Exams are like Markets . . Confidence is key

The big education story of today is the fall in the number of A* to C grades in the GCSE results.  The drop was just 0.4% which is hardly evidence of an education apocalypse, but against a background where results have been rising since 1988, this fall made big news. Compounding the issue was the larger drop in English Literature grades which fell by more than 1% and Science where the fall was 2.2%.  This chart from the BBC sums up the overall picture quite well.

The trouble with the examination system is that it has become very politicised, and charges that Michael Gove had put pressure on exam boards to raise the thresholds for grades (effectively dishing out more Ds than Cs than they would have one year ago) have been rife.  Today Gove has played the innocent, denying political interference, although this is disingenuous in the extreme as he has spoken frequently of the ‘dumbed down nature’ of the GCSE and its lack of rigour.  He was doing some serious damage to the reputation of the qualification just a few months ago when he leaked plans to replace the GCSE with a new two tier exam system similar to the O level and CSE regime in place before 1988 (http://bbc.in/NLRXzi). Gove’s insistence that he has not brought political pressure to bear is remarkable in its audacity but laughable if he thinks anyone will believe it.

Ultimately exams are like markets. Not the markets where you buy fruit and veg, but markets such stocks and shares, bonds and guilts, commodities and even houses.  All markets are largely built upon trust, or rather a collective decision to believe in the net worth of assets being traded.  Once you move beyond the simple barter system (I give you a box of tomatoes in exchange for a sack of corn), the assets of the market are codified in abstract form and become an artefact of social agreement.  When the system is working, both buyers and sellers believe in the value of the assets. They will haggle to get the best price of course, but under the market is a belief in its veracity. When confidence in markets collapses, this evaporates, as we saw with the large crashes which happened during the financial crisis which started in 2008 and has continued to this day. A loss of faith causes violent spikes  in both buying and selling (some will buy because they think the assets have become underpriced, and therefore a bargain).

Exam regimes are very similar.  There is no tangible physical entity expressed in an A at GCSE. It is a social judgement made on a student’s performance and anyone with any experience of the sharp end of examining will tell you that the system is far from perfect in its judgements (although most judgements are probably in line with each other). When confidence in an entire qualification is eroded, the result is a little like the crash in the market. People are confused and look around at what to do next. For instance, employers complain that GCSEs don’t tell them whether young people they are going to employ are literate or numerate.

Gove has welcomed this confusion as it furthers two of his political ends. The first is that it allows him to further criticise the education system and point to low aspiration and poor quality teaching which needs urgent attention. And just as the person who has only a hammer begins to see everything as a nail, he will see a change to academy status as the only solution for schools which are under-performing.  Converting community schools to academies is Gove’s big plan.  Academies become directly accountable to him upon conversion and he can control them in ways which no Secretary of State could do when the Local Authority was in an intermediary position between Whitehall and the school.  Aggregating academies into chains is another link (excuse the pun), in the plan. Silently the assets of the school are transferred to the academy chain and Gove’s dream of allowing profit from state education edges ever closer.  Convincing the public that state education can be run for private profit will be much easier when large academy chains control as many as a hundred schools.  The argument will be made that the profit made from widespread economies of scale can be ploughed back into investment.  The argument behind this will be that shareholders and a board of directors will be risking capital investing in the chain and therefore it is only right that they share in some of that profit.  Gove may well be stopped before this comes to pass, but I am convinced that it his ultimate end game for the academy programme.

Secondly the confusion around disquiet around GCSEs brings his plan for the return to the O level one step closer. The lib dems came out to oppose this plan when it was leaked and even David Cameron expressed surprise, but Gove is wily and plays the long game. Any damage to the GCSE system adds weight to his call for a return to a two tier system.

This is definitely a day to reflect on the fact that education, and the future chances of young people are far too important to be left in the hands of politicians.

The Rampant Politicisation of Education

It is nearly the end of 2011, so time to look back and think about what has happened to education in England during 2011.  When thinking what to write here, one theme struck me as paramount, namely the rampant politicisation of the education agenda. It seems that every single facet of education from the way schools are funded, to the buildings they inhabit, to the exams the students take, to the pensions the teachers have to live on after years of service have been subjected, this year, to a ramping up of political pressure.

