Introduction: political context

We are witnessing the most radical changes in the system of education and training since the establishment, in 1944, of secondary education for all within a maintained system of education. These changes affect deeply the provision of 14-18 education and training.

Two aspects require clarification. First, the ‘maintained system’ was a partnership between government (central and local), the Churches (trustees of many schools) and the teaching profession. Responsibility for ensuring education for all was in the hands of Local Authorities. Second, ‘secondary education for all’ required a re-think of the organisation of schools. As Edward Boyle, Minister of Education, said in the preface to Newsom Report, 1964, ‘all children should have the opportunity to acquire intelligence, and of developing their talents and abilities to the full’. Subsequently that concern for all children led to the development of comprehensive system of secondary education, intended to cater for the full range of ability, social class and vocational aspiration.

It is important to refer to a comprehensive system rather than to comprehensive schools. The system includes comprehensive schools. But many local authorities have 11-16 schools, from which students transfer to 6th Form Colleges or Tertiary Colleges. These are crucial parts of the comprehensive system – but ones which, despite their merits, could be an endangered species because of the reforms now proposed (see p.8 below).

In what sense, then, are we witnessing a radical change? In Education, Education, Education, Adonis describe how he (as education adviser to Tony Blair and then Minister for Schools), ‘reinvented the comprehensive school’, leading to ‘a nationwide movement for educational transformation’ – namely, academies, the ‘new type of independent state school, with dynamic independent sponsors taking charge of their management’ ¹. To that end the maintained system is being dismantled, schools are individually contracted and accountable to the Secretary of State, and their continued future depends on the Ofsted inspectors and the results of tests and examinations agreed by the Secretary of State.

Demise of local education authorities, centralisation of education through contracts to the Secretary of State, success or otherwise of school and colleges on the basis of a testing regime, and influential calls for the creation of a three stage system of schooling (5 to 9, 9 to 14, 14 to 18)² affect profoundly how we see the future for 14-18 year-olds.

Adolescence and social context

The Hadow Report, 1926, aptly entitled The Education of the Adolescent, claimed that ‘there is a tide which begins to rise in the veins of youth at the age of 11 or 12. It is called by the name of adolescence’³ . That tide is more often than not in full flood by the age of 14, and hence 14 is the age at which a shift in the nature of education is advocated by many ⁴. Already choices are made at 14 between different educational pathways leading to different qualifications at 16 – affecting further choices for qualifications at 18. Moreover, to support such choices, transfer to different institutions is now made available at 14 – full-time through the new University Technical Colleges (the brain-child of Kenneth Baker) and part-time through partnerships between schools and colleges of further education (affecting over 100,000 young people). Indeed, it has been proposed that young people at the age of 14 should be able to transfer full-time to FE Colleges where there will be more effective vocational pathways.

The argument is that between the age of 14 and 18, young people require a more adult environment as they prepare for the future. They require a wider range of opportunities than can be offered by schools, which inevitably lack the expertise and resources to satisfy the learning needs of many. Also, recent reviews of research have shown how much the lives of young people have changed over recent decades, especially in relation to the increase in mental health problems⁵. Again, David Lammy’s analysis of the 2000 young people (90% male) prosecuted for offences in the 2011 Autumn riots, points to the need for more practical, engaging and vocational preparation for working life ⁶. The traditional framework of the curriculum and of the school day may well not satisfy the range of learning needs of young people with such different aspirations, abilities, social backgrounds and problems to be overcome. It would seem that one size does not fit all.

Add to this the changed economic situation and declining opportunities in the labour market. Up to the mid-1970s, the majority of young people would leave school at 16 (the raising of the school leaving age was in 1972) without qualifications but able to find work in unskilled jobs. By 2000 the majority were in full-time education. Now nearly 50% continue into higher education. But the collapse of the labour market leaves a million of 16 -19 year-olds without employment or likelihood of employment, despite being better qualified.

How should such factors affect our understanding of the aims of education for 14-18 year olds, of the kind of learning to be promoted, of the range of qualifications worth pursuing, of the institutional provision which will respond to so many different needs?

Aims of education

Such a question forces us to raise fundamental questions about the aims of education and the values which schools, colleges and youth service should nurture. Unexamined values shape the educational experience of young people from 14 to 18. These values need to be examined critically: for example, the division between prestigious academic pathways for some and vocational studies for others; the dismissal of arts and humanities from the core curriculum at 14 or in the core subjects which had been proposed for the EBac; concentration on examination grades; absence of practical knowledge and experiential engagement for those deemed ‘academic’; the mode through which merit is recognised in formal assessments. All these reflect unquestioned values and thus the aims of education.

What then, by contrast, are the educational aims which enable all young people to live fully human lives – not just the academically able. We need a vision of 14-18 education which embraces those who have opted out of or who are disengaged from formal education – those who are often rescued by colleges of further education or by the youth service with its own distinctive pedagogical approaches (see the evidence of the National Youth Agency to the Select Committee ⁷ ).

Such aims are: to develop
• self-worth – leaving school or college with a sense of achievement and able to enter the adult world with a sense of dignity and confidence;
• basic capabilities in reading, numeracy and communicating both orally and in writing;
• knowledge and understanding for the intelligent management of life – making sense of the social, physical and economic worlds they inhabit;
• practical capabilities through which they come to understand the world in a different way and to act creatively within it;
• ‘moral seriousness’ in thinking about the life worth living and about the big problems which affect the future (e.g. environmental destruction);
• capacity to contribute to the wider community of which they are part.

Such aims requires a wider vision of learning than what generally prevails, too often driven by ‘high-stakes testing’ and the consequent league tables.

A wider vision of learning

Formal education is dominated by success in narrowly conceived forms of academic learning, thus undermining other capabilities of importance to our society, namely, those reflecting the broader aims outlined above. This is crucial, not simply for the many young people disengaged from formal learning due to its narrow focus and the deep sense of failure caused, but also for those deemed successful but whose success often lacks understanding of the subject matter. (See, for example, the trenchant criticisms by the Smith Report where successful teaching to the test, though leading to high scores, too often leads to poor understanding) ⁸ .

A wider vision of learning is required, one which respects the practical as well as the academic, informal and experiential as well as formal learning, key concepts and ideas as well as facts and formulae, and the possibilities opened up by recent developments in Information and Communication Technology. It should draw on the range of expertise and resources within the community. There is a need, therefore, to restore

• practical capability and technical knowledge, for, in words of the Royal Society of the Arts, which for 250 years has emphasized the unity of thinking and doing, there exists in its own right a culture which is concerned with doing and making and organising and the creative arts. This culture emphasises the day to day management of affairs, the formulation and solution of problems, and the design, manufacture and marketing of goods and services ⁹.
And yet that ‘intelligent doer’ is too often neglected – unrecognised in the ‘standards’ by which learner and school or college are tested;

• development of understanding, namely, a grasp of the key ideas through which young people understand (at different levels) the physical, social and moral worlds they belong to. This must not be confused with the ‘transmission of knowledge’, as is illustrated by ACME’s The Mathematical Need of the Learner;

• the centrality of the arts (drama, dance, fine arts) through the active participation in which young people are enabled to explore what it means to be human;

• space for discussing matters of personal and social concern, based on evidence and experience (e.g., as in once widespread ‘Humanities Curriculum Project’);

• emphasis on the quality of work-based learning;

• engagement in community activities through which they come to see how their efforts, howsoever modest, can make a difference for the better.

All the above need to be learned through the initiation into the different forms of knowledge and understanding, into moral traditions so neglected, into practices of doing and making, and into civic and public traditions of service.

Need for Information, Advice and Guidance (IAG)

Essential to this wider vision of learning, as young people have to make decisions as early as 14 about their future (namely, the learning pathways to follow and the qualifications to pursue), is an independent, impartial and well-informed IAG.

Let us consider some of the problems. There are about 8000 possible combinations of A Level examinations. The wrong combination, chosen in all innocence, might deprive the student opportunity to enter the degree course wanted. The Russell Group of universities require of the majority of successful candidates to have a university based examination or test as well as their A Levels. The more knowing schools will provide coaching or at least show where such coaching is available – something not known about by many schools. Again, those who seek apprenticeships need to know where such apprenticeships are to be found. Again, students often move onto Level 2 vocational qualifications in college, discovering only later that the qualification leads to nowhere.

Despite these problems, appropriate IAG is not available for many. Connexions Service has focused on the minority who are in danger of becoming disengaged from education. IAG for the rest has too often been conducted within schools by people who are not well informed about routes into the plethora of higher education degrees (with different A Level and entry test requirements), appropriate further education courses, local and regional apprenticeships, and employment needs and possibilities. Rather should such IAG be shared by schools and further education, data driven (what has happened to young people who took such and such a qualification?), and peopled by experts.

However, despite the vital importance of an independent and professionally staffed IAG , it is notable for its absence in the lives of many young people as the most recent Richard Review has pointed out ¹⁰ .

Impoverishment of learning through testing and qualifications turnover

‘High stakes’ testing, at 14, 16, 17 and 18, in preparation for national examinations and tests, impoverishes learning. It encourages teaching to the test, extensively researched by Mansell ¹¹. Yet, under the revitalised system of accountability, under the political ‘reforms’ referred to in the first section, and under the role of Ofsted inspectors, the ‘high stakes testing’ will become even higher. This impoverishment of learning applies as much to those who are deemed highly successful ¹² as it does to those who are disengaged. Furthermore, the system of qualifications, into which this assessment feeds, is highly complex in terms of progression routes, levels and equivalences, and little understood by employers, young people themselves and higher education.

One needs to reflect on the damage done to so many by the constant changes in the examination and qualification system, affecting particularly those who do not go up the academic route. Remember, for instance, the pre-vocational courses beginning with CGLI 365 in the 1970s, superseded by CPVE, superseded by DOVE, superseded by GNVQ, superseded by 14-19 Diplomas. This last was said by DfES, only three years ago, to be the future qualification of choice. Now it is dead. Remember, too, the complex framework of GCSE equivalences, now abandoned so that once highly successful schools have now become highly unsuccessful – where the change has been, not in teaching or curriculum, but in an arbitrary shift in accountability. Remember, too, the recent debacle over AL2 (seeking a return to AS Supplementary), Ebac and EBCs ¹³.

But do we need any longer to have a public and highly expensive examination at 16, when the leaving age for education in some form or other is to be raised to 18? There is a need to return to the proposals of the Tomlinson Report for an overarching Diploma at 18 reflecting the wide range of educational achievements, including apprenticeships ¹⁴.

Therefore,

• the different purposes of assessment (i.e. supporting learning; holding the system accountable; certifying achievements) require different modes of assessment. Research showing how this possibility has been ignored in favour of assessing only what is easily measurable ¹⁵ ;

• assessment should reflect the aims of learning, including the practical, informal and experiential, as these are negotiated with HE and occupational sectors;

• qualification reform needs to pause whilst a representative and independent Commission, on the basis of wide consultation, relevant research and evidence, makes recommendations which ensure stability for the future.

Curriculum and teaching

Teaching is increasingly referred to as a matter of ‘delivering the curriculum’, as though the curriculum is a document or a set of instructions for a technical expert in ‘delivery’ to transmit. This reflects the gradual demise of teaching as a profession. Rather should the teacher be seen, not as ‘curriculum deliverer’, but as ‘curriculum thinker’ whose expertise lies in (a) knowledge and love of the subject-matter being taught, (b) the pedagogical know-how through which the learners (of different types and attainments) might engage with that subject-matter, (c) thinking about (action research into) how educational aims might be implemented in the classroom. And this applies just as much to the master craftsman teaching the apprentice in the workshop.

The emphasis is on the teacher rather than on the curriculum, because there is no curriculum development without teacher development ¹⁶ . A broad curriculum framework is necessary, and again this applies to those who, either on vocational courses or apprenticeships, are engaged in practical and occupation-related education and training (see Baker’s and Winch’s examples of what this could mean in particular instances ¹⁷). But it is the professional job of teachers and trainers, working together, to exercise judgement as to how that framework should be applied to the different young people, with diverse backgrounds and abilities, in order to meet the different educational aims outlined above. Flexibility is essential.

Such expertise requires continuing professional development, shaped predominantly by the perceived needs of the teachers and promoted mainly from within the teaching profession where the expertise largely abides.

The changing system: the need for partnerships

The so-called system of education and training from 14-18, as that has evolved in recent years, is bewildering. Indeed, it is no longer a system governed by the same legal and funding frameworks. There are: 11-18 schools; 11-16 schools; University Technical Colleges 14-18; Sixth-Form Colleges; Tertiary Colleges; Further Education Colleges; Private Training Centres; Youth Service. Half the secondary schools are maintained by the Local Authority. The other half (Academies and Free Schools) are under contract to the Secretary of State. The latter have sponsors, very often chains of academies which are businesses seeking profit either through directly running the schools or from selling educational services. Here there are parallels with the privatisation of the National Health Service. The 94 Sixth Form Colleges are, like the FE Colleges, incorporated institutions which, amongst other things, have to pay VAT; their students (over 150,000 of them) are funded at a lower rate than years 11 students in schools ¹⁸. Too often forgotten is the Youth Service, which, despite its vital service to many young people (being for some the one opportunity to return to learning), suffered most from recent education cuts ¹⁹.

There are many problems arising from this fragmentation of the system:

• unequal funding of students doing the same courses in different institutions;

• lack of the expertise and resources required for teaching some courses (e.g. there are 500 secondary schools without a qualified physics teacher);

• unequal distribution of well-informed IAG;

• small 6th forms even though they produce poorer results on a smaller range of subjects at greater cost;

• competition between institutions rather than the collaboration needed.

In addition, the constant re-branding of apprenticeships (once seen as the development of excellence in a craft, guided and assessed over time by a master-craftsman, within a covenant between employer and apprentice) has devalued its meaning.

This calls for a thorough review of 14-18 provision – perhaps, as in the case of qualifications, an independent Commission to make recommendations, in the light of evidence and research, because no one school can go it alone. Local collaborative learning partnerships (embracing schools, colleges of F.E., universities, employers, youth service, training providers, and voluntary bodies) should be established to enhance lifelong learning, with shared administrative posts, funding, professional development, IAG, subject expertise and links to community. Such partnerships would be more local than Local Authorities, but local authorities would be needed to create them, to ensure appropriate funding, and to support regional as well as local collaboration. There were, under the last Government (stimulated by the introduction of the new 14-19 Diplomas) many examples of such partnerships, making possible (for example) technical and engineering courses in consortia of schools with the local college and with local employers. Over 100,000 young people between 14 and 16 take a substantial part of their curriculum at FE colleges where there are the resources (e.g. workshops, trainee restaurants and kitchens) and the experts (e.g. qualified craft persons) for the more practical and technical studies which are routes through to apprenticeships, higher education and educational engagement.

However, more radical solutions are now being proposed, namely, a return to a middle school system in which the ages of transfer are 9 and 14. At 14, students would be able to move into one of four pathways, each possibly (but not necessarily) located in a distinct institution, namely, (i) technical (e.g. the UTCs); (ii) liberal arts (the so-called academic subjects); (iii) sports and creative arts; (iv) career pathway, combining basic academic subjects with work-based apprenticeships and off-the-job education and training ². Should such a proposal be implemented, then the chief sufferers could be the 94 Sixth Form Colleges which have been one of the most successful elements in the comprehensive system – achievements which rarely find a voice in the big debates.

Conclusion

To ensure education for all, not just the academic minority:

• ask what counts as an educated 18 year old in this day and age;
• develop a broader vision of learning (e.g. practical as well as ‘academic);
• ensure an independent, well-informed and professional IAG for all from age 14;
• get rid of high stakes testing and national examinations at 16;
• provide a system of accountability based on the broader aims of education;
• formulate a national framework, leading to an overarching Diploma at 18, which provides several pathways in response to different learning needs and aspirations;
• respect teachers’ expertise in learning and curriculum, and ensure continuous professional development to create and protect that expertise;
• stop fiddling with qualifications until a National Commission recommends a system accepted by employers, higher education, etc.;
• create the partnerships between schools, sixth form colleges, further education, youth service, higher education and employers so that the broad aims might be achieved for everyone;
• ensure equal funding for students on similar courses, whatever the institution.

References
¹ Adonis, A., 2012, Education, Education, Education,
² Baker, K., ed, 2013, 14-18: A New Vision for Secondary Education, London: Bloomsbury
³ Hadow Report, 1926, The Education of the Adolescent, London: Board of Education
⁴ See, for example, Smithers, A., 2013, ‘Making 14-18 education a reality’, in Baker (2013) op.cit.
⁵ See, for example, Hagel, A., 2012, Social Trends and Mental Health: introducing the main findings, London: Nuffield Foundation
⁶ Lammy, D., 2012, Arising from the Ashes
⁷ House of Commons Select Committee on Youth Service, 2010, London: Stationery Office
⁸ Smth Report, 2004, Making Mathematics Count, London: The Stationery Office, p.93
⁹ Royal Society of the Arts, 1986, Education for Capability, London: RSA
^10
11 Mansell, W., 2007, Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing, London: Politico
¹² See Smith Report op cit
¹³ See Pring, R., 2013, forthcoming, ‘Another reform of qualifications: but qualifying for what?’, Political Quarterly
¹⁴ Tomlinson Report, 2004, Curriculum and Qualifications Reform, London: DfES. See also Tomlinson, M., 2013, ‘The qualifications’ in Baker, op.cit.
¹⁵ See Assessment Research Group, 1999, Assessment for Learning: beyond the black box, University of Cambridge School of Education
¹⁶ see Stenhouse, L., 1975, Introduction to Curriculum Development and Research, London: Heinemann, ch..
¹⁷ Baker, K., op.cit, p.23; Brockmann, M., Clarke, L. and Winch, C.Winch, C., 2011, Knowledge, Skills and Competence in the European Market, London: Routledge
¹⁸ Igoe, D. and Kewin, J., 2013, Creating a level playing field in sixth form education, Sixth Form Colleges Association
¹⁹ See Pring, R., 2012, Life and Death of Secondary Education for All, London: Routledge, pp.83-4
²⁰ Baker, op.cit, p.20, 21, 27-42

The provision of teacher education is undergoing an unpublicised crisis in recent months. This statement looks at two issues to do with the initial training of teachers in England. The first is the Government’s ambivalence towards the initial training of teachers and the second is the effect of the introduction of School Direct.

Responsibility for initial training of teachers and qualified teacher status

The first and most alarming issue is that the need to train teachers at all has come into question. Michael Gove has said that neither Academies nor free schools have to have teachers trained to the Qualified Teacher Status standard. Given that he wants most schools to be either one of these, it is clear that he does not prioritise the need for teacher training. The number of academies has increased dramatically so that now over half the secondary schools in England have Academy or free school status and if Gove has his way this number will continue to grow. Coupled with this, Gove has given up the need to plan teacher training places nationally.

We have now reached a position where:

• no-one person or agency has the duty to ensure a sufficient supply of trained teachers nationally, or an efficient local distribution of training places covering all subject areas; and

• qualified teacher status is no longer seen as a necessary requirement for teachers in the English public education system, unless they are in LEA maintained schools.

This is very disturbing.

School Direct and the initial training of teachers

The second issue is the introduction of School Direct, which is a new school-based employment route into teaching which does not necessarily involve higher education and the award of Qualified Teacher Status, and an academic qualification in education. This should alarm parents of school-aged children.
The 2010-11 Ofsted annual report found that Higher Education (HE) routes into teaching were more effective than employment based routes. Ofsted evidence:

‘shows that there is proportionately less outstanding provision in employment-based routes than in HEI-led partnerships’ (The Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills 2010/11, HC 1633, page 76).

The numbers are quite telling: 65 (47%) HEI-based courses gained outstanding whereas only 19 (19%) employment-based providers were found to be outstanding.

Charlie Taylor, the Chief Executive of the Teaching Agency, claimed, however, on 18 January this year while referring to improving the quality of teachers,

‘I think things can get better and the introduction of School Direct last summer will change things significantly’ (DfE In the News Speeches, 2013).

So, Taylor is overseeing the introduction a system that Ofsted believes produces significantly fewer outstanding courses in teacher education. He is right, however, when he says that it will change things significantly.

Postgraduate teacher training places

In November 2012, the placements for postgraduate teacher training were announced for September 2013 starts. Without any notice at all the numbers were cut by a third. The situation was particularly bad in the arts and humanities.

It appears that anyone without an ‘outstanding’ in their last Ofsted inspection lost their provision to train teachers, again, particularly in the arts. This left strange regional variations.

Places in English

As the new-year turned, London, for example, with a population of 8 million had only 163 places left, in English, for HE providers for 2013 starts, a reduction of 27%. The number of providers was cut from seven providers to just three – The Institute of Education, King’s College London and Roehampton University. Roehampton has just been Ofsteded again and this time they only received a good which may mean that next year their provision may go.

In Leeds (36 places to zero) and Sheffield (23 places to zero), too, for example, they have no more English. The situation has changed slightly in some places. Recently, for example, we have heard that Goldsmith’s, in London, were offered some of their places back as was Leicester, but the picture has changed little. Oxford-Brookes which had all their places in English taken away only to have ten of them returned is not going to pursue a PGCE for English in 2014 as the landscape looks uncertain.

