No legislation is no bad thing

This is my latest Sutton Trust blog post

When I was a special adviser at the Department for Education in the late 1990s, it was seen as a measure of a Department’s success the extent to which it achieved legislation in the Queen’s Speech. This essentially macho test often led to more legislation than was strictly necessary to achieve policy goals.

Many people forget that although the Labour government needed legislation to restrict most infant class sizes to 30, it needed no legislation to introduce the literacy and numeracy hours in primary schools. The latter were the result of a mix of persuasion and accountability, and were arguably more effective as a result.

And legislation was too often used as a way to trumpet changes that could have been introduced less dramatically. Trust schools – the centrepiece of Tony Blair’s 2005 education reforms – were a good example. As with Michael Gove’s first academies legislation, the essential architecture was already in place, and what changes were needed could have been introduced with less fanfare through regulations.

So, it is no bad thing that there was no education legislation in this year’s Queen’s Speech. Of course, that didn’t stop the Government using the occasion from getting Her Majesty to remind Parliament of changes already in train, such as the curriculum overhaul or performance pay for teachers.

But nobody would argue that Michael Gove is any less powerful because he hasn’t got a fifty or a hundred clause bill to take through Parliament over the next twelve months. And I doubt any of his junior ministers – who would be tasked with the legwork – is overly concerned either.

However, what it does mean is that it is all the more important that changes the Government is introducing get the scrutiny they deserve, and that they are subjected to the sort of rigorous evaluation – usually through randomised control trials – that the Sutton Trust and the Education Endowment Foundation are using.

That is important not just for ministers who want to ensure that their reforms are making a difference to results, particularly for the poorest pupils, but also if they are to gain buy-in from teachers and headteachers.

With more than half of all secondary schools now having academy status, as well as a growing number of free schools and university technical colleges, schools are getting used to having more freedoms than before. And while complex legislation can be important on some issues – such as ensuring a fair admissions code – it is a blunt instrument over issues such as the curriculum or performance related pay.

Over-complexity militates against successful reform. When Estelle Morris first introduced performance pay in 2000, the intervention of the teaching unions ensured the whole process was wrapped in endless bureaucracy.

Leave aside for a moment the perfectly valid issue of the impact of PRP on attainment – though Gerard Kelly’s recent TES piece show why in this case there are other issues to consider – the real problem is that legal issues come to outweigh the flexibility that allows heads to reward good teachers in a straightforward way. A less complex system may prove to be more effective in overcoming the culture against PRP in some schools. And we might then have some serious research on the issue too.

But those increasingly independent state schools will equally need to be persuaded on the curriculum – including on the detail now planned in subjects like history – and on other issues where ministers feel strongly. As they do so, it is important that they use evidence rather than past practice or even DFE guidance to make their decisions.

That’s why the increasing popularity of the Sutton Trust/EEF Toolkit is so important. Next week, we plan to publish new evidence of just how popular it is becoming. But in the meantime, we should reflect that giving Michael Gove and schools a break from the 2014 Education Act is not only no bad thing, it may allow the breathing space needed for genuine reform to take place.

Are fees putting off working class boys?

In my latest Sutton Trust blog, I look at new evidence suggesting that working class boys may be being deterred more than girls by higher university tuition fees.

Students are well into the first year of higher tuition fees. While 54,000 fewer young people started university in 2012 than in 2011, the Government has been congratulating itself that the dip was not much greater.

And the water has been muddied by the changes in student controls that took effect just as the £9000 fee cap was introduced. Moreover, this year’s applications suggest that there is some improvement on last year’s dip.

So is all well in the world of higher fees?

The truth is it is too early to tell. And a new report this week from the Independent Commission on Fees highlights a number of areas where there is some cause for concern.

The first is what’s happening to boys, particularly working class boys. The Commission’s study of UCAS acceptance data has shown not only that the gender gap continues to widen, but that it appears even more pronounced in the lower participation neighbourhoods.

Women are now a third more likely to enter higher education than men, according to HEFCE, and the gender gap seems to have widened as a result of the new fees regime. Among UK residents, 143,600 women aged 19 and under were accepted to English universities in 2012 compared with 118,952 young men.

This represents a decline since 2010 of 2.6% for girls and 4.0% for boys, and a 5.9% decline for girls and a 7.5% decline for boys since 2011.

But in the 40% of English neighbourhoods where university participation is lowest, there were 1700 fewer boys aged 19 and under who were accepted for places in 2012 than in 2011. This represents a decline of 5.4% in the number of young men from these areas going to university this year. By contrast, the fall in the number of young women from these neighbourhoods going to university was smaller, at just 3.7%.

Perhaps of more interest, since it discounts any surge into 2011 to avoid the higher fees, when compared with 2010, the number of young male acceptances fell by 1.4%, while young female acceptances increased by 0.9%. By contrast, between 2009 and 2010, male and female acceptances rose.

In England, while the overall change in the gender gap in the less disadvantaged neighbourhoods was 1.6 percentage points between 2010 and 2012, the overall change in the gender gap in more disadvantaged neighbourhoods was greater, at 2.3 percentage points.

Although the decline in male participation in the most advantaged neighbourhoods was even larger, 20,000 more boys go to university each year from the two top fifth neighbourhoods than from the two bottom fifth neighbourhoods.

It means that the female: male ratio is now nearly 57:43 in the less advantaged neighbourhoods whereas it is closer to 53:47 in the more advantaged neighbourhoods.

With 2013 applications, UCAS has suggested that this gap is persisting. Its January applications report noted that 18 year women remain a third more likely in England to apply to university than men, but this rises to 50 per cent in disadvantaged areas.

If this is the case, it suggests that the information about the new loan repayments may be proving more attractive to young women than to young men, or that young men from disadvantaged areas are less likely to believe that the cost of a degree is worth it. Either way, there is a challenge here for policymakers to meet.

The Commission’s new report has two other important findings that should cause policymakers to take pause. The first is the familiar data on mature students – those aged 20 and over – who had 7.6% fewer acceptances in 2012 than in 2010, more than twice the 3.3% decline for younger students as a whole.

The decision to allow part-timers to have access to student loans hasn’t seen full-timers move to part-time courses either. HEFCE has shown a dramatic drop in part-time numbers, with 105,000 fewer students since 2010, or a 40% drop.

This is important for access, as studying later is an important route to social mobility for those from less advantaged backgrounds, and it is vital that the impact of fees on this group is not neglected just because the reductions among young people are smaller.

As the new President of Birkbeck College, Baroness Bakewell, put it at the weekend:

Part-time study is crucial for our society. It improves skills and kick-starts new careers – exactly what we need for the economy, employers and individuals during these difficult economic times. In response to the dramatic downturn in part-time students nationwide, unprecedented support is needed now to ensure part-time study thrives in future.
 

And the other key finding is perhaps a warning shot at this stage, but one that will need closer scrutiny as the university-level data becomes clear.

While there has been an increase in the numbers of young people from the most disadvantaged areas going to the least selective universities, there has been minimal improvement in the numbers going to the Sutton Trust’s list of the 30 more selective universities (which includes the 24 Russell Group members) and a small dip in the numbers going to the Sutton Trust 13 most selective group.

While the only rises to the Sutton Trust 30 were in the lower participation neighbourhoods, the only quintile showing a dip in acceptances to the Sutton Trust 13 was the lowest participation group. This means that there is a widening gap between this group and other more advantaged areas, and those from the richest fifth of neighbourhoods are ten times more likely to attend these universities than those in the poorest fifth of neighbourhoods.

