The Cambridge Review: what is and what might be
Richard Howard
Click here for a print version of this article.
Some months ago, a primary school was having an Ofsted inspection. In one classroom of 7 and 8 years-olds, an RE lesson was taking place. An inspector sat down next to a boy who was busily drawing. 'What are you drawing?' asked the inspector. 'I'm drawing a picture of God' the boy said. 'But', said the inspector, 'no-one knows what God looks like'. 'They will when I've finished', said the boy.
The Cambridge Review has also finished a picture - and on reading 'Children, Their World, Their Education' no-one can say that they don't know what primary education looks like – or, in the words of E. G. A. Holmes nearly a century ago, to know 'what is and what might be'.
The level of research and scholarship, and the interviews with children themselves, which support the Review, are more than that commissioned by the Hadow and Plowden Reports, by the Butler Act and by the Education Reform Act – combined.
Like many others, I am deeply concerned that the schools minister should have dismissed the Review so superficially and negatively. Children who believe that they can draw a picture of God deserve better than that; teachers and school leaders who for more than a decade have asked that the present structures and regimes should be reviewed deserve better. So too do parents and local communities who reasonably want to know that their local school is doing a good job for its children.
Children themselves are remarkably clear about what and how they want to learn. Nearly a hundred primary schools have responded to the National Education Trust's Children's Charter which we introduced with the National College for School Leadership. We asked primary schools all over the country what mattered to them about their learning and they have told us what they wanted. It was:
- to learn about real things, things which matter to us.
- to learn from experts who inspire us, e.g. artists, musicians, writers, mathematicians, scientists...
- to learn more about the world, world events and where we live.
- to be involved in choosing what we learn – what interests and inspires us.
- more opportunities to work in teams, to learn from one another and to work with different age groups.
- more time to learn, more time to research and more time to finish.
- to learn by doing and making.
- to learn with our parents and other adults.
- to communicate our learning through the technologies we use.
- to learn more by being outside the classroom and outside school.
- to be listened to.
There are no soft options there and, in essence, the Review is saying something very similar.
But things are not so clear for the rest of us: parents, teachers, community leaders, governors, and local authorities – or indeed within local government itself. The shift of control in all aspects of primary education in the last two decades - be it the curriculum, leadership and governance, accountability, or statutory documentation – has been extraordinary.
The Review quotes Jack Straw, then Opposition Education Spokesperson, in 1988 saying in a Commons debate that 'the Education Reform Act marks a shift from local to central government control in a manner without parallel in the western world'. The Review also makes the point that the subsequent demise of what were then known as LEAs was something that many may well have brought upon themselves in their refusal to be clear about their responsibilities – just as it is often said that because the teaching profession could not clearly articulate what was being taught and how progress was being measured, the National Curriculum and its associated assessments came into being.
But that was then and this is now, and many detect an opportunity to move on. And this Review indicates a series of directions that we should take – each one questioning and challenging the overtly central control that primary education is experiencing.
The many head teachers who have welcomed this Review and, indeed the Rose report, where in both there is encouragement to offer a more exciting, locally based, creative and challenging curriculum have then added to their welcome and their relief – ah! but what about Ofsted?
The DCSF has learnt, a decade too late, that more of the same literacy and numeracy drills as prescribed in the national strategies doesn't work. It has not, surprisingly, decided that tests don't work, and despite five changes to the schedule in the last decade there is not a firm – or firm enough - conclusion that Ofsted doesn't work.
And then there are the school improvement enthusiasts who are completely driven by data. Data about schools, children and families is available on one of the largest inspection database in the western world which often collapses when confronted by social and community comparators or by the sheer brilliance of a school which beats all the odds.
But data is alluring and it makes even the best of us averse to risk taking and creative provision. The best school leaders use data to inform them and the community about what is going well and where improvements can be made – and so they should. But the nation, as the Cambridge Review argues should not use the same format to judge the progress of an individual child, the quality of a school and the apparent progress being made at certain stages by the country as a whole.
Much of all this was summed up recently by a senior member of a Health Authority when he said: 'I see the same thing in the NHS: self-protective, risk obsessed, over controlled, over inspected, a philosophy that is having the same negative impact, though it hasn't yet got to the serious state we seem to have reached in primary schools'.
What has resulted is there is an actual loss of local accountability. Whilst it is unlikely that there will be a renewal of the lost Local Education Authorities, the replacement of their responsibilities for knowing about their schools has not been met by School Improvement Partners, however well-intentioned they may be in their visits to schools.