Of course education has always been politicised, it is state funded from general taxation and each political party quite rightly has its own beliefs on the best way of spending that money. The series of decisions in the 20th century to make schooling universal were political in nature. Since that time, any further decisions about what happens in education have been entangled within political structures and caught up in the nuanced (and not so nuanced) party politics of the day.  But it seems to me that since the coalition has come to power and begun running education in England and Wales this politicisation has intensified and crucially it has become more divisive.

So what is the nature of this politicisation and how is it being manifested? Firstly it is related to the evidence base used to frame national debates about educational standards.  Paranoia about standards in free fall as exams become ever easier was part of the wallpaper during the New Labour years, and that motive has not disappeared. But there is now a new kid on the block in the form of  the PISA programme which Michael Gove has used as the groundbass for nearly every speech he has made to show that standards in English schools have been falling relative to our international counterparts. Gove seized on the PISA scores which show England falling back from 7th (out of 32 countries) for reading in 2000 to 25th (out of 65 countries) in 2009 (1).  Once Gove sat down in the big chair at the department for education he had of course to trash the previous administration’s performance in education.  This, for once, is not solely the fault of Gove, but rather a function of the black and white, yabooh politics which seems to be as British as ‘Fish and Chips’. No Secretary of State in an incoming government which has been out of power for 13 years could admit to achievements by their predecessors.  Instead a narrative of rapid decline and an imminent crisis with millions of illiterate school leavers flooding the streets had to be quickly sketched out so the right wing press could portray the coalition reforms as saving the nation from sure destruction.  But the PISA data, just like any data, can be contested, and in October even the TES accused Gove of cherry picking PISA data by not entering English schools into the Problem Solving tests (2).  Commentators are split as to whether English pupils would do even worse on the problem solving tests than they do in reading, maths and science, or whether they would actually steal a march on other countries by showing some flair for problem solving and lateral thinking.  We will never know the truth, but as John Bangs states in that article, if you are going to use PISA as the benchmark then you can’t start ‘pulling back’.  The exam system has been further tainted late in 2011 by revelations that exam boards were coaching teachers on the content of exam papers.

The second major locus of politicisation in education is on supply side reforms to schooling, namely the free schools and academy agenda.  This is the coalition answer to what they see as years of failure prior to their taking office and can be summed up in the word ‘autonomy’. Gove constantly talks of the need for autonomy and how this can raise standards in schools. ‘Autonomy’ has become a rather totemic word, seemingly imbued with magic powers and resisting attempts to unpick exactly what it might mean and crucially how Local Authority schools lacked ‘autonomy’.  Reforms in this area have been radical and far reaching and the impact will be felt for many years.  In the very early days of the coalition, the academies bill was passed but not given the usual period of scrutiny for a major bill.  The chair of the Education Select Committee lamented this rushing of the legislation (3), and he is a Conservative himself so unlikely to be rocking the boat unless he felt very strongly about this.  Using governmental powers reserved for times of terrorist attack to force through education reforms is itself a highly suspect act and not allowing proper debate of the changes was an affront to the democratic principles and standards of the country which traditionally the Conservatives have purported to support and uphold.  The result of the bill was to create a dash for schools to become academies as not only the rules but the whole philosophy behind the principles of academies was changed overnight.  New Labour created the academy programme to allow sponsors to take on schools which had been failing; but Gove opened up the process to any schools with ‘outstanding’ OfSTED ratings and dropped the need for a sponsor to work with the schools. At the same time the concept of the ‘Free School’ was launched. From a legal, technical and financial perspective a free school is an academy, but groups (such as parents, or academy chains) can apply to create a school where none existed before.  The word ‘free’ in ‘free school’ is a piece of political bunkum without parallel. Free schools are anything but free in terms of cost to the tax payer. There have been repeated attempts to get information about the costs of setting up a free school, but these appear to have been successful (5).  Many people have strong suspicions that free schools are in fact very very expensive schools, hoovering up bucket loads of cash when budgets to other schools have been under attack.  Free schools do appear to be free from having to teach the national curriculum, but late in the year a story broke that the Secretary of State was requiring academies and free schools to teach promote marriage and protect students from ‘inappropriate teaching materials’ (4). Failure to toe the line and teach this conservative cultural agenda could lead to a school’s funding being cut. So essentially the Secretary of State now has direct control over what is taught in schools and the legal and technical powers to close any which do not comply. When schools were funded at arms length by government with the local authority acting as proxy this threat was not possible and schools were somewhat protected from caveats from Whitehall. So the word ‘free’ in free schools has more spin on it than a Federer serve, it is slippier than ; it is a word which has been hideously interfered with and abused in the most cruel and unusual way.  As a result the word insults the usual way in which we bring semantics and syntax together to make sense of language.