Closer scrutiny of patterns among individual selective universities will be important here. Already, there is some evidence from HESA data that in 2011, the proportion of new undergraduates from state schools and colleges at the 13 top universities slipped for the fourth year in succession.

There is clearly an important issue for the most selective universities and their recruitment from the poorest neighbourhoods – and it is one that the Sutton Trust will return to shortly. The Trust has also commissioned the Institute of Fiscal Studies to examine the potential impact of students leaving university with debts likely to exceed £40,000 on their ability to afford graduate study, buying a house, and having children. Their findings will be published later this year.

So, the truth is that the jury is still out on fees. We need to see whether these findings for 2012 become clearer trends in the next few years. It is vital, meanwhile, that Government, universities and schools do all they can to reach young people with the ability and potential to benefit from university, particularly in areas where university participation is already low.

Access and the Avalanche

In my latest Sutton Trust blog, I look a new report suggesting that the days of many traditional universities are numbered in the face of online and mass delivery challenges.

In 1926, John Clarke Stobart, the classical scholar and Children’s Hour creator who was also the first BBC Director of Education, had the idea that there might be a ‘wireless university’, bringing learning to the masses in a way that traditional universities, then the preserve of a small elite, could not achieve. What followed was rather less ambitious: a series of 25 minute talks supplemented by study aid pamphlets.

It would be another four decades before Jennie Lee started to develop her ideas for what would become the Open University in 1969. Those of us old enough to remember the late night OU broadcasts will forever have the image of the typical OU lecture from the 1970s imprinted on our minds.

Nevertheless, despite an initial lack of technical sophistication, the Open University helped over 1.6 million people to gain a higher education. More recently, it has embraced the Internet with the enthusiasm due to a medium well suited to its ambitious approach to access, and it now boasts some 250,000 students worldwide with 1200 academic staff and 7000 tutors. Its model of delivery has been picked up across the world, not least in fast-growing large nations like India and China.

Reading the fascinating new report from Michael Barber and his colleagues for the IPPR this week, one couldn’t help but think of the profound changes that the Open University made in providing access to higher education for many people, initially on TV and latterly via the Internet.

At the same time, the model did not prove as disruptive as it might have to traditional universities which now educate nearly half the young adult population in ways not so different from the approach taken when J C Stobart was expounding his Reithian mission. Nor, despite its often impressive academic credentials, has it managed to challenge the grip of the elite universities in the UK.

Barber and his colleagues argue persuasively that an ‘avalanche’ is coming in higher education which will completely transform the delivery and – in many respects – the nature of higher education. They say all universities face key challenges including the traditional degree structure, the need for specialisation, their links to employability and a devaluing of the worth of an ordinary primary degree.

Of course, we have had some false starts before. I remember all too well what happened to the ill-fated e-university initiative, a construct that was perhaps too premature. Yet, with the growth of Massive Open Online Courses – bearing the unattractive acronym of MOOCs – the world could potentially become a smaller place for students. A relatively small but growing number of UK students now prefer to study in the US – some with the support of Sutton Trust summer schools.

But some US universities including Harvard, MIT and Berkeley, using the EdX platform, are putting many courses and lectures online, opening them up to mass audiences. In developing countries, online may be the only way to achieve mass higher education, but how much will it affect tradition universities in developed nations?

Barber et al argue that it will require universities to adopt one of five models: the elite, the mass, the niche, the local or the lifelong learning. That may well be true. Equally, they point to the impact of rising fees on students as consumers, and their rising expectations as a result. Students may start to demand more contact time and fewer enforced holidays.

Already there are concerns that few students complete MOOC courses, with dropout rates as high as 90 per cent, though that could also reflect differing motivations for signing up. It may well be that students without a higher education tradition at home are the least likely to be able to sustain such course options. However, universities cannot afford to be complacent, and must acquire far more flexibility in their approach if they are to remain relevant in this brave new world, both in their traditional and online delivery.

Universities will have to make the case for an experience that is collaborative, and which opens students up to networks that still feel more real than the social media alternatives that are supposed to act as substitutes. As importantly, they will need to show that they are delivering it.

Of course, that may mean new ways of doing things. Warwick University, which ran some excellent summer schools for gifted and talented school students in the first decade of this century, has recently created a new online network – IGGY - that it wants to blend with face-to-face activities and use that as a way to encourage able students of all backgrounds to network.

Whatever the mode of delivery, access will surely be as important an issue to all the new types of university as it is to traditional institutions. MOOCs must not become the poor man or woman’s alternative to a place at Harvard or Cambridge, which seem unlikely to forfeit their prestige or their role in developing leaders in all fields. Unless we are careful, there is a real danger they will do so.

If elite institutions are here to stay, as Barber et al believe they are, new levels of global competition for talent will make it more important than ever to harness brainpower from the whole of society, not just a narrow elite. That social mobility challenge seems no more destined to disappear than the great universities of the world and their formidable brands.

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.
 

Can we get a secondary consensus?

In my latest Sutton Trust blog, I look at the implications of last week’s announcements on secondary school exams and the curriculum by Michael Gove. This is written in a personal capacity.

Last Thursday’s unexpected U-turn by Education Secretary Michael Gove over his plans to replace GCSEs was presented by some as a sign that the most sure-footed cabinet minister in the coalition had come unstuck.

Yet a closer look at what actually happened suggests that though his plans may not have had the full rebranding he envisaged, they remain rather more intact than commentators have suggested.

While reformed GCSEs will no longer be known as EBCs, other changes announced last week could still have a profound effect on schools, what they teach and how they are assessed.

Alongside the confessional appearance in the Commons, Gove also unveiled his plans for the national curriculum, a radical change in the key league table measure for GCSEs and confirmed his plans for those exams to remain linear and become more demanding.

The draft national curriculum makes little change to range of subjects that students take – computing replaces ICT, but PSHE, citizenship and PE remain statutory requirements, even if their programmes of study are sharper and less prescriptive.

The level of prescription in subjects like history – which is now wholly chronological – and English which has a level of detail on grammar unseen since the literacy hour – stands in sharp contrast to the notion that schools would be increasingly free to decide for themselves what they would do. Teachers are freer to decide how to teach, but are much more circumscribed in what they must teach, at least until the age of 14 (and, at least for core subjects, to 16).

In that context, it was particularly surprising that Gove dropped plans to move towards a single exam board for each GCSE syllabus. He may have done so on the advice of Ofqual and worries about European competition law, but it was a reform that had wide support outside the exam boards and should be revisited.

The context for the new Gove curriculum was set out in a speech to the Social Market Foundation last Tuesday, where his belief that a core body of knowledge should lie at the heart of schools was set out more sharply than ever before, with the Conservative Secretary of State choosing the Italian Marxist father of Euro-Communism, Antonio Gramsci as his chief witness, alongside more familiar contemporary advocates such as the American academic E.D. Hirsch.

At the same time, Gove is proposing a number of changes to the league tables, which could have even more wide-ranging impacts on what schools teach.

Instead of measuring schools primarily on five good GCSEs – at C grade or above – including English and Maths, they will be measured on English and Maths grade Cs and on an average point score based on a student’s best eight subjects.

