Tag Archives: schools

No more free market for teachers

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The North of England Education Conference may have diminished in status over the years, but it hasn’t completely lost its role as a major source of policy announcements, especially in relation to teachers and school leaders. This year, both the Chief Inspector, Michael Wilshaw, and Minister of State, David Laws, used their speeches to the conference to hammer very hefty nails into the long-held doctrine of the market as the solution to all public sector problems by suggesting that teachers – and heads – should be matched to schools where their services are most needed. This is a radical break from the practice of the last 50 years when schools have become used to advertising vacancies, and teachers have been free to choose which ones to apply for.

HMCI talked of a “national strategy” to ensure we place ‘good teachers in schools that face the greatest challenges’, while the Minister announced a ‘pool of top talent within the profession, a champions league of head teachers, made up of heads and deputy heads, who will stand ready to move to schools in challenging circumstances that need outstanding leaders’.

From the policy of matching initial appointments of trainees to schools for their first appointment it is but a short step to the idea of then moving teachers between schools. To do this most effectively schools need to be grouped geographically in a manner that most academy chains, with the possible exception of Harris and some ARK schools, clearly are not. No doubt this will be a point the new school Commissioners will not be slow in making to their boss as they waste large amounts of time travelling around their bailiwicks.

However, the idea of assigning more senior “champions league” head teachers to schools, and possibly moving them long distances, as might happen under David Laws’ plans for heads to be parachuted into failing schools, must come with  terms and conditions that are attractive enough to encourage staff to sign up to the proposals. As we know, most heads, especially in the primary sector, only apply for posts within their existing travel to work areas: this is hopefully something that has been researched properly before the Minister made his announcement.

Now, I have always thought it daft that the weakest NQTs had to wait to find a teaching job, and in some cases were left without a teaching post for some time so that when they did eventually find a vacancy (after term had started) they were even more in need of further help than if they had been hired at the start of term. Of course, if there are more than enough teachers of good quality to go around that isn’t an issue. However since teacher supply is already under pressure in some subjects, and at risk of becoming even worse in 2014, the debate threatens to become academic as some schools will just need a teacher to fill their vacancy. David Laws has no doubt taken advice about the outcome of Labour’s Fast Track Scheme of the early 2000s before launching another national staffing initiative.

Linking training and employment will also help identify whether I was correct in 2008 in coining the phrase, admittedly about the primary sector, of ‘training in cathedral cities to teach in inner cities’ to characterise those who trained in one sort of environment, but found employment in an entirely different setting. Not everyone agreed with me, and there are those that think you can train anywhere to teach in any school. The new HMI inspection evidence will help clarify the situation.

Finally, it will be interesting to see what Mr. Taylor, has to say on Friday morning at the conference. Last year in Sheffield he proclaimed the end to central planning for teacher supply. However, this year, the message now seems to be that the new NSS (National School Service) will look increasingly like the NHS – and be equally devoid of democratic accountability.

Notable during 2013

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Education politician of the year

Graham Stuart, chair of the Select Committee at Westminster. He has returned strongly to his role after a serious accident. His rebuke to David Laws for being late and taking off his jacket without permission, and his interchanges with the Secretary of State, notably over careers education, stamped his authority on a Committee where often he has had to rely upon the terrier like support of the Labour members in evidence sessions.

PR coup of the year

Nick Clegg’s announcement, on the Tuesday of his Party Conference, that all 5-7 year olds would receive free school lunches. This was a closely kept secret up to that point, known only to a few. Had it been announced as part of his Leader’s speech it wouldn’t have had the same impact. In the 2015 Manifesto the Lib Dems can suggest extending free meals to all primary school pupils at some point in the future. Honourable mention must go to the DfE for the announcement in early December of the new role of School Commissioners through the jobs pages of the TES. Seemingly even the TES didn’t pick up on the implications. Hopefully, that is not a return to the bad old days when journalists at the TES didn’t know what interesting news stories were appearing in the classified pages of their own paper. Finally, but not in the running for coup of the year, was the Labour Party’s well researched press release issued on Christmas Eve highlighting the government’s failures in recruitment to teacher training courses. Whoever at Labour HQ thought education journalists would be working in the run up to Christmas needs some re-education, especially when these journalists have to work throughout the Easter holidays attending the professional association conferences. This was a waste of a good opportunity.

