Helping the high attainers

This piece appeared in the TES print edition on 14 July 2017.

Nearly 20 years ago, as then education secretary David Blunkett’s special adviser, I helped to introduce a programme for gifted and talented pupils in urban secondaries. The initiative focused the efforts of many comprehensives on new ways of tailoring provision for more-able students. The programme sadly lost its way in the later years of the Labour government, though its legacy lives on in some schools and academies.

More recently, Sir Michael Wilshaw, as chief schools inspector, reported annually on how schools were catering for their more-able students. Ofsted inspectors now ask about the progress of high-attainers. But we are still grappling with many of the issues we faced nearly two decades ago – and we need to ask, are we doing enough through accountability to encourage schools to support high-attainers?

This summer, parents and businesses will learn that GCSE results are no longer as easy as ABC. Grading results on a 9-to-1 scale is the last in a series of steps that could have a profound effect on accountability in secondary schools. But whether the changes also help stretch able students as much as they support those with poorer test scores aged 11 remains an open question. There is a good case for addressing their needs more directly.

The debate around how to ensure that less-advantaged pupils of high ability fulfil their potential is not uncontroversial. Some say a focus on top test scorers at 11 – those in the top 10 to 20 per cent – means missing out on others with the potential to be just as successful. Others want the focus to be much more on low-attainers – those who don’t get the expected standards in English and maths – and argue that the £2.5 billion pupil premium should be entirely directed at them.

But this cannot be about pitching groups of students against each other. The Sutton Trust’s Missing Talent research showed that over a third of disadvantaged boys and a quarter of disadvantaged girls, who were in the top 10 per cent of pupils at age 11, were outside the top 25 per cent in their GCSEs. Meeting their needs was an argument for Progress 8 – the new GCSE school-success measure – in that every grade is now credited, so getting a student from a 2 to a 3 is rewarded as much as getting from a 3 to a 4 or a 6 to a 7 in the new grading scale. The system has its teething problems, but its intentions have been good. However, recent arguments about whether a 4 or a 5 is equivalent to a C grade, and the continued importance of floor targets, suggest that border lines haven’t disappeared.

I was never as convinced of the evils of the C-D border line as some were. For employers or sixth-form admissions, a C proved to be far more valuable than a D. Focusing there did more than improve a school’s league-table scores. But the old system failed to accredit schools properly for getting students As rather than Bs, limiting opportunities for higher-achieving students to access Russell Group universities including Oxbridge.

As our Chain Effects 2017 report highlighted, there is still much to do. Sponsored academies are good at improving results for low-attaining disadvantaged pupils, but are weaker with their high-attainers. Given that these academies often serve the poorest communities, this disparity should be of concern.

All this matters to social mobility. The Office for Fair Access reported recently that disadvantaged young people remain far less likely to get to our best universities – and from there to access good professional and well-paid jobs – than those from better-off backgrounds.

The gap is still as much as 10:1 on some measures, though it has been wider. That isn’t just bad for those individuals, it is bad for society and bad for our economy to waste so much talent.

Before the election, the government saw an increase in grammar schools as the answer. But while grammars often do a good job for the disadvantaged students on their rolls, our research has shown that far too few such pupils are admitted in the first place.

Indeed, there is a gradient linked to income in grammar school admissions, not just a gap. Moreover, the evidence is that highly able pupils in the best-performing comprehensives do just as well.

Now that new grammar schools are on the policy back burner, policymakers must not forget the needs of able students from less-advantaged backgrounds. In fact, there is a real opportunity here for comprehensives to live up to their mission to cater for the needs of students of all abilities.

Three important steps could help: the first is to encourage fairer admissions to the most successful comprehensives – the top 500, based on GCSE results; these schools only take half the proportion of poorer pupils that live in their catchment.

Randomly allocating half the places in successful urban comprehensives – backed by outreach and travel support – could open such schools up to those who can’t afford the house-price premium attached to these schools.

The second is to excite and engage more able students with a curriculum with greater enrichment, as well as access to more demanding lessons and lectures – in partnership both with other schools and universities. The Sutton Trust has moved from working only with sixth formers to supporting able 12- to 15-year-olds through its Sutton Scholars programme. And the government should support schools and universities in trialling what is most effective for highly able students.