What might all this mean for social mobility and for disadvantaged students? On the one hand, there is a lot to be said for bringing greater clarity to the body of knowledge that children should learn. The curriculum had, arguably, lost the clarity it had in 2000 and earlier versions, and many will welcome this. It is also right to encourage greater breadth – and that would be welcome at A-level as well as GCSE, as Peter Lampl has argued recently.

The challenge – and test – for the new curriculum will be the extent to which it is adopted by academies, the 50 per cent of secondary schools that are free to choose most of their own curriculum, and the extent to which today’s parents expect them to adopt it.

There is a perfectly good argument – as Gove made in his SMF speech – that children need a body of knowledge if they are to benefit fully from acquiring the research and study skills that most teachers – and the evidence from the Sutton Trust/EEF toolkit – suggest can play a big role in boosting attainment. A false dichotomy has been created between knowledge and skills, and both need to be seen as an important part of children’s educational development.

Of course, for students who go to university, it is right that they should be encouraged to take a strong suite of academic subjects, and it is to be hoped that the new GCSEs have the rigour to bring an end to the soul-destroying annual ritual of criticising the achievements of young people at the moment when they learn how well they have done in their exams.

Yet a big gap in the Government’s thinking lies in what happens after the age of 14 to those for whom a more vocational or technical education would be more motivating. EBCs may be gone but the EBacc remains, and will lie at the heart of the 8-GCSE measure in the new league tables. For students taking 8 GCSEs, it is perfectly reasonable to expect them to take five EBacc subjects, and they now have a chance to have achievements in other subjects like art, technology and religious education recognised. This has pleased those lobbying for such recognition.

Kenneth Baker’s University Technical Colleges start students on technical and vocational pathways from age 14. Further education colleges will be able to recruit from that age. Yet because of the undoubted abuses of vocational equivalences in the past, all technical and vocational qualifications, regardless of depth and intensity, have equal weight in the league tables.

The Government still has to find a satisfactory way of recognising the achievements of those who take a more technical curriculum, and it should use the reformed league tables to do so. To argue this point is to be neither Luddite nor defeatist, but it is to recognise that for some students – a minority maybe but at all ability levels – an academic curriculum post-14 will not enable them to fulfil their potential.

There is a real chance to develop a lasting consensus on education, one that outlives changes in Government, and one that caters for the needs of every child at different phases of their education. Last week’s suite of announcements could herald a different approach. For that to happen, the consultations on the curriculum and league tables need to be as open to reasonable change as that on GCSE reform turned out to have been.

The Trouble with Boys

My latest Sutton Trust blog post looks at research on white working class boys.

Universities minister David Willetts was quick off the blocks for 2013 with his ideas on how to encourage white working class boys to go to university.

Young women are now a third more likely than young men to go to university, and there is a three-fold gap in applications between the poorest and richest neighbourhoods. In an article and interview for The Independent, Mr Willetts said that the education system “seems to make it harder for boys and men to face down the obstacles in the way of learning.

He told the paper that the Office for Fair Access “look at a range of disadvantaged groups – social class and ethnicity, for instance – when it comes to access agreements, so I don’t see why they couldn’t look at white, working-class boys.”

The Minister has a point. Growing research in recent years suggests that white working class boys perform less well than many minority ethnic communities in their test and exam results.

Stephen Machin and Sandra McNally, in a 2006 LSE study, identified a stronger gender gap in secondary than primary schools. They argued that “the importance of coursework in the GCSE examination is likely to be a key explanation for the emergence of the gender gap at age 16.” They also identified differences in teaching and learning styles, and modes of assessment.

In 2007, Joseph Rowntree Foundation research, conducted by Robert Cassen and Geeta Kingdon, with some Sutton Trust input, found that nearly half of all students defined as low achievers were White British males. White British students on average – boys and girls – were more likely than other ethnic groups to persist in low achievement.

National College research by Denis Mongon and Christopher Chapman from Manchester University with the National Union of Teachers in 2008 suggested that some school leaders were better than others at narrowing this gap. They suggested a focus on clear strategies including relentless application of the highest standards in teaching and attention to data detail were key where the gap was lower.

They rightly pointed out that the social class gap is much wider than any gender gap, yet the data suggest that white working class boys are at an even greater disadvantage than white working class girls. This lower attainment can translate into lower ambitions, as reflected in applications to Sutton Trust summer schools – an important route for many low and middle income young people into leading universities.

Sutton Trust summer schools target the first child in families who might go to university. In 2012, there were 5,295 applicants from girls and 2,712 from boys, a ratio of 2:1. Even with a slightly higher acceptance rate among boys than girls, 62% of attendees were girls and just 38% boys.

Recent exam data bears out both the gender and socio-economic gaps. The 2012 Key Stage Test data suggests that 60% of White British boys eligible for free school meals reach level 2 in English and Maths, compared with 67% of White British FSM girls. This is larger than the three point gender gap among all other pupils. However, there is a six-point gender gap across all FSM pupils. The big difference is in English, where the gender gap among FSM pupils is 12 points.

On the main 5 GCSE indicator (including English and Maths), 2011 data (2012 data is due later this month). shows that 26% of White British FSM boys reached this standard compared with 32% of girls, a slightly smaller gender gap than exists for all other pupils, but one consistent with the gap at age eleven. On overall performance, only traveller boys perform worse now at GCSE. 33% of Black Caribbean boys, for example, now reach the 5 GCSE standard (though overall White British students perform ten points better than Black Caribbean students).

So what can we do? David Willetts is surely right to want universities to provide concerted help through summer schools over several years to lift aspirations. The Trust is planning to use this approach through programmes with Kent academies and working with University College London to support highly able pupils from Year 8 onwards over five years.

Of course, Michael Gove’s changes to the exam system and curriculum – more facts, more end-of-course testing – may reduce the overall gender gap, as girls are believed to perform better in coursework.

But, in addition to OFFA looking more closely at the data, a more concerted focus on white working class boys could also be productive. When the Labour government targeted Afro-Caribbean achievement in the late 1990s, after the Stephen Lawrence murder, it set clear goals and a strong focus that has particularly benefited FSM pupils. The London Challenge will have been of particular benefit, with its strong focus on leadership, teaching and data.

Today, our sister charity, the Education Endowment Foundation is testing the most effective ways to lifting achievement for pupils in receipt of free school meals, and has the potential to make a real difference in narrowing attainment gaps. 70% of its target group is White British.

The experience of minority ethnic communities suggests cultural change is also important. Bangladeshi students used to perform relatively poorly in schools. Now they out-perform White British students overall, and 56% of Bangladeshi students eligible for free school meals – including 53% of FSM boys – reach the five GCSE benchmark. That change owes a lot to a community’s desire to learn, backed by parents and teachers working to meet that desire.

Harnessing a similar will to learn in white working class communities must be a part of the solution to the low attainment of too many of their boys – and girls.

Turning the global league tables

Last week’s publication of a new global education league table by the Economist Intelligence Unit and Pearson raised some eyebrows with its claim that the UK’s education system now ranks sixth in the developed world.

After all, on the same day, the Chief Inspector, Sir Michael Wilshaw was using the data from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to make a case that English schools must do better if we are to match global competitors in the future.

The UK scores around average in PISA for reading and mathematical literacy, and a little above average for scientific literacy, based on tests of 15 year-olds. This places UK schools 25th for reading, 28th for maths and 16th for science, out of 65 countries.