And this is part of the problem. Apart from making the distribution of teacher training places in England startlingly haphazard, with no serious calculation of teacher need, the difficulty of transferring the number of places in HE to schools is that HE providers cannot guarantee jobs for people if they are unclear how many students they will need to support through School Direct. There are departments that have transferred all their work to School Direct provision – Reading University being one such an example. They too lost all their HE provision for English but have 18 School Direct places. They are still, however, in the hands of the schools. It is schools which decide whether or not they are going to have a student, and thus determine whether university provision is required. It is quite possible that a school will decide that they do not want a student in a given year.

HE school partnership in teacher training

The other problem with the introduction of School Direct is that Charlie Taylor appears to think that HE providers do not use schools in their teacher training. In his North of England speech, he said ‘In the past teachers were often parachuted into schools from on high without any direct school involvement in the content or the focus of their training course’. Although he does add ‘that there are many examples of excellent partnerships between schools and providers of teacher training’ he downplays the role of this partnership so much as to distort the truth of the relationship between schools and HE.

Trainee teachers spend 60% of their time in school and only a third of their time in college. That means that the bulk of their training is school-based. Much of their time in college is spent on subject work at the very beginning of the course by teachers preparing for secondary teaching. In that subject work, they explore ways of turning what they have learned in college into work that can be tackled by teenagers. They look at, for example, how you plan lessons and schemes of work, differentiate the work for pupils of various abilities, and how you assess pupils both formatively and summatively. This is a very cost effective way of doing it because it means that students are trained together en masse. There is also time for students to reflect on what they are doing and time too for students who are in different schools to talk about how their school tackles the subject. Ofsted, in the 2010-11 report adds that,

‘The ability of trainees to reflect critically on their practice is a significant factor in promoting their progress, particularly in HEI-led partnerships where staff use their own research activity to promote critical thinking and link the development of subject knowledge with underpinning theory of how children learn’ (Ibid, page 77)

School teachers or mentors do not have the time for this and soon university departments may not be able to employ people to do this type of research. One good thing about the Post Graduate Certificate of Education is that it keeps both sides – the academic and the school teacher – in touch with one another so that they can learn how children learn.

Conclusions

The question of the partnership between schools and universities is ever changeable but to divorce them completely is a mistake and to suggest that teachers need no training at all is a grave error. Teaching is a complicated business and you must have time to reflect on the pedagogical processes involved. It appears that Michael Gove considers subject knowledge enough. What he appears to fail to see is that you need far more than subject knowledge if you are going to stand up in front of thirty children and teach them stuff that they do not already know and inspire them to want to learn more. You need time – mostly at school but in college too – to learn to do this. For this to continue HE must have a more of a guarantee than School Direct can offer. As it stands at the moment the offer of places is too ephemeral for university departments to continue to employ people. Oxford Brookes may well be just the first of many universities to decide that it is no longer economic in such uncertain times to continue to run strands of PGCE – or perhaps PGCE courses at all.

This paper has focused on the initial education and training of teachers in just one, albeit vital, secondary subject (English) but as we suggest the same problem applies across all subjects and in the primary sector too where there is an imminent need for many more teachers as the pupil population rapidly expands over the present decade. To leave the training of teachers to the market with no attempt to plan places is a dereliction of duty and will accelerate the realisation of the present Secretary of State’s belief that no training is required to teach. All the research and evidence of other successful systems elsewhere in the world suggests otherwise. We wonder too how many parents really want their children taught by unqualified teachers. Unless something is done, we shall soon find out.

Tim Brighouse
4 April 2013

Further Background
Under section 62 of the Education Act 1944, the Secretary of State had a duty to secure sufficient facilities were available for the training of teachers and a power to direct LEAs to give whatever assistance was needed to ensure the presence of sufficient Initial Teacher Training (ITT) in their areas. The Secretary of State was responsible for awarding Qualified Teacher Status (QTS), the main function being the awarding of ITT courses to higher education institutions. Under the Education Act 1994, these duties (and responsibility for funding courses from HEFCE), went to a quango the Teacher Training Agency, latterly the Training and Development Agency (TDA), and the standard for the QTS went to the General Teaching Council England (GTCE) following the Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998. Following the abolition of the TDA and GTCE on 1 April 2012 under the Education Act 2011 the duty on the TDA to secure sufficient ITT was repealed and not passed to the Secretary of State. A few functions relating to the management of the teaching workforce, such as induction for teachers who have gone down the QTS route, funding of initial training, and banning individuals from teaching have passed to the Secretary of State which is exercised through an executive arm of the DfE called the Teaching Agency (TA). This is headed by Charlie Taylor whose recent experience was a headship of a small West London special school. The TA will merged with the respected National College for School Leadership (NCSL) on 1 April 2013 with Charlie Taylor in charge

The statement should be read alongside the article from Professor Cathy Nutbrown “Shaking the Foundations of Quality ? Click here to read Professor Nutbrown’s article.

(Professor Hevey is not currently a member of the New Visions for Education Group)

The recent government policy statement ‘More Great Childcare’ announced major changes to education and training at graduate professional level for those working with young children from birth to 5. While welcoming much of its content, the following statement expresses the outstanding concerns of some of the representative organisations of academics, researchers and teachers in Higher Education, major nursery chains and other representatives of wider stakeholders with an interest in higher level education and training leading to Qualified Teacher Status and Early Years Professional Status including those directly affected by the changes

Statement:
• We welcome the government’s recognition of the value of EYPS as a multi-disciplinary training programme specifically designed to produce graduate leaders capable of meeting the holistic needs of young children from birth to five and their families;

• We welcome the governments recognition of the impact that graduate leaders who are EYPS status holders have had/ are having on the quality of Early Years provision nationally;

• We welcome the expressed intention to build on the strengths of the EYPS standards and training programme in future and would question the need for any significant modification to the standards that have recently been revised to align with QTS standards;

However, we have a number of concerns about the current proposal for a new profession of Early Years Teacher (0-5) without QTS. Recent research has confirmed that the roles of Early Years Professionals and Early Years Teachers with QTS are fundamentally different in relation to:

• the breadth and scope of knowledge and skills:- EYPS deals broadly with the whole child from birth to the end of the 5th year in a family and community context and from a multi-disciplinary standpoint in which health, welfare, working with social disadvantage, parent support and safeguarding have equal importance with education; although considering these wider aspects, QTS focuses primarily on the educational dimensions, delivering curriculum content and partnership with parents in their role as the child’s first educators from 3 onwards.

• the expectation and assessment of leadership:- EYPS prepares graduates to act as change agents responsible for raising standards across the whole setting and leading and supporting/mentoring teams of staff from day one; QTS prepares graduates initially for curriculum leadership of a single class, including any para-professionals, whereas wider responsibility for leadership and quality at school level develops after the initial supervised NQT year.

• EY teachers with QTS are recognised for their specialist, in-depth knowledge and skills in teaching and enabling children aged 3-7 to access required learning across the curriculum. Involving parents in their children’s learning is seen as an important part of this, as is liaison with specialist professionals in order to support children’s learning.

• EY professionals with EYPS are required to demonstrate knowledge, skills and experience with 0-3 year olds, to actively engage with and support parents of children of all ages regarding parenting issues and to liaise directly with social workers, health workers and others to promote and safeguard children’s health and well-being as well as educational aims.

Different and Unequal

The current proposal gives a situation which is confusing for parents and prospective students in which some graduates will be 3-7 trained with QTS whilst others will be 0-5 trained with the equivalent of a revised EYPS yet both will be called Early Years Teachers

• EY Teachers without QTS are likely to be regarded as second class citizens in maintained schools since they will not be employed on the same pay and conditions as those with QTS (though it is recognised that strict adherence to national pay scales is changing with the advent of academies, free schools etc)

• EY Teachers without QTS are also likely to be disadvantaged in competition for jobs because of restrictions on their flexibility to be deployed in all areas of the school. In contrast, those with QTS or QTLS can be deployed throughout a maintained school at the discretion of the head teacher.

• In the longer term, there is a danger that those who work in the Foundation Stage as Early Years Teachers, regardless of qualification type, become cut off from the core profession of teachers and the importance of their work downgraded.

Different but Equal

We consider that Early Years Professionals/ new Early Years Teachers and Early Years Teachers with QTS should be equally valued, equally remunerated and equally able to be employed throughout the education and childcare sectors. It should be up to employers, Head Teachers and Local Authorities to deploy staff on an equal basis according to their expertise.

• Alternative models across Europe allow for a distinction between pedagogues and teachers with equivalent but different graduate training and status and equivalent recognition in terms of pay, terms and conditions of service and in terms of employment throughout the education sector.

• An alternative model already exists within England that expressly recognises two forms of teaching professions as different but equal:-

‘Since April 1st 2012 further education teachers who have been awarded QTLS by the Institute for Learning(IfL) and are members of the IfL are recognised as qualified teachers in schools. This will allow them to be appointed to permanent posts in maintained schools in England and they will be paid on the qualified teachers’ pay scale.’ ( DfE 08 May 2012)

While recognising that teachers pay and conditions have recently changed to increase the discretion of head teachers to employ, deploy and remunerate staff according to their expertise and performance, we endorse the government response to the recent review to retain a ‘broad national pay structure’ in particular that ‘all entrants to the profession will know what they can earn as a minimum starting salary’ (DfE response to School Teachers Review Board recommendations Nov 2012)

At the moment, the Teaching Agency’s advice is that new Early Years Teachers without QTS may be employed in schools as ‘instructors’. This reinforces the perception of different and unequal that we reject. Whilst recognising that legal change may be necessary, we strongly recommend that the government makes a statement of intent to the effect that either :

(a) the new status is QTS (0-5/Foundation) so that teachers are simply differentiated by phase and that standards reflect the essential differences in promoting children’s learning, well-being and development under the EYFS and supporting parents; or,

(b) The equivalence of Early Years Teachers with their distinct role and standards will be treated in the same way as that of QTLS holders.
Both the above options would serve to confirm the message of different but equal.

Prof Denise Hevey University of Northampton, Early Years Division

In this article, reproduced here from Professor Nutbrown’s own blog, she explains why she is ‘not delighted’ by the Government’s response to her report

(Professor Nutbrown is not at present a member of the New Visions for Education Group)

On the 19th of June 2012 following a rigorous public consultation, I published my government–‐commissioned report ‘Foundations for Quality’, an independent review of early education and childcare qualifications in England. I began my report with the statement that:

‘Learning begins from birth, and high quality early education and care has the potential to make an important and positive impact on the learning, development and wellbeing of babies and young children, in their daily lives and the longer term’.

Conscious of the century–‐long tradition in England of high quality early education through nursery schools, I noted the developments to improve quality and include provision for very young children that had occurred in recent decades, and I said that ‘every child in home and group settings today deserves the very best early education and care’. It was on this principle that I based my Review and my final recommendations.

If it seems obvious, it is still necessary to reassert that what matters most in the early years workforce is the quality of the experiences they can offer young children. I made clear my view that early years carers and educators are professionals who themselves need continually to develop their own knowledge, skills and understanding. They need to be confident in their own work with children and in engaging with parents and professionals, such as health visitors and social workers. I wrote a report that I hoped would give good advice to Government about the importance of the people who make up the diverse early years workforce having opportunities to progress in their careers, and to become effective pedagogical leaders who understand the learning and development needs of children and can enhance and extend teaching and learning opportunities whatever form the provision takes.

In my report I set out and justified recommendations to improve the quality of early education and care for young children so that:

• every child is able to experience high–‐quality care and education whatever type of home or group setting they attend;

(Foundations for Quality 2012:10)

My recommendations were widely welcomed by the sector and I received many messages of support from key agencies, organisations, and individuals involved in early childhood education and care. There were clear indications that providers from private, independent, voluntary and state–‐maintained sectors, childminders and parents were in broad agreement with my recommendations and were looking forward to a positive response from Government.

I knew that my aspirations were achievable because I had seen them happening in so many settings. However, they did not always happen, and children’s preschool experiences varied too much. Therefore I made recommendations to Government to ensure the following:

• An increase in the number of qualified teachers with specialist early years knowledge who lead practice in settings who –‐ working directly with babies, young children, and their parents, –‐ demonstrably use their pedagogical expertise to support young children’s learning, play and development.

(Foundations for Quality 2012:11)

So why, on 29th January 2013, when the document ‘More Great Childcare’ was published, was I not delighted that the Government was announcing the introduction of Early Years Teachers, enhanced entry requirements to level three qualifications and a stronger level three qualification? Why? Because, as they say, ‘the devil is in the detail’. As I read beyond the headlines of the government proposals I realised that most of my recommendations had, in effect, been rejected. Turning to the Appendix of the ‘More Great Childcare’ document, the disappointing response is only too clear. Whilst I felt that my recommendations taken together, would enhance quality, I am not at all convinced that accepting just five, and tinkering with many others, will achieve the outcomes for children and for their professional practitioners that many had hoped for. The table below shows that, of my 19 recommendations it has been proposed that:

5 are ‘Accepted’
7 are ‘Accepted in principle’
3 are ‘Still under consideration and subject to consultation’
1 is noted to ‘Keep under review’
2 are ‘Not accepted’
1 is noted as ‘No action for Government’.

Nutbrown Review recommendations in Foundations for Quality 2012 (FfQ) and Government Response from appendix to ‘More Great Childcare’ (MGC)

Recommendation 1 The Government should continue to specify the qualifications that are suitable for staff operating within the EYFS, and the Teaching Agency should develop a more robust set of ‘full and relevant’ criteria to ensure qualifications promote the right content and pedagogical processes. These criteria should be based on the proposals set out in this report. (FfQ p 29)
Accepted. Teaching Agency will consult on revised set of ‘full and relevant’ criteria and proposals for the Early Years Educator. (MGC p 41)

Recommendation 2 All qualifications commenced from 1 September 2013 must demonstrate that they meet the new ‘full and relevant’ criteria when being considered against the requirements of the EYFS. (FfQ p 29)
Accepted in principle, but timescale changed to September 2014. The Teaching Agency’s ‘full and relevant’ consultation will state that we will ensure that new Early Years Educator Level 3 qualifications will be in place from 2014. (MGC p 41)

Recommendation 3 The previously articulated plan to move to a single early years qualification should be abandoned. (FfQ p 29)
Accepted. The Teaching Agency’s ‘full and relevant’ consultation will state this plan will not happen. (MGC p 41)

Recommendation 4 The Government should consider the best way to badge qualifications that meet the new ‘full and relevant’ criteria so that people can recognise under what set of ‘full and relevant’ criteria a qualification has been gained. (FfQ p 29)
Accepted. The ‘Early Years Educator’ title will offer a recognised badge of quality for qualifications which meet the new ‘full and relevant’ criteria. (MGC p 41)

Recommendation 5 The EYFS requirements should be revised so that, by September 2022, all staff counting in the staff:child ratios must be qualified at level 3. (FfQ p 34)
Still under consideration and subject to consultation. (MGC p 41)

Recommendation 6 The EYFS requirements should be revised so that, from September 2013, a minimum of 50 per cent of staff in group settings need to possess at least a ‘full and relevant’ level 3 to count in the staff:child ratios. (FfQ p 34)
Still under consideration and subject to consultation. (MGC p 42)

Recommendation 7 The EYFS requirements should be revised so that, from September 2015, a minimum of 70 per cent of staff in group settings need to possess at least a ‘full and relevant’ level 3 to count in the staff:child ratios. (FfQ p 34)
Still under consideration and subject to consultation. (MGC p 42)

Recommendation 8 Level 2 English and mathematics should be entry requirements to level 3 early education and childcare courses. (FfQ p 34)
Accepted in principle. The Teaching Agency’s ‘full and relevant’ consultation will set out that entrants to Level 3 Early Years Educator courses will be expected to have secured at least a C grade in GCSE English and mathematics. We will consult on proposals on how this might be made a requirement, including by inserting a requirement for English and maths GCSEs into the Early Years Foundation Stage Statutory Framework, in due course. (MGC p 42)

Recommendation 9 Tutors should be qualified to a higher level than the course they are teaching. (FfQ p 40)
Accepted in principle. DfE will work across Government (i.e. with BIS) to help Further Education and other post–‐16 providers to promote good practice in this area. (MGC p 42)

Recommendation 10 All tutors should have regular continuing professional development and contact with early years settings. Colleges and training providers should allow sufficient time for this. (FfQ p 40)
Accepted in principle. DfE will work across Government (i.e. with BIS) to help Further Education and other post–‐16 providers to promote good practice in this area. (MGC p 42)

Recommendation 11 Only settings that are rated ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted should be able to host students on placement. (FfQ p 42)
Accepted in principle. DfE will work across Government (i.e with BIS) to help Further Education and other post–‐16 providers to ensure that placements are normally only in settings that are rated ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted.(MGC p 42)

Recommendation 12 Colleges and training providers should look specifically at the setting’s ability to offer students high quality placements. (FfQ p 42)
Accepted. DfE will work across Government (i.e. with BIS) to help Further Education and other post–‐16 providers to promote good practice in this area. (MGC p 43)

Recommendation 13 The Department for Education should conduct research on the number of BME staff at different qualification levels, and engage with the sector to address any issues identified. (FfQ p 49)
Keep under review. The Teaching Agency’s ‘full and relevant’ consultation will seek views on whether or not the proposals for the content and standard of new qualifications have equality implications, and we will consider including questions in future Childcare and Early Years Provider surveys. (MGC p 43)

Recommendation 14 Newly qualified practitioners starting in their first employment should have mentoring for at least the first six months. If the setting is rated below ‘Good’, this mentoring should come from outside. (FfQ p 51)
Accepted in principle. Settings should consider how they can put mentoring arrangements in place for new front line staff. (MGC p 43)

Recommendation 15 A suite of online induction and training modules should be brought together by the Government, that can be accessed by everyone working in early education and childcare. (FfQ p 53)
Accepted in principle but no action by Government. Rather the sector/settings should seek to draw this together. (MGC p 43)

Recommendation 16 A new early years specialist route to QTS, specialising in the years from birth to seven, should be introduced, starting from September 2013. (FfQ p 59)
Not accepted. We agree with Professor Nutbrown that there is a need to transform the status of the profession and we want more high quality graduates to consider a career in early education. We do not, however, consider a route to the award of QTS is necessary to do this. We will introduce Early Years Teachers who will be specialists in early childhood development trained to work with babies and young children from birth to five. The training route and the new Teachers’ Standards (Early Years) will build on the strengths of the EYPS programme. Early Years Teacher Status will be seen as the equivalent to QTS, therefore entry requirements to Early Years Teacher training courses will be the same as entry to primary teacher training. This change will give one title of ‘teacher’ across the early years and schools sectors which will increase status and public recognition. (MGC p 43)

Recommendation 17 Any individual holding Early Years Professional Status (EYPS) should be able to access routes to obtain QTS as a priority. (FfQ p 61)
Not accepted. Those with EYPS are graduates already trained specifically to work with babies and children from birth to five years. Existing Early Years Professionals will in future be seen as the equivalent of Early Years Teachers. Early Years Professionals will therefore not need to obtain QTS to increase their status, although routes are already available to QTS if they wish to take them. (MGC p 43)

Recommendation 18 I recommend that Government considers the best way to maintain and increase graduate pedagogical leadership in all early years settings. (FfQ p 62)
Accepted. We will introduce Early Years Teachers to lead the further improvements in quality we want to see. We will set out funding arrangements for Early Years Teachers in due course. (MGC p 43)

Recommendation 19 I am not recommending that the Government impose a licensing system on the early years sector. However, the Government should consider supporting a sector–‐led approach, if an affordable and sustainable one emerges with widespread sector support. (FfQ p 63)
No action for Government. (MGC p 44)

The decision to accept only five of my recommendations needs some examination in the context of other measures put forward by Government on 29th January 2013, most specifically the plan to reduce the number of staff working with groups of very young children.

So I want in this paper to unpack some of the detail. Government proposes that Early Years Teachers will be introduced and given a training that covers the years birth to five (not birth to seven as I recommended). They will not follow a Post Graduate Certificate in Education, not be awarded Qualified Teacher Status, and not undertake a mentored Newly Qualified Teacher year. In my review I said:

A typical route to the early years specialist QTS will be an early years degree (Early Childhood Studies being an appropriate example) followed by a PGCE. Many EYPs will already hold early years specialism at degree level, so should be able to gain QTS after a PGCE course.

(Foundations for Quality 2012: 60, 5.23)

But the early years teachers now proposed by the Government will not have QTS, nor will they follow a PGCE course, in other words, they will not have the same status as teachers of children over five years of age. One of the many email messages I have received recently came from a teacher working with three to five year olds who wrote:

My main concern is with the proposal for the introduction of Early Years Teachers –‐ if EYT’s are required to meet the teaching standards expected of classroom teachers why are they not to be awarded QTS? This in my view will not raise the status of graduate practitioners in the early years field as they will not have the same pay and conditions as those holding QTS. Will the introduction of EYT’s mean that school settings no longer need to employ a teacher with QTS to lead nursery and reception classes?

