Change at the chalkface

I've written this feature on the Gove legacy for the October edition of Public Finance.

David Cameron's replacement of Michael Gove with Nicky Morgan as education secretary caused consternation among reformers whilst exciting enthusiasm in many staffrooms. Reformers fear his changes will be watered down by his successor; many teachers hope the relentless pressure of change will ease.

But Gove’s legacy may lie less in academies and free schools than in the changes to the curriculum, teaching and accountability. And a focus on classroom teaching by Morgan, with her more conciliatory tone to teachers, could reap real dividends.

Academies are funded directly by the government rather than local authorities, and have had greater freedoms over the curriculum, teachers’ pay and admissions, subject to regulation and funding agreements. By May 2010, the growing programme was targeted on underachieving secondary schools, with 203 such ‘sponsored academies’ already open and 60 more due that autumn.

Gove allowed successful schools to become academies and brought primaries into the programme. Many signed up for extra cash – typically £250,000 per secondary school – as they gained control of their local authority budgets. At a time of austerity, it was a no-brainer. In return, these ‘converter academies’ would work with weaker schools. Most say they do, though the extent to which they do so varies, and academy take-up has been much slower in primary schools.

Meanwhile, Gove also introduced ‘free schools’, essentially new academies set up in response to parental demand or innovative ideas from teachers, educational and faith-based charities. The government barred local authorities from establishing any traditional community schools.

Since 2010, the number of academies has grown rapidly. There are now over 4,000 academies, including nearly two-thirds of secondary and about one in eight primary schools, as well as dozens of technical academies – 30 university technical colleges and 37 studio schools with practical curriculums and close industry links for 14- to 19-year-olds.

Sponsored academies – of which there are now 1,100 – were intended to improve standards, particularly for the poorest students, which is why Gove required many failing primaries to change status, sometimes in the teeth of strong local opposition. Downhills primary school in Tottenham, north London – now the Harris Primary Academy Philip Lane – was a particular flashpoint and the scene of strong protests. The proportion of its pupils getting the expected level 4 in reading, writing and maths rose from 69% to 77% this summer – twice the national average improvement.

And, sponsored academies generally have improved faster than other schools, albeit from a lower base. Many belong to chains – groups led by an educational charity, a university or a successful school. Sutton Trust analysis in July found that disadvantaged pupils in nine of 31 chains studied had better results than the average for all schools, while improvements in 18 chains were faster than average. Some well-known chains, like Harris and Ark, each with 27 academies, do particularly well. But the study confirmed Department for Education concerns that other chains that had grown very rapidly since 2010 were underperforming.

The DfE capped 14 academy chains in March, including the 77-school Academies Enterprise Trust. They must focus on improving their existing schools before being allowed further expansion. Ministers also forced another academy chain, E-Act, to transfer 10 of its 34 schools to other sponsors. Ofsted chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw has inspected weaker academies in co-ordinated swoops across chains, including AET, where half the 12 academies inspected were deemed inadequate. He has yet to be given the power by ministers to inspect chains as separate entities.

This mixed picture also extends to the 250 free schools now open, though few have been open long enough for a full judgment. Seventy-nine free schools opened this term and 76 more have been approved, but the programme still feels incoherent. It may be the default mechanism for new schools with rising demand for new places, but relatively few free schools result from parental action.

Instead, there is an eclectic mix of genuine teacher innovation and rebranding of existing options, including faith schools, former independent schools or new academies established by chains.
One celebrated success has been the London Academy of Excellence, a free school for sixth formers in Stratford, east London, supported by Eton and the independent Brighton College, which sent four of its 160 students to Oxbridge and 68 to Russell Group universities this year. However, the local college says it does well too: of the 75 students it admitted with the 5A* or A grades at GCSE required by LAE, 60 went to Russell Group universities and two to Oxbridge.

Other free schools have faced real difficulties. The Montessori Discovery free school in Crawley, Sussex, had to close in January after a damning Ofsted report. Anal ysis by independent factchecking organisation Full Fact of Ofsted data suggests a similar proportion of free schools were rated outstanding as other schools, but a higher proportion rated inadequate or failing, based on 40 free school inspections.

For all the arguments about academies and free schools, their impact may be more prosaic than their supporters or critics allow. Good chains have an effective model absent in weaker chains. But their success still reflects quality of leadership and teaching, and their consistent application, which may not simply be an academy effect when many schools are forming collective trusts and federations.