Pearson has aggregated this PISA data with other studies from the Trends In International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which measures international trends in mathematics and science achievement of 9 and 13 year-olds, and the Progress In International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) which just focuses on the reading achievement of 9 year-olds – those in fourth grade.

The Pearson Learning Curve report also includes some UNESCO data to create a ranking of countries that looks at both cognitive skills and educational attainment. For cognitive skills, they use PISA, PIRLS and TIMSS, and for attainment they use UNESCO data on adult literacy and OECD data on graduation rates at the end of secondary school and at university.

PISA and TIMSS/PIRLS measure different things and do so at different ages. The primary difference is that TIMSS/PIRLS looks at what you been taught in a particular subject and how much you have learnt, whereas PISA looks at what you are able to do with the science you have been taught. PISA is more about the practical application of your knowledge.

The Learning Curve report also draws wider conclusions and lessons for education policymakers, including the importance of good teachers, a strong pro-education culture and on the best ways to engage parents.

But how does it reach so different a conclusion from PISA on the comparative health of the UK education system? It does so quite easily, in fact, and it is all in the weightings. And in looking at how it reaches the conclusions it does, there are also lessons on how one should use such league tables.

First, on PISA, the Pearson/EIU index has fewer countries than PISA in its list, so removing those countries and only using Hong Kong for China (PISA includes Shanghai and Macao too) elevates the UK four places higher in reading and science and six places higher in Maths. The new index is more interested in a country’s relationship to the mean than its ranking, so bunching around the mean in PISA would also reduce ranking differentials.

Second, on PIRLS and TIMSS, England and Wales score significantly better on these tables (some of which exclude other major developed nations such as France, Finland and New Zealand) than on PISA. Although Scotland scores lower, the UK average remains strong. Because TIMSS has both Grade 4 and Grade 8 tests, the combined value of PIRLS and TIMSS is stronger than that for PISA.

And finally, although the UK is rated 6^th overall, it is only ranked 11^th for cognitive skills – those measured by PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS – and its higher rating on the overall table owes more to adult literacy and graduation rates.

Add in all these factors, and look at the weighting given to each factor in the report. The default weight for the Index is two-thirds to cognitive skills and one-third to educational attainment. Within the cognitive skills category, the Grade 8 tests’ score accounts for 60% while the Grade 4 tests’ score accounts for 40% (Reading, Maths and Science all account for equal weights).

 So, the PISA reading and Maths scores combined, where the UK is weakest, only account for 20% of a country’s ranking, and PISA science another 6.7%. But because PIRLS and TIMSS are available at Grade 4 and Grade 8, they will be worth 26.7% for the Grade 4 and 13.3% for the Grade 8, a total of 40%. The HE and adult literacy scores are worth a further 33.3% between them.

Perhaps a bigger issue than the rankings is what the tables do not reveal about education in the UK, particularly the absence of any measure in the Pearson/EIU table of the attainment gap or of social mobility. One recent OECD report, for example, said that only Russia and the Czech Republic had a more socially segregated schools system.

The big gaps in attainment between pupils on free school meals and their peers in GCSEs are another important indicator – other countries have narrower gaps in attainment, as we demonstrated at our social mobility summit in May.

And the rankings should also look at how well countries perform with their most able students. Sutton Trust analysis earlier this year showed that, in maths, just 1.7% of 15-year-olds attained the very highest PISA level (level 6), compared with an OECD average of 3.1%, placing England 26^th out of 34 countries.

The new index is an important step forward in consolidating international data. But any such league table is dependent on the quality and range of inputs. As the Economist Intelligence Unit and Pearson develop the index, they should consider adding measures of mobility and the achievements of the most able to give a fuller picture of the success of national education systems.

This posting first appeared at the Sutton Trust blog. It was also quoted by Anne McElvoy on the Economist Blighty blog.

Making the pupil premium go further

I've written this piece in my capacity as Director of Research and Communications for the Sutton Trust for the first edition of Teaching Leaders Quarterly:

 

Times are tough in schools, as across the public sector. But there is one element of the school budget that is growing, and is set to grow further. The pupil premium, worth £600 this year, is set to rise to £900 next year and could reach £1200 per pupil by 2015, the year of the next election. The average school receives £53,000 this year, and more than 2800 receive more than £100,000. The challenge for school leaders is in how to use that money where it will have most impact.

 

The premium was created by the Government to narrow the attainment gap between pupils in receipt of free school meals and their schoolmates, and to encourage successful schools to take more disadvantaged pupils. Although previous governments have provided extra resources for such pupils through extra funding to local authorities with high levels of poverty, this is the first grant that is paid to schools for each disadvantaged pupil, regardless of where the school is located.

 

There is certainly a real issue. England has one of the most divided education systems in the developed world.  Recent research has shown that our schools are among the most segregated in the OECD. According to Department for Education statistics, only 35 per cent of pupils eligible for free school meals achieved five good GCSEs, including English and Maths, in 2011 compared to 62 per cent of all other pupils. At the end of primary school, 58 per cent of pupils eligible for free school meals achieved the expected level in both English and mathematics in 2011, compared with 78 per cent of all other pupils. The premium is intended to narrow those gaps, which despite some small improvements, have remained stubbornly large over recent years.

 

Moreover, England is relatively unusual in having a gap that widens after the start of secondary school. The Government has not ring-fenced the pupil premium money, although schools are now expected to publish details of their pupil premium spending on their websites. The attainment of pupils in receipt of the premium will also be included in the league tables.

 

Nevertheless, with many budgets frozen, it can be tempting for school leaders to try to focus spending on simply maintaining or expanding staff numbers. And it is here that school leaders, including middle leaders heading teaching departments, have a particularly important role.

The National Foundation for Education Research, in a survey of 1700 teachers in 1200 English schools for the Sutton Trust earlier this year, showed that little of the pupil premium allocation for 2012-13 – a sum worth £1.25 billion in total – was likely to be spent on activities proven to be the best bets for boosting attainment.

 

Eight per cent of teachers said the money would offset other budget cuts. 28 per cent said it would either be used to employ new staff or cut class sizes. A further 28 per cent didn’t know how the money would be used.

A more recent survey of 260 school leaders for Ofsted found that only one in ten school leaders said that the pupil premium had significantly changed the way that they supported pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. School leaders commonly told inspectors that they were using the funding to maintain or enhance existing provision rather than to put in place new initiatives. The most common use was to pay for teaching assistants.

Yet the evidence shows that simply employing more teachers or assistants, and deploying them as they have been deployed in the past, is a costly but relatively ineffective way of boosting attainment. Researchers at Durham University assessed 21 different interventions for both impact on attainment and relative cost and helped the Sutton Trust to create a toolkit which a growing number of schools are using to set priorities for the premium. The toolkit will be updated and expanded by our sister organisation, the Education Endowment Foundation, in 2013.

The Sutton Trust/EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit shows that there are three strategies that schools can undertake with a high impact at relatively low cost. Using evidence from here and abroad, they calculate that each of these strategies can provide the equivalent of between six and nine months extra learning, at a cost of around £170 per pupil.

The single most cost-effective strategy identified is improving feedback from teachers to pupils. Providing effective feedback is challenging, but it is important that it is provided well. Research suggests that it should be specific, accurate and clear – in other words, provide an explanation as well as a judgement. It should compare what the student is doing now with what they were previously doing. It should encourage and support further effort, but it should also be given sparingly so that it is meaningful as too much feedback can stop learners working out what they need to do for themselves. Importantly, It should provide specific guidance on how pupils can improve.