Finally, we need to look again at how schools report their results, and how their success is judged by Ofsted and regional schools commissioners. We shouldn’t just report the overall Progress 8 and Attainment 8 scores, but we should specifically report on the results and progress for high-attaining students.

We could then see exactly how the best comprehensives perform – encouraging others to emulate them – and how they compare with grammars on a fair measure. Ofsted and regional schools commissioners would look at these results alongside the main scores. But more importantly, this could do a lot to improve social mobility, too.

The data deficit effect

In my latest Sutton Trust blog, how a dearth of data in Scotland propelled a Sutton Trust report onto the front pages.

A funny thing happened with the Sutton Trust's Global Gaps report a couple of weeks ago. John Jerrim’s excellent look at the different performance of highly able 15 year-olds from different social backgrounds gained some good – but not spectacular – coverage in the London media.

But on the same day it became the top political news story in Scotland. The report included breakdowns for the four UK nations and the Trust had targeted stories at outlets in each.

The Scottish data was marginally worse than that in England – and crucially it showed that science results had dipped over the last ten years significantly – but this was enough to create front page splashes in some papers and much bigger stories in Scottish editions than in their English counterparts.

Crucially, too, the opposition took the data and ran with it. The two year gap in performance between poor and better off teenagers hit a nerve, and fed a narrative that the Scottish government has been failing on education. So much so that both Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Conservative leader and Keiza Dugdale, the Labour leader, majored on the report at First Minister’s Questions.

That took the story into a second day of front page news and saw the BBC’s Scotland political editor filing a lengthy report for the evening news bulletins. By the time last Thursday’s Question Time was broadcast from Glasgow the story was still fresh enough to warrant a separate discussion.

I’ve been reflecting on why this happened. There were some strong political reasons. Opposition politicians clearly leapt on the report with a vigour long lacking in their London counterparts, and that certainly gave the story more legs than had it been solely a Sutton Trust press release and report.

Education is also a much bigger issue in Scotland, both because Nicola Sturgeon and her education secretary John Swinney have made narrowing the attainment gap their big issue in this term, which means that any signs of failure get seized upon.

But I think another factor is just as important – the data deficit North of the border. I became acutely aware of this when I served last year on the Commission on Widening Access in Scotland. The dearth of data was the main reason I subsequently commissioned researchers at Edinburgh to produce the Access in Scotland report for the Sutton Trust.

At school level, this data deficit is particularly significant. Swinney is now introducing a more rigorous – if controversial – testing system this autumn. Scotland scrapped national testing in the mid-2000s, along with Wales. The result was predictably disastrous in Wales, which has been edging back towards testing, and the PISA results suggest it saw a slide in Scottish results too.

Potentially the reintroduction of national testing could do a lot for research into social mobility in Scotland, something the critics of testing often wilfully ignore, as well as ensuring that aspirations for able disadvantaged students are stretching.

Combined with the introduction of a Scottish version of the Teaching and Learning Toolkit, currently being developed by the Education Endowment Foundation with Education Scotland, this could have a genuinely beneficial impact on less advantaged pupils’ results.

Contrast the dearth of data in Scotland (and Wales) with its abundance in England. The National Pupil Database is an invaluable resource with the potential to improve social mobility as it shows schools how others succeed in similar circumstances and with linkage to other databases including HMRC it allows researchers to measure how well students from different backgrounds progress from the start of school to the workplace.

PISA is useful for its comparability in that respect, but is not sufficient – hence the excitement surrounding our recent report. Gratifying as it was to have such great coverage, I look forward to the day when such data doesn’t cause so much of a stir in Scotland because there is much more data available on the progress of Scottish children – and teachers have the tools to compare their pupils with similar pupils elsewhere in the country.

Lost in the grammars debate

I've blogged at the Sutton Trust website on the grammar schools debate

It was just three months before Tony Blair’s historic victory in 1997. Ben Chapman was fighting as the Labour candidate in the Wirral South by-election. And David Blunkett, the shadow education secretary, was visiting the Wirral County Grammar School. While he had a cup of tea with the headteacher, the late Eric Forth, then the schools minister, protested outside that Labour was no friend of grammars.