Export of the year

The TES, to a USA company: will the profits from all that recruitment advertising now flow overseas.

Most challenged local authority of the year

There are two main contenders: Norfolk and the Isle of Wight. This proves that size has nothing to do with success. Both were effectively issued with notices to improve by Ofsted. Interestingly, both are experiencing the effects of a move from a 9-13 three tier system to a break at 11+. Oxford City, whose schools at Key Stage 1 were once the worst in the country also experienced such a system change. It is worth looking to see whether sufficient attention was paid to CPD when these changes take place. Unlike Oxford, both Norfolk and the Isle of Wight also have many coastal communities, one of the vogue terms of the year.

Technology of the year

Tablets: these electronic successors to slates seem likely to put the learning firmly in the hands of the learners even more than laptops did. And, for the first time the software to make really useful is starting to emerge. Whether teachers have been trained to make the best use of new technology, or even old technology like interactive whiteboards is another whole debate.

Still waiting at the bus stop award

The DfE pulled guidance on school transport during the early summer, promising a revised set of rules by the autumn. At the year-end this is still awaited. Perhaps the problems in the Prime Minister’s own backyard may be causing some re-thinking. One overdue change is to increase the age for free transport to 18 now the participation age has been raised. This is a real issue for less well off families living in rural areas, including Mr Cameron’s own constituency, as the audience of around 100 at a recent turbulent meeting at Burford School made clear.

Tectonic Plate award

The notion of combining children’s social services with education into a single department looks increasingly passé. With child protection issues taking up more and more of many Director’s time, and schools policy no longer run by councillors or even authorities but School Forums, the idea of marrying all services for children into one department will undoubtedly come under scrutiny as local government cuts begin to really hurt. For many authorities, schooling is now little more than a regulatory activity and an oversight of standards. For that reason it might now better live in the Chief Executive’s domain in many authorities, along with Trading Standards and the lawyers.

Personality of the year

Like him or loath him, it must be the Secretary of State. Although the Chief Inspector made a brave run on the inside rail late in the year nobody else came close to Mr Gove as the public face of education change. However, the run up to the 2015 general election may prove more of a challenge if other Free Schools follow the Discovery School into closure, and his School Direct training route for teachers proves less than a resounding success. However, his Achilles heel is undoubtedly a lack of feeling for numbers. When the Chancellor was accepting the needs of rural areas, including specifically mentioning schools, at his recent visit to the Treasury Select Committee, Mr Gove was continuing a policy of per pupil funding regardless of where the pupils live. This may drive some Tory voters towards UKIP in 2015 if they think their former Party is favouring urban areas.

And finally, in no especial order, the Parliamentary Education debate of the year award

This goes to the debate where the differences between the coalition partners over teacher training were first written into the Order Paper for all to see.

This afternoon the Labour Party at Westminster have an opposition day debate in the main chamber around the topic. This is the sort of debate that normally passes relatively without comment, but what is interesting is the amendment put down by the government in the names of the prime minister and his deputy; and Michael Gove and David Laws. I have reproduced it below with the key section underlined:

Line 1, leave out from ‘House’ to end and add ‘notes that this Coalition Government is raising the quality of teaching by quadrupling Teach First, increasing bursaries to attract top graduates into teaching, training more teachers in the classroom through School Direct and providing extra funding for disadvantaged pupils through the pupil premium which schools can use to attract and reward great teachers; notes that the part of the Coalition led by the Deputy Prime Minister believes all schools should employ teachers with Qualified Teacher Status, and the part of the Coalition led by the Prime Minister believes free schools and academies should retain the freedom to hire teachers without Qualified Teacher Status; further notes that funding agreements with academies and free schools will not be altered in relation to Qualified Teacher Status prior to the next election; and regrets the findings of the recent OECD skills report which revealed that those young people educated almost entirely under the previous administration have some of the worst levels of literacy and numeracy in the developed world, underlining the need for radical schools reform and demonstrating why nobody can trust the Opposition to protect education standards.’