This is why other reforms may matter more. There is growing interest in using research evidence to inform school improvement. Since 2011, the Education Endowment Foundation, a sister charity of the Sutton Trust established with £135m of government money to help improve results for disadvantaged pupils, has used 75 randomised trials to test approaches to school improvement. Nearly half of school leaders now consult its research evidence.

Tougher accountability is making its mark too. Ofsted has put many coasting schools into special measures and placed more emphasis on good teaching, downgrading some previously top-rated schools. Gove toughened Labour’s floor targets, requiring weaker schools to achieve ever-rising minimum standards. Failure often prompts a requirement to become an academy.

However, the biggest upheaval has been to the curriculum and exams. This term, primary pupils face tougher spelling, grammar, punctuation and mental arithmetic lessons, in addition to phonics checks introduced in 2012, while secondary schools are introducing computer science, harder maths and more historical chronology. GCSE coursework, modularity and resits have been dropped, leading to a dip in English performance this year. Many vocational qualifications have been devalued or removed from the league tables.

From 2016, secondary schools will be judged on their best eight GCSE subjects, using average points, rather than the five best graded C or above as now. This builds on the English Baccalaureate, a league table measure of English, maths, science, languages and humanities results. The combined impact is intended to make exams harder and ensure that schools don’t game the league tables to conceal underlying weaknesses. However, they also make it much harder to make a fair judgment on the success of Gove’s reforms, and could force down results at once struggling schools and academies that were starting to improve.

Yet behind the flurry of change, there remains an underlying truth. The two things that make the most difference to a school’s success, particularly for poorer pupils, are the quality of its teaching and the calibre of its leaders.

Gove has introduced teaching schools, with a remit to improve teaching quality among groups of local schools, and expanded school-based teacher training. But for all the emphasis on new teachers – 35,000 are recruited each year, and their quality has been improving alongside that of school leaders – there is far too little done to improve the skills of the 450,000 serving teachers in England’s classrooms. In fact, there is much more variation in the quality of teaching within schools than there is between schools.

Improved professional development and teacher appraisal may not set reformers’ pulses racing, but they could make most difference at the chalkface. Sutton Trust research has shown that raising the quality of the weakest tenth of teachers to the average would lift England from a middling position in the OECD international league tables to the top five, and the trust is now working with the Gates Foundation to capture international best practice. That could deliver the revolution in standards that politicians want to see – in academies and community schools alike.

A voice still to be heard

I've written about the proposed College of Teaching for my latest Sutton Trust blog post.

An effective independent voice for the teaching profession is a dream that sometimes seems more elusive the closer it is to being realised. And if the experience of the General Teaching Council (GTC) for England is not to be repeated, supporters of the new College for Teaching need to take seriously the findings of our new poll today.

Advocates for what was originally called a Royal College of Teaching – but now seems to have lost the royal title if not the patronage of the Prince of Wales’ teaching institute – made their case in a carefully argued blueprint earlier this year:

In many other walks of life, professionals choose to belong to a Royal College or similar professional body which serves several critical functions: it sets standards of performance for the profession – the expectations that professionals have of one another; it translates these standards into training requirements for those entering the profession, and on-going professional development expectations for those who are qualified; it ensures that professional practice is grounded in the best up-to-date evidence; and it connects together leading researchers and practitioners so that each informs the other. In consequence, a professional body plays a crucial part in generating continuous improvement across the profession. We believe that a new College of Teaching would serve a similar function for the teaching profession.

Of course, they have a case. But independence and influence require two things to be effective:  influence requires the support of the vast majority of the profession; independence requires members rather than government to pay the bills.

Today’s National Foundation for Educational Research poll suggests the College has work to do in both respects.  As many teachers of the 1163 teachers questioned don’t know whether they support a Royal College as are in favour. 41 per cent of teachers support the College proposal, while 17 per cent are opposed and 41 per cent haven’t made up their minds yet. Support is higher among secondary teachers – at 45 per cent - than among primary teachers, where 37 per cent are in favour. It is also higher among school leaders.

When those who express support for the college concept were asked how much they would be prepared annually for membership, 26 per cent said they wouldn’t be prepared to pay for it and most of the rest were unwilling to pay more than £30 a year to be a member.

Given the fate of the GTC in England, which was finally abolished unloved in 2012, these are troubling numbers. Not only is there a lack of awareness and enthusiasm for the idea among teachers, there is an unwillingness to pay a modest price for membership among the majority of supporters.