Ensuring that feedback is consistently and effectively provided is not a cost-free exercise, but with regular professional development, it is estimated that it would cost £2000-£5000 a year per teacher, or as little as £170 per pupil.

The second most effective approach is what the academics call ‘meta-cognition’, or programmes that teach pupils strategies to plan, monitor and evaluate their own learning. This is often referred to in schools as ‘learning to learn’. These strategies involve students being aware of their strengths and weaknesses as a learner, being able to set and monitor goals and having strategies to choose from or switch to during learning activities.

The Toolkit recognises that this is not always easy. A teacher can support pupils’ work too much, so that they do not learn to manage their own learning but rely too much on their teacher’s prompts. The Toolkit suggests that a useful metaphor is scaffolding: you remove the support and dismantle the scaffolding to check that learners are managing their own learning well.

The third approach that is seen as having high impact at low cost is peer tutoring in Maths and English. This can take a number of different forms. In cross-age tutoring, an older pupil tutors a younger schoolmate. The EEF is piloting a project based at Durham University involving ten year-olds acting as tutors in maths for eight year-olds.

Peer-Assisted Learning is a structured approach for mathematics and reading with session of 25-35 minutes two or three times a week. Reciprocal Peer Tutoring sees pupils tutor and be taught by their classmates. The common characteristic is that learners take on responsibility for aspects of teaching and for evaluating their success.

These proven approaches are worth considering by schools as a way of making the pupil premium go far. By contrast, the evidence suggests that, as they are currently deployed, employing extra teaching assistants produces little impact, despite the relatively high cost, and that reducing class sizes could produce learning gains equivalent to three months, but at a much higher cost of £1000-£1200 per pupil on average.

Behind all these approaches is the recognition that at the heart of school improvement lies good teaching – how teachers do their job in the classroom, and how they enable pupils to learn effectively. Strategies focused on improving teaching feature much more highly in the Toolkit than structural changes like block scheduling or ability grouping. Nobody would argue that this is a novel insight. But it now has the benefit of being backed up by all the best international evidence.

Research for the Sutton Trust by leading UK and US academics has shown that English schools could move into the world’s top five education performers within a decade if the performance of the least effective tenth of teachers were brought up just to the average.

For middle leaders that is as much an in-school challenge as one between schools. Variations in teaching quality within schools are often greater than those between schools. So, a strong focus across all teachers on proven teaching and learning strategies could pay real dividends in how much pupils learn and on their results.

Traditionally in Britain there has been too little connection between research and the classroom. Too much research has felt remote from classroom life, and too many teachers have been unaware of the latest research where it could improve their teaching. The Sutton Trust/EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit makes research accessible as never before, and provides leaders with the tools to make the most of limited resources.

When the NFER asked teachers how their school decided which approaches and programmes to adopt to improve pupils’ learning, only 36 per cent of teachers said their school looked at research evidence on the impact of different approaches and programmes.

The Toolkit is recognised by the National Association of Head Teachers, the Department for Education and Ofsted as a good resource for schools in deciding how to spend the pupil premium. Employing its insights could ensure that the premium pays real dividends in the classroom – and for your less advantaged pupils.

Valuing the vocational

I've written this post for the Sutton Trust blog

This week, the Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee called for apprenticeships to be seen as equal to study at university.

As the Committee noted in a hard-hitting report, the problem under successive governments has been a focus on the quantity of qualifications rather than their quality. Many of the old Train to Gain qualifications were effortlessly rebranded as apprenticeships. This has fed an attitude in England that sees the vocational as inferior.

In their report, the MPs argue: “There remains an underlying assumption that vocational training is only for those unable to take an academic route. This is wrong and must be changed.”

They make a host of practical suggestions, including giving the academic and the vocational route equal prominence in careers advice, as well as useful reforms to the apprenticeship system.

But the problem is surely rather more fundamental in Britain. Vocational education is too often seen not only as something for those with few GCSEs, but also treated in a narrow sense that owes more to the world of 50 years ago than Britain today.

Yet a true vocational system should be about preparing people not only for crafts and trades, but for careers in business and the professions. Martin Doel, the chief executive of the Association of Colleges, argued in an Institute for Public Policy Research pamphlet last year that we should create a master craftsmen role – akin to the German meister – in the UK apprenticeship programme, something that would certainly help to change perceptions.

Indeed, in Germany, apprenticeships are not simply seen as being as good as a university education; in many careers they are seen as superior.

There are two important aspects to the German system that set it apart. The first is that it has a long tradition of very high standards policed by business and the professions in a way that the Sector Skills Councils have never really been able to emulate here.

The second - more troubling aspect for some - is that they depend very heavily on a system of licensing that appears anathema in our more open economy. As Bagehot in the Economist has put it: “The bedrock of Germany's apprenticeship system is corporatism and restricted practice.”

In his speech to the Sutton Trust social mobility summit last May, the opposition leader Ed Miliband first introduced his ideas of the ‘forgotten 50%’ – those young people who don’t go to university, but for whom learning a trade or a craft used to be a strong vehicle for social mobility. He said:

“I also want to challenge some of the assumptions about social mobility. A few months ago I met a group of apprentices working at Jaguar Land Rover. They told me how lucky they felt to be working on racing car prototypes. They had found a path into a really exciting job. One where they would be trained, stretched and expected to make use of their talent.

“They were at the beginning of a career.  One which will lead to better wages, better prospects and a better life than perhaps their parents had. But they told me they felt they were the lucky few…In Germany, middle-class parents boast about their kids doing great apprenticeships. But in Britain, too often people think that if they don’t go to university, they are written off by society.”

Ed Miliband was right to say that social mobility must be about more than a good university education for those who should be able to benefit from it. It should also be about ambitious apprenticeships, top-class technical education and pre-eminent professional training.

That is why the Sutton Trust will be working with the Boston Consulting Group in the months ahead to investigate whether there are lessons we can learn from abroad that have an application here.

Of course, we will look at Germany. But, while the strengths in quality of German vocational education may well outweigh its corporatism, we accept that many aspects of a German system with a tradition that stretches back to Bismarck may not be so easy to import.

So we will also look at Singapore, a country with a similar exam system to Britain that has revamped its poorly regarded vocational system since 1992 through the creation of the Institute for Technical Education (ITE). According to the OECD, the ITE has transformed the content, quality and image of vocational education. Enrolment has doubled and ITE students now constitute about 25% of the post-secondary cohort. Pay levels and job prospects for ITE graduates are also strong.

We’ll keep you posted on what we learn.

Making the pupil premium go further

Most schools face standstill budgets, or real terms cuts. But some of the school budget is growing, and will grow further. The pupil premium, worth £600 this year, rises to £900 next year and could reach £1200 per pupil by 2015. The challenge for schools is how to use that money where it will have most impact – and there is a case for incentivising effective practice.

The pupil premium was part of both the Liberal Democrat and Conservative manifestos. It had two important roles: firstly, to narrow the attainment gap between pupils on free school meals and their classmates, and secondly, to encourage successful schools to take more disadvantaged pupils.

Previous governments have provided extra resources for such pupils through extra funding to local authorities with high levels of poverty. Nevertheless, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has pointed out that pre-premium extra funding in the system attached to deprived pupils amounts to £2000 in primary schools and £3000 in secondary schools. And that has had variable impact.