But, by then the opposition had decided to park the issue of grammar schools if it got into government. As Blunkett's special adviser, I helped devise the 1998 legislation that is now reported daily as the ‘ban’ on new grammar schools. I briefed its details to the media ahead of that Wirral visit. But ironically, while it did indeed stop new academic selection, the legislation also made it hard to close existing grammars without parental consent. And that was as much its primary purpose. Neither Blair nor Blunkett wanted to be distracted from their wider plans to improve education by a huge debate about the remaining 166 grammar schools. (A few have since merged so there are now 163).

Nearly twenty years later, the last few weeks have shown us why. Theresa May’s speech at Downing Street last week may have had four key points to it – including, interestingly, a plan to require private schools to justify their charitable status by engaging more fully in state school partnerships – but most of the acres of coverage and debate have focused on ‘plans’ for ‘new grammar schools’.

But there are real dangers in making this the big focus of education policy, let alone the cornerstone of the Government’s drive for social mobility.

The first – and most obvious – reason is that the evidence is pretty thin that grammar schools improve social mobility. In the Green Paper, the Government quotes from a lengthy 2008 Durham University report published by the Sutton Trust. That report looked at GCSE results in existing grammar schools and found that those from poorer backgrounds who are highly able do marginally better than similar pupils in comprehensives.

To quote in full from the report: “We find that pupils eligible for [free school meals] appear to suffer marginally less educational disadvantage if they attend grammar schools. The difference is equivalent to about one-eighth of a GCSE grade; although this is statistically significant, it is certainly not large. It also seems possible that FSM pupils in grammar schools may typically be quite different from FSM pupils as a whole in ways that are not well measured, so we should be cautious about interpreting this as a strong endorsement of grammar schools.”[i]

At the same time, our more recent reports from 2013 showed that less than 3% of grammar school pupils come from an FSM background, 13% come from outside the state school system, largely independent preparatory schools. Perhaps more significantly, given the focus of the Prime Minister’s speech on those on modest incomes, the Anna Vignoles and IFS research[ii] showed a direct correlation between income and likelihood of grammar entry in each IDACI quintile.

In any case, at a political level, given the strength of opposition on the Conservative benches, there is no guarantee the 1998 legislation can be overturned in the Commons, let alone the Lords, where an alliance of crossbenchers, Labour and LibDems, as well as sceptical Tories could defeat it. Where Tony Blair could turn to the Conservatives when he faced a much larger rebellion over his 2006 education reforms, in the Commons, May can only count on the DUP, a single UKIP MP and hope that the SNP see this as a solely English matter.

Even if the government passes all its legislative hurdles, the likelihood is that the ‘dash’ for grammars, as the Sunday Times had it at the weekend, will be confined to existing grammar school areas. In reality, the number of grammar school pupils has steadily increased from 129,000 to 163,000 since 1997, or from 4.0 to 5.2% of all pupils. Adding new school buildings in those areas, without pretending they are satellite schools, and a few within their catchments in outer London, will hardly match the rhetoric of recent days. There is not much evidence of demand elsewhere.

Interestingly, within the hastily produced ‘Green Paper’ this week, there was one idea[iii] that could allow a practical way forward for highly able pupils – organising support hubs for the highly able within multi-academy trusts, composed of comprehensive schools. MATs already pool resources for A-level classes, and such a model could offer a way to boost support for able students without selection at 11 and with all the flexibility that a MAT offers.

Either way, it is important that the Government doesn’t lose sight of the needs of the highly able in comprehensives. Becky Allen’s Missing Talent research for the Trust is widely quoted by ministers, and shows that between the ages of 11 and 16, a third of working class boys who are in the top tenth at Key Stage 2 are outside the top quarter by the time they get to do their GCSEs. As the selection debate grips Westminster and Whitehall, no legislation is required to ensure they get a fair deal, just action in the name of social mobility.

[i] See pages 218-219; [ii] See page 38; [iii] See page 27

Helping the highly able

In my latest Sutton Trust blog, I look at the debate around the highly able in state schools.

This week saw a flurry of activity on the issue of promoting the interests of highly able – or gifted and talented – students in state schools. With Ofsted issuing its second stinging review in two years, and Tristram Hunt announcing plans for a new ‘gifted and talented fund’ if he is elected, the issue of able students from low and middle income backgrounds has been placed firmly on the national agenda.

Ofsted’s report found that most schools had been slow in taking forward Ofsted’s previous recommendations, especially for 11-14 year-olds, and notes a degree of complacency in some. Half of all schools visited made no special provision for the highly able. Too often in those schools, the inspectors recorded a sense that ‘expected progress’ was not good enough.