The final way in which education has been overtly politicised is a very cunning move on the coalition’s part. Free Schools and academies float free of local authority control so they sit within a local community where people are as likely to object to them as they are to support them. The localisation agenda here is used to create conflict within communities as supporters of either the LA schools or the academies/free schools do battle as to what types of schools will serve their communities.  Opposition to academies is nothing new, but  a new phrase ‘forced academisation’ entered the educational lexicon this year to describe a school being forced to become an academy against the wishes of the local community, the governors and/or the staff.  One wonders if politicians who take to platforms to protest their profound desire to improve the ‘life chances’ of young people bother to reflect on how the creation of so much conflict at a local level was a help or hindrance to improving educational outcomes.

We should expect more rather than less direct political intervention in the coming year and further polarisation over the types of schools which are seen as successful or desirable. I end the year convinced of one thing namely that education is far too important to be left to politicians; and hoping for another namely some vestiges of objectivity creep into these debates.

1: DFE (2010) Secretary of State comments on PISA study of school systems, [online] available: http://www.education.gov.uk/inthenews/inthenews/a0070008/secretary-of-state-comments-on-pisa-study-of-school-systems date accessed 13th December 2011.

2: Times Education Supplement (2011) Mr Gove fixes new PISA problems by ignoring them [online] available: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6115609 date accessed 13th December 2011

3: BBC (2010) Academies Bill rushed through Claim [online] Available: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-10664722

4: Daily Telegraph (2011) Free Schools and Academies must promote marriage [online] Available:  http://tgr.ph/uPlItc

5: Whatdotheyknow.com (2011) Costs for Current Free School Projects [online] Available http://bit.ly/vuCJtc.

Image is Creative Commons. Provided by user: ‘regional cabinet’ on Flickr.  Amended by author by the addition of a speech bubble of parodic nature in response to the news tht the Secretary of State wants free schools and academies to promote marriage http://bit.ly/rEz5y2.

Extra lessons at Free Schools: Is cramming more teaching in a good idea?

Free Schools are finally opening and Michael Gove’s flagship policy is morphing from an ideological position on supply side reform to schooling to physical reality. The number of free schools opening this term is 24 which is a tiny proportion of the state funded schools in England, but the media attention is blown out of all proportion as everyone tries to find out a little more about what these schools will do once open, and more broadly what the ‘Free School’ agenda means.

The BBC carried an umbrella story on the fledgling free schools earlier in the week: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14731677 .  In this article we read about Alborough Academy, in Redbridge London which is run by the E-ACT group. Those of us who have been following the Free School movement have been quite rightly asking how these schools will be different to the Local Authority controlled schools which they are set to compete with/replace/augment (choose the term based on your politics and reading of the spin).  I had hoped that Free Schools could use some of their freedoms to do attempt some pedagogic innovations.  Rethinking how teaching and learning works, trying some experiments out; these kind of  activities could see the Free Schools challenging the orthodoxies of teaching and learning and offering genuine alternatives, and in the process stimulating a much needed debate about teaching and learning within the wider education community (including politicians and parents).

I was, therefore, a little disappointed to read of the comments of the chair of Governors from Alborough which appeared to offer little understanding of the complexities of teaching and learning within school settings. To quote the section in full:

 There will be an optional extended day – with an educational slant – says Mr Greatrex, who will be the leader of the school’s governing body.  Children could be at school from 08:00 to 18:00 – and could find themselves in extra lessons after school if they are not making enough progress.  “Teachers’ focus will be on high attainment and they will track pupils’ progress in every lesson. If a child does not make enough progress in a lesson, they will be asked to stay later that day,” said Mr Greatrex.