Someone with Early Years Professional Status wrote to me saying:

I am SO pleased that I can now be given QTS and work in schools, at last parity with teachers!

Sadly this practitioner, like others, had misunderstood (or been misled by) the government headline. Because my recommendation on QTS was not accepted, the hoped for parity with primary and secondary school teachers will not be realised.

We need some more answers here to be assured that this is not simply ‘changing the label on the tin’. Are Early Years Professionals simply being renamed? If so, is this not insulting? (To EYPS , to existing early years teachers –‐ of whom there are many, and indeed with QTS–‐ to children, and to parents?). Will this name change without any other apparent change, mislead parents? And is this not insulting and misleading to those who undertake Early Years Teacher courses? How would it be if the reverse was the case and it was decided, at relatively short notice, with no justification, to rename teachers in secondary schools ‘Secondary Years Professionals’? It would not work, and I sincerely believe that it would similarly fail in the early years.

So how will the Early Years Teacher feel when told that she or he cannot teach children in Year 1 because they are not sufficiently qualified to do so? And how will they feel about the investments they have made in their qualifications when they realise they cannot achieve the kinds of promotion opportunities open to teachers of older children? And why is the title ‘teacher’ being used to mean something quite different from the commonly understood, established and accepted meaning? This reaches deep into the heart of the culture and nomenclature of UK practice.

Since the first introduction of Early Years Professional Status, those who worked hard to obtain that status have been questioning the lack of parity with QTS. In my review I sought to end the disparity that many people holding EYPS were concerned about. It seems now that one form of inequality is now to be replaced with another. Yet again, those who work with young children are offered a lesser status (and, we should realistically anticipate, poorer pay and conditions than those who work with older children) but a title that makes them appear to have the same role and status.

Another email message asked me:

What is the difference between a ‘teacher’ and an ‘educator’?

So, what is the difference between a ‘teacher’ and an ‘educator’? Do teachers not ‘educate, and care, and support, and guide, and observe, and talk with parents’? And do not early years educators do those things too? The Rumbold Report in 1989, suggested that all who lived and worked with young children (including parents, childminders and volunteers and professionals in groups settings) should be known by the collective term ‘educator’ for they all had a part to play in young children’s early education (which also involved ‘caring’).

Now ‘educator’ is being redefined from a generic and conceptually universal term referring to all those in working with young children, to a delimited and specific qualification and role.

Childminders have battled long and hard to be recognised as equal to their peers in daycare and pre–‐school settings, and my recommendations with regard to childminders appear to have fallen on stony ground. There is no planned requirement for childminders to hold any formal qualifications even though the number of children they can work with seems set to rise. What reasonable justification is there for treating part of the workforce – also working within the Early Years Foundation Stage – differently from the rest?

So, yet again, babies, toddlers, young children, and their families, have to be content with something different, something that is ‘not quite’ the same in status as that offered to older pupils and students in the education system, something confused and confusing. In England, the Early Years Foundation Stage (birth to five) marks the beginning of the education system. The question as to why those working with children in these challenging and complex years of early development and of learning, should be less well qualified and afforded a lower professional status than those teaching older children remains unanswered.

So, yet again, an opportunity truly to value the thousands of women and the small number of men who dedicate energy, intellect and commitment to providing the best they can for our youngest children is to be dissipated, and –‐ plus ca change… –‐ they are to content themselves with something less than their colleagues working with older children. And they are also to be asked to do this in a context of diminishing support (as Local Authority responsibilities for this disappear) and increased inspection (with OFSTED being the sole arbiter of quality). Measurement and inspection alone will not enhance quality for young children; support, continuing professional development and time are needed to do that.

In the last few weeks the question most often posed to me has been: do you think changing ratios will make a difference if staff are better qualified? This is the question that is vexing many parents, early years practitioners, key early years agencies and organisations, and Further/Higher Education institutions and tutors. If the small children whose early years settings could be affected understood what was going on, I think they too would be worried. This is my answer:

The positive impact of raising the quality of level 3 qualifications to make them stronger and more appropriate for work with young children and their families from birth to five will be weakened if ratios are weakened. Reducing the number of adults available to work with very young children will dilute any positive effects on the quality of the experiences children could expect to receive. When I made my recommendations, I made them taking into account the context in which I undertook my Review. To change the context, yet use the hoped–‐for enhanced quality of staff as a justification for reducing the number of adults to children in a setting, makes no sense at all. I made it clear in my Review that, though with properly qualified teachers (trained to teach children aged from birth to seven, and with Qualified Teacher Status) it might be sensible to look at the ratios for working with children aged three to five, that ratios for working with younger children should not be tampered with. I said:

I do not think there is any case for changing the ratios for babies and two–‐year olds, but I think it is worth exploring whether better–‐ qualified staff could reasonably work with more three–‐ and four–‐ year–‐olds (as is the case for teachers in nursery and reception classes).

(Foundations for Quality, 2012: 69, 6.23)

I fear that any positive effects for children that might have come about through enhancement in qualifications will be cancelled out because there will be too few early years professionals working with them.

So, do I think changing the ratios will make a difference if people are better qualified? The difference will be too few adults with too many little children; too few moments in the day for a toddler to have uninterrupted time with their key person, and too few early years practitioners to talk and work with parents. Who will suffer most? The youngest, most vulnerable children. Their parents who will know that their little children will get less attention, less conversation, less holding, than they need. And with them, their early years practitioners who – though they may be well qualified – are unable to provide the best that they can because they have had their greatest resource (their time for children) reduced. Here is the nub: there is nothing relaxing about the proposal to ‘relax’ ratios. It will lead to stress – for children, for parents and for early years practitioners (whatever their title or qualification). Practitioners will continue to do their best knowing that it is not the best that they could do (if they were not working with too many children). Trading staff:child ratios for higher qualified staff is nonsense. Watering down ratios will threaten quality. Childcare may be cheaper, but children will be footing the bill. High quality early years provision in home and group settings means high quality staff and a staff:child balance that can positively support young children’s development, learning and well being.

At the heart of early childhood education and care are children and their families and, again, it may be a truism but it is worth reiterating that no changes in policy should be made unless they are demonstrably beneficial to them. It is not possible to provide good foundations for life and learning for the youngest children on the cheap. But it should be possible, with political will, to provide quality experiences for children that are affordable. When the budgets are set the question to be asked is not ‘Can we afford high quality early education and care with well qualified professionals?’ Rather, when we take account of the strongly evidenced benefits of high quality and appropriately caring early learning experiences to later life, the question to be asked is ‘Can we afford not to provide high quality early education and care with well qualified professionals?’ I do not mind sounding like a Cassandra if I warn passionately that later generations of politicians will count with regret the social and economic costs of insufficient investment in early years provision.

As I said in my Review:

‘Babies and young children must have the very best early education and care. If those working with young children have the necessary skills, knowledge and understanding, they have the potential to offer the formative experience all young children deserve, supported by the significant Government investment in the early years.’

(Foundations for Quality 2012: 10)

Current proposals will shake the foundations of quality provision young children. Watering down ratios, regardless of the level of qualifications held by staff is likely to lead to worse, not ‘great’, childcare and will undermine intentions to provide quality early learning experiences.

I want to thank the many who contributed to my Review, and those who welcomed its outcomes, for their contributions and their continued commitment to getting this right for young children. I hope they, and many more will read the detail of ‘More Great Childcare’ with a careful eye, and will continue to alert Government to any concerns they have about the weakening of ratios, the watering down of good quality qualifications, and the implementing of a two–‐tier status for ‘teachers’. Inequality has deeply adverse effects on society, and particularly those who are most vulnerable. High quality early education and care provides one effective means of combatting those inequalities. Young children must not bear the costs of Government getting this wrong. Put most simply: the foundations of quality are being severely shaken, and the price of quality in the early years is surely a price worth paying; and in terms of the life–‐course this can only be a solid, sound investment for future generations.

Professor Cathy Nutbrown
The School of Education
The University of Sheffield
c.e.nutbrown@sheffield.ac.uk
+44 (0) 114 222 8139

References
Foundations for Quality: The independent review of early education and childcare qualifications Final Report (June 2012) Department for Education https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/standard/publicationDetail/Page1/DFE-00068-2012

The Rumbold Report (1990) Starting with Quality The Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Quality of the Educational Experience offered to 3 and 4 year olds, chaired by Angela Rumbold CBE MP London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office 1990 http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/rumbold/

For further information please contact: Paul Mannion, Media Relations Officer, on 0114 2229851 or email P.F.Mannion@sheffield.ac.uk

See also the statement from Professor Denise Hevey “Different but Equal” responding to More Great Childcare.

Comparisons between professions are fraught with danger. And comparisons between teachers and other professions are especially problematic. Should teachers be compared with doctors or nurses, with barristers or solicitors, architects or engineers? Teaching has always had a rather ambiguous position in the social order.

Uncertainty about status extends to the way teacher development is perceived. Whilst most people would expect health staff and lawyers to be conversant with the latest treatments or cases, few would extend the perception to teachers. In this paper, we want to argue that this should change. We strongly believe that a teaching profession that is demonstrably up to date, conversant with new knowledge and skills, and confident about the evidence on which practice was based would be significantly strengthened. Such a profession would more easily command the respect of society and would be less subject to the fads, foibles and grumbles of central government.

This paper is about teachers in England. Whilst we think the general thrust of our arguments would apply to all parts of the UK (and internationally), we have specific proposals that need to be rooted in existing institutional frameworks. We also want to focus on classroom teachers, from the early years through to 18, after they have entered the profession. The New Visions for Education Group has some interesting ideas about the forms and structures of teacher qualifications and initial education and training. The Group also has significant concerns about current policy developments in this crucial area of teacher preparation. These ideas and concerns will be the subject of a future group paper.

We present our analysis teacher professional development in two parts. First, we look at the evidence about the organisation and quality of teacher development in schools. As we show, there are very significant concerns. In the second part of the paper, we set out our proposals for change, including our strongest plea – that the teaching profession needs to become independent of government and take teacher development into its own hands.

The quality of teacher development in England today

There have now been a number of studies that, as the Times Education Supplement reported (10 September 2010), demonstrate that the professional support provided to teachers is ‘haphazard, poorly planned and poorly assessed’. The leadership of professional support is seen in one study as ‘unstrategic, disjointed and erratic’ and in another study as ‘lacking in any overall coherence’. Surveys of teachers show them to be, quite rightly, highly critical of the activities provided. One in four primary teachers sees the time they commit as of little use. The figure is higher for secondary teachers. Teachers express concern that there are insufficient opportunities for developing classroom teaching or subject updating – activities we would see as at the core of professional learning.

In England, for more than two decades, teachers have been required to participate in five in-service training days per year The research evidence demonstrates that these are rarely well organised, are seen as of little use by participating teachers, and represent a wasted resource. Some schools convert these days into after-school events or extend the school holidays. The use of consultants is common, although there is often little evaluation of these inputs, and sourcing expertise relies heavily on word of mouth.

On resources in general, the situation is opaque, verging on chaotic. Many schools do not have a professional development budget. Thousands of teachers have no idea of the resources being set aside for their professional development, and very few have any sense of a resource entitlement for improving their practice. In this context, it is not possible to calculate the investment involved and what variations there might be between schools, phases or geographical areas. One of the recent studies has pointed to the structure of most professional development programmes. These, it is suggested, are conceived in terms of inputs rather than processes that could lead to changes in thinking and practice. Little thought is given to outcomes – what will happen as a result of the development activity – and teacher development activities are still largely thought of as ‘off site’ courses and conferences involving release and cover for absence.

OFSTED has also been critical. A 2006 report, based on a survey of school inspections that identified good professional development, found that teacher needs were not effectively identified, that evaluation was poor and that school leaders had no conception of value for money in devising professional development programmes. OFSTED revisited teacher development in 2010 and found the picture broadly similar. Again, they found leadership as lacking in expertise, inadequate evaluation, and inadequate opportunities to develop subject knowledge in many areas of the curriculum.

This overall picture is disappointing, particularly given the growing evidence about the extent of the linkage between achievement and the quality of teaching. Research by LSE and Stanford, commissioned by The Sutton Trust suggests that the effect of having a very effective as compared to an average teacher adds between 25-45% to a pupil’s math score performance across a school year. And the impact of effective teachers is most marked for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds.

There are, of course, examples of good teacher development practice to be found in individual schools and groups of schools. The growing networks of Teaching Schools are of interest and will surely have an important role in the sorts of initiatives we propose in the second part of this paper. The centres for mathematics and science teachers, likewise, provide lessons about how and how not to approach professional development. The Evidence for Policy and Practice Information Coordinating Centre at The Institute of Education provides valuable analyses on a range of professional issues. We have seen these incorporated in professional development programmes. Such practice, however, is not reflected across the education system as a whole, and our concern is with systemic improvement and a real step-up in the professional opportunities provided to teachers. It comes as no surprise that, given the inadequacies of the present system, research also shows that what is provided leads to little change and improvement in schools and classrooms. Teachers, we believe, deserve much better than this.

England is not alone in appearing to have a poor record of teacher development. Research in other parts of the world reveals similar shortcomings. In the USA, the Institute of Education Sciences within the US Department of Education recently looked at the record of teacher development over the previous decade. In a critique that resonates with the English evidence, they found a lack of coherence with provision ‘a patchwork of opportunities – formal and informal, mandatory and voluntary, serendipitous and planned’. A particular target for criticism was the prevalence of ‘single shot’ one-day workshops that were found to be intellectually superficial, disconnected from deep issues of curriculum and learning, fragmented and non cumulative. This evaluation was carried out seven years after the No Child Left Behind Act had mandated that all teachers should receive career-long learning with a strong focus on classroom practice and subject teaching.

In 2008, OECD also carried out an intensive study of teacher development. A particular feature of the report (TALIS – Teaching and Learning International Study) was a synthesis of a detailed survey of teacher development in 28 OECD countries. It is a great pity that England chose not to participate in this. It would have been instructive to look at our record in comparison with others, particularly high-achieving systems such as Finland and Singapore. Across the 28 countries surveyed, teachers took part annually in just over 15 days of teacher development. Teachers in England simply do not have similar opportunities and their professional development suffers in consequence. Over half of the teachers in the OECD survey indicated important curricular and pedagogic areas where further development was necessary. No one country provided a model for career-long development that could be held up as good practice. Three out of four teachers surveyed reported that attempting innovative approaches in the classroom would not be encouraged by senior managers. The OECD study was helpful in producing a useful summary of the linkage between the creation of effective learning environments and the consequences for any framework for teacher development.

Finally, in looking at present policies for teacher development, we ask: who thinks they are responsible? There was a time when Local Education Authorities would have seen this as a major responsibility, and a few did it quite well. But the erosion of the LEA/LA role is such as to make this unfeasible today. Universities have also played a role, although are now primarily confined to a tiny minority of teachers taking masters’ degrees. Universities, like local authorities, have been mistrusted by governments and have rarely featured in strategic thinking around professional development. Finally, the professional and subject associations have done their best. Although it is inevitable that their efforts touched a minority of the profession, it underlines what we think important, namely that teachers themselves now need to be in the driving seat in establishing a systemic underpinning of teacher development.
Education ministers have made repeated attempts to play the key role. In a 1998 policy initiative, Teachers: meeting the challenge of change, the then DFEE said:

A clear and continuing commitment to professional development throughout a career should be at the heart of teachers’ professionalism … much existing training is unsystematic and unfocused. We intend to set out a clear framework for professional development …

In 2001, government therefore initiated another strategy for teacher development with millions of pounds spent on launch events and road shows. However, there was little follow-through on this, in part because of a funding crisis two years later. In 2005, responsibility was passed to the Training and Development Agency, one of the quangos later (2011) rolled back into the Department for Education, but with a remit reduced to focus on recruitment and initial training. Indeed, inexplicably, a very useful and comprehensive TDA web guide to CPD provision across the country was closed down. In the same year (2010), however, the DFE produced yet another document The Case for Change. (We estimate that the DFE attempts to engage with teacher professional development on a two-yearly basis.) Although this was produced under the coalition government, the rhetoric reflects that of 1998.

The record shows that governments, from as far back as the well-received James report in 1971, have just not been good at following through from advocacy to the creation of realistic implementation strategies. In large measure, we think this is due to government mistrust of the very organisations (LAs, universities, teachers’ associations) that are capable of providing an infrastructure that could serve all teachers. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that ministers, officials and inspectors repeatedly revisit the issue, but do not reflect on why their previous policies failed. Moreover, there seems to be an approach that appears to ‘blame’ schools and teachers for the current state of affairs. OFSTED, for example, is particularly prone to see effective professional development as a managerial problem. If only school ‘managers’ planned, implemented and evaluated through what OFSTED terms ‘logical links’, then policies would work. We believe this is simplistic and naive. The leadership and management of professional development is crucial, but for teachers to engage fully they, rather than their managers, need a sense of pride and ownership of the process. That patently is not the case. Teachers deserve better.

The future of teacher development

The purpose of this paper is to stimulate debate and discussion of the ways in which teachers can call upon more appropriate and effective professional development support. We know that successful change comes from the judicious implementation of a range of interrelated measures and much detailed work will be necessary. Here, we set out in outline a number of ways in which we believe relatively rapid change could be brought about.
Our first proposal is that teachers should take control of the professional development agenda. We have shown that repeated attempts by different governments to exercise control have failed or fizzled out. Government just does not have the reach, structures or systems to do this. In making this proposal, we are aware of the dismantling of the local authority structures and we know there is no longer the capacity to take on the scale of the challenge we have described. We are also aware of the failure of the General Teaching Council in England to gain sufficient trust and support from teachers. Our proposition is the establishment of a National Institute for Teacher Development in England that is wholly independent of government.

This National Teaching Institute would have a number of interrelated purposes including:
• recommending a curriculum for in-service teacher education (initially focused on classroom teaching in primary, secondary and special schools) that, drawing on the most recent evidence and analysis, would provide a foundation and route for career-long teacher development programmes
• establishing a framework of accredited and non accredited teacher development programmes through which schools and teachers could build and design programmes and, within which, providers of all types (public and private) could offer development opportunities, activities and courses;
• creating an evaluation model, independent of government and OFSTED, which provides teachers and schools with appropriate information upon which professional development can be planned;
• creating a national teacher development portfolio that is owned by teachers and gives recognition to the career-long process of development;
• disseminating new thinking and innovation of all kinds around teacher development.

The curriculum would be open and flexible, encouraging innovation, offering alternative visions of pedagogic practice but strongly focused on children and students growing their potential and achieving the highest standards. It would embrace important concepts that, surprisingly, receive little attention in current provision – new understandings of the way children learn and changes in subject knowledge are just two examples. The curriculum would also acknowledge that, whilst external courses and visits have an important role, it is within the school environment that most professional learning will take place. In creating such a curriculum, it would be necessary to establish some definition and vision of the processes of professional development, including, for example, the role of research, modes of leadership and coaching in schools and partnerships. We also believe that there needs to be an explicit values dimension to professional development that provides focus to the social purposes that schools serve (addressing all forms of disadvantage or discrimination, for example).

Our priority concern is with classroom teachers, although subsequently the Institute may interface with existing provision around issues such as leadership and management.

In suggesting that the Institute be independent of government, we do not seek structures that are oppositional to government. We believe that the curriculum of teacher development could be formulated in ways that accommodate changes in government and we envisage that, over time, the Institute would become a wise partner and critical friend in the governance of education. A National Teaching Institute could give to teaching the sort of professional knowledge base that other professions have (the Royal Institute of British Architecture, RIBA, for example) and that has characterised many occupations for centuries – the guilds would be one illustration.

Most crucially, the Institute would be charged with gaining the confidence of teachers and head teachers, providing intellectual leadership and bringing to teachers a much greater sense of the sheer fascination and excitement that the best professional development provokes.

We are aware that, as we developed the ideas in this paper, a number of parallel discussions have been taking place about the sort of independent initiative we are proposing. In part, the consultations with key groups and individuals in the development of this paper have already fed into debates. We think there is a momentum building that could be exploited. Recent House of Commons select committees have considered an Institute of Teaching. There have been meetings where a Royal College of Teaching has been considered. We support such ideas, provided the essential ‘independence of government’ dimension is writ large.

Our second proposal looks to the ways that such a body should be established. We recommend that four groups work jointly to do this:
• the teachers’ associations and unions;
• the subject associations (and this would include associations representing primary and special education and other interest groups);
• the universities;
• other appropriate organisations ( The British Educational Research Association, CfBT, The Princes Trust and independent school associations are just four examples ).

We are aware of the tensions that sometimes exist within and between such groups. And we are aware that some groups command greater government confidence than others. But these are the major stakeholders, and teachers recognise their legitimacy. None could take on this crucial task alone, and all, we believe, have the capacity to work cooperatively for such an important purpose.