The GTC foundered initially on a bitter dispute about the cost of affiliation – which, to be fair, was compulsory – and this led in the end to the Government paying all but a fraction of the annual affiliation fee.  As Estelle Morris, the schools minister who delivered the GTC that was a longstanding demand of many in the teaching profession, including the unions, has put it in the Guardian:

In retrospect, we seemed to define professional self-regulation as dealing with professional misconduct. So while this was devolved to the GTC, the responsibility to set professional standards, influence training and qualifications and build a framework for professional development were all retained by the government. Together with the unhelpful approach of some teaching unions, which treated its creation as a turf war, it wasn't perhaps surprising that the GTC didn't win the hearts and minds of the profession.

Her argument is that a new College should be responsible for teaching quality – which it should champion and is the subject of the Trust’s new partnership with the Gates Foundation – and teacher qualifications if it is to be a serious professional body. And though she doesn’t say it, it must not become a playground for the unions. As she adds:

There can be no better way of enhancing the reputation of the profession than to establish in the minds of the public that it is teachers' professional skills not the structural change so loved by governments that will improve standards for children.

Another prominent supporter of the College, the Conservative MP Charlotte Leslie envisages a professional body getting a grip on poor standards:

A Royal College can also sort out another concern for ministers: how to deal with really bad teaching. We would not tolerate an incompetent surgeon, but a bad teacher can have a devastating effect on a child’s life. If teaching is to be seen as equally professional as medicine, it must have equally exacting standards. A professional organisation, determined to maintain the proud reputation of excellent teaching, would have the credibility, sensitivity and authority to challenge and raise low standards.

Yet, for any Government to be ready to trust the new college, it will need not only to avoid being a union talking shop; it must positively become the true voice of the profession.

The recent blueprint is quite bold in the range of tasks it envisages the College acquiring. It talks of expecting its members to embark on a ‘professional journey’ from subject knowledge to leadership, with certification en route. It plans to run professional development itself and also kitemark external courses. It wants to curate research (something the Sutton Trust/EEF Toolkit is already doing) and share knowledge.

To do all this, it envisages a voluntary membership paying £70-£130 a year in membership fees, which as the blueprint rightly notes, is lower than many comparable bodies, yet is rather more than teachers told NFER they would be willing to pay.

Supporters of the College argue that when the benefits of membership are explained, support rises as does teachers’ willingness to pay a reasonable fee. And there is clearly much to be said for a truly effective teachers’ professional body.

However, all these ambitions will not be realised unless the idea sparks real enthusiasm among those whose support it most needs.

Freedom to teach well?

In my latest Sutton Trust blog, I note that arguments over free schools miss the importance of reducing in-school differences in the quality of teaching.

The damning Ofsted report on the Al-Madinah free school in Derby has invigorated a lively debate on a flagship policy of the coalition. It should also prompt some soul-searching about the balance between structures and standards in school improvement policy.

Free schools were introduced in 2010 as part of a ramping up of the academy model introduced by Labour. Academies share a number of characteristics: they are funded centrally rather than through local government, which means they receive more of the funds that are otherwise pooled locally; they have freedoms to vary non-core subjects in the national curriculum. They can set their own pay scales; and like foundation and voluntary-aided schools, they have freedom over their land and buildings, though these remain in trust. Under the original model, all academies had to have sponsors: academy chains or trusts, universities, philanthropists or successful schools. An initial expectation that sponsors made a financial contribution was dropped.

Labour’s academies were largely targeted at failing secondary schools in disadvantaged areas. There were some exceptions: a small number of independent schools entered the state sector as academies and a couple of outstanding schools were allowed to convert in return for sponsoring weaker schools in new chains. The academy chain model developed at this time, with organisations like Ark, Harris and United Learning growing significantly.

The coalition extended this sponsor model to primary schools, though its initial focus was on allowing successful schools to convert: half the 3200 secondaries in England are now academies, though fewer than 10 per cent of primaries are. They also created a model for new academies which they called free schools. Legally, they are little different from academies, though opponents have seized on the fact that all their teachers do not have to have qualified teacher status. If they have a faith character, they are also expected to keep 50% of places for those of other or no faiths, though the nature of some faith schools is such that this stricture is unlikely to be invoked.

Sponsored academies have had positive research results, Stephen Machin and James Vernoit at the London School of Economics, in a 2011 report, which looked at the academies that started between 2001 and 2008, concluded:

Our results suggest that moving to a more autonomous school structure through academy conversion generates a significant improvement in the quality of their pupil intake and a significant improvement in pupil performance. We also find significant external effects on the pupil intake and the pupil performance of neighbouring schools. All of these results are strongest for the schools that have been academies for longer and for those who experienced the largest increase in their school autonomy. In essence, the results paint a (relatively) positive picture of the academy schools that were introduced by the Labour government of 1997‐2010. The caveat is that such benefits have, at least for the schools we consider, taken a while to materialise.