For the full write up read the blog entry for the 30th October 2013.

So, what will 2014 bring? But, perhaps that’s best left to another post.

Another nail in the coffin

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The first Friday in December is a strange time to advertise eight top jobs in education. At this time of year either the employer is in a tearing hurry to make the appointments or the likely candidates have already been handpicked and by advertising when few candidates are job hunting the field can be appropriately small. I assume the DfE’s adverts for eight School Commissioners, each responsible for a region of the country, falls into the former category of advert.

The creation of these School Commissioner posts, and that of the overall national school commissioner, is the next step on the road to the full ‘nationalisation’ of the school system in England. Although these Commissioners are initially only to have oversight of academies and free schools, and presumably UTCS and Studio Schools as forms of academy, it would be an easy step for parliament to add maintained schools to their brief, thus finally depriving local authorities of any oversight of the school system after more than a century in some form of control.

I wrote earlier this year that I could understand such a system for the secondary school sector, but am apprehensive once central government control is extended to the primary sector. Most primary schools are essentially local in nature serving their local communities, and remote decision-making is not a good idea. The region that contains all the primary schools in Oxfordshire also stretches to include primary schools in Hackney and Haringey. The needs of schools such as Bruce Grove Primary in Tottenham and Buckland Primary in Oxfordshire would test any organisation, as we have seen when Oxfordshire managed to apparently overlook the poor performance of Oxford City’s primary schools a few years ago.

What is more alarming is that there has been little or no discussion about the change in control of schools with those most involved. At present, Oxfordshire is deep into a consultation, its second this year, on changes to home to school transport policy. But, the DfE doesn’t seem to have consulted before creating these new posts. Indeed, it doesn’t even seem to have bothered to tell MPs at Westminster.

There is also an assumption in the adverts that heads, assisted by a board of six other heads elected by their peers, will create the best management tier. Now there are many other capable people in and around the education scene that might want to apply, and I hope that they won’t be excluded if these posts do go ahead. Fortunately, being past current pensionable age, I can rule out self-interest in making that comment.

I don’t know what the churches will make of this change since many faith schools are now academies. Will they want one of the six person board to be from a faith-based schools. And what of the governors: how will they relate to the activities? Governors are key players on School Forums – will the power of that body now be diminished in favour of dictats from the Commissioner’s Office. The Daily Mail reported today that Bob Russell, a Lib Dem MP, held a surgery that lasted twelve hours: a record. Add in responsibility for schools, and who knows how long it might last?

Hard work ahead on teacher supply

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This has been a busy week for statistics about teacher preparation courses in England. Along with the full details of allocations made for 2014, published last Friday afternoon with little or no notice, always an interesting sign when that happens, there has been the census of recruitment to 2013 courses that was published on Tuesday.

The headlines from 2014 allocations are that higher education is still massively involved in teacher preparation, either directly or through validating the offerings of schools places offered via the School Direct scheme. However, many universities find themselves with allocations that are not economic in terms of viable courses, and there may still be other higher education institutions that follow Bath and the OU and either exit teacher preparation completely or withdraw from particular subjects. As the DfE has ensured some 30% more secondary places than might have been allocated if the Teacher Supply Model was followed more closely the risk has been transferred to students should all places be filled. In reality, there will be a tussle between the School Direct route and higher education in many subjects as to which places will be filled if the government cannot attract enough potential applications into teaching.