Our third proposal relates to universities and accreditation. As we have indicated, we believe that the linkage between teachers and universities should be strengthened. The universities hold the understanding of new developments in subject knowledge, as well as the awareness of new developments in research around teaching and learning. The university represents the public face of the sorts of enquiry that ought to be central to teacher development.

We propose, therefore, that firstly, the National Teaching Institute should find systemic ways in which the work and ideas of leading academics in school subjects and education can be made accessible to teachers. Some initiatives in this area already exist. The experience could be used to plan for this on a national basis; including the exploitation of the new communication technologies now available (see our fifth proposal below).

Secondly, we propose that all teachers would be expected and encouraged to complete a master’s level qualification within ten years of joining the profession, and that provision for updating and refreshing this should created through the curriculum of teacher development. Recent attempts by the last Labour government to move in this direction faltered. A radical rethinking of how this could be achieved would be a central task for the National Teaching Institute. Moving the teaching profession to a master’s level standard through the teacher development process would be a very important statement about the status of the profession, with important implications for the future of teacher recruitment.

Our fourth proposal relates to funding. We suggest that, in the first five years, private funding to support this initiative is sought from private foundations or equivalent. The purpose of this proposal is to create structures and visions for teacher development that go beyond the particular issues of the day. It is not, as some might suggest, a return to corporate structures. We envisage something that is nimble and lightweight in operation but influential in the way the remit is carried forward. We observe that as schools have acquired more autonomy for teacher development, so they welcome frameworks and ideas about development that can be trusted to be sustained over time. We note with interest the growing number of schools working cooperatively together and we believe the National Teaching Institute could offer important support and legitimisation for this approach.

Our fifth proposal relates to the use of new communications to support teachers. Government initiatives to do this have failed (the DFE’s Teachers’ Virtual Centre was one misguided experiment). There are initiatives in other parts of the world that do appear successful. Wikiwijs (translated as Wikiwise) in the Netherlands and the Le@rning Federation in Australia and New Zealand are two examples. Both have embraced an ‘open source’ or ‘open educational resource’ approach, and we would expect an English equivalent to do likewise. Teacher support sites exist in the media but we are looking to something that is world beating in terms of overall quality and professional rigour. If every teacher is to participate in master’s level activity, they need access to the electronic library resources enjoyed by university academics. But beyond that, we believe that teachers have a right to online support that rivals the best in the world in terms of vision and quality.

Our sixth proposal addresses the problems on INSET days. We know that some schools use these days imaginatively, but the evidence is that these are few in number and the teachers who benefit are in a small minority. The Centre for the Use of Research Evidence in Education has shown how sustained professional development activity can impact significantly impact on pupil achievement. To show impact teachers need to be involved in at least in 50 hours of professional activity spread over no more than two terms. A priority task for the National Teaching Institute would be to provide a range of models as to how such provision could be achieved and the ways impact and effectiveness could be monitored. We know that the present INSET day structure is an irritant to many working parents and new models would have to be sensitive to this.

Our final and seventh proposal looks to a new role for government. We believe that government’s policy role in relation to teacher development would be strengthened if it became more hands off. International evidence suggests that the most successful schooling systems have a tradition where governments work within policy frameworks supportive of teachers controlling their own development. Integral to systemic teacher policies are strategies for teacher learning and development. To quote the OECD (2011):

The frequently cited claim that the best-performing education systems all recruit their teachers from the top-third of graduates … is not supported by the evidence. Successful reform cannot wait for a new generation of teachers; it requires investment in the present teacher workforce, providing quality professional development, adequate career structures and diversification, and enlisting the commitment of teachers to reform.

We believe that countries that have teacher development strategies agreed with their teaching professions and their representatives are the ones that create the best conditions for embedding high levels of achievement for all their young people. In such contexts there is a partnership between teachers and government that reflects critical dialogue but also trust.

Sadly that hasn’t happened here.

It has, nevertheless, been the task of government since 1944 to plan teacher numbers and to make sure pay and conditions are agreed at national level. This has been one of the strengths of the UK system, and we are not suggesting changes there. We think, however, that beyond these matters there is plenty of evidence that shows the limitations of central authorities trying to intervene. A good government, we believe, would welcome an initiative such as the National Teaching Institute and provide ways of contributing to its success. For example, there has been some discussion about the possibility of linking proven and approved professional development activity with earlier pension entitlement. Teachers’ conditions of service agreements could become friendlier to professional development. We think an explicit commitment to a career-long entitlement to support for professional development for teachers would enhance the status of the profession. Some countries (Canada for example) have a structured programme of teacher secondments, which could form a part of such an entitlement. Government, as it currently does, will wish to monitor the nature and impact of professional development programmes. An expectation that schools would have an earmarked professional development budget should underpin such evaluations. The National Teacher Institute, in the form we propose, could also contribute significantly to a richer and more grounded evaluation framework than is currently the case.

Conclusion

The central message of this paper is simple. We believe that teacher development should become more relevant, a great deal more interesting and be more sharply attuned to improving teaching and learning in ways that demonstrably raise the bar of pupil achievement. We believe that a new model of teacher development is best planned by teachers. The English school system, a newly centralised system, is subject to repeated political and governmental change. This may well go on for some time, but we do not believe the great profession of teaching should be beholden to government for the way the profession manages professional development. We believe that it is teachers who could and should bring coherence, and hence our strong support for creating a new concordat in the setting up of a National Teaching Institute for England.

We invite the leaders of the teachers’ associations and unions, the teacher subject associations and the universities to establish a means through which this can be brought about.

Select references
Bangs, J., MacBeath, J. & Galton, M. (2010) Reinventing Schools, Reforming Teaching: From Political Visions to Classroom Reality (London: Taylor and Francis)
Cordingley, P. & Bell, M. (2012) Understanding What Enables High Quality Professional Learning: A report on the research evidence. Centre for the Use of Research Evidence in Education (CUREE); Pearson School Improvement.
Dall’Alba, G. & Sandberg, J. (2006) ‘Unveiling professional development: a critical review of stage models’ Review of Educational Research 76:3 pp. 383–412
Earley, P.O. (2010) ‘State of the nation’: a discussion of some of the project’s key findings The Curriculum Journal 21:4 pp. 473–484
Fields, E.T. et al. (2012) ‘The science of professional development’ Kappan May pp. 44–47
Hobson, A.J. & Ashby, P. (2012) ‘Reality aftershock and how to avert it; second year teachers’ experience of support for their professional development’ Cambridge Journal of Education 42:2 pp. 177–196
Ingersoll, R.M. & Strong, M. (2011) ‘The impact of induction and mentoring programs for beginning teachers: a critical review of the research’ Review of Educational Research 81:2 pp. 201–233
James, M. & Pollard, A. (2011) Principles for Effective Pedagogy (London: Routledge)
Leach, J. & Moon, B. (2007) The Power of Pedagogy (London: Sage)
McCormick, R. (2010) ‘The state of the nation in CPD: a literature review’ The Curriculum Journal 21:4 pp. 395–412
OECD (2012) Preparing Teachers and Developing School Leaders for the 21st century – Lessons from Around the World (Paris: OECD)
OFSTED (2006) The Logical Chain: Continuing Professional Development in Effective Schools (London: OFSTED)
OFSTED (2010) Good Professional Development in Schools (London: OFSTED)
Opfer, V.D. & Pedder, D. (2010) ‘Access to continuous professional development by teachers in England’ The Curriculum Journal 21:4 pp. 453–472
Opfer, V.D. & Pedder, D. (2010) ‘Benefits, status and effectiveness of continuous professional development for teachers in England’ The Curriculum Journal 21:4 pp. 413–432
Opfer, V.D. & Pedder, D. (2011) ‘The lost promise of teacher professional development in England’ European Journal of Teacher Education 34:1 pp. 3–24
Pedder, D. & Opfer, V.D. ‘Planning and organisation of teachers’ continuous professional development in schools in England’ The Curriculum Journal 21:4 pp. 433–452
Pedder, D. et al. (2010) ‘Schools and continuing professional development in England – “State of the Nation” research study; policy, context, aims and design’ The Curriculum Journal 21:4 pp. 365–394
The Sutton Trust (2011) Improving the impact of teachers on pupil achievement in the UK-Interim findings
Wei, R.C., et al Professional Learning in the Learning Profession: A status report on teacher development in the United States and abroad. Dallas TX National Staff Development Council.
Yoon, K.S. et al. (2007) Reviewing the Evidence on How Teacher Professional Development Affects Student Achievement (US Department of Education National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance)

The authors would like to acknowledge the advice and comments of members of The New Vision Group , in particular John Bangs, Dave Brockington, Jonathan Crossley-Holland,Christine Davies, Peter Earley, Ron Glatter and Margaret Maden, in the preparation of the paper.

On September 17th 2012, Michael Gove announced further details of the proposed changes to the examination system at age 16. These modified significantly his earlier (June 21st) statement requiring a return to an O-level type of examination, apparently in order to obtain the agreement of his Liberal Democrat coalition partners. The new English Baccalaureate Certificates (EBCs) in five core subjects are now intended to be designed not just for high attainers but for the same percentage of the school population who currently enter for GCSE (90-95% in mathematics and English). The consultation closed in December and we await the results.

The ministerial statements offer no real arguments as to why 16 is the appropriate age to have costly external accountability-related examinations when all students will now remain in education or training until age 18, but focus on the rationale of making the examinations ‘more rigorous’ to raise standards in order to compete internationally. But can we be sure that the EBC system will raise standards?

The recommendation for more rigour seems likely to be interpreted both in terms of the style of examination, which will be discussed later in the article, and in terms of the difficulty of subject content. Certainly the contents of the new mathematics EBC which were first proposed by the DfE were even more ambitious than 1950s O-levels, although pass grades were then only obtained by under 25% of the population. This is presumably because of a belief that the way to raise standards is to make the examined curriculum tougher. There is some justification for this in that countries with demanding curricula generally score higher in international comparisons, but this is partly because parents are forced to support students who experience difficulty with the curriculum either by supporting their children themselves or by buying into private evening classes or personal tutors. However what happened in Curriculum 2000 when the Mathematics AS and A syllabus was made harder, by a committee constituted mainly of university mathematicians and awarding body examiners, was a much higher failure rate at AS level followed by a significant drop in the participation rate for mathematics AS and A2 courses. This was eventually reversed by removing or postponing most of the additional content, but the recovery process took many years, during which the supply of future scientists, engineers, statisticians and economists was reduced. The country cannot afford a repeat of this lower post-16 participation by toughening the content of the age 16 examinations.

But were O-level examinations always harder than GCSEs? Some of the work on ‘standards over time’ has confined itself to comparing the difficulty of examination questions. For example if we look at what was demanded in the English Language O-level set by the old London Board three things were demanded – a comprehension completed by multiple choice, a précis and an essay which could be argumentative, descriptive or narrative. In the current exam set by Edexcel, candidates have to complete two controlled assessment tasks one that will focus on their ability to comprehend another on their writing; they then have to complete an examination of an hour and three quarters either on a non-fiction text or a text from other cultures, an opinion piece and another writing task, and finally they have to complete three speaking and listening tasks, one spoken language study and one writing task from a choice of speeches, stories with a focus on dialogue, and scripts.

Similarly if we consider what has to be done for English literature again the comparison is stark. For O-level in the London Board students had to be familiar with three texts – a Shakespeare play, a novel and some poetry – and answered on them all in a two-hour exam. Now they have to study two novels – one from the canon and another from another culture, an anthology of poetry and both a Shakespeare play and a contemporary one. There is now an emphasis on the language used to create effects in addition to discussion of character and plot.

Given that most students enter for both language and literature they are being asked to do considerably more than they were in 1989 when O-level gave way to GCSE. Indeed those who took the previous JMB O-level in English Language and Literature could avoid doing an examination altogether and could complete the qualification through 100% coursework.

The fact that a wider range of performance is now demanded does not of course prove either that the examination is now ‘harder’ or that students’ standards of written English would be judged to have improved over time. The only way to check standards over time is when students are re-tested on the same test. This is what makes the international comparisons so attractive to politicians because PISA for example has been maintaining a uniform standard since 2003 by calibrating its questions and using a common core of questions, though again there are difficulties with the PISA test in English as much of the work is de-contextualised and multiple choice, neither rated highly as assessment methods by the English teaching community (Marshall, 2011).

Using common tests over time to measure standards may not be possible in subjects where the curriculum or the expectations have changed significantly, but is possible in many parts of mathematics. For example a 30-year comparison by Jeremy Hodgen et al (2009, 2010, 2011) suggests that mathematical standards have dropped slightly yet the proportion of O-level/GCSE grade A*- C passes has more than doubled from about 23% to 58% over that period. This is consistent with evidence that there is about a 2-grade slippage in marking, i.e. a level of attainment that would now be awarded a grade A would in the early 1980s have been awarded an O-level grade C. Similar results were obtained for some aspects of science by Shayer et al (2007, 2009).

Of course it would be quite possible to maintain the current distribution of grades on a more difficult examination by reducing the grade boundaries (the percentage of the total marks needed to achieve each grade). This touches on the vexed issue of the balance in the use of criterion- referencing and norm-referencing to award results in transition to a new assessment system, which was highlighted by the debacle over disappointing GCSE English grades in June 2012. When the style of assessment changes, as it did between June 2011 and January 2012, awarding bodies are still required to specify in advance the broad criteria for achieving each grade (criterion-referencing), which they then translate into a marking scheme for each component. However at the end of the accumulation process this may well initially result in a very different distribution of grades from the previous year. Ofqual reasonably claim that a change in standards across one year is unlikely and therefore using criterion-referencing alone in this way might lead to unfairness between candidates in adjacent years. They prefer to achieve continuity across such a change in examinations by requiring a very similar distribution of final grades to those in the previous year (norm-referencing), which may require a post-hoc revision in the grade boundaries. (There was a further complication in 2012 because the first of the new style of English GCSE examinations was in January, where the limited entry is unrepresentative and rapidly changing, rather than the main entry period in June.)

The O-level examination on which Michael Gove seems to modelling the new EBC was for part of its life a norm-referenced examination and therefore the grades that students received were predetermined to the extent that they had to fit into the grading distribution of earlier years. There was a move after the introduction of GCSE to use pure criterion-referenced assessment, so that any given grade would indicate to employers or others what a candidate had mastered. However research studies, in particular those by Mike Cresswell (1996), suggested that even within apparently similar examinations, examiners were not easily able to set grade boundaries which represented consistent standards from year to year, given that the content of the papers themselves varied slightly in type and in difficulty. Thus the only way of making the awarding process fair was to check the initial criterion-referenced results against previous years’ grade distributions and to alter them if there were significant differences. It is possible that Gove wants to return a pure type of norm-referenced assessment. If so, it means that students grades will be awarded only on the basis of how well they do in comparison to others, and that EBCs will not therefore be able to measure changes in national standards. (Actually as noted below it is not clear anyway that GCSEs have been successful in doing this.)

As noted earlier, the EBCs are clearly intended to be ‘more rigorous’ than GCSE not only in their subject content but also in their style, in particular including removal of the options of being examined in ‘bite-sized’ modules, or in an easier tier of papers aimed at a limited range of grades, or in teacher-marked controlled assessment or coursework.

The proposed removal of modular examinations has some disadvantages in relation to student learning. Currently students can take the modules again and again until they get the grade they want. This is not unlike an MOT approach to exams whereby you pass when you have addressed all those things which were wrong on previous tests. It also takes a more formative approach to the exam as each time you learn from your errors and put them right. Gove, however, wants everybody to take one set of exams in the summer of Year 11. This again is more in keeping with the old O-level type exam where all the papers were sat together.

Reverting to terminal exams will mean that the school year is less cluttered by the perpetual taking of tests, yet as a system, it puts much faith in a student’s ability to show what they can do under examination conditions. This affects what is known as the validity of exams. Although the reliability of the exams may be easier to achieve in a terminal examination (the London Board in English Language had multiple choice comprehension tests to improve the reliability of the O-Level, for example) it seems unlikely that such narrow styles of examining are more valid tests of ability in English. Arguments about the validity of the examination system are particularly prevalent amongst English teachers (see for example Marshall, 2000, 2001 and 2011). Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam have also written much on both the reliability and validity of terminal examinations (see for example, Black, 1998 and Wiliam, 2001).

O-levels may also have been viewed as benign forms of assessment because they were around before national tests and league tables. Many of the top public schools barely noticed them. Now everyone, including inspectors, prospective parents and universities look at GCSE results in detail. When the new examinations are introduced then teachers will be pouring over the examination criteria, making sure that their lessons are geared towards passing the exams and focusing on the C/D borderline. So it is not clear why Gove claims that EBCs will improve the quality of education by reducing the tendency for teachers to teach to the test (GBPHCCSFC, 2008).

Yet entertaining the possibility of a higher failure rate in EBCs due to their increased rigour is dismissed by Michael Gove as defeatist; his statement expresses faith that the increasing excellence of academies, heads and teachers will simply achieve similar pass rates in a system with tougher curriculum and assessment regime. This optimistic assertion on standards seems to have little base of solid evidence.

In reality, if the content and style of the age 16 assessments suddenly become more demanding, without a compensating lowering of grade boundaries, we may see a very much greater catastrophe than was created this summer. That will be a difficult clock to turn back.

There are alternatives. The current IGCSE, unlike the present GCSE, in English still has coursework as part of its component and as with the old O-level there should be different syllabi offering a variation on how the course will be delivered. Certainly the National Association for the Teaching of English will support this as a move partly because, as has been said before, of the objections to the validity of a terminal exam alone. The sheer range of subject matter that can be assessed is far greater if some form of coursework or controlled conditions is allowed.

There are certainly several problems with the existing GCSE in maths (e.g. a lack of interesting and challenging questions, which in turn affects the curriculum) but a new ‘matched pair’ of maths GCSEs are currently being trialled which could improve the current offering. Although the EBC proposal of a single examination for all (or at least the top 80%) sounds very attractive, it is technically impossible within 2 papers to have enough questions to reliably differentiate between both A and A* and between F and G grades. And even if it were, current practice with Year 6 coaching for a single set of maths papers suggests that students likely to scrape a level 3 become disillusioned at never being able to succeed with most questions on practice papers, while those likely to easily achieve a level 5 can waste a year practising what for them are mostly very easy questions. The even wider spread of attainment at Year 11 is likely to exacerbate the problem. However a more flexible model could be provided (e.g. 3 papers increasing in difficulty of which all students take the middle one and have a choice of whether to take one or both of the others). It is technically possible to set questions which differentiate by outcome in maths as well as English, but there would have to be a much longer assessment period, probably using controlled assessments, to obtain reliability.

To return to an earlier point, with the leaving age of pupils soon to become eighteen it is strange that Gove should place so much emphasis on re-designing the examination for sixteen year olds. We are almost alone in the West in having assessment at this age. Surely it would be better to consider once more the Tomlinson proposals which concentrated on the fourteen to eighteen range and did not focus on an intermediate 16+ qualification that carried such weight. Pupils would then take a range of subjects including vocational, technical and academic courses, with a core of functional English and Maths, up to the age of eighteen as is done in other countries. This would create a different kind of baccalaureate more akin to the one taken in many European countries, and one which we believe to be more appropriate for the 21st century.

References
Black, P. (1998) Testing: friend or foe?: Theory and practice of assessment and testing. London Falmer Press
Cresswell, M.J. (1996) Defining, setting and maintaining standards in curriculum-embedded examinations: judgemental and statistical approaches. In H. Goldstein & T. Lewis (eds.) Assessment: problems, developments and statistical issues (p.57-84). Chichester: John Wiley and Sons
Great Britain Parliament House of Commons Children, Schools and Families Committee. (2008) Testing and assessment: Government and Ofsted responses to the Committee’s third report of session 2007-08, fifth special report of session 2007-08. House of Commons papers 1003 2007-08. London, HMSO.
Hodgen, J. Küchemann, D. Brown, M and Coe, R. (2009) Children’s understandings of algebra 30 years on Research in Mathematics Education 11(2) 193-194
Hodgen, J., Küchemann, D., Brown, M., & Coe, R. (2010). Multiplicative reasoning, ratio and decimals: A 30 year comparison of lower secondary students’ understandings. In M. F. Pinto & T. F. Kawaski (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Conference of the International Group of the Psychology of Mathematics Education (Vol. 3, pp. 89-96). Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
Hodgen, J., Brown, M., Küchemann, D., & Coe, R. (2011). Why have educational standards changed so little over time: The case of school mathematics in England. Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association (BERA) Annual Conference, Institute of Education, University of London
Marshall, B. (2000) English Teachers – The Unofficial Guide: Researching the philosophies of English teachers. London, Routledge Falmer
Marshall, B. (2001) Marking the Essay: Teachers subject philosophies as related to their assessment English in Education, 35(3)42 – 57
Marshall, B. (2011) Testing English: Summative and formative assessment in English. London Continuum
Shayer, M., Ginsberg, D. & Coe, R (2007) Thirty years on – a large anti-Flynn effect? The Piagetian tests Volume and Heaviness norms 1975-2003. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 77(1), 25-41.
Shayer, M., & Ginsburg, D. (2009). Thirty years on – a large anti-Flynn effect? (II): 13- and 14-year-olds. Piagetian tests of formal operations norms 1976-2006/7. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 79, 409-418.
Wiliam, D. An Overview of the Relationship Between Assessment and the Curriculum. In D. Scott (ed) Curriculum and Assessment. Washington, Library of Congress

INTRODUCTION

This paper provides a series of briefing notes on a number of current higher education policy issues.