But this is the first grant paid to schools for each disadvantaged pupil, regardless of where the school is located. The Government decided against ring-fencing the premium, relying instead on schools publishing details of spending on their websites and extra league table measures.

But there is mounting evidence that the premium is not being used as intended (nor is there any evidence that is changing admissions behaviour). Ofsted reported last month that often schools did not disaggregate the pupil premium from their main budget, and said that the funding was often used to maintain or enhance existing provision.

The National Foundation for Education Research, in a survey of 1700 teachers in 1200 English schools for the Sutton Trust earlier this year, showed that little of the pupil premium allocation for 2012-13 – a sum worth £1.25 billion in total – was likely to be spent on activities proven to be the best bets for boosting attainment. Many would spend it on staff rather than improving teaching.

But there is evidence of the most cost effective approaches to improving standards. Researchers at Durham University assessed 21 different interventions for both impact on attainment and relative cost and helped the Sutton Trust to create a toolkit which a growing number of schools are using priorities for the premium. The toolkit will be updated and expanded by our sister organisation, the Education Endowment Foundation, in 2013.

The Sutton Trust/EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit shows that there are three strategies that schools can undertake with a high impact at relatively low cost. Using evidence from here and abroad, they calculate that each of these strategies can provide the equivalent of between six and nine months extra learning, at a cost of around £170 per pupil.

The single most effective strategy is improved pupil feedback, which should be an important part of a school’s drive to boost the quality of teaching and learning. Other low cost proven methods include teaching pupils to learn effectively and peer tutoring, where young people help each other to learn.

Of course, a growing number of schools are already turning to the Toolkit for ideas, and a new version will be online early next year. However, there is surely a case for the Government to help give proven ideas a further boost.

As the size of the pupil premium pot grows, why not use some of it to match fund schools’ spending on proven strategies? It is not as if the Government is opposed to ring-fencing any of the premium; Nick Clegg has used it to fund summer catch-up schools.

So, why not have a pot which schools where schools could double a proportion of their premium provided they spent it on a menu of proven activities? With a little extra incentive, ministers might find that the pupil premium went a lot further.

This post also appears at the Sutton Trust blog.

Do Gove's changes add up?

I've written this column for the September edition of Public Finance magazine:

There’s little that Michael Gove and his advisers like more than crunching numbers. The education secretary is very proud of the mountains of data, previously shared only with schools, that are now publicly available.

So, the figures for academies and free schools appear encouraging. By July, 1,590 English schools – mostly successful secondaries – had chosen greater independence as academies. Another 540 will convert this term, making more than half of England’s 3,200 secondary schools academies, although just 6% of primaries.

Another 367 schools are sponsored academies, with external support, often from a school chain such as Ark or Harris, used to improve standards. Some 280 are close to approval, including 187 poorly performing primaries.

In terms of free schools – new academies sponsored by parents, teachers, charities or faith groups – 68 are opening this term, adding to the two dozen already open; 102 more are planned, some focusing on special educational needs or ‘alternative’ provision for disaffected youngsters.

But these numbers alone won’t produce better results. And this new school year will test the effectiveness of the coalition’s laissez-faire approach.

It is easier to persuade a school to convert to academy status than to transform a failing school. And while some converter academies chose independence to change their curriculum or timetable, three-quarters did so to improve their financial position and avoid budget cuts.

Nationally funded academies receive extra money for services previously provided by local authorities, often greatly exceeding their value. For secondary schools, this could add several hundred thousand pounds to their annual budget. Significantly, Gove now plans to reduce these differentials, making converting less attractive.

But he must also persuade converters to support weaker schools. Gove resisted making this a condition of their funding, so relatively few have done so. This is particularly a problem for primary schools. Some attempts to force change have attracted local opposition. A bigger obstacle is the absence of sponsors.

The big chains have focused on secondary schools. While they will sponsor a few primaries, they won’t support hundreds. Gove needs successful schools to step in, but his refusal to link such change to the extra cash has made his task harder.

His other primary problem is whether there will be enough places. The focus on free schools – some in areas with little demand for new schools – has led to a potential shortage of places for primary-age children, particularly in cities. The Department for Education gave £500m to help resolve this in April, but now estimates that 736,000 more places will be needed by 2020. Meeting this demand would cost at least £3bn extra a year.

Some schools are considering double shifts to cope. If significant numbers of children don’t have a place, the emphasis on free schools could become a political headache.

Shadow education secretary Stephen Twigg has already shifted Labour’s position from opposition to free schools to focusing new schools on meeting parental demand.

The government says its main goal is narrowing the educational gap between rich and poor pupils – poorer children perform significantly worse at GCSE and in tests at age 11 than others.

Yet without the right levers, it might fail to do so. Already, there is evidence that the pupil premium, which gives schools extra cash for pupils entitled to free school meals, is not being used where it might have most impact. A Sutton Trust study showed that 28% of teachers did not know how the cash was being used, and others were using it in ways that had little proven impact.

The government has no way to ensure that the pupil premium – which is set to absorb £2.5bn of the education budget by 2015 – is well spent or to link it to outcomes. Indeed, critics believe the premium could stand as a metaphor for the coalition’s education reforms: strong on inputs but weak on outcomes. This school year, Gove must show that his reforms can deliver results – and not just with the low-hanging fruit.

The politics of playing fields

I have a small confession to make. I was the one who suggested that an independent panel should be set up to recommend which applications for playing fields should be approved and which should be rejected. The reason I did so was because such decisions are never black and white, and it made sense to involve the strongest critics in the decision-making process. So while I think he has made a serious political error, I have some sympathy for Michael Gove this morning, as he is assailed for approving five applications that the panel had rejected. But I also think the case highlights the need for far greater transparency in the whole process - and greater honesty about the issue on the part of the media.

In 1997, after thousands of playing fields had been sold off in the previous decades, Labour set a presumption against the sale of school playing fields for the first time. Schools should generally not sell off playing fields, except in circumstances where doing so would not reduce access to sport and the proceeds would be used to provide better sports facilities at the school. Around 200 applications were approved between 1997 and 2010 and in these cases such criteria were met. After 2001, the decision-making process was effectively delegated to an independent panel where critics of the sale of playing fields were included so they had to look at the reality of the issue on a case-by-case basis. The presumption against their sale was also strengthened a little.

I suggested the independent panel having spent many hours poring over the applications on behalf of ministers and discussing with officials the precise reasons for any case that they planned to recommend for acceptance. Although some such playing fields were overgrown disused patches of land, there were also cases of viable playing fields that were being sold to make major improvements in the quality of sports and other education in a school. Inevitably, however, there were strong opponents to each sale and each approval attracted widespread criticism. Hence the independent panel.

So, while I have some sympathy with Gove this morning, I think he made a major political error not accepting the recommendations of the panel. And he was also unwise to reduce restrictions on the amount of space that schools have to provide for sports. Remarkably, since the panel was established, there has been virtually no controversy about the sale of playing fields. Fields in Trust - as the National Playing Fields Association is now called - sits alongside representatives of headteachers and local authorities to act as an independent and fair-minded jury on each case. By overruling the panel, however justified he may have felt he was in the individual cases, he has re-politicised a process that had effectively been de-politicised. More importantly, the publicity around today's story may have made it that much harder for the panel to take genuinely independent decisions.