This is where the evidence from the 2013 ITT Census becomes important. Taken in association with the figures from the previous two years it shows some reduction in places filled. But, this was partly due to the 13% over-allocation the government has now owned up to. However, that does not explain either the massive decline in applications to train as design and technology teachers or the further declines in computer science and physics trainees accepted on to courses. The lack of awareness on the part of ministers as to how important the study of design and technology in schools is to the British economy is extremely worrying. Whether this lack of concern is part of the class system that says since you cannot study the subject at Oxford or Cambridge it cannot be important, or comes from a ministerial team with limited experience manufacturing industry I cannot tell. However, I might have expected the RSA along with other bodies with an interest in the future of design to be alarmed by the figures. The same is true for computing. I doubt whether the government will easily fulfil its desire to improve the skills in programming across the nation unless something is done to overcome a lack of trainees.

On May 8th I posted on this blog my concerns about recruitment for 2013, and that helped spark a debate about both where we train teachers and how many to train. My prediction for 2014 is that the challenge to recruitment may well be even tougher than last year, and the failure of the head of the NCTL to address the issue of teacher supply in his speech yesterday at the Academies Show, at least in the version I have seen, was a missed opportunity. In almost every subject the School Direct scheme under-performed higher education in recruitment, apparently leading one Vice Chancellor to reflect that universities rose to the government’s rescue. I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but how schools handle the significant increase in places allocated to them needs close monitoring. After all, in 2013, School Direct barely recruited more trainees than the former employment-based programmes achieved at the height of their popularity. That’s a long way off the total domination of teacher preparation ministers were championing only a year ago. This will be an interesting twelve months.

Do we need a Board?

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Much fuss is being made this morning over whether the Revd Flowers had the right expertise to chair a bank, and whether the regulators took any action to ensure his fitness for the post. Being chairman of a Board is an important post, arguably as important as the role of Chief Executive, but in a different way. For that reason it is unfortunate that unlike Ofsted or Qfqual the teaching profession no longer has a board to oversee the actions of the full-time officials working in the field of teacher preparation and development.

When the TTA and its successors in title were non-departmental bodies they had a Board to which the Chief Executive nominally reported. That did allow for some debate about issues of teacher preparation and development. It may not always have been the most challenging of Boards, but at least it was there. The same was true for the National College. Since the functions of teacher preparation and development have been taken back into the Department no such balance now exists, and the only checks on what is happening are either through the media or the parliamentary process. The absence of a balance to the Executive may well account for the extra scrutiny that teacher preparation changes have come under this year. However, to the good, there has been much more data published by the Department than in previous years, including the recent profiles of 2011-12 teaching graduates. Used properly, these data can help inform the debate.

It was inevitable that a switch to School Direct as a training route, especially for secondary teachers, would attract attention, as any change where there are winners and losers always does. Might a NCSL Board have aired some of the issues it has been left to the professional associations, politicians and participants in the teacher education process to raise in public? I would have hoped so. That is why I have worked with Chris Waterman to suggest the government establish an Advisory Committee on Teacher Supply and Training in order to bring together those concerned with the long-term development of a world-class teaching profession rather than just leave decisions to politicians and officials whose horizon rarely extends beyond the next funding cycle, and only as an election approaches beyond the end of the present parliament or term of office of the Secretary of State.

Next week sees the publication of the ITT Census for 2013, and the extent to which teaching has retain its glamour as a profession in all subjects and phases will become apparent. This week, the new UCAS application system is to go live, and the first applications by graduates wanting to train in 2014 as teachers will start to be made. Undergraduates have been applying ever since the UCAS system opened.

I hope 2014 will be a good year for recruitment, but I am pessimistic about whether the government has done enough to attract sufficient high quality applicants with the right range of academic knowledge into the profession. After all, social mobility will definitely be hindered if we run into another teacher supply crisis, even in just one part of the country.