However, this research was focused on sponsored academies. The selling point – or problem, depending on your perspective - with free schools is that there is no single model. So just as the experience of the Derby Muslim school cannot be translated to the Bristol Cathedral School’s primary that was celebrated on the Today programme this morning, the success stories of some free schools won’t necessarily translate into successes for others run on very different lines. And that is as true of academy chains, where some models appear more successful than others.

It may be that critics are right to demand greater regulation, and certainly financial controls will be hugely important, but it is surely as likely that the biggest determinants of success and failure will lie in the quality of leadership (including in the sponsors) and the quality of teaching. The successful academy chains have very clear approaches to leadership and teaching. Moreover, international evidence is that variation in teaching standards is greater within schools than between schools.  OECD research highlighted by the National College has shown that as much as 80 per cent of the variation in achievement among UK students lay within schools, four times more than that between schools.

In a separate report for the Sutton Trust, Eric Hanushek from Stanford, with Stephen Machin and Richard Murphy at the LSE, have shown that English schools could improve their low position in international league tables in Reading and Mathematics and become one of the top five education performers in the world within 10 years if the performance of the country’s least effective teachers was brought up to the national average. Richard Murphy’s March report for the Trust highlighted how schools can use appraisal to improve performance, and it is an area where the Sutton Trust will do more research in the coming year.

The truth is, whatever the arguments over school structures, it is in improving the quality of our 430,000-strong teaching workforce that the greatest gains in standards can be made. Those free schools and academies that successfully narrow that gap are the ones that will succeed.

Testing teachers

I wrote this blog post for Independent Voices on why improved test scores are a far better measure of success than student surveys

Good teaching is at the heart of good schools. We have done a lot to improve the quality of new teachers, but there has been much less focus on the quality of the existing workforce. Yet, while 35,000 new teachers enter the profession each year, the teacher workforce is 440,000-strong.

Schools need to make the most of teachers’ talents if young people are to get a decent education. For a disadvantaged pupil, an excellent teacher can deliver the equivalent of 1.5 years learning in a year, whereas a poor teacher contributes just half a year: the difference is a whole year of a child’s education.

That’s why it is important we evaluate the contribution that teachers are making and can make with the right support. A new Sutton Trust study, Testing Teachers, shows that the contribution that teachers make to improving exam and test results is the most reliable way to predict a teacher’s long-term success.

The study, by Richard Murphy of the London School of Economics, drawing on the latest international research, shows that improved test scores are nearly twice as effective as student surveys and nearly three times more effective as classroom observations.

But schools can’t simply look at a single year’s test scores to assess performance. A reliable and fair approach requires a sensible combination of these and other measures taken over several years, and might also include teachers’ contributions to sports and school trips.

When Labour introduced performance related pay in 1999, it did so within a very bureaucratic framework that didn’t work as intended in most schools. By contrast, the education secretary Michael Gove is hoping that leaving schools to develop their own systems will improve results and see the best teachers more effectively rewarded.

But without the right systems in place, schools may be no readier to do so now than they were in the past. So what are the characteristics of an effective system of teacher appraisal?

Most importantly, it should involve clear standards, fairly and consistently applied. External advice can be helpful in getting this right, and could assure staff of its fairness and governors of its robustness.

Teachers or school leaders involved in evaluation should be properly trained, and should discuss their evaluation fully with the teachers concerned.

When using exam or test results, it is important to focus on value added rather than absolute results, as they are the most objective and comparable assessment of a teacher’s contribution. It is also important that the baseline for such comparisons is sufficiently robust.

With classroom observations – where teachers or school leaders witness teaching in practice – the report suggests that those designed to help a teacher improve should be carried out separately from those used for appraisal, as this is more likely to promote honest feedback.

Pupil surveys can also be used – particularly with older pupils – as they are the ones in most day-to-day contact with teachers, but when they are they should be clearly structured, be age appropriate, and should complement other measures.

Getting all this right can have real benefits for pupils and teachers alike. Earlier research for the Sutton Trust has shown that if we were to raise the performance of the poorest performing tenth of teachers to the average, we would move into the top rank of the OECD’s PISA tables internationally.

But there is a more compelling reason: by improving the quality of our teachers collectively, we can ensure that every child has a decent education, and is not held back by poor teaching. That is a goal well worth pursuing.