There is one aspect to the panel's workings that should change, however. They should have to publish their decisions on a regular basis. The Telegraph claims this morning that these are not made public. When I suggested the panel, I certainly assumed that their decisions and membership would be made public. There is no justification for this not being the case, as happens with the Schools Adjudicator on admissions, for example. That said, there must still be occasions - not many, it is true - when it is in the greater interest of pupils to sell a playing field to provide superior sporting facilities than it is for that land to remain largely unused. To their credit, Fields in Trust, through their participation in this process, recognised that reality. Others should too.

John Rentoul quoted from this post in his Independent on Sunday column.

Autumn challenges for Clegg and Miliband

As he contemplates the next parliamentary year from the comfort of his Spanish holiday, the Deputy Prime Minister will have plenty of time to consider the perils of coalition. With a stand-off between Nick Clegg and David Cameron over constitutional reform, it is becoming increasingly clear how little the Liberal Democrats have gained from being in power with the Conservatives.

There are two reasons why this is so. First, Clegg failed to secure unconditional support for key policies from Cameron. He won a referendum on the alternative vote, but had no guarantees that his position would not be trashed by his coalition colleagues. Instead of just having a referendum, he should have made boundary changes conditional on AV being passed, and put both on the ballot. Now, rather belatedly, he has chosen to link the constituency carve-up to the failure to get Lords reform through. It looks petulant done this way, and does Clegg few favours in the eyes of voters.

But the second failing was not to insist that the Conservative Parliamentary Party be asked to endorse the coalition agreement in the same way that Clegg gained the support of his Liberal Democrat colleagues. This has allowed many Tories to take a pick-and-mix approach to its measures. This was, of course, as much Cameron's failure rather than Clegg's, but it was a weakness of the whole arrangement.

Of course, a bigger problem for Clegg is that on measures where his party gained seats, notably tuition fees, he has accepted a position the exact opposite to that which he argued for during the election. The concessions on repayment thresholds may make the loans more attractive to some, but have made the finances of higher education less sustainable. Clegg would have been better insisting on a lower cap on fees which might have appeared less daunting to potential students in the future.

Where the Lib Dems claim some credit for policies delivered - the pupil premium and a higher tax threshold - it can plausibly be argued that they are delivering policies that most Tories willingly embrace. The pupil premium also featured in the Conservative manifesto. But. so far, its failure to link with a national funding formula and to recalibrate the much higher premium inherited from Labour, means that it is often being used to mitigate cuts elsewhere in the budget rather than for proven measures that could tackle achievement and aspirations among target students.

If he is to regain some of the credibility he enjoyed before the last election, Clegg needs to be ready to revisit the coalition agreement in the autumn, and establish some key priorities for the second phase of the government, some of which should reflect the reality that George Osborne's economic policies are not working as intended. Top of the list should be a serious investment package in national infrastructure, one that starts to have a real impact on the economy, and a stimulus to service industries that pump money directly into the UK economy, perhaps through targeted VAT reductions for tourism-related industries or a strong incentive package to boost UK education. He should also try to put a halt in both cases to the Home Office's unstinting efforts to deter tourists and students from spending their money in Britain.

Meanwhile, Ed Miliband has benefited from the coalition's woes, but still lacks a strong enough policy on the economy and taxation. His challenge for the autumn is to put flesh on a policy that goes further than heckling 'I told you so' at the Chancellor. Ed Balls has argued for VAT cuts, but they need to be targeted on services and industries that are largely home-grown if they are to improve growth, not add to the trade deficit. Stella Creasy has rightly argued for a wholesale bottom up review of all public spending, with value for money at the heart of it. And the focus on any extra investment must be on infrastructure - both small-scale, such as restoring individual school capital budgets, and large-scale, including sorting out London's airports. Miliband has gained stature in the last year: this autumn is the time he needs to translate that into economic credibility.

My new role at the Sutton Trust

The Sutton Trust has issued this press release this morning. I very much look forward to starting in my new role in September.

Sir Peter Lampl, chairman of the Sutton Trust, has today announced new senior appointments to the Trust, which improves social mobility through education and provides educational opportunities for non-privileged children.

Conor Ryan will be the Trust’s new Director of Research and Communications, starting in early September. 

Conor was senior education adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair from 2005-2007 and was David Blunkett’s special adviser from 1993-2001, covering both policy and media relations in government and opposition for the Education and Employment Secretary. He has also worked as a senior local government press officer in London in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Conor has been an independent writer and consultant since 2007, working with many national education organisations, including the Sutton Trust. He has written or edited reports for the Social Market Foundation, Centreforum and other think tanks. He has also written extensively for the national media in the UK and Ireland.

Dr Lee Elliot Major will be the Trust’s new Director, Development and Policy. Lee has led the Sutton Trust’s research work for the last 6 years, overseeing highly influential reports on social mobility and education policy. He is a trustee of the Education Endowment Foundation, and chairs its evaluation advisory group. Lee has served on a number of Government advisory bodies on social mobility and education. He was previously an education journalist, working for the Guardian and Times Higher Education Supplement.

James Turner will be Director, Projects and Partnerships, continuing with his current role and taking on responsibility for partnerships with Trusts and Foundations.  James has been at the Trust for 8 years, starting as a research analyst.  He managed the establishment of the Education Endowment Foundation by the Sutton Trust and served as its interim CEO.  James is now one of the EEF’s trustees and also sits on the board of a number of Trust-funded projects. 

Sir Peter Lampl said today: “These new appointments will strengthen the work of the Sutton Trust at a time when social mobility is the number one social issue in this country. I am delighted that Conor is joining us and that Lee and James are taking on major new responsibilities in the year that sees the Trust celebrate its 15^th anniversary.”

The Sutton Trust was founded in 1997 by Sir Peter Lampl with the aim of providing educational opportunities for young people from non-privileged backgrounds and improving social mobility through education. The Trust and its partners have committed over £40 million to educational projects helping hundreds of thousands of students, as well as commissioning over 100 research studies. Last year, the Government awarded £125 million to the Trust as the lead charity in partnership with Impetus Trust, to establish the Education Endowment Foundation to boost the attainment of the country's most disadvantaged children.

Will this secondary shake-up boost standards for all?

Today's Daily Mail splash on the future of GCSEs, the national curriculum, league tables and exam boards has the air of a brainstorm session at Sanctuary Buildings that has been released before being fully thought through. Nothing wrong with that, if Michael Gove spends some time thinking through all the implications of what he is proposing. But he needs to be careful that his proposals don't end up undermining a wider drive to raise standards for all.

There are some perfectly good ideas in what appears to be being considered. It makes perfect sense to have a single exam board for each exam. The effect, of course, will be to have a single syllabus in these subjects. Which makes the supposed removal of the national curriculum from secondary schools rather less radical than is being suggested: indeed it would ensure that academies and free schools work to a single syllabus. Lord Baker is right to argue that it is as important that technical subjects are examined at a high standard as well as Gove's favoured subjects like history and geography.

The second question concerns the proposal of splitting the GCSE into a CSE and O-level exam. There is a seductive sense to this idea if you believe that the only impact of GCSEs has been a 'dumbing down'. But this is a tabloid caricature. It is perfectly fair to feel that there needs to be more rigour involved in getting an A grade, but that doesn't mean writing off thousands of youngsters who could today strive for a C. There is a terrible canard in the notion that the use of the 5 A-C benchmark itself denies ambition: in fact, a C is worth far more to a child than a D when talking to employers, and the existence of the benchmark has led many schools to push such pupils towards a grade they can achieve in a way that the average point score would not necessarily do.