It is widely recognised that the higher education sector has a vital role to play in the economic, social and cultural life of the country, but it is one that is increasingly being undermined by government policy. Universities are experiencing unprecedented financial insecurity whilst the sector’s reputation is being unnecessarily damaged by immigration policy and the actions of the UK Border Agency. New evidence that disadvantaged students are being deterred by fear of debt comes on top of UCAS data showing that the numbers of UK and European students entering UK universities this autumn has declined by 14 per cent, even some highly selective institutions having failed to achieve their target numbers. Instability is rife and both widening participation and social mobility are under threat in a system marked, through government policy, by increasing levels of class-based stratification.

There is therefore a clear and urgent need for a new vision and direction for HE policy. To support this, this paper contains analysis and recommendations in five key areas:

1. Purposes and functions.
2. The funding of undergraduate education.
3. Research.
4. Widening participation.
5. Quality assurance.

In each case a description of current government policy is followed by an analysis and alternatives.

The main recommendations are:

1. There needs to be a rebalancing in the purposes and functions of higher education with a much greater emphasis on public purposes, funding and regulation.

2. An undergraduate fee reduction to £6,000 needs to be accompanied by the restoration of the HEFCE teaching grant and a support package tilted much more towards the disadvantaged.

3. Research selectivity should be confined to areas that are resource-intensive. There should be greater incentives for collaboration and for research that serves social and community, rather than commercial, objectives and interests.

4. Whilst the key to equitable participation lies in schools policy and funding, disparities in institutional funding and esteem should be reduced. Instead of being used to promote individual universities, resources for support and outreach should be pooled and used to raise aspirations and promote progression across the country.

5. There needs to be stronger regulation of academic standards but the real key to raising quality is to increase funding per student and constrain competition for students and income.

In summary, we believe that what is needed is not a market-driven system but one that recognises and promotes the multiple and distinct public and private purposes of universities; protects institutional autonomy but also recognises the obligations of universities to the society that grants them that autonomy; recalls universities to their core functions of teaching and research rather than the pursuit of resources and prestige; acknowledges the pressures on the public purse and uses that money to control unjustified, and socially dysfunctional, differentials between different categories of institutions and students; incorporates some competition for students and research funds but within an overall institutional ‘division of labour’ that maximises functional differentiation and minimises reputational hierarchy; and offers students, research funders, the Government and society as a whole the best value for their commitment to, and investment in, higher education. In short, a balanced, fair, socially responsive but efficient higher education system.

PURPOSES AND FUNCTIONS

Current Policies

Following the October 2010 Browne Report, current Government policy sees higher education primarily as the provider of private goods and benefits; moreover it sees those goods and benefits mainly in economic terms (employment, salary, benefits). The assumption is that higher education should as far as possible be organised on market lines, with levels of public subsidy reduced and the remaining subsidies channelled via the consumer, the student. At the same time, institutions should compete not only on product quality and availability but also on price (tuition) and status. Increased information and leverage for consumers and lower market entry barriers for new providers are further key strands. Research funding should be even more highly concentrated whilst widening participation should focus on fairness of access to the more highly selective institutions, with any progress achieved through students’ and institutions’ own efforts, rather than on the more general issue of access to higher education generally by students from a wider range of backgrounds for which the Government itself accepts a major responsibility.

Assessment

Although they go further than any previous British (or other) national administration, these policies need to be seen in the context of a progressive process of marketisation that began with the Thatcher Government’s removal of the subsidy for overseas students in 1980, and continued with the introduction of maintenance loans in 1990, top-up fees and the (temporary) abolition of maintenance grants in 1998, and variable fees in 2006. Other important elements of this process were the gradual removal of formal distinctions between different categories of higher education institution (especially the abolition of the ‘binary line’ between universities and polytechnics in 1992); the concentration of research funding (with the first selectivity exercise in 1986); the development of system-wide institutional performance indicators (from the mid-1980s); the increasing influence of corporate models of institutional governance and management (the 1985 Jarratt Report); and, last but not least, the increasing role of market mechanisms (institutional rankings or ‘league tables’, the National Student Survey, the Key Information Set, etc.) within quality assurance.

Together, these policies have made UK universities more efficient and more responsive to stakeholders; institutions have also become more entrepreneurial and, possibly, more innovative. But they have reduced the level of institutional diversity in the system, and increased stratification. They have also damaged quality. Perhaps most seriously, they have helped to disguise and/or justify the longer term financial deterioration of the system, to the point where, on official figures, student-staff ratios are nearly two points higher in the universities (17.1) than they are in the state secondary schools (15.3). This reflects the fact that in spite of some improvement since the early 2000s, the UK spends a smaller proportion of its GDP on higher education than nearly every other major OECD country.

The Coalition Government’s higher education reforms will reinforce these effects. On the one hand, even to prevent a further worsening in the financial position requires some pretty heroic assumptions about the likelihood that private revenue (repaid fee and maintenance loans) will substitute for public spending; matters are not helped by the Government’s refusal so far to reveal the detailed assumptions on which its projections of future claims on the Exchequer are based. On the other, the ending of most direct subsidies of teaching and the creation of what is in effect if not in name a ‘voucher’ system, will create (almost certainly intentionally) a much more hierarchical system without any compensating gains in quality, efficiency or equity.

The only real beneficiaries of these policies are the small number of highly selective universities that are able to charge the maximum fee of £9,000 to as many students as they can be bothered to recruit whilst continuing to absorb the lion’s share of the available (somewhat more protected) research funding. The remaining institutions, the vast majority, are reduced to second or third class status even though they may be, indeed they almost certainly are, fulfilling functions that are at least as socially and economically (and educationally) valuable, and with greatly inferior resources. This is not only unjust but also wasteful as the additional resources go not into improving student education but into raising institutional status and position through investments in status-raising activities like the recruitment of expensive research ‘stars’. This is why a fundamental change in Government policy is needed.

Alternatives

The starting point must be an explicit recognition of the role of universities in producing a wide range of both private and public goods (democratization and political institutions, human rights and civic institutions, political stability, community activity, life expectancy, reduced inequality, less crime, lower health and prison costs, a better environment, etc.). This in turn requires (a) an adequate level of public funding, at least to the level of our main OECD analogues, and (b) public funding being used to subsidise both institutions and students (through income contingent loans for fees and maintenance, alongside maintenance grants for the most needy, as now).

As argued in the note on research, selectivity in research funding should continue but be confined to areas of research that are disproportionately expensive to conduct (the original impetus for the RAE) or where there are concerns about a lack of a critical mass; the quality of the remaining research should be monitored through local audits, as teaching now is. Institutions’ public funding for both teaching and research could be combined through multi-annual performance agreements that could also include subsidies for other activities that are seen as socially, culturally or economically valuable, such as widening participation and economic development. Subsidies should also be offered for institutional collaboration: ideally, universities, even the most prestigious, should work in partnership not only with one another but also with other post-compulsory providers, schools, employers, trades unions, local authorities and other local agencies.

THE FUNDING OF UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION

Current Policy

The aspect of the changes in the funding of Home/EU undergraduate teaching introduced from autumn 2012 that is most visible to the public is the increase in the maximum permitted annual fee to £9000 (subject to an institution charging more than £6000 gaining the approval of OFFA for its Access Agreement). This raising of the cap has, for the first time, resulted in a significant range of fees being charged by English universities, with variation within, as well as between, institutions; London Metropolitan University, which attracted headlines with its decision to charge £4500 for some courses, has an average fee of £6850, and charges £9000 for some courses.

An equally significant change however is the 80% reduction of the amount distributed by HEFCE through its ‘T’ grant. The remaining grant will be allocated to laboratory sciences (towards the additional costs of such courses) and SIVS (Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects) – principally highly quantitative courses and modern foreign languages. Even though this change is to be phased in with new cohorts of students, its implementation in 2012 is expected to result in an immediate reduction of £830m (equivalent to 20 per cent) of direct funding for teaching. Instead, public funding will be support higher education teaching indirectly, through the subsidised student loan system, the system that has operated in America since the 1970s.

Assessment

In introducing these changes, the Government has cited the benefits that the principles of the market are assumed to bring: efficiency, quality and choice. On many measures, the UK higher education system is already more efficient than that in most other major OECD countries and there is a clear risk that a further reduction in core resources will begin to impact on the quality of provision. By taking places for entrants with AAB+ (ABB+ from 2013) outside HEFCE’s student number controls, it could be argued that some applicants at least will have greater choice under the new system; however, and in spite of Ministerial pleas, the majority of the most selective universities (Bristol and UCL are notable exceptions) have not responded by increasing their undergraduate places.
Furthermore, for choice in a market to be genuine, the ‘consumers’ – that is to say UCAS applicants – must have the information and knowledge with which to make their decisions. The introduction of KIS (Key Information Sets) from September 2012 is intended to provide information on courses on a comparable basis, covering items such as methods of teaching and assessment and graduate destinations, as well as fees and bursaries. The categories were chosen on the basis of research with students and applicants, but the need to present the data in simple graphics and ‘headline’ figures has resulted in broad generalisations which lose fine grained (but highly relevant) detail. Even ignoring this point about the relevance of the information contained in KIS, higher education is an ‘experience good’ and thus applicants at the age of 17/18 cannot reasonably be expected to make entirely informed choices, even with access to this data.

The UK already has one of the most privately funded regimes. It has been estimated that these changes will shift the balance of cost sharing for an undergraduate degree between the individual and the state further, from 40:60 to 60:40. Assuming costs are being allocated equitably in line with benefits received, this suggests that obtaining a degree is of greater benefit to the graduate than to society more widely. It is however notoriously difficult to estimate even the financial gain to an individual (the graduate premium) let alone the other personal benefits and the economic and non-economic benefits of graduates to society.

Furthermore, the cost to the public purse of underwriting student loans (the RAB charge) is highly contested – this depends both on the salaries that graduates earn and the effectiveness of processes to collect repayments, especially from those who do not pay income tax in the UK (whether Home or EU students working outside the country). The Government uses a figure of 30% in its estimates, but several authoritative commentators have queried the underlying assumptions (on average fee and levels of repayment), and suggested that the value of student loans to be written off after 30 years will realistically be several percentage points higher.

The cumulative costs of the student loan system may, according to the OBR (Office of Budget Responsibility), add £50bn (or 3.4 per cent of GDP) to the national debt by 2030. These cost considerations and the resulting concerns about the sustainability of the loan system raise the prospect that future governments may be attracted to sell off some or all of the student loan portfolio, to transfer this debt to the private sector – however such a sale would only be attractive to potential purchasers if the terms of the loans became more commercially realistic. They may also partly explain why (in spite of widening participation considerations) there is to be no penalty for early lump sum repayment of student loans.

Perhaps in part because of these concerns about the long term costs of the student loan system that will operate from 2012, the Government has introduced two elements to the package of reforms related to undergraduate teaching that have the effect of encouraging institutions to reduce the fees that they charge (and thus amount of fee loans to which their Home/EU students are entitled). These are the terms of the National Scholarship Programme (NSP) and the ‘core and margin’ policy for the allocation of a proportion of places under HEFCE student number control.

The NSP is co-funded by universities and HEFCE; it gives support worth £3000 annually to specified numbers of undergraduates within each institution from the lowest income households – however only £1000 can be in cash, the remainder must be in indirect benefits and many institutions have met this requirement by offering fee waivers. Once they have this mechanism in place, and to ensure that they can offer the same package to all students from similar backgrounds, many universities offering fee waivers to their NSP students are also giving these to others from low income backgrounds.

The ‘core and margin’ policy enabled universities and colleges charging fees of no more than £7500 to bid for undergraduate places from a ‘margin’ of 20,000 created by top slicing existing HEFCE allocations (with certain categories of ‘core’ places excluded from the calculations); when this policy was announced for 2012-13, a number of universities and colleges submitted revised Access Agreements, so that they could bring their fees below £7500. This had the effect of reducing the average fee charged to £8354, from £8393 (£8071 from £8161, when fee waivers are included). HEFCE’s allocation of places was done on a formula basis, in proportion to the bids received; this resulted in 10,354 places going to FE colleges from the margin of 20,000 that had been created mainly by deducting them from universities. This shift in places subsequently, it has been suggested, led to a number of universities reviewing their franchising arrangements with FE colleges.

Although it is still too early for definitive conclusions, it seems clear that the first year of the new fee regime has deterred large numbers of students from disadvantaged backgrounds whilst reducing institutional incomes and creating a great degree of instability for most institutions.

Alternatives

The problem that the Government faces with the affordability of its contribution to the costs of undergraduate teaching and student support is inevitably related to the participation rate – this has now reached 47% (for English-domiciled 17-30 year olds studying in Great Britain). While it is clearly important that individuals who can benefit from education and/or training beyond compulsory education age have the opportunity to do so, under the current pattern, a full-time university degree is seen as the first choice, with other routes such as apprenticeships having lower status and hence attraction to applicants. More work needs to be done to encourage the consideration of such alternatives, for example through the provision of information, advice and guidance that is easily accessible to people both at school or college and throughout their adult life. At the same time, the supply of apprenticeships and other forms of education and training (whether workplace based or not) will need to be increased to satisfy the demand created for such courses. It is encouraging that the Official Opposition has recognised this and the importance of raising the profile of ‘vocational’ and work-based education more generally.

Given the limited public resources that are currently available to fund post-compulsory education, consideration should be given to remodelling the higher education student support package to shift the balance further towards those from the lowest income backgrounds, for whom fear of debt appears to be a greater deterrent to participation. There are various ways in which this could be done, bearing in mind the fact that the personal tax regime is now far less onerous for higher earning individuals than it was before the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s.

If a Labour Government were to reduce the fee cap to £6,000, in line with its current policy position, it would be essential to replace this source of income to institutions with an equivalent restoration of the HEFCE T grant. This would tend to move the share of public:private funding towards 50:50, which would be desirable on many grounds, not least that it would provide a means of redressing some of the huge (and increasing) disparities in institutional funding (see the note on widening participation).

RESEARCH

Current Policies

The UK research base has been judged the most productive of the G8 countries, and a key aim of current research policy is to maintain this ‘world-class’ status. Public funding for research is distributed selectively through a dual system of block grants based on performance in periodic research audits (the Research Assessment Exercise, the RAE, now replaced by the Research Excellence Framework or the REF) and through applications to the Research Councils. The aim of selectivity has been to identify and fund research excellence, with research funding increasingly concentrated in a smaller number of research intensive universities. Evidence that the UK’s research performance and impact has increased as funding has become more concentrated has legitimised recent policy directives aimed at increasing the concentration of research funding even further, so that from 2012-13, even research judged to be ‘internationally excellent’ will no longer be funded as part of the block grant. Research council funding is also increasingly concentrated, both in fewer institutions and on fewer, larger grants.

Current policy also emphasises the commercialisation of research, with partnerships between universities and industry seen as important for innovation and the exploitation of research findings. In a context in which competition for funding is intense, and where gaining external funding has become a prerequisite for conducting research in many universities, academics are increasingly under pressure to seek out funding from a wide range of potential sources.
Finally, there has been a renewed emphasis on the impact of research, with requirements that research council grant applications include a statement of the anticipated impact of the proposed study, and an assessment of research impact will constitute 20% of the overall assessment for REF 2014. However there remains no requirement on universities, even the most research intensive, to show how staff research benefits student learning.

Assessment

The introduction of selectivity, in particular through the RAE, has increased the priority given to research across the higher education sector and increased research productivity. There are, however, drawbacks, not least the prioritisation of research at the expense of teaching, the encouragement of institutional game-playing, and the emphasis on multiple academic journal publications rather than publications that facilitate public and professional engagement. There is also a tendency to encourage conservatism and homogeneity rather innovation and diversity. The RAE has also reinforced inequalities, with white, senior, male and able-bodied academics more likely to be entered than others, with consequences for career advancement. Finally, there is the considerable cost of these activities for universities and academic staff, with research now a high-stakes activity for individual academics, research groups and universities.
Assessments of quality are also not straightforward: research success in the RAE has been, in part, about learning to ‘play the game’, the criteria used to assess quality are not without contention, and there is evidence from other countries that assessments of research excellence can be influenced by extraneous factors such as the gender of the researcher. The criteria for assessment tend to benefit senior staff at the expense of newer researchers, and discipline-specific research rather than multi-disciplinary work. Research that does not easily fit with the dominant themes of a research group or department may also be excluded, however good that research is, resulting in a narrowing of research agendas.

The increasing concentration of research funding in fewer universities leads to the perception that excellent research is only found in these institutions. Yet a significant proportion of research in such institutions remains uncited, whilst RAE 2008 identified research excellence across a wide range of institutions. Nevertheless, extreme concentration continues, with the Russell Group of research-intensive universities increasing its share of funding in 2012-13 by 1.5% to 71.3%, whilst the allocation to the Million Plus Group of post-1992 universities has fallen by over 10% to just 2.1% of the total. Whilst some level of concentration may be justified for resource-heavy disciplines, where the cost of expensive labs, etc, mitigates against a wide dispersal of funds, the resulting geographical concentration also means that some regions lose out, with implications for regional community and economic development. The case for a general policy of increased concentration has not been made: not only is excellent research widely distributed, but those universities that receive only modest levels of research funding have been particularly effective in using it, including generating additional funding from other sources. Such universities have often been at the forefront of developing new knowledge, subject specialisms and methodologies. Moreover, the assumption that only large research groups produce excellent research is not supported by the evidence, whilst the over-concentration of research funding in a small number of elite universities and research groups raises questions about the kinds of research questions that are asked and the kinds of knowledge that are produced. In addition, whilst most researchers want their research to have an impact, the requirement to predict impact in advance and to demonstrate a direct relationship between research and economic/social impact risks further restricting the kind of research that is conducted.

Furthermore, the increasing emphasis on the commercial exploitation of research findings, along with the growing reliance on commercial funding, risks limiting research to that with high potential of economic utility in the near future, with basic or ‘blue skies’ research, along with research in the social sciences/humanities and any research that is potentially critical of commercial or policy interests, at risk. Detrimental effects of the increasing commercialisation of research include large corporations exerting undue influence on the setting of research agendas and bias in the reporting of findings, with, for example, direct commercial funding of projects making it more likely that the results will be favourable to the funder. Confidentiality agreements to protect commercial interests potentially raise further ethical issues.

Finally, research policy has contributed significantly to the increasingly hierarchical stratification of universities. Variation in teaching quality between institutions is minimal: it is research reputation that predominantly determines which universities are labelled ‘the best’ or ‘top’, with universities that have been most effective in widening participation struggling to maintain their research activities and denigrated in this value system. This threatens future research capacity. Post-1992 universities, small-scale projects and research deemed ‘internationally or even nationally excellent’ are all important for the support and development of early career researchers, who also crucial for the development of new and innovative ideas.

Alternatives

There is a place for selectivity in research funding. Within the dual system of funding, it makes sense for research councils across all subject areas to distribute funds on the basis of assessments of grant applications, though it is important to ensure a wide range of funding opportunities to encompass ‘responsive mode’ and programme grants, smaller as well as larger scale projects, basic and applied research, interdisciplinary initiatives and opportunities for early career researchers. Selectivity, however, is not the same as concentration.

In relation to the distribution of block grant research funding, there is a case for selectivity for those areas of research that are heavily resource-dependent. Some form of research audit activity may make sense for these areas. For all other areas of research, however, the distribution of institutional block grants, to cover teaching, research and other key activities (such as widening participation or local community/business partnerships), could be based on an agreed system that includes institutional plans along with a formula that reflects staff/student numbers and subject spread. Additional funding could also support institutional collaboration within the HE sector and, potentially, with other education providers, community organisations, etc. The aim should be to encourage and facilitate excellent, innovative and critical research across the disciplines to further knowledge and the development of civil society. The focus needs to move from the emphasis on research that serves the market to research as a public good.

WIDENING PARTICIPATION

Current Policy

All institutions charging more than £6,000 in tuition must agree Access Agreements with the access regulator (OFFA) setting out what they are doing to attract more students from disadvantaged backgrounds; if these efforts are deemed insufficient the regulator may decline to approve their fees. There is more generous financial support for low-income students, both full- and part-time. In addition the new National Scholarship Programme, jointly funded by the Government and institutions, provides assistance in the form of fee waivers or discounts, free foundation years, discounted accommodation or other services, and/or financial scholarships/bursaries for low-income students. Most recently, OFFA and HEFCE have been asked to report on how access can be increased within existing policies. The whole widening participation problem is now seen in terms of ‘fair’ access to more selective institutions rather than in terms of access by underrepresented groups to the university system as a whole. Moreover, responsibility for improving participation is increasingly being shifted to institutions and students/graduates (through the diversion of fee income), and away from the government and the state. This is in spite of statements by Ministers and others accepting that social mobility has stalled and that the education system is in large part responsible for this.

