentage point increase.

* The Primary Review's own evidence suggests it is teachers and parents, not children, who are the most anxious about tests, which is not all that surprising when you think about it.

So, we are then left with an argument about reading, not testing, which is not, I know where those behind this morning's 'swap teaching for fun' report would like us to be. Now, as it happens, I have felt for some time that synthetic phonics should be a central part of the early teaching of children to read (and that means teaching them to read, not showing them books and expecting them to pick it up by osmosis) and there has been plenty of evidence on that. This is precisely the change the government has made over the last two years, thanks to the excellent Rose Review (pdf) and it is now coming into effect in primaries.

But this doesn't mean there have been no measurable improvements in reading since 1997. Here are four facts that suggest otherwise:

* Improvements measured through the national tests have been greatest in the most disadvantaged and underachieving schools, where floor targets have sought to lift minimum standards

* As well as there being a significant improvement in English at level 4, there has also been a substantial improvement at level 5 for 11 year-olds, putting them at the same standard as 14 year-olds. The numbers reaching this higher standard have doubled.

* Jim Rose headed an independent review in 1999 (pdf) of the testing process - with headteachers nominated by the opposition parties and the education editor of the Times as members. It showed that complaints about dumbing down were without foundation.

* Teacher assessments, the holy grail for those seeking to abolish national tests, recorded the same results as the tests in the disputed years.

Let's make sure we don't lose the gains made since the introduction of the national curriculum and testing by allowing ourselves to be seduced back to the bad old days when children were not taught to read properly and when we didn't know it because there were no national tests. And let nobody lose sight of the importance of teaching children to read.

Where the real pressure on children comes from

Today's Primary Review interim report makes interesting reading, but not for the reasons that John Humphrys would have you believe. We awoke this morning to the Today programme's ritual claims (audio, go to 7.09) that testing is destroying childhood. Yet a closer inspection of the self-styled 'biggest review of primary education in forty years' (pdf, p.19) - based on interviews with 750 people including children - reveals something that most of us suspect, but for which we have not yet had such striking academic evidence. Children are much clearer about why tests are useful than their teachers and parents, who often transfer their anxieties onto them. To quote from the report:

The children were more ambivalent about SATs than any other constituency that we met during the community soundings. SATs were ‘scary’, made them nervous and anxious, and put them under pressure. But equally:
• ‘tests tell teachers, and us, how we are doing’
• ‘parents want them’
• ‘children should be tested to show that they have done well and have been listening’
• ‘tests help children know what they have learned’
• ‘we need SATs to find our potential, and gaps in our understanding.’
• ‘high grades give you confidence.’

Ambivalent is code here for: they didn't conform to our prejudices. As the Times notes in its leader this morning, this is a report based on the instincts of the 'educational world' rather than any objective evidence of what testing, inspection and the national curriculum has achieved and can do. For schools that use tests and assessment regularly and confidently find that they help children improve, and contrary to what the author of Toxic Childhood Sue Palmer proclaimed also on Today, tests and targets have helped disadvantaged pupils and their schools to improve faster than middle class schools and pupils.

This report comes on the same day as the far more troubling results of the Foundation Profiles of around 600,000 youngsters are published, showing that 40% of children are educationally underdeveloped at the age of five. The idea that not testing them at 11 will somehow compensate for this is bizarre. But I was encouraged by the reported comments of Mick Brookes, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers when asked whether we should pay much heed to these findings. The Times reports:

But the assessments, which are known as the Foundation Stage Profile, were criticised by teaching unions last night. Mick Brookes, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, called them “unreliable and unhelpful” because they are based on subjective teacher observations, not tests.

Now there's a challenge for ministers. When the assessments first started, there were attempts to create a single national system of baseline assessment. Thanks to the sort of people who would prefer other people's children not to learn to read until the age of eight the profiles have become unwieldy and less useful than they might be. So, let's cut the areas of assessment and have a single short national set of criteria to make them into the reliable and helpful data that Mr Brookes is presumably calling for. Meanwhile, ministers must go further than just saying that 'tests are here to stay'; they need to explain why and how. And they need to get on the case quickly.