But there is a good argument for saying that achieving an A grade should be really demanding. With a single syllabus there is no reason why this cannot be achieved in a single exam, particularly since Gove wants to move back to linear testing at the end of two years. That is not to say there is no place for more practical exams in English, Maths and Science. Such tests should be available, however, at GCSE standard of level 2 as well as the less demanding level 1, and less 'academically -minded' students should not merely be expected to achieve level 1. It would be a serious and terribly retrograde step to move in this direction, and Gove will find that it could have as serious an impact as Labour's scrapping of an expectation that all schools study languages through to 16.

This raises the issue of league tables and floor targets. And it is here that Gove could be making his biggest mistake. The big improvements in London and by academies over the last decade have been spurred in part by ever-more ambitious floor targets based on the 5 GCSE standard. It is a realistic but relatively demanding ambition for schools to expect a majority of their pupils to reach this level, and Gove has sharply increased the demand of the floor targets. Of course, one could set a target based on the average point score, but this could have the perverse effect of lowering expectations in terms of breadth. And since there is no longer a strong incentive to use high GCSE vocational alternatives, the main concern here has been addressed. By all means publish a 5A target alongside this, though in truth the EBacc is becoming the more rigorous target here.

Gove has time to get this right. More rigorous GCSEs, particularly for top achievers, do not have to place a cap on ambition for many other students. More practical business-focused English and Maths tests should not themselves be set unambitiously. And Gove should not throw away one of the most effective drivers of improve standards for many schools in the process.

Freedom, what freedom?

I recognise quite a lot of what was in the English and Maths curriculum materials issued by the Department for Education last week. They bore an uncanny resemblance to the documents that accompanied David Blunkett's national literacy and numeracy strategies in the late 90s. The expectations on spelling, grammar and punctuation were all there, as was a focus on mental arithmetic and times tables. So, the nonsense in the Tory press about this being the first time since the 1950s that schools had such expectations suggested that they were being even lazier than usual in accepting the line being spun by Michael Gove's spinners.

So far as I can see, all that is really new is that children, bizarrely in a decimal age, will have to learn their 12 times tables in case Britain abandons decimal currency in sympathy with a Greek return to the Drachma.

Equally, today's focus on synthetic phonics is not new either. Phonics were a part of the literacy strategy too, but the specific focus on synthetic phonics gained traction with Sir Jim Rose's report in 2005. This, too, was for a Labour government, for the benefit of confused Tory columnists. However, we didn't, it is true have the phonics screening check which seems to having some bizarre requirements.

So, I welcome quite a lot of this renewed rigour in the primary curriculum. I also think that most primary schools have been doing quite a lot of this, at least since the late 90s.

But I can't for the life of me see how it fits in with the philosophy of a government that insists it will set schools free. Is it any wonder that several members of the curriculum review have quit in the confusion?

Why is this man being allowed to preside over the wilful destruction of a major British export industry?

Imagine, if you will, a Government in the midst of a recession that chooses to insult investors who bring £8 billion a year into the UK economy. And it does so purely for reasons of ideology and prejudice, with little regard for the economic consequences. Such an approach would surely be the subject of widespread ridicule, and the minister responsible given the opportunity to spend a little more time with their constituents and their backbench colleagues.

That is precisely what is happening to our universities and colleges, as they strive to compete with Australia, Canada and the US for the brightest and best students in the world. This week, nearly 70 university chancellors have written to the David Cameron urging him to back UK universities in their efforts to recruit genuine international students. What other major export industry would have to go on bended knees to beg the PM's backing?

Yet the coalition's ill-considered immigration policy is turning students away. Already numbers from India have fallen, and other major countries are likely to turn elsewhere unless they see Britain welcoming international students rather than treating them like pariahs. Essentially the problem is this: the coalition is committed to reducing net migration at a time when the number of Britons migrating is falling. There are already strict controls on overseas workers, so the only way to achieve this is to cut student numbers.

Yet as the universities point out in their letter:

In an age of increasing global mobility, the number of individuals considering a university education abroad is growing rapidly. In this market for talent – and export income – the UK performs exceptionally well, with 9.9% of the total market share in 2009, and export earnings of £7.9 billion. International students also play an important role in towns and cities up and down the country, and contribute significantly to local economies. There is a clear opportunity to build on this success, with forecasts suggesting that export earnings from this activity could more than double by 2025.

Since the formation of the coalition, the Home Office has tried to cut immigration to the UK in several ways. It was perfectly reasonable to clamp down on 450 bogus colleges and prevent them from sponsoring students.The Border Agency claims that this has meant 11,000 fewer bogus students coming to the UK. At the same time, universities and colleges are licensed as Highly Trusted Sponsors to admit overseas students and must take responsibility that students will turn up to and attend courses, and that they are legitimate. Institutions that fail in this quickly lose their status, so they have a strong incentive to do so. It is not always easy, as the wholly inept Border Agency is often behind on the paperwork, but it makes some sense. 

What makes no sense is keeping students within the net migration figures: it is like capping manufacturing exports or saying we have enough tourists this year, thanks.

Moreover, the impression from outside is not that there is a sensible balance being struck between recruiting legitimate students and barring bogus ones. Rather it is that an increasingly zealous minister at the Home Office, Damian Green, the man most responsible for the chaos at the borders last month, seems hell bent on discouraging students from coming here in the first place. The Home Office has dusted down all its old wheezes and finally found a willing buyer in the once moderate and mild-mannered Kent MP. As a result, an £8 billion export industry is playing second fiddle to their fantasy targets. So much so that Green told a Policy Exchange event in February that

there is scope for further examination of whether and to what extent foreign student tuition fees boost the UK economy and, crucially, how UK residents ultimately benefit from that. 

Universities UK has argued that the total ‘export earnings’ of higher education, including tuition fees and spending by non-UK students, could grow from £7.9bn in 2009 to £16.9bn in 2025 with the right policy environment.Its research also highlighted the extent of growth in Indian postgraduates, as well as higher international student mobility from China, the Middle East and Nigeria. A recent IPPR report has calculated that current Government targets could see losses of up to £3bn a year from students: in truth it could be a lot higher if the Green message reaches those growing markets. Moreover, these students are not just an invisible export, as the IPPR adds

The difference in terms of the dynamic contribution to the economy over 20 years, in terms of losing so many young, highly qualified and motivated migrants is hard to calculate, but would likely be very large.

It is time for David Cameron to take a decisive stance on this issue, and to back British higher education. If he wants a simple solution, he could start by emulating the Australians - one of our big competitors for East Asian, Indian and Chinese students by treating students differently in the statistics. The IPPR explains:

Australia keeps a record of international students in its estimates of total net overseas migration (NOM), but these fall within the ‘temporary’ category (alongside business long-stay migrants, working holidaymakers and long-term visitors) and there are few formal caps on these numbers, although the government is able to exert some control through policy, such as by raising English language requirements.

Then he should borrow another idea from Tony Blair, and launch a major Downing Street campaign actively to promote UK higher education in overseas markets. The message should be that Britain welcomes international students - and he should show that his government means it.