There is some confusion here, firstly the extended school day is optional, but a few words later it seems pupils not making sufficient progress will find themselves (as if by some miracle it seems) in extra lessons. Will they be forced to attend or not is the simple question, and once open the school will realise that writing policies is the easy part, implementing them justly within the busy chaotic life of a school is the challenge.  Just as one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, one pupil’s extra lesson may be another’s pupil’s detention. I struggled hard to think about how children kept behind for extra lessons could fail to see this as some sort of punishment, or at least a palpable signal to themselves and the school that they are not learning as much as they could.

But what concerns me most about all of this is the crude, even simplistic understanding of the nature of learning which it reveals.  The idea that within a single lesson a student should make progress sounds great as a soundbite, but learning is often not like this, particularly with concepts which challenge and test student’s cognitive abilities. I sat in Maths lessons as a pupil and often struggled to make sense of what was being taught, despite listening hard and desperately trying to understand. Learning somedays would just not happen, although often a few days, weeks or even months later something would slot into place and things would start to make more sense. Dylan Wiliam has a brilliant phrase for this:  ‘Learning is a liminal process, at the boundary between control and chaos’ (Wiliam 2007). He bases this insight on a review of papers about the learning of Mathematical concepts which show that learning is indeed chaotic. Some students learned concepts at the point at which they were taught, others did not learn at the point of teaching but understood after 3 months, some understood at the point of teaching but 3 months later had lost that learning.  Learning is only partly controlled by the teacher, and only partly controlled by the learner; it’s a slippery process, sometimes difficult to pin down. The idea that you have to learn something which can be measured in every lesson and face sanctions if you do not learn is problematic for me.

Putting children under notice that unless progress was made in each and every lesson surely could create unnecessary stress, particularly for those who regularly have to stay behind. People of any age under stress do not learn well; the physical responses to stress are about fight and flight rather than thinking.

When you picture the kids staying behind each day, what mental image do you have? If you had a mental image of a group of 11 year olds trudging into a classroom to reluctantly do battle with Algebra and the Kings of England for a second time, then you are wide of the mark. Alborough has two classes, one reception and year 1, so we are talking about  4 and 5 year olds here!! It is true that the spokesperson for Alborough explains that the after school activities will combine fun with learning, such as doing mental arithmetic whilst playing cricket, but that whiffs of gimmickry to me. What if the progress not made cannot easily be fitted to a social or sporting activity? What if teachers under pressure from management and governors to create remorseless progress, simply resort to repeating the lessons of the day to the unfortunate non learners? A final irony is the young children who are going to get this kind of cramming approach would not even be in school in a country in Finland where formal schooling does not start until 7.  Surely this approach will see the UK pull even further ahead of Finland in measures of international achievement?  Well not quite, the UK lags well behind Finland in the PISA tables. 28th position in Maths in 2009 as opposed to 6th for Finland. 25th position for reading as opposed to 3rd for Finland.  Rather than seeking new and unusual methods for cramming even more teaching into the school day, perhaps the English education system should be looking to countries to Finland to see how their policies which counter intuitively start formal teaching much later, have delivered much better results. We need to think about the Finnish concept of teaching less and learning more.

Ultimately what we can learn from this is that the debate about teaching and learning currently underway as a result, amongst other things, of Free Schools, is the need to increase the quality of the debate about teaching and learning.  The outline of the pedagogic strategy from Alborough suggests a school leadership which has a rather simplified and ultimately unrealistic notion of what learning is. Their position appears uninformed by any of the research work or even some basic reading of the vast literature about learning which is freely available.

  

 References

Wiliam, D. (2007) Assessment, Learning and Technology: Prospects at the Periphery of Control, Keynote at ALT 2007. Available from http://www.alt.ac.uk/sites/default/files/assets_editor_uploads/documents/altc2007_dylan_wiliam_keynote.pdf. Date accessed 3/09.2011

Image licensed through Creative Commons. Kindly given by FreeFlyer 09 and available from http://www.flickr.com/photos/freeflyer09/4841810469/sizes/z/in/photostream/