Assessment

The extension of fee loans to part-time students has been widely welcomed, as has the marginally more progressive nature of the support regime. Whether these enhancements will be sufficient to overcome the longstanding and well attested aversion to increased costs, risk and debt on the part of many students and potential students from disadvantaged backgrounds remains to be seen: at present the evidence from enrolments this year is against it. In any case, such improvements have to be set against the abolition of policies – notably, Aim Higher, Educational Maintenance Allowances and subsidies for adults on Level 3 and Access courses – that were known to be helping with participation. Of even greater importance, however, are new policies, both inside and outside higher education, that are directly inimical to wider participation in higher education generally.

In higher education, the new funding regime encourages the spread of merit-, rather than need-based, institutional aid packages. It also discourages the use of ‘contextual’ data to offset the advantages of applicants who have attended private or selective schools. The continuing constraints on non-AAB+ places are also unhelpful, the 50 per cent participation target having long been abandoned. But the main threat to widening participation from within higher education comes from the increased stratification of institutions and the constituencies and social groups they serve. This is not only the inevitable but also the intended outcome of the Government’s policies, aimed as they are at protecting the interests of a small set of highly selective institutions at the expense of the rest.

Even so, the greatest threat to widening participation in higher education arises from the combination of unprecedented spending cuts in, and the ever increasing fragmentation of, the compulsory sector. Whereas across all OECD countries, on average, 57 per cent of the performance differences between schools can be attributed to the social character of the intake, in the UK the social intake accounts for over 70 per cent of the performance differences . There is a clear relationship between variability in school performance and the fairness of progression to higher education: countries providing fairer access to higher education – such as Finland, Ireland and Spain – are also those with the most equal between-school performances in PISA 2000. This has led the OECD, in its recent Economic Survey of the UK, to recommend that the Government should experiment with proscribing the use of residence criteria in admission to state schools in some areas. This would be an important step towards the objective of trying to ensure that state-funded schools are as similar in character, intake and process as possible, so that a child’s background, or where they live, makes little difference to the kind of school they attend, the kind of education they receive, or the sort of post-compulsory experience they go on to have.

It seems clear that, whatever may have happened in the past, the intensification of market-based policies in the compulsory sector, alongside huge spending cuts to education generally, will widen the existing class-based differentials between schools, and thus reduce even further the supply of students from disadvantaged backgrounds with both the qualifications and the motivation to enter higher education. At the same time, tuition fee policy and the increasing stratification of the university system will present a further barrier and disincentive to many such students. In this way the stratification of the tertiary sector reinforces that of the secondary sector and vice versa. Unless alternative polices are adopted we seem bound to continue with the situation where the more selective institutions mainly draw their student body from private schools and middle class households, while the less selective ones recruit more heavily from state schools, FE colleges, minority ethnic communities and working class households. This is not a recipe for increased social mobility.

Alternatives

The key to widening participation in higher education lies in policies to create a fairer and less fragmented school and college system. But direct steps should also be taken to reverse the stratification of higher education. As well as banning competition on fees and student aid packages, the existing severe disparities in funding between those institutions that regularly surpass their state school entrant benchmarks and those that regularly fall short should be addressed. It cannot be right that, even after allowing for differences in subject costs, Cambridge University should have more than four times the income per student of Edge Hill University (the differences in institutional wealth are even greater: the 24 members of the enlarged Russell Group own between them over half the sector’s total assets). Beyond that, universities and colleges should be required to devote a significant proportion of their resources to collective, locally focussed and coordinated efforts to work with schools, colleges, employers, local authorities and trades unions to raise aspirations and to improve progression to all forms of post-compulsory education.

QUALITY

Current Policy

Current policy is governed by the assumption that quality will be raised as universities compete on price (tuition fees), as well as quality and availability, and new providers enter the market, some of them private ‘for profit’ companies. Greater information for students – the Key Information Set (KIS) gives no fewer than 17 items of information for every undergraduate course including class contact hours and assessment regimes – will also strengthen students’ ability to demand and receive better teaching. Students will have a more prominent role in quality assurance and will even be able to trigger institutional audits (reviews) in certain circumstances. The QA regime will be made more effective by moving to a ‘risk-based’ approach whereby certain institutions with better ‘track records’ will receive less frequent or less intensive visits from the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA). The Government’s main funding agency, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) will become the principal (‘independent lead’) regulator with a particular brief to act as ‘champion’ of student interests.

Assessment

Although there is no conclusive evidence, there are strong grounds for suggesting that quality in UK higher education has fallen over the past 25 to 30 years, and that the main reason for this is that institutional revenues have not kept pace with student numbers; greater competition for students and revenue has almost certainly exacerbated this. It is therefore unhelpful that, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, under the current Comprehensive Spending Review higher education will suffer a 40 per cent per cent reduction in current spending between 2010-11 and 2014-15. There are four further sets of reasons for suggesting that quality is actually at greater risk from current policies.

First, a genuinely risk-based approach will almost certainly prove to be unworkable, as several experts have already warned. There is simply no secure basis for making the necessary judgements. Even in the more closely regulated school sector, a significant proportion of ‘outstanding’ providers fail to sustain the designation. Second, markets in higher education do not work like the markets of classical economic theory. Because of a combination of information difficulties and the role of universities in allocating status, they are ‘positional’ markets where price is a synonym for quality rather than a reflection of it, and where no competitive advantage accrues to universities that provide better teaching. Third, as the House of Commons Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee found in its 2009 inquiry into quality, increased competition is already weakening the main means of protecting quality, academic peer review, without putting anything worthwhile in its place. Finally – and at least as long as anything like the present degree of competition continues – there are strong reasons of principle for arguing that the monitoring and regulation of quality should be done by an agency wholly independent of both the government and the sector if even present levels of quality are to be maintained.

Alternatives

It is unthinkable – at least in the current economic context – to return UK higher education to the funding levels it enjoyed prior to the great expansions of the 1960s, or even the 1980s. But a good start would be to aim at public expenditure on higher education attaining the same share of GDP as the leading OECD countries (at present only Japan has a lower share than the UK). It is also desirable to limit the share of teaching revenue that comes via the fee, and to prevent competition on fees, aid packages or fee waivers (see separate note on funding).

Beyond that, and assuming the continuation of strong competition for students and revenues, the existing regulatory apparatus needs to be strengthened, especially if we are to see a wider range of providers (our existing universities are both legally and practically ‘private’ providers, and there may be no secure way of keeping ‘for profit’ providers out). The QAA should be reconstituted as a statutory agency accountable directly to Parliament. It should be responsible for ensuring minimum ‘threshold’ standards. For this purpose, it should have the power to accredit (and de-accredit) all providers, whether or not they are in receipt of public funds (directly or via their students). The agency should report on how institutions are using their resources to maintain or improve quality. This should be the basis for an annual report to Parliament on quality and standards and what should be done to maintain them. The agency should continue to operate on the basis of academic peer judgements but there is also a case for considering whether there should be statutory protection for academics, and especially internal or external examiners, who find that their judgements are being overruled or interfered with by institutional managers for reasons of revenue or reputation.

Finally, whilst it may not be practical politics to cut back on the information now provided for students, efforts should in future go to improving the existing channels of information, advice and guidance for students at 14 and 16 plus, as several authoritative reports have urged, rather than into extending the existing, increasingly meaningless, categories further.

The draft programmes of study (PoS) for English, mathematics and science at Key Stages 1 and 2, published on 11 June 2012, were accompanied by a letter from the Secretary of State to the chair of the Expert Panel (EP)ⁱ. Others have commented on the draft programmes of study. This response concentrates on the Secretary of State’s letter. It does so for two reasons. First, the programmes of study require a response commensurate with the considerable detail they provide, preferably from specialists in the three subjects in question, so apart from commenting on the government’s treatment of spoken English – a field in which I do claim specialist expertise – I leave this task to others. Second, the Secretary of State’s letter is the closest the government comes to providing an account of the character of the national curriculum as a whole, and since such an account ought to a prominent feature of any national curriculum review worthy of the name, what the Secretary of State says on the matter merits attention.

The use of international evidence

The injunction to emulate the policies and successes of ‘high performing jurisdictions’ appears several times in the Secretary of State’s letter and the quoted phrase has become something of a policy mantra, regularly punctuating the official discourse of the national curriculum review, especially where the Secretary of State and the chair of his Expert Panel are concerned. However, here as elsewhere there is little evidence that the government is aware of the spectrum of relevant evidence from international comparison outside what the US National Research Council calls Type 1 and Type 2 studiesⁱⁱ , or of the tendency to over-interpret the PISA and TIMSS international student achievement data, or of the hazards of naive, monofactorial and otherwise unsustainable attributions of cause and effect in accounting for other countries’ success.ⁱⁱⁱ

The Department has certainly been made aware of reservations from many quarters about its use of international data. For example, I submitted a paper on such matters in November 2011^iv and have regularly copied officials into other relevant material.^v I have also put the Department in touch with authoritative sources in other countries whose expert knowledge may well exceed that on which ministers have chosen to rely.

Rather than repeat all this I merely refer the Department to what is already in its hands. It is not just that international evidence has been cited selectively and tendentiously in support of the line taken by the current national curriculum review, essential though such evidence undoubtedly is. It is also clear from the Secretary of State’s letter that the limited range of international evidence of which ministers have been made aware has been allowed to supplant or become a proxy for the analysis of those national circumstances and needs – cultural, social, demographic and economic – that are no less important a determinant of a country’s national curriculum.

There are several points at which the Secretary of State’s letter illustrates this distortion, perhaps most strikingly when it says that we must ‘ensure that our children master the essential core knowledge which other nations pass on to their pupils’ (my italics). Clearly, in an interdependent and competitive world it is useful to know what other nations define as ‘essential core knowledge’ in the school curriculum, but it is surely taking matters too far to ordain that because a sample of their 15 year olds outperforms a sample of our 15 year olds in the PISA tests those nations’ accounts of ‘essential core knowledge’ should replace our own.

We study education elsewhere to learn from it, not to copy it. Even granted the fact of globalisation and the imperative of economic competitiveness, there is much more to shaping a national curriculum than mimicking the curricula of PISA high performers; and it has yet to be shown that such mimicry raises standards. In any case, as I’ve shown elsewhere, double standards all too often apply. Thus British governments voice admiration for high-performing Finland but then, finding Finnish education policies politically unpalatable, copy the United States, whose schooling system performs relatively modestly in PISA and by some accounts verges on the dysfunctional. Meanwhile, the true lessons from Finland go unheeded.^vi

Aims

In both its final report and its evidence to the government’s national curriculum review, the Cambridge Primary Review devoted much attention to the aims of our national education system, and the imperatives and values that might shape it over the next few decades.^vii This work was informed by widespread stakeholder consultation across the country as well as by commissioned searches of published national and international evidence. CPR also deplored the typically British tendency to determine aims after the event, so that they decorate school prospectuses and entrance halls rather than shape the curriculum.

The Expert Panel referred to this work but did not use it, and proposed instead five aims of its own with no obvious evidential provenance. In turn, both these and the CPR’s proposed aims framework have been ignored by the government, which has fallen squarely into the trap against which we warned. Having determined the precise structure of the curriculum and much of its content, the Secretary of State now invites us to enter into discussion about the aims which his non-negotiable curriculum specification can be claimed, post hoc, to pursue, thus guaranteeing that yet again the aims will be no more than cosmetic.

Further, though the intended consultation on aims seems somewhat pointless for the reason I have given, the Secretary of State says that in this matter he will privilege the views of teachers. This is wrong. In a pluralist democracy the aims and values underpinning the state’s maintained education system and its curriculum concern every citizen, not just those who happen to be teachers, for we are all electors and taxpayers. Where teachers’ views should have supremacy is in deciding how within schools and classrooms the agreed national aims should be implemented.

Sadly, therefore, the concerns that CPR summarised in its 2010 policy priorities statement have not been heeded:

Address the perennially neglected question of what primary education is for. The Mrs Beeton approach – first catch your curriculum, then liberally garnish with aims – is not the way to proceed. Aims must be grounded in a clear framework of values – for education is at heart a moral matter – and in properly argued positions on childhood, society, the wider world and the nature and advancement of knowledge and understanding. And aims should shape curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and the wider life of the school, not be added as mere decoration.^viii

As noted earlier, learning from ‘high performing jurisdictions’ is desirable but is no substitute for those ‘properly argued positions on childhood, society, the wider world and the nature and advancement of knowledge and understanding’ that a well-founded national curriculum requires. In this matter, the government has sided with Mrs Beeton.

Standards and accountability: the core and the rest

Like the government, CPR stands firmly for high educational standards and the public accountability of schools and their teachers. However, it differs from government and the Secretary of State in the matter of how standards should be defined and how accountability should be exercised. The Secretary of State’s letter defines standards as how well pupils perform in English, mathematics and science, and accountability as how such performance is publicly demonstrated, though he also urges high expectations for other subjects even though they will not be tested nationally. The latter sentiment is welcome, but we should remind ourselves of the familiar and well-documented risk that many schools will concentrate on what is tested to the detriment if not the exclusion of the rest. Further, for the subjects outside the core – that is, those subjects whose content is to be determined by each school individually – it is hard to know how accountability can be meaningfully demonstrated in other than a highly localised and non-transferable sense.

Again, I do not wish to repeat what CPR has reported elsewhere on these matters,^ix but I must stress our central arguments: national ‘standards’ should be about all aspects of the curriculum, not just limited aspects of three subjects; schools should therefore be accountable for the quality of the whole curriculum, not just part of it; and accountability should be demonstrated by a variety of indicators, measures and procedures, not just through national tests. Or as CPR expressed the matter in its list of policy priorities presented to the incoming government in 2010:

“Abandon the dogma that there is no alternative to SATs. Stop treating testing and assessment as synonymous. Stop making Year 6 tests bear the triple burden of assessing pupils, evaluating schools and monitoring national performance. Abandon the naive belief that testing of itself drives up standards. It doesn’t: good teaching does. Initiate wholesale assessment reform drawing on the wealth of alternative models now available, so that we can at last have systems of formative and summative assessment – in which tests certainly have a place – which do their jobs validly, reliably and without causing collateral damage. Adopt CPR’s definition of standards as excellence in all domains of the curriculum to which children are statutorily entitled, not just the 3Rs. And understand that those who argue for reform are every bit as committed to rigorous assessment and accountability as those who pin everything on the current tests. The issue is not whether children should be assessed or schools should be accountable – they should – but how and in relation to what”.^x

It is a source of considerable disappointment to us that the government’s Bew review of testing did little more than scratch the surface of these issues, and that ministers continue to treat tests, assessment and accountability as synonymous. It is also clear that for accountability and quality to be guaranteed beyond the three core subjects, there need to be agreed national frameworks of some kind for those subjects whose content schools are invited to determine for themselves.

Levels and assessment

The Secretary of State says in his letter that he has ‘decided that the current system of levels and level descriptors should be removed and not replaced’ on the grounds that it is ‘confusing for parents and restrictive for teachers.’ This appears to be a decision already taken rather than a proposal offered for discussion, so there may be little point in commenting on it. However:

• CPR’s evidence suggests that the system of levels, which has been in place since 1988, may well be in some respects restrictive but it is at least familiar to all teachers, and indeed to parents, and many teachers say that they find it helpful rather than otherwise.
• The Secretary of State’s letter is not at all clear about what should replace the current levels. He talks of ‘some form of grading of pupil attainment in mathematics, science and English’. At the DfE/CPR consultation on the proposals on 29 June, officials referred to assessment at the end of years 2, 4 and 6 to ‘show if children have met standards’ and to secure the government’s aim of ‘high stakes accountability’ (the phrase used by the officials), but in response to further questions said that there will be no testing in Year 4. There seems to be some confusion, then, over both the alternative to levels and the nature and extent of national assessment. We trust that clear proposals on these matters will form part of the formal consultation in autumn 2012.
• If it is the intention to up the assessment stakes by increasing the amount and frequency of testing, then this suggests that government has failed to heed the extensive negative evidence on this issue, including that contained in CPR’s interim and final reports.^xi

Spoken English

The Secretary of State, and the draft programmes of study, announce that ‘the importance of spoken language should be a priority throughout the new national curriculum’. What is actually proposed in the draft programmes of study contradicts this. Indeed, there is deep concern in many quarters – including very prominently at the CPR/DfE consultation sessions on 20 and 29 June – about what is seen as a severe weakening of the profile of spoken language in the draft programmes of study, and this despite the considerable array of evidence with which ministers and the Department have been presented.

That evidence makes talk that is cognitively challenging and rigorously orchestrated absolutely essential to children’s thinking, learning and understanding both within each subject and across the curriculum as a whole. It is also a vital tool for effective communication and a lifeline for those children who are disadvantaged socially and linguistically. And we now have a critical mass of international evidence demonstrating that high quality talk raises tested standards in the core subjects.^xii

Of all this, as of alternative evidence on international comparisons, ministers and DfE officials are fully aware. Indeed, on 20 February 2012, at my request, the Department organised a seminar on spoken language in the national curriculum attended by lead NC review officials, national and (by videolink) international experts, and the Schools Minister. The event was preceded by extensive correspondence and meetings with both ministers and officials, including the Secretary of State himself.^xiii

I and several others who participated in the DfE seminar are particularly concerned about (i) the statements that head each of the three draft programmes of study, which are so brief and bland as to be pointless, (ii) the failure to follow them through within each PoS to the extent required, (iii) the removal of spoken language as a distinctive strand within the English PoS.

Although the partial attempt to implement the seminar’s recommendation of ‘talk across the curriculum’ is a small step forward, it is not convincingly pursued in the mathematics and science drafts, or even in the reading and writing components of the English draft, where the relationship between spoken and written language is of critical importance. As to the removal of the spoken language strand from English, this is an error which in my judgement cannot be allowed to stand. It appears to be informed by the wholly mistaken belief that in the teaching of English there is no more to spoken language development than what can be subsumed in reading and writing. In fact, children’s acquisition of the knowledge, understanding and skill that enable them to use spoken language with the fluency and flexibility necessary for learning, employment and life requires attention to talk in its own terms as well as in the contexts of reading and writing. This is emphatically not an either/or issue, for such a focus draws on knowledge about the dynamics, registers and grammars of spoken language, and of language in use in a wide variety of real life contexts, a pursuit which is distinct from the teaching of reading and writing. This is something employers and university admissions tutors readily understand when they complain about school leavers’ restricted powers of oral communication and their limited ability to shift from informal and colloquial talk to the more precise and formal registers required for presenting and defending a case, explaining ideas, probing others’ reasoning or participating in discussion.

Far from prioritising talk as claimed in the Secretary of State’s letter of 11 June, the decision to remove it as a distinct strand of the English PoS represents a backward step – one, indeed, which may well frustrate two of the government’s key intentions: to raise educational standards and to close the gap between disadvantaged children and the rest. Incidentally, the Expert Panel’s suggestion that spoken language can be enhanced by highlighting it in curriculum aims is a non-starter and should be disregarded. It is what is required by the programmes of study that makes the difference. Spoken language must remain as an explicit strand of the English programme of study.

We have to say that we are also somewhat baffled by this turn of events, for at the DfE seminar on 20 February, the Schools Minister signalled his acceptance of the arguments summarised above. However, he also expressed the fear that raising the profile of spoken language could ‘encourage idle chatter in class’. We say again here, as we said then, that those of us working in this field have long advanced something which is neither idle not mere chatter: an approach to spoken language that is rigorously planned and implemented; that engages and sustains children’s attention to the task in hand; that challenges and stretches their thinking; that probes their understanding and misunderstanding, building on the one and rectifying the other; that demands as much of the teacher’s expertise as it does of the child’s developing linguistic skills. In any case, one person’s idle chatter may be another’s exploratory talk, especially where early years teaching and learning are concerned.

It would be a cause for grave concern to us, as it would surely be to every parent and teacher, if the perception I have quoted were to triumph over a body of international evidence which is as conclusive as it is vast, and if as a consequence children were to be denied access to the full cognitive, social and pedagogical potential of classroom talk properly managed.

I urge ministers to reverse their ill-advised decision on spoken English. I also remind them of the evidence summarised in the position paper prepared for DfE’s February 2012 seminar on Oracy, the National Curriculum and Educational Standards.^xiv Not to act on that evidence would be irresponsible. It is true that the evidence also shows that in too many classrooms the quality of talk is not what it should be, but that is precisely why the government needs to give a clear lead; and it is why raising the profile of spoken English in the curriculum needs to be accompanied by action in initial teacher training and CPD. On this front ministers should be encouraged by the considerable strides that some schools and ITE/CPD providers have made, even though the national picture remains very uneven.

Breadth, balance and the character of the curriculum as a whole

Perpetuating the divided curriculum?

We are pleased to see that the Secretary of State endorses the principle of curriculum breadth for which CPR has so strenuously argued. However, what is proposed is breadth in a somewhat qualified form.