Quality Assurance v Quality Control

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One of the interesting features of living in Oxford is that although we are known as a city of learning we also have a thriving car industry. We celebrate 100 years of car production in the city this year. Car production locally has mirrored the fate of the industry nationally. When I arrived in Oxford in the late 1970s the car plant was suffering, along with much of British manufacturing industry, from a range of ills. Nowadays, the Cowley plant is producing the world-beating mini, and once again on top form.

One of the changes in production methods, along with the extensive use of robots and just in time ordering during the past 30 years, has been a change from quality control to quality assurance. At one time a car was checked for defects at the end of the line, and those defects were rectified. It was said that in the worst cases the car had to be virtually rebuilt. This was the quality control approach. In the worst cases what it lacked was any feedback to change procedures. With a quality control approach faults still arise from time to time, but the reason for them is investigated and, if possible, preventative measures are put in place to avoid a re-occurrence. As a result, fewer cars need remediation, and more cars go straight to the consumer rather than back to the factory.

Now, education isn’t a production line, and pupils aren’t components to be bolted and welded together to create an artefact. However, I do think that we can learn from these two approaches. I have been in two different meetings this week where output measures, and specifically, the GCSE output measure, have been discussed. This felt like a quality control approach, with a focus on improving the output.

My preference is to spend more time on what is happening with much younger children. After nearly 150 years of state involvement with five year olds we have a lot of information about those children that fall behind and often why. But, we may need to be more systematic in our approach to what works. Although I am not a fan of synthetic phonics for all because it was a one size fits all approach, it should have persuaded schools and policy-makers to tackle this question of what works. If a pupil arrives at school from a background where the printed word is largely absent, they may well have a different attitude to books and the alphabet than pupils from homes where both the printed and the spoken word are commonplace parts of daily life. If one group is then absent more often than the other we need to work out as educators how we overcome those disadvantages to allow all children to learn effectively. Early failure is costly to the whole education system, and too often results in a ‘cannot do’ rather than a ‘can do’ attitude to learning on both the part of the learner and those responsible for their learning.

So, a quality assurance approach that asks the question, why are this group not learning, and seeks appropriate approaches to overcome this challenge might move us away from the censorial ‘you failed’ view of both the learner and the teacher towards a more challenging but cooperative approach. The move at both the DfE and Ofsted towards looking at progress of all pupils over time is a start, but we still lack a mechanism for communicating what works, and also for schools to ask for help without seeming to be failures. The best Children’s Services, dioceses, and academy chains do provide this support, but one of the problems of the lack of a effective middle tier to support primary schools in particular is that it is less easy to arrange than before. As holders of the purse strings, this is an issue all Schools Forums might like to consider next year when reflecting on budget priorities for their system as a whole.

Teacher Preparation – Allocation for 2014/15 – The direction of travel

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Although the NCTL only published outline figures today for the 2014/15 ITT allocations to allow schools and universities time to confirm that they will be taking up the places offered to them, the direction of travel is clear. Once again there has been over-allocation against need as modelled by the statisticians. The over-allocation is in the order of 18% compared with 13% in 2013/14, and is probably largely in the secondary phase. This over-allocations has allowed 16,200 places to be allocated to universities, although once the likely 9-10,000 primary places have been factored in, the secondary total is likely to be around 6-7,000 places, compared with 9,300 last year. Hence the decimation of courses not rated ‘outstanding’ in some subjects and in some parts of the country. Had the over-allocation not taken place, it seems likely that secondary provision in higher education would have all but disappeared if the real target was around in the 14,000-15,000 range of required places for the secondary sector. We won’t know for sure until the detailed allocations are published sometime in the future. However schools are already advertising their School Direct places on web sites three weeks before the admissions system goes live.