It may be, as Ofsted suggests, that the new Progress 8 measure (which replaces five good GCSEs as the Level 4 benchmark from 2016) will start to change such attitudes, though a focus on the extent to which high attaining pupils (who are already singled out in the performance tables) gain at least 5As at GCSE and get into Russell Group universities and Oxbridge would be a far sharper measure. More to the point, as the Government moves towards ever less comprehensible measures on the attainment gap, there is a danger that the new data’s impenetrability to the public will reduce rather than increase accountability.

However, the bigger issue goes beyond measures of accountability. It is about the extent to which schools recognise that their most able students – those in the top 5-10% nationally, particularly from low and middle income backgrounds with whom the Sutton Trust is most concerned – need extra nurturing just as much as those who may start school as low attainers. When David Blunkett launched the first ‘gifted and talented’ provision and plans for what became the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth he saw such provision as an essential part of truly comprehensive education.

With government funding, many schools developed gifted and talented programmes, and accompanying support for Aim Higher summer schools meant that the needs of the highly able started to have a government focus that extended beyond grammar schools or even promotion of setting by subject ability, into masterclasses, university links, accelerated AS levels and other activities.

Sadly, the early energy of those programmes dissipated in the late 2000s, in part with the disbandment of the Warwick-based national centre in 2007 – I have met a number of young people at Oxford and Cambridge from modest home backgrounds whose ambitions were raised in their early teens by attending Warwick – and the lost focus that accompanied a changed contractor for the programme. Any remaining support for teachers was scrapped in 2010, ending the national drive for highly able students.

That’s why Tristram Hunt’s commitment this week to establish a national ‘gifted and talented’ fund is so welcome. It draws on ideas in our Mobility Manifesto last year and is an idea we would like to see adopted by all the political parties in the May election. Essentially his new fund would enable promising ideas to be evaluated, with schools bidding to draw down funds, using some of their own money to match government support.

The Sutton Trust has already started to develop a new programme in this space. Sutton Scholars, which started at University College, London is extending to Cambridge, Nottingham and Warwick offering an intensive two years of support to bright low and middle income students during the early years of secondary school, so they take the right subjects at GCSE that will lead on the A-levels that are in demand at leading universities.

The Trust supports over 2,100 students a year at our 10 UK and 2 US summer schools, and we greatly increase their chances of going to top universities. But we also know that we are not reaching enough able young people early enough in their education so that they have the ambition to apply for those summer schools and similar access programmes in the sixth form.

Whoever wins the next election should see provision for the highly able before GCSEs as an important a part of the access agenda as outreach in the sixth form or fee bursaries for undergraduates. We are not doing enough to harness the talents of all our young people. Ofsted’s timely report this week should be a wake-up call to all the parties in the months to May.

Early GCSEs are no scam

Today's Telegraph and Mail have found a new target in their relentless battle against the achievements of our schools and young people: the early GCSE. They tell us (with some encouragement from the exam boards, it would seem) that the main reason schools enter their students for exams early is to 'play' the league tables. This is not the case. The practice was actively encouraged for bright students, so that some they might be stretched, just as a growing number of schools have students taking AS levels a year early too. One of the most inspiring classes I ever visited was a 15-strong AS Maths class of 15 year-olds in North Liverpool Academy, a place I should imagine is entirely alien to those who try to concoct new ways to do down students each year. These were young people from some of the most disadvantaged communities in the country. Schools were actively encouraged to do this as part of Labour's 'gifted and talented' drive. Another reason why schools do some GCSEs early is to encourage young people to do a wider range of exams, and to show them that they can achieve. Others do use it is a practice run. Yes, some schools will bank the GCSEs early, but their motive is not just about the tables, it is as much about widening the achievement of their students and stretching them. But that is perhaps too noble an explanation for the shrill voices of the Tory press.

Celebrating talent

Andrew Adonis, the schools minister, has started the new year well with his plan to publish the achievements of the ablest students at Key Stage 3 in the annual performance tables. Secondary heads' leader, John Dunford of the ASCL, grumbles that schools don't really take the tests at 14 seriously. But with English and Maths now properly recorded in GCSE tables, they are increasingly going to do so. So, combining them with the gifted and talented programme is surely the sort of joined-up thinking of which he ought to approve?