Schools will be required to teach, alongside the three core subjects, ‘art and design, design and technology, geography, history, ICT music and physical education across all the primary years.’ However, that formula guarantees breadth on paper only, for the programmes of study in these subjects will be very brief, and what is taught will be largely determined by schools.

There is nothing wrong with that approach. Indeed, it is close to what CPR commended in its own curriculum framework.^xv But whereas CPR’s framework allowed local discretion and variation for every subject, the Secretary of State offers such freedom only for those subjects he deems relatively unimportant. In contrast, for English, mathematics and science he proposes to specify in exhaustive detail ‘the content that each child should be expected to master … every year.’ Since this contrast is reinforced by assessment requirements, with English, mathematics and science subject to national tests and ‘some form of grading of pupil attainment’, we can be reasonably sure on the basis of past experience that in a significant proportion of schools teachers will teach to the test and have scant regard for the rest.

As CPR argued in its final report and its evidence to the national curriculum review, the only meaningful sense of a broad curriculum is where breadth is allied to quality, and where all children encounter a curriculum in which every subject is taught to the highest possible standard regardless of how much or how little time is allocated to it. Here, history is once again a sobering guide to where the government’s proposed approach could lead:

“During the 1970s and 1980s inspection evidence showed that … literacy and numeracy were always taught, but the fate of the rest of the curriculum depended on the inclinations and expertise of each school’s teaching staff. In our best primary schools this autonomy yielded a curriculum of vision, vitality and rigour. At worst it meant that during their seven critical years of primary education many children encountered little or no history, music or drama (for example), and when they did so those encounters were fleeting and undemanding. In these schools, teachers’ freedom to choose what subjects to teach, and with what degree of conviction, effectively denied their pupils the later freedom of choice for which a balanced and well-taught foundational curriculum, grounded in much more than functional literacy, is the minimum prerequisite. Especially hard hit, as always, were those children whose families lacked the resources to make good the deficit out of school.”

“This is the warning from recent educational history that the government’s national curriculum review must not ignore. Freedom for teachers – a necessary corrective to 13 years of government micro-management – cannot be pursued at the expense of young children’s need for a proper foundation for later learning and choice”.^xvi

What former HMCI and DfE Permanent Secretary David Bell called the ‘two tier curriculum’ (the ‘basics’ and the rest), and what CPR’s evidence showed was a hierarchy of teaching quality as well as allocated time, was in the view of CPR one of the problems of English primary education most urgently in need of attention.^xvii Not only has it not been attended to in these proposals: it has been reinforced.

Looking forward or harking back?

There are three further difficulties with the proposed approach to shaping the whole curriculum. First, just as the lessons of history in respect of the two-tier curriculum have been ignored (indeed the lessons of Britain’s educational history overall appear to have been overtaken by the obsession with ‘high-performing jurisdictions’), so the habits of history have been allowed to persist unchallenged. The start and end point of this review has been the same hierarchy of subjects that frames the current national curriculum. Neither the government nor the Expert Panel appears to have asked whether this hierarchy, which goes back to the 1988 Education Reform Act (and indeed to a century before that) remains appropriate for the next generation of children. The omission is curious as well as serious, given how much we have heard about modernisation, globalisation, the changing international situation and the need to plan for the future, and it seems decidedly odd to look forward by harking back. This retrospective tendency is underlined by the fact that the one subject in the current national curriculum which the Secretary of State does not prescribe is one of its most recent and welcome arrivals: citizenship.

Second, the anomalies of the current national curriculum – notably, perhaps, the handling of faith – are allowed to persist, presumably on the grounds that attending to such anomalies would require legislation, and legislation is what the whole curriculum package seeks to avoid. I should add – and CPR’s curriculum proposals underline this – that what we object to here is not religious education but the persistence of the 1944 Butler Act’s separation of the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ curriculum, a separation that makes it difficult to approach the treatment of faith in contemporary education and society in a manner that is properly in tune with the cultural, religious and moral condition of Britain 70 years after Butler.

Third, the entire framework is informed by a view of ‘essential knowledge’ which is hinted at but not explicated or justified, though enough has been said about the influence on these proposals (including by ministers themselves) of the ideas of E.D.Hirsch for the rationale to be pretty clear, and that rationale is undoubtedly illustrated in the three proposed programmes of study. However, just as we challenged the idea that the future of spoken language in young children’s education can depend on one minister’s anxieties about ‘idle chatter in class’, so we would wish to challenge the assumption that it is for ministers in a culturally diverse and very plural democracy to determine exactly what knowledge is ‘essential’ and what knowledge is not.

Neither national nor a curriculum?

This takes us to our final concerns about what the Secretary of State has proposed. We have to ask whether what we have here represents a national curriculum that is worthy of the name. We believe that there are four senses in which it does not.

First, the proposed ‘national’ curriculum is for some children in the nation’s maintained schools but not all of them. Academies and free schools may opt out. If there is to be a national curriculum at all, then it should be both an entitlement for all children in maintained schools and an obligation on all those who teach in those schools.

Second, as already noted there is little evidence in the Expert Panel report, and even less in the Secretary of State’s proposals, of the kind of close and careful weighing of national culture, national needs and England’s unique and hugely complex mix of commonality and diversity that should precede and inform any attempt to devise a national curriculum that has a reasonable chance of speaking to the condition of more than a minority of the nation’s children and families. The Cambridge Primary Review undertook this task, working both from published evidence and an extensive programme of discussions with stakeholders – including children, parents, teachers, community representatives, business leaders, faith leaders, local and national politicians from all parties, and many others in different parts of the country. In this programme CPR also made a point of meeting and hearing from children and families who in our society tend to be marginalised, disadvantaged and vulnerable.^xviii It is regrettable that DfE, and indeed the Expert Panel, have ignored this extensive and vital work.

Third, although the responsibility for initiating a review of the national curriculum certainly rests with government, government has an equal responsibility to ensure that what emerges is able to cross political divides and unite the majority of the electorate around a view of the curriculum for state-maintained schools to which most can subscribe. Indeed on pragmatic grounds alone this makes sense, for a policy which teachers support is more likely to be successful in practice than one with which they unwillingly comply, and the evidence from the period 1997-2010 is very clear on this. Equally, the national curriculum is surely one area of public policy where a government has an obligation to try to achieve political consensus and where the debate ought to rise above party politics. Instead, this venture has been pursued in an aggressively party-political manner and both evidence and expertise have been viewed through an unashamedly ideological lens. Alternative views and evidence on curriculum scope and balance, or on the nature and structure of knowledge, have been dismissed out of hand as leftist or ‘progressive’, which for those of us who believe in an inclusive, rational, principled and evidentially-grounded approach to curriculum thinking is as inaccurate as it is insulting.

Fourth, what we have here are proposals not for a curriculum but for just three subjects. The attempts by the Expert Panel, the Cambridge Primary Review and others to conceive of the curriculum as a whole, addressing questions of scope and balance in relation to individual, cultural and economic need, have been rejected in favour of the assumption that if the inherited ‘core’ subjects are prescribed in detail the rest can sort itself out. Past evidence shows that in relation to what happens in many schools this assumption is optimistic.

So in four decisive senses what is proposed is neither national nor a curriculum:

• it is for some of the nation’s children in state maintained schools but not all of them;
• it offers no account of the national culture and circumstances to which a national curriculum ought to relate, being influenced more by dubious extrapolations from what other countries do;
• it makes no attempt to reach a consensus on values and rationale, presuming instead that it is entirely proper in a democracy for a national curriculum to serve as a vehicle for imposing upon the majority the values, beliefs and prejudices of an ideological minority;
• it represents not so much a curriculum as a syllabus for three subjects.

Implementation issues

Genuine curriculum reform cannot be achieved merely by redefining what is required, for the curriculum as enacted in schools and classrooms is a much more powerful determinant of educational quality and progress than the curriculum as prescribed on paper.

DfE has been advised that if it aligns with the prescribed curriculum various ‘control factors’ like testing, inspection, teacher training and approved textbooks it will have a better chance of ensuring that teachers teach what is required and of reducing the gap between prescription and enactment.^xix However, I have warned elsewhere that far from being a novel insight as has been claimed, this is precisely what was attempted with Labour’s national literacy, numeracy and primary strategies between 1998 and 2010.^xx Not only did this approach work only up to a point; it also caused considerable collateral curriculum damage, alienated much of the teaching profession and replaced the autonomous judgement which is essential to intelligent and effective teaching by dependence and unthinking compliance. This is yet another historical lesson that has been ignored.

The precedent is doubly important, for the new national curriculum requirements will be implemented in a context where established forms of professional support – notably from QCDA and local authorities – are no longer available.

This situation makes it all the more urgent that government addresses the problem of curriculum capacity about which it was warned in the CPR’s final report and in numerous subsequent exchanges. CPR argued that children are entitled to a curriculum which is taught to the highest possible standard in all its aspects, yet HMI and Ofsted have consistently revealed considerable variation in the quality of subject teaching across the primary sector, especially in relation to the non-core subjects, and it is clear that this relates to schools’ access to appropriate levels of subject and pedagogical content knowledge.

In 2011, the Secretary of State accepted CPR’s recommendation on this matter^xxi and initiated an enquiry into the capacity of primary schools to plan and teach a broad curriculum to a consistently high standard. The enquiry was undertaken internally, and the report was not made publicly available. However, CPR remained closely involved and the DfE report supported CPR’s and Ofsted’s published conclusions: curriculum capacity, in many primary schools, is indeed a serious problem; and it is a problem because the curriculum has expanded in scope and complexity beyond what the inherited pattern of generalist class teaching can sustain.

The solution is not as simple as replacing generalists by specialists, though nurturing and more effectively deploying specialist expertise is certainly an essential element. I have proposed a range of strategic options for tackling the problem, ranging from the diversification of models of initial teacher training (as opposed to routes into teaching, which are already diverse) to more flexible ways of deploying staff both within and between schools.^xxii As yet, the options have not been properly discussed. The matter cannot be postponed much longer.

We stress, however, that in the coming discussion curriculum capacity must not be equated solely with subject knowledge, essential though subject and subject-specific pedagogical content knowledge certainly are. As I argued in a recent paper for DfE:

The term ‘curriculum capacity’ refers to the human and other resources that a school is able to command in two areas:

• relating to the aims, scope, structure, balance and content of the curriculum as a whole;
• relating to the detailed planning and teaching of individual curriculum subjects, domains or aspects.

A school is regarded as having appropriate curriculum capacity if:

• it is able to conceive and plan a broad, balanced and coherent curriculum in pursuit of relevant and properly argued educational aims;
• each subject, domain or aspect of that curriculum is planned and taught to a consistently high standard, regardless of how much or little time is allocated to it.

Capacity in the first sense is even more important in the context of a national curriculum review that offers schools no meaningful perspective on the curriculum as a whole.

1 August 2012
© 2012 Robin Alexander
______________________________________

Notes and references

i www.education.gov.uk/schools/teachingandlearning/curriculum/nationalcurriculum/b0075667/national-curriculum-review-update

ii National Research Council (2003) Understanding Others, Educating Ourselves: getting more from international comparative studies in education (C.Chabott and E.J.Eliott, editors), National Academies Press. ‘Type 1’ studies include PISA, TIMSS and other international student achievement surveys, ‘Type 2’ include desk-based cause-effect policy extrapolations from those data, exemplified by the McKinsey and Oates reports; ‘Type 3’ encompasses the much larger body of empirical comparative educational research, of which governments mostly tend to be unaware despite their often significant policy applications.

iii Alexander, R.J. (2012) ‘Moral panic, miracle cures and national policy: what can we really learn from international comparison?’ Scottish Educational Review, 44(1), 4-21.

iv Alexander, R.J, (2011) ‘Could do even better? Making the most of international comparison as a tool of policy’, paper for DfE, November.

v For example, Alexander, R.J. (2012) ‘Entitlement, freedom, minimalism and essential knowledge: can the curriculum circle be squared?’ Paper presented at the CPPS Westminster seminar, 23 April; Alexander, R.J. (2012) ‘Citing Finland’s educational reforms in support of those proposed for England: a warning’, paper for DfE, May.

vi Alexander, R.J. (2012) ’International evidence, national policy and classroom practice: questions of judgement, vision and trust’. Keynote address at the Third Van Leer International Conference on Education, Jerusalem, 24 May; Ravitch, D. (2010) The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Basic Books; Alexander, R.J. (2012) ‘Citing Finland’s educational reforms in support of those proposed for England: a warning’, paper for DfE, May; Sahlberg, P. (2010) Finnish Lessons: what can the world learn from educational change in Finland? Teachers College Press.

vii Alexander, R.J. (ed) (2010) Children, their World, their Education: final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review, Routledge, pp 174-202.

viii Cambridge Primary Review (2010) After the Election: policy priorities for primary education, University of Cambridge Faculty of Education, p 3.

ix Alexander, R.J. (ed) (2010), Children, their World, their Education: final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review, Routledge, especially pp 239-245, 319-326, 471-474 and 496-500.

x Cambridge Primary Review (2010) After the Election: policy priorities for primary education, University of Cambridge Faculty of Education, p 3.

xi Alexander, R.J. (ed) (2010) Children, their World, their Education: final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review, Routledge, chapters 16, 17 and 23; Alexander, R.J., Doddington, C., Gray, J., Hargreaves, L., Kershner, R. (ed) (2010) The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys, Routledge, chapters 17 (Tymms and Merrell), 18 (Whetton, Ruddock and Twist), 19 (Harlen), 16 (Balarin and Lauder) and 29 (Wyse, McCreery and Torrance).

xii As reviewed at the AERA international conference Socialising Intelligence Through Academic Talk and Dialogue held at the University of Pittsburgh in September 2011: Resnick, L.B., Asterhan, C., Clarke, C. and Hofkens, T. (ed) (2012, forthcoming) Socializing Intelligence [papers from the AERA Pittsburgh conference], AERA.

xiii The correspondence and meetings with ministers, DfE officials, Ofsted and the government’s reviews are listed at the beginning of the paper referred to at note 14.

xiv Alexander, R.J. (2012) ‘Improving oracy and classroom talk in English schools: achievements and challenges’, paper for DfE.

xv Alexander, R.J. (ed) (2010) Children, their World, their Education: final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review, Routledge, pp 261-277.

xvi Alexander, R.J. (2011) ‘Primary schools need a broad curriculum’, The Guardian, 15 March.

xvii Alexander, R.J. (ed) (2010) Children, their World, their Education: final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review, Routledge, chapters 13 and 14. HMCI David Bell’s warning (‘We cannot afford, and our children do not deserve, a two-tier curriculum’) is in Ofsted (2005) Standards and Quality 2002-3: the annual report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools, Ofsted.

xviii Alexander, R.J. and Hargreaves, L. (2007) Community Soundings: the Cambridge Primary Review regional witness sessions, University of Cambridge Faculty of Education.

xix Oates, T. (2010) Could do Better? Using international comparisons to refine the national curriculum in England, Cambridge Assessment; DfE (2011) The Framework for the National Curriculum: a report by the Expert Panel for the National Curriculum Review, DfE.

xx Alexander, R.J. (2012) ‘Entitlement, freedom, minimalism and essential knowledge: can the curriculum circle be squared?’ Paper presented at the CPPS Westminster seminar, 23 April. – See www.newvisionsforeducation.org.uk/2012/05/10/entitlement-freedom-minimalism-and-essential-knowledge-can-the-curriculum-circle-be-squared/

xxi ‘[We recommend] a full national primary staffing review of the relationship between (i) the curricular and other tasks of primary schools as they are now conceived, (ii) the roles and numbers of teachers and other professionals required, (iii) the expertise and training/retraining which this analysis dictates … The potential to tackle the problem through clustering, federation, resource-sharing, teacher exchange and all-through schools should also be examined.’ (Alexander, R.J. (ed) (2010) Children, their World, their Education: final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review, Routledge, recommendation 127, p 506).

xxii Alexander, R.J. (2012) ‘Strengthening curriculum capacity in primary schools: definitions, levels, roles and options’, paper for DfE, January; Alexander, R.J. (2012) ‘Curriculum freedom, capacity and leadership in the primary school’, paper for the National College NPQH curriculum leadership module.
xxiii See note 22.

See also Robin Alexander’s commentary on the Expert Panel report: www.newvisionsforeducation.org.uk/2012/05/10/entitlement-freedom-minimalism-and-essential-knowledge-can-the-curriculum-circle-be-squared/ .
For further information about the Cambridge Primary Review, its reports, briefings and current activities: www.primaryreview.org.uk .

“This report shows that the Government’s education structure is not fit for purpose. Michael Gove has overseen a huge programme of centralisation, with the majority of secondary schools now accountable to politicians and bureaucrats in Whitehall.

“That is not sensible, nor is it sustainable. It is why you see schools being set up in areas where there is no demand from parents, and mistakes being made with academy funding, wasting taxpayer’s money. Labour wants to see schools be accountable to local families and communities.”

Editor’s Notes
1. Press Release: The New Visions for Education Group today publishes a major policy document calling for a restoration of democratic accountability in the education service in England. It attacks the loss of accountability and fragmentation of the education service which it says is the result of the government’s drive towards academies and so called ‘free schools’. The Government’s structure for the public education service is not fit for purpose, the Group asserts. http://www.newvisionsforeducation.org.uk/
2. As part of Labour’s Policy Review, Stephen Twigg MP, the Shadow Education Secretary, has launched a consultation to ask how Labour might devolve more power from central government, as a means for improving education standards. The consultation document sets out the rationale behind the process and calls for ideas for devolving more power locally. http://fresh-ideas.org.uk/devolving-power-in-education

Alex Bigham
Political Adviser to Stephen Twigg MP
Shadow Secretary of State for Education

alex.bigham@parliament.uk
020 7219 4158
07534 047 908

Twitter: @EducationLabour

This is the first public contribution made by the Group to the debate on how the public education service in England should be organised and governed. There is already critical comment over the absence from this framework of coherent, area based, structural planning with statutory accountability to local electorates. The New Visions for Education Group has a very deep concern about this trend of government policy, and has a significant contribution to make to the debate. This statement does not however purport to express fully the views of the Group’s members. The Group will have more to say on wider aspects of this statement, both as individual commentators and collectively, as the debate progresses.

Introduction

1. We believe that there is a great need for a more rational and coherent approach to the organisation and governance of education. We recognise that the progressive devolution of power to schools since 1988 has been a force for educational improvement and is firmly here to stay. Nevertheless we do not believe that the current structure within which that autonomy is exercised is fit for purpose. It cannot deliver what has been promised. Partly because it is, in fact, over-centralised. For strategic purposes, there are some important complex matters that neither individual institutions nor central government, can effectively deliberate and resolve.

2. The true test of a good education structure is whether it ensures quality education for all children and young people. It is not fit for purpose if it fails to do so. Children and parents collectively need champions of their interests over and above those of any one school. They cannot count on a remote central government as their champion. They must have some more local authoritative body to plan and deliver a well-co-ordinated and well balanced education service in every area of the country.

3. The Secretary of State is committed to academy conversion and the creation of new institutions in response to the desires of individual or group promoters. He seeks to introduce a market under the banner of increasing ‘school autonomy’ via creation of publicly funded private schools. The structure is flawed and the market that has been created is actually a ‘monopsony’, in which only one buyer faces many sellers, under the absolute control of the Secretary of State.

4. Undiminished dictation from the centre limits the real autonomy of schools and weakens the position of individual parents and children. The removal of schools from a clear statutory legal framework describing the rights and responsibilities of pupils, parents and schools, and the suppression of information behind confidential commercial contracts, seriously weakens accountability. It leaves the ordinary taxpayer out of the equation altogether.

5. We support the proposition that there should be a diversity of providers of educational services, including autonomous Schools and other institutions. There is merit, too, in giving a higher level of professional autonomy to those who work in these institutions; matched by a more radical reduction of central government prescription. But none of this requires a diversity of structures. The desirability of professional autonomy should not be a pretext to deny that any publicly financed institution providing essential public services should also have a public legal status.

6. Institutional autonomy is not in conflict with strategic organisation and planning. Properly understood, institutional autonomy is the freedom for professional educators to pursue excellence and maximise the achievement of learners within common, and nationally agreed, objectives and boundaries. Autonomy in this sense should be the accepted norm as the basis for quality in education. Greater autonomy should not be granted only as a reward for perceived success. All institutions should have the maximum level of autonomy consistent with the wider public interest. Intervention which curtails professional autonomy should only be used when necessary to rectify objectively identified inadequacies in performance.

7. The public interest, particularly in education, is diverse. It can never successfully be mediated entirely from a single central point of authority. It is necessary to have appropriate structures in place at institutional, local and/or sub-regional level. We do not attempt to prescribe in detail the features of these structures. However any effective set of structures that are fit for purpose would need to meet the following criteria:

• The powers and responsibilities of each body should be appropriate to its competence and the level at which it operates;
• The wider public interest must be recognised through some form of popular electoral process – whether by direct election or nomination via other democratic structures
• Decision making bodies must have access to relevant professional and technical advice and support – either from permanently employed officials or from external specialist agencies.
• They must comprehend the fact that those who confront the greatest barriers in securing a full and successful education are most likely to be relatively disadvantaged in a more market-driven or fragmented education system.