The next issue is whether the guarantee to ‘outstanding’ providers will be repeated in 2014 for the 2015 allocations. If not, and School Direct recruits to target, then higher education will disappear from direct provision in most secondary subjects. Universities will, of course, be free to work with schools as partners in School Direct, and the NCTL notes that 10,800 of the School Direct places are delivered in association with universities. Overall, universities have a hand in the delivery of 82% of the provisional allocations, either directly or in association with schools. However, that percentage is undoubtedly lower for the secondary sector.

What is clear is that the divide between secondary and primary phase training is now sharper than at any time in the past 50 years. It seems likely that universities with large primary numbers, especially undergraduate numbers, can continue to cope with a mixture of smaller secondary allocations and association with schools through provision of School Direct training. Those universities with no primary provision plus secondary courses with fewer than 150 places must be at a genuine risk of exiting teacher preparation as their programme will probably not be financially viable.

The long-term challenge for the government is to ensure a stable and high quality secondary teacher preparation programme that will be able to deliver the number of trainees needed when the secondary school population rises sharply towards the end of this decade, and on into the first half of the 2020s. The immediate challenge is to ensure the new and untried admission system works effectively, and that as many trainees as are needed are recruited in the 2013/14 round. That will be no small challenge.

Private education, but State Funded?

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As a nation, can we afford private education funded by taxation? For that is surely what Nick Clegg was offering when he said in his keynote speech earlier today:

“But I am totally unapologetic for believing that, as we continue to build a new type of state funded school system – in which parents are presented with a dizzying range of independent, autonomous schools, each with its own different specialism, ethos or mission “

So if you want a school for your child, and are prepared to meet the food standards, follow the National Curriculum, and employ qualified teachers, my Party, the Lib Dems, will fund it even if there is another school down the road. As a result could every humanist is a village with a Church of England primary school have an academy that looks like a typical community school even though both schools will be half empty? I bet the Treasury wouldn’t approve that. But, Nick might, of course, have been talking only about urban areas.

With the huge rise in the pupil population that is occurring over the next decade we will certainly need more school places, as David Laws discussed for two hours yesterday with the Education Select Committee members at Westminster. But, choice, and a funding guarantee for existing schools, plus the Pupil Premium, means any further inflow of pupil numbers from hard-pressed parents currently paying for school fees that now want the State to pay for their child’s education, but on their own terms in respect to ethos and mission, and presumably admission criteria, and who might see this parental guarantee as a good deal, will cost the State money to finance the switch of sectors for these children. In 2002, I calculated that the cost of such a transfer might be more than £2 billion, and it would certainly be more now. It might even bring back many of the former direct grant day schools that left the state system over the issue of comprehensive intakes in the 1970s since they presumably meet most of the criteria set by Mr Clegg.

If this huge influx of new schools happens in the secondary sector over the next few years, then either other services will be less well funded or taxes will have to rise.

Nick’s other big idea, of superheads for failing schools, has been tried before with mixed results. The difference this time is that he seems to expect these new head teachers to take the job for the long-haul rather just until the school improves. But that’s what every chairman says when they appoint a new football manager. If these superheads are to be employed by Whitehall, then it is another nail in the coffin of local authorities’ involvement in education. After all, until recently, Oxfordshire and many other authorities had a pool of primary heads to undertake just this sort of role, and they already knew the school and the area. The money might be better spent identifying what works for schools that are under-performing, and providing local help and support. In some cases it might mean a new head, but in others raising aspirations or dealing with a problem outside the school that is affecting a group of children may be what is needed to raise performance.

What does a ‘Qualified Teacher’ mean to Mr Clegg?

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What does being a ‘qualified teacher’ mean in Nick Clegg’s mind and how far will his guarantee go? Will he go further than the need for just a teaching qualification and guarantee parents that he will work towards a profession where teachers are not only qualified in teaching, but also qualified in what they are teaching?