As the Review notes in its conclusion to chapter 12 – What is primary education for? – 'the value of local voice and initiative has been a constant theme in the evidence we have collected, and the community without a primary school is in a fundamental sense bereft'.
It was a widely accepted premise of the National Curriculum that a child in a Cornish village school should have the same opportunities as the same aged child in inner-city Newcastle.
The child in Cornwall and the child in Newcastle has the right to the dignity of being literate and numerate and we should not, as a nation, demur from the fact that nearly all, not just 80%, should become literate and numerate by the end of primary school. This should be an aim for the government, a practice for the school and an expectation of the Cornish village or the Newcastle street.
How that is done is a matter for the school. The rural school may well involve its children in studies of moorland and seashore; the inner city school might exploit a rich industrial history, trade routes and immigration. The two might share experiences by linking websites or making residential visits.
Whatever, they should be free to aspire for the best for all their children; to excite them with the culture and history of their local environment; to provide them with role models from the workplace and the community; to share their findings and have them enhanced by other members of the family; and to be judged on the results by all who have contributed to the learning.
****
Someone said to me recently that although they welcomed the findings of this Review it was likely that that it would be put on a government shelf in the same way that the inspiring report by Ken Robinson 'All Our Futures – Creativity, Culture and Education' was shelved ten years ago. I've thought about that and, over time, Creative Partnerships which sprang from that report have developed 8000 locally based initiatives and nearly one million young people have been involved.
My point here is that initial official responses may not be those which remain over time. Interestingly, 3 years ago, there was another 'All Our Futures' Report commissioned by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister which looked at challenges for local governance in 2015 and concluded, 'Whitehall itself will have to change its relationship with local services more significantly than has been the case since 1997', and that 'community leadership is likely to be the single most important feature of local governance.'
In Chapter 20 the Cambridge Review welcomes the Every Child Matters agenda as an essential feature of joined-up services for children and their families, but the Review also picked up upon warnings that an 'initiative intended as a holistic approach to education may fail because of too much emphasis on pre-determined outcomes'.
As it is, it would appear that schools and higher education are more heavily inspected than other ECM partners, with school gradings for the ECM agenda being in the public arena to a greater extent than other services who themselves also make a contribution to the five outcomes, to social cohesion and to well-being.
There are success stories, such as the health services offered to schools in Tower Hamlets and the centrality of some small and isolated Cumbrian primary schools to their community as a whole.
However, the patchiness of development is sometimes the result of an endemic inertia from some schools who are seen as resisting partnership in multi-agency working; sometimes it is the result of partners not prioritising multi-agency commitments; and there is often confusion about the role of the Children's Trusts, being able to make essential contacts, or having anyone left in LAs who can be of assistance. The Review itemises these in detail and they are real for schools - whatever their attitude to partnership.
So, is the future and necessary development of the ECM agenda merely one of attitude – by the headteacher, the chair of governors, the parent or carer, the local officers and the policy makers? Success depends on attitudes at all levels.
Some measures are simple, some would say simplistic, such as it being accepted that celebrating with a child the birth of his baby sister is just as important to his well being as that of turning over the next page of a book. At a policy level it means that no school can exist as an island and that the Review's recommendation for there to be a review of resource allocations at a local community level suggest federations (or clusters or partnerships) of schools working together to provide multi-agency support for an area.
To take this further, the Welsh Assembly's Rural Development Inquiry in the autumn of 2008 proposed the idea of re-shaping service provision in rural areas in ways that gave an agreed, properly calculated pot of resources to communities for them to provide their own services, including educational space. The LEA would retain responsibility, as would the Assembly for educational policy and law, but the school space would be rented by the Authority from the community who would, for example, be better able to manage space and personnel in terms of fluctuating demand.
The Review's recommendation for parity in primary funding - something that has been an issue for at least 70 years – should not go unheeded. It has properly recognised that education funding, overall, has substantially increased over the last decade. It has not alluded to where money is wasted in the system, or where costly initiatives have been set up without professional or local support.
Were funding to be best targeted, then it would be upon groups of schools, based upon the communities they serve. The sharing of specialist teachers, school nurses, social workers, counsellors, family support services would depend upon the needs of the community, which could also call upon a range of sampling techniques to check on their progress and provision, or to make decisions about whether to increase the element of health support or specialist teaching.
It would then be possible for government and the recognised local authorities to ensure that every child, every school and every family matters, and to do so in real partnership.
Richard Howard is Chair of the National Education Trust
|