Although there is no optimal size for bodies or agencies of this nature; they must be sufficiently ‘local’ to be responsive to a natural community (or groups of communities) but large enough to have the capacity to discharge their given functions cost effectively.

8. Services, training provision, health and housing – should be included, where relevant, in the oversight and consultative functions of governance arrangements.

The Role and Functions of Governance

9. In relation to public services ‘Governance’ is not the same as operational management of ‘provision.’ Governance involves making strategic policy decisions at the appropriate level to secure the proper provision of services. Current policy appears to confuse them as it tends towards a structure in which there is only national government and institutional governance. That is, in our view, a serious structural flaw. There is a range of necessary services and governance/policy decisions which, for one reason or another, cannot be delivered/decided at institutional level but which are not easily or effectively provided or determined nationally.

Service Provision

10. A number of education related services require a critical mass of expertise beyond the capacity of a single school or other educational institution, especially if value for money is an important objective. Examples include: more complex SEN services (both diagnostic and support); more advanced sports and arts provision; and, dedicated centres for alternative provision.

11. In current policy, perceived inadequacies in the public education service are attributed to a bureaucratic and inefficient public sector. It is argued that the remedy is greater involvement of the private sector, with an entrepreneurial spirit and motivated by the opportunity to profit. Rather than tackle perceived weaknesses by enhancing technical and democratic accountability, the strategy is instead to rely on competitive forces to raise standards. But there is no evidence to support this analysis. Private and community voluntarism can contribute valuable energy and enterprise to public services; but the democratic accountability baby should not be thrown out with the bureaucratic bathwater.

12. It is true that many of the services required by educational institutions, but not internally available to them can be organised by specialist agencies and ‘bought-in’ by institutional budget holders on behalf of the pupils/students. Whether such an approach is always the most efficient and cost effective way of delivering a service is open to question. But, more importantly, when there is a public guarantee that services will be available, there must be an accountable public agency to act as the commissioner and, in some instances, provider of last resort.

13. If a public agency must exist as a ‘last resort’ it will provide a better service and value for money if it has developed expertise and capacity via routine delivery of relevant functions. Whilst there is no intrinsic need for such services to be provided or commissioned by a democratically established authority, neither should such a body which may exist for other reasons be prevented from doing so when appropriate.

Governance

14. An element of supra-institutional governance is properly required where certain kinds policy or resource allocation decisions need to be made. Quintessentially this is necessary to guarantee the rights of parents and Children, and the public at large, to expect that the educational offer is of the highest possible quality. The need for governance at this level will arise when:

• There is a potential conflict between the institutional interest of the provider and that of the consumer – i.e. parents and children.
• There is a need for longer term planning and oversight to meet the continuing needs of a geographical area.
• The outcome of decisions will affect a community beyond those families currently accessing the particular institution/service.
• The equitable allocation of scarce public funding between institutions is at stake.

In all such cases a combination of technical expertise and democratic legitimacy is necessary to achieve sound decision making. Whilst in theory these matters could be decided by central government; experience has repeatedly shown that the remoteness of central bureaucracies leads to slow and poor decision making.

15. Responsibilities which fall into this category include:

• Provision of independent information, advice and advocacy on behalf of parents and children.
• Predicting, and planning for, demographic change including:

 Securing sufficient provision to ensure that every child has a school place;
 Managing the impact of declining or shifting population.

• Determining the location of new institutions and, where necessary, expansion, contraction or closure of existing provision.
• Monitoring of school admissions and ensuring that all local institutions comply with the School Admissions Code.
• Home to school transport policy and implementation.
• The acquisition/disposal of land and allocation of capital resources for significant planned development as well as responding to emergencies (e.g. major fires or natural disasters).
• A broader ‘scrutiny’ role; recognising that where a complex set of services are delivered by a diverse array of providers, a public body with the capacity to take an overview can provide important checks and balances within the system.

16. There is then a further set of responsibilities which can be identified as ill-suited to being left entirely to individual institutions, or which are related to education but not within the core function of all schools. Although they do not necessarily require high stakes policy decisions; they are both ‘resource hungry’ and sensitive to local conditions and might therefore sensibly be secured (if not directly provided by) a local strategic body created to discharge essential functions at a local/sub-regional level.
These might include:

• Working with schools (and groups of schools/school providers) on school improvement, drawing up action plans and monitoring implementation where schools are identified as under-performing. The particular merit of a ‘localist’ function here is that light touch early support can anticipate and forestall larger failures that would otherwise result in major intervention. [A point recently made by HMCI before the Education Select Committee – see minutes of oral evidence 29 February 2012]
• Special Educational Needs, both diagnosis and provision in more complex and costly cases.
• Monitoring pupil exclusions and overseeing (if not arranging) independent appeals and brokering local agreements on hard to place pupils.
• Early Years provision and Youth Centres.
• Services for ‘looked after’ children
• Services for 14-19 year-olds:

 careers advice;
 work experience liaison & employer engagement;
 co-ordination across and between schools and colleges for 16+ courses;
 Support and development strategies relating to progression rates and access to higher education;
 The continuing education (full or part-time, irrespective of locus) of all young people, whether or not enrolled in schools and colleges.

Wider children’s services also fall into this category. These currently remain the responsibility of Local Authorities and it would clearly be necessary for there to be continued regular and systemic liaison with any local/sub-regional body/bodies set up to discharge functions in education.

17. Such bodies could also offer school support services where it is possible to demonstrate value for money relating to economies of scale and effectiveness. It is not necessary to enumerate such services because they are neither essential functions, nor central to the case for creating local/sub-regional bodies. The overriding principle is that functions which individual schools are unable by virtue of their systemic position to fulfil satisfactorily, must be carried out at this level.

18. It follows from this that there would need to be a coherent network of bodies with contiguous borders and the legal duty (backed by the necessary capacity and authority) to discharge key functions in the interest of a geographically defined population. Additionally, services which enhance children’s educational success but which are not, or not fully, provided in schools should be co-ordinated, and, if necessary, commissioned or provided at this level. The provision of further support services should be within the powers, but not the duties, of these bodies to provide at their discretion and subject to individual institutions’ wish to purchase them.

19. The government has in fact already conceded the central logic of our case. By promoting the idea of ‘chains’ of educational institutions, the government has accepted that many of these institutions cannot be fully effective as isolated units.

The Case for a Sound and Stable Legal Framework

20. There is overwhelming evidence that the most important factor in successful education systems is the quality of professional staff. We strongly believe that future progress in school depends on high quality school leadership focused on teaching and learning. But if good leaders are to flourish within the system they need to be challenged as well as supported. The present administration recognised this in the sub-title of its first education White Paper “The Importance of Teaching” and the previous one in the slogan “Standards not Structures”. And yet successive governments have expended time, energy and public money on constant structural changes. Clearly frameworks are necessary but, of themselves, they have a relatively small impact on what goes on in the classroom. Complex, opaque and constantly changing structures militate against ordinary citizens’ ability to navigate the system and bear most heavily on those who are already disadvantaged. Change is intrinsically expensive and potentially disruptive. It therefore makes sense to settle on a set of structural arrangements that are clear, simple and fit for purpose and then direct energy and resources to those aspects of policy –e.g. curriculum and professional quality – that can make a real difference to outcomes.

21. Beyond this general case there are good reasons why the present policy agenda is making the position worse not better. The present government has rightly condemned the ‘over regulation’ it inherited. However the policy response has been to leave most of the pre-existing regulation in place whilst encouraging favoured institutions to ‘opt out’ of it. However this ‘opting out’ is actually a process of ‘opting in’ to central control via a contract with the Secretary of State. This contract (an academy ‘funding agreement’) selectively re-imposes much of the regulation by other means but with less transparency and reduced accountability.

22. For example the School Admissions Code applies by statute to all maintained schools but must be followed by Academies only to the extent required as a condition of their funding agreements. This dual structure increases complexity and uncertainty in the system. If, as has been said by DFE, exemptions are minor and rarely agreed, the duality serves no useful purpose; but if Code exemptions were to become more common the system would become fragmented. The legal ‘commercial confidence’ status of parts of the funding agreements, not to say their general inaccessibility, would also make it difficult for anyone except the Secretary of State to know what set of rules any given school is expected to abide by.

23. If, as seems to be the intention, all schools achieve academy status a legal anomaly will be created. Although education regulations “apply” in a legal sense, only to themaintained sector, they would still have to be retained because academies were originally conceptualised as an adjunct to a larger public sector which they are broadly required to mimic. Thus a body of redundant education regulation that no longer applies directly to any real institution (because no maintained schools would then exist) would have to be maintained as a template for academy contractual compliance.

24. There is an important constitutional reason for adopting a legal framework where public services are delivered by “public bodies”. Parliament confers powers and imposes duties by statute upon public authorities which are themselves creatures of statute. For example, the Education Acts impose duties on school governing bodies (public authorities created by statute). Bodies which are not public authorities, companies, charities, trusts etc may of course be regulated by statute but statute does not describe in detail their rights and duties. The legislation which authorises the Secretary of State to enter into agreements (i.e. contracts) with private organisations to run Academies means that Parliament as “the legislature” has handed over its regulatory role to “the executive” and surrendered its power of scrutiny. The executive in government then has the power to enter into agreements with such private bodies as it chooses on contractual terms, many of which remain confidential because they affect the business interests of the other contracting party. The executive of course does remain nominally accountable to Parliament; but this is otiose after Parliament has authorised the government to do largely as it pleases. Parliament’s continuing accountability to the electorate has been seriously undermined by this process.

25. The proper way to deal with an over-complex regulatory framework is to simplify it; not to invent elaborate mechanisms which appear to allow some institutions to circumvent it. Similarly the antidote to excessive micro-management from the centre is real devolution of power through the system. This has not been achieved by the most recent legislative changes, which have left the present Secretary of State with greater powers of direct intervention than any of his predecessors.

Possible New Structures
National

26. At the national level there is an urgent need for Parliament to re-assert its control over the Executive in the interests of the electorate. At the same time it would be highly desirable to clear away the accretion of legislative and regulatory clutter accumulated by successive legislative activity adding to, amending and partially replacing what has gone before. Transparent democratic accountability and the need to deliver a high quality education system within constrained public finances demand nothing less.

27. That process of consolidation and simplification needs to include setting out clearly the legal status and structural parameters for front line delivery institutions, as well as the powers, duties and geographical jurisdiction of the local/sub-regional agencies and bodies that are required to discharge necessary intermediate functions.

Institutional

28. For schools (and other front line institutions) the direct responsibilities of Head-teachers/Principals for service delivery are generally well understood and equivalent across all types of institution. But ‘governance’ is a different matter. There is a plethora of different types and categories of publicly funded school. They are divided between those that are ‘public bodies’ (all ‘maintained’ schools –community, voluntary and foundation) and those that are not (three kinds of academy and non-maintained special schools). Within each of those two broad categories there are those where the governing body stands alone (e.g. Foundation schools without a ‘foundation’, some converter Academies and some free standing Voluntary Aided schools) and others where there is another legal entity behind the Governing Body with supervisory powers (Church VA & VC schools, Sponsored Academies, Foundation schools with a ‘foundation’ – i.e. ‘Trust schools’- and Community schools). Within those two sub-categories there are significant differences in the permitted composition of governing bodies and the extent of the powers they wield.

29. There is no sensible or logical reason why this should be so. It is partly a result of historical accident; but more recently there seems to have been a tendency for governments to invent new categories of school in an attempt to persuade the electorate that this is a vehicle for improvement. Despite frequent claims, there is no evidence for this – nor is there any logical reason why there should be. All observed improvement can be traced back to changes that could equally well have been effected under a different structure. In reality the new and extended re-categorisation of schools has led to widespread fragmentation and confusion. [By the same token, any attempt to discredit a particular structure on the basis of individual failures is also a fool’s errand. Examples of both success and failure can be found within all types and categories of school.]

30. Multiple categorisations of schools is a diversion from the real issues, and something of an insult to the intelligence to the general public who are assumed to be unable to make choices without having ‘brand’ descriptions to persuade them. A school is quite simply a school. All schools should have their professional autonomy, in the sense described above, under a single coherent structure of professional leadership, management and direction. There will continue to be differences at the institutional level in the ways in which schools are influenced by their local communities. For example we are not advocating the abolition of faith schools. However we do not see this as a cause for multiple categorisation. It is simply a matter of formulating the statutory rules that will apply to certain schools in certain circumstances with a flexibility that allows all ‘supporting agencies’ to maintain their contribution to the maintenance of a healthy and dynamic system.

31. Nor are we suggesting the abolition of school governing bodies and their replacement by professional autonomy on one side and area strategic planning on the other. We do however strongly advocate a rationalisation and a clarification of the role and functions of governing bodies so that they can most effectively make their contribution where it has been shown to be most valuable. The status of governors as hardworking volunteers must be acknowledged as it has not been since 1988. Governing bodies as ‘public bodies’ bear a very large number of the often very complex and technical statutory duties and responsibilities which have been heaped on schools since the Education Reform Act of 1988 first legislated for ‘local management’. However the idea that these duties can actually be discharged by lay volunteers meeting and working in whatever time they might have available is, and always has been, absurd. The problem has escalated as government has legislated to centralise and increase the Secretary of State’s power of direction over maintained schools.

32. Essentially what is needed is a formally constituted body of regulation to ensure that all appropriate interests in the school community are represented and with powers sufficient to enable that body to hold the senior managers of the school to account to its community. As now, parents, staff and members of the wider community need to be represented. Faith school governing bodies would have specified additional powers as would perhaps particular sectional interest groups in particular circumstances; but overall the structure would be unified into a coherent and well understood whole.

33. There is much historical evidence, as well as recent experience, that would suggest that a two tier approach is a more robust structure than all powers being vested in a free-standing Governing Body. There would be a need for a legal framework requiring all schools to have their land and buildings vested in a body with charitable status which may also have nomination rights to the Governing body. But this is largely a technical legal matter and, where there is no pre-existing body that already performs this function, the role could well be filled by an area authority such as we propose in the next section.

34. Stability and coherence and a wider understanding of the common framework could be achieved with minimal disruption. Provided there was sufficient flexibility within the common framework there would be no obstacle for beneficial future innovations to be implemented within it.

Local & Sub-Regional

35. There is currently a live debate about the need for a so called ‘middle tier’ to sit between central government and schools. The implication of a hierarchy in that terminology is unhelpful and it should, we believe, be abandoned before misunderstanding of its meaning distorts this important debate. This section of our paper is, nonetheless, a contribution to the debate currently under that heading.

36. For the reasons articulated above we believe it is a mistake to construe this aspect of the system as either acting on behalf of central government or managing or supervising groups of institutions. Rather it is our contention that there are important discrete functions that cannot, or cannot effectively, be carried out at any other level. Whilst we accept that ‘academy chains’ or other voluntary agencies can provide useful services, it is inappropriate to regard such bodies as capable of adequately fulfilling the necessary ‘governance’ role.

37. The range of functions we identify have in the past been, and to a significant extent still are, delivered by local authorities; but that category itself has been exemplified in different ways – small and large; upper tier or unitary, directly elected and/or nominated; free standing or part of a body with broader functions. At the same time local authorities have lost their distinct identity as local education authorities. Where they were once education specific authorities, they are now just local authorities with functions in relation to education.

38. Whatever may be said of the role in education of local authorities as we have known them, we are convinced that there remains a very strong case that the functions we have identified should be delivered by area based and education specific bodies with common features. Again, however, we do not attempt to describe in detail a structure for such local and/or sub-regional authorities. Rather we advocate that having such a structure is essential, and we offer what we consider to be the key features of local/sub-regional governance in the education system. What is important is that there should be a stable, consistent and widely understood structure, or set of structures, set up by statute to discharge defined functions for the benefit of the whole population without gaps or overlaps.

39. Options which have so far been considered in the ‘middle tier’ debate include:

• a separately constituted ‘School Board’ or ‘Education Council’ (if functions extend beyond schools);
• an individual local “School Commissioner” –whether appointed or directly elected; and
• local offices of a national non-governmental agency similar to the former Learning and Skills Council, or perhaps by giving enhanced responsibilities to the regional offices of Ofsted.

40. We do not favour the third of these options. Inevitably offices of that kind would be seen as extensions of central government without any sense of local or area ‘ownership’ or accountability. Indeed if they had those characteristics they would be the same as ‘school commissioner’ offices.

41. As between the first and second options we do not see them necessarily as alternatives to each other but rather as complementary. There are some distinctions to be made between, on the one hand, strategic planning in some of the areas of work we have identified and, on the other, the tasks necessary to support schools and other educational institutions including those which are not achieving to an acceptable level. The former is rather more the role of an elected Education Council for an area, whilst the latter may be more suited to an appointed School Commissioner and his or her team of professionals and specialists.

42. It is a matter for detailed consideration as to whether each of the various functions outlined in the ‘Governance’ section above would better fall within the remit of an Education Council or that of a School Commissioner. There are certainly inter-relationships such that the functions of the Council and the Commissioner should be discharged in respect of the same geographical area. It may be that a Commissioner should be an appointee of a Council, but this should be with the proviso that the independence of the Commissioner in monitoring performance and in intervening professionally in schools in difficulty should not be unduly compromised by his or her status as an employee of the Council.

43. There will remain scope for some functions to be discharged by specialist agencies, consortium arrangements or through sub-units of larger bodies, but we do not think it necessary to legislate extensively other than for the authorities described above. Again a degree of flexibility and permissive powers within new legislation would allow effective existing arrangements to be subsumed within a new coherent framework; at the same time as creating space for new solutions to be found where the current situation is unsatisfactory.

44. If new bodies are to be created (as opposed to building on existing ones) determining size and geographical boundaries will be problematic. Though we advocate authoritative area bodies with common features, we do not ignore the fact that different constraints apply as between, for example, urban and rural areas. A greater critical mass would certainly enhance the likelihood of expertise, at manageable cost, being available; but increased size attenuates the literal and metaphorical ‘distance’ from electorates and communities served. Legislation must again allow sufficient flexibility to acknowledge these different constraints. Ultimately fitness for purpose should be the main determinant of the shape of these new authorities. They must be sufficiently ‘local’ to be responsive to a natural community (or group of communities) but large enough to have the capacity to discharge their given functions cost effectively. Other incidental structural changes, e.g. the current devolution agenda or the creation of ‘city regions’ may need to be taken into account for pragmatic reasons.

45. We have written in this paper of ‘new bodies’, but it is obvious that many features of these new authorities could also be found in local authorities through which education was provided to communities for over five decades following the 1944 Education Acts. In looking forward as we do to new policy and new models suited to a 21st century high quality public education service, we do not abandon what those authorities have stood for. Much of the criticism that has been made of them to justify turning them into service commissioning bodies rather than providers has been doctrinaire and politically motivated on the part of national governments seeking to limit and control local government inclined to resist national government policies particularly in education. The alleged inadequacies of local government involvement in education has become an accepted mythology which now deserves re-examination in forward looking and creative reform. No blanket condemnation of local authorities as providers of education services beyond the individual institution has ever been objectively justified.

46. Until 2009, local authorities throughout England and Wales were nominally identified as local education authorities giving them a clear education specific identity alongside their broader local authority identity. The name change in 2009 was said to be no more than the removal of an anomaly, but that was an anomaly which had resulted from a steady erosion over a decade of local government’s direct role in education. It is that which we challenge. We are now quite openly advocating a restoration of education specific democratically elected authorities with powers and responsibilities to deal with area wide strategic and general issues of the kind we describe. We do so because we believe that there are features of the existing local authority structures which have proved themselves to be of real value and benefit to the education service and should be restored with the necessary adaptations to ensure their greatest effectiveness in a 21st century education system.

47. Electorally accountable local/area authorities have another rather more subtle, but nonetheless vitally important, function. The best local authorities are champions and supporters of their own local communities. That is something which can and should evolve into a new educational role for authorities in the so-called ‘middle tier’ as we envisage them. It is a feature which is sadly lacking from the present government’s model. A two tier structure involving highly centralised control of the kind of monopsony we have identified provides no easily accessible support for communities, for pupils, parents and ‘citizens’ in general.

48. It is the proper function of central government to determine, after consultation and proper parliamentary debate, the shape of new legislation. We are not advocating a specific solution; but it is vital that a new settlement should establish a coherent framework that is capable of meeting those key criteria with which this paper began and which we now repeat:-

• The powers and responsibilities of each body should be appropriate to its competence and the level at which it operates.
• The wider public interest must be recognised through some form of popular electoral process – whether by direct election of individuals or nomination via other democratic structures.
• Decision making bodies must have access to relevant professional and technical advice and support – either from permanently employed officials or from external specialist agencies.
• They must comprehend the fact that those who confront the greatest barriers in securing a full and successful education are most likely to be relatively disadvantaged in a more market-driven or fragmented education system.