To be a successful teacher requires a range of different qualities but, at least in the secondary sector, there ought to be a minimum level of subject knowledge equivalent to two years of an honours degree. Anyone without this basic level of knowledge should be offered Subject Knowledge Enhancement courses to allow them to acquire sufficient knowledge before they complete their teacher preparation experience. Even those with the requite degree may still lack expertise in areas of the school curriculum in their subject, and ways should be found to allow them to continue to acquire such additional knowledge. Any programme leading to Qualified Teacher Status should be restricted to preparation for specific subjects and phases rather than continue to be generic as at present, where a teacher with QTS can teach anything to anyone at any level of schooling. The fact that more than 20% of those teaching some Mathematics in our schools do not have a qualification above ‘A’ level in the subject may explain why many children neither enjoy the subject nor do well in it.

Qualified Teacher Status should be restricted in the subjects and phases where teachers are allowed to practice.

 However, it is in preparing teachers for the primary sector that I believe that most attention needs to be paid. The present post-graduate course attempts to cram the equivalent of a quart into a pint pot. Many curriculum areas receive scant attention, and there is no guarantee that the time in school will effectively dovetail in developing the time spent on the programmes outside the classroom. It is time for a thorough overhaul of how primary teachers are prepared. In the first instance, the undergraduate training route should be replaced by a wider first degree programme that would prepare graduates to work in a range of services including youth and social work as well as teaching. The specific training to be a teacher would be entirely postgraduate. Such a new degree would prevent undue early specialisation among those entering university straight from school.  It would also avoid the bizarre situation created by the Coalition whereby graduates wanting to become a teacher are subject to a minimum degree standard, except in Mathematics and Physics, but no such standard is imposed on undergraduates. As with the secondary sector, where there are already virtually no undergraduate teacher preparation courses, graduates of the new courses would not be licensed to teach at any level in the primary school, but would be certificated to teach at a particular Key Stage.

Overall, graduate training would be on a two year model leading to a Masters degree with the possibility of appropriate credit against the subject components of secondary subject training for those with appropriate honours degrees.

Teacher Training, and especially training for primary teachers, needs a radical overhaul. All teachers should be expected to study to a Masters level.

For too long the nation has under-invested in its teacher preparation programmes because politicians have never really been convinced of the need for such courses. If this is the first step on the road to a fundamental reappraisal of what we want form qualified teachers, then it is a welcome move. But, if Mr Clegg is just embarking on a bit of marketing then it will be an opportunity lost.

Consensus: but on whose terms?

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When advisers to Ministers write long extended essays you wonder how they have the time on their hands to do so, and whether they are looking for a role once they leave the sanctuary of the Minister’s entourage.

Here are extracts from some of the claims about education in an essay by the education secretary’s adviser Dominic Cummings[1]

The education of the majority even in rich countries is between awful and mediocre. A tiny number, less than 1 percent, are educated in the basics of how the ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’ provides the ‘language of nature’ and a foundation for our scientific civilisation and  only a small subset of that <1% then study trans-disciplinary issues concerning the understanding, prediction and control of complex nonlinear systems. Unavoidably, the level of one’s mathematical understanding imposes limits on the depth to which one can explore many subjects. For example, it is impossible to follow academic debates about IQ unless one knows roughly what ‘normal distribution’ and ‘standard deviation’ mean, and many political decisions, concerning issues such as risk, cannot be wisely taken without at least knowing of the existence of mathematical tools such as conditional probability. Only a few aspects of this problem will be mentioned.

There is widespread dishonesty about standards in English schools, low aspiration even for the brightest children, and a common view that only a small fraction of the population, a subset of the most able, should be given a reasonably advanced mathematical and scientific education, while many other able pupils leave school with little more than basic numeracy and some scattered,

soon-forgotten facts. A reasonable overall conclusion from international comparisons, many studies, and how universities have behaved, is that overall standards have roughly stagnated over the past thirty years (at best), there are fewer awful schools, the sharp rises in GCSE results reflect easier exams rather than real educational improvements, and the skills expected of the top 20 percent of the ability range studying core A Level subjects significantly declined (while private schools continued to teach beyond A Levels), hence private schools have continued to dominate Oxbridge entry while even the best universities have had to change degree courses substantially.

There is hostility to treating education as a field for objective scientific research to identify what different methods and resources might achieve for different sorts of pupils. The quality of much education research is poor. Randomised control trials (RCTs) are rarely used to evaluate programmes costing huge amounts of money. They were resisted by the medical community for decades (‘don’t challenge my expertise with data’) and this attitude still pervades education. There are many ‘studies’ that one cannot rely on and which have not been replicated. Methods are often based on technological constraints of centuries ago, such as lectures. Square wheels are repeatedly reinvented despite the availability of exceptional materials and subject experts are routinely ignored by professional ‘educationalists’. There is approximately zero connection between a) debates in Westminster and the media about education and b) relevant science, and little desire to make such connections or build the systems necessary; almost everybody prefers the current approach despite occasional talk of ‘evidence-based policy’. The political implications of discussing the effects of evolutionary influences on the variance of various characteristics (such as intelligence (‘g’) and conscientiousness) and the gaps between work done by natural scientists and much ‘social science’ commentary have also prevented rational public discussion.

Now Mr Cummings goes on to make many other claims in his 250 page essay, many of which I disagree with. However, I do think that many politicians have spent too much of the last half century dealing with issues about the organisation of education, and other relatively less important matters, while too often letting the big questions go unanswered, and sometimes even ignoring them completely.

I sense from his essay that Mr Cummings may be a deeply frustrated man after his period advising the Secretary of State, and I can sympathise with him. Those who made education a political football in the 1970s, mostly over the issue of non-selective secondary schooling, meant that I have spent my adult life in an environment that all too often thought if one side championed a policy it was obviously wrong, and should be reserved. It would be better if, we could create a new consensus so that as a country we can identify the key issues for change in our education system, and work towards improving them. Locally, all political parties have worked to improve standards in primary schools, but not together. For whatever Mr Cummings has to say about the secondary schools and higher education, it is in the primary schools that the foundations of learning are developed. Hopefully, this takes place alongside the child’s home and the work done within the family, but we have yet to tackle successive generational failure in this area. This is an aspect of schooling where focussed research should help by harnessing the benefits of those that achieve success with this group.

Mr Cummings has the wisdom of youth. I am reminded of that passage from Acts Chapter 2 where the writer says in the words of Mr Gove’s beloved King James translation:  ‘the young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams’.  Sentiment similar to that found the words of the Old Testament prophet Joel.  Visions are necessary to replenish what we as humans strive for in the future. Personally, despite my no doubt qualifying for the title ‘old man’ in the mind of the writers of those Bible passages, I still have a vision of an improved primary school system based upon better teacher preparation and higher status for those that teach our young children. To achieve just that would be a major step forward.

Now Mr Cummings is keen on the importance mathematics, and also an understanding of statistics, so I offer him the following equation about education that I first wrote about in 2007 in a chapter I contributed to a book called ‘Reinventing the State’. My equation went as follows:

Performance = Pounds (for resources) + People (Sufficiently appropriately trained staff) + Premises (School buildings fit for purpose) + Pedagogy (An appropriate curriculum and learning methods).

To the original algorithm I added a fifth ‘P’ for Parents since, as I have already acknowledged, their role is vital. Now of course we can discuss the relative weighting of each element, but Mr Cummings is right to look for research evidence to drive success forward.

I have ignored the headline grabbing part of Mr Cummings’ essay about nature v nurture and the possible ‘showers of blood’ because others will focus on those aspects of the essay. However, the Select Committee is currently exploring the lack of achievement by White Working class boys in our school system, as this is a factor holding back a large group in society from future achievement in life, so perhaps Mr Cummings will let them know what he believes will work.