Labour Teachers

Cross-posted from Robert Hill’s blog.

[We've recently hosted a number of contributions about what Labour education policy might look like: John Blake's is here, Emma Hardy's here, Dave Mingay's here and Fiona Miller's here. This post focuses on the specific area of academy accountability, following the recent publication of the House of Common Public Accounts Committee's report into academy finance]

Much of the coverage and debate on the Public Accounts Committee report  on managing the expansion of the academies’ programme  (http://www.parliament.uk/pac) will no doubt focus on the scale of the unbudgeted extra cost. The Committee says that in the two years from April 2010 to March 2012, the Department spent £8.3 billion on academies – of which £1 billion was an additional cost to the Department and not originally budgeted for this purpose. That is some finding. However, the debate should not overlook the second part of the Committee’s report which raises important issues on the oversight of academies and academy trusts.

There are two issues here: financial oversight and scrutiny of educational performance. The Committee makes three telling observations.

First, in 2011/12 over half of academies submitted their self-assessment returns late, and nearly 100 academy trusts failed to file their statutory accounts on time.

Second, the Committee remains sceptical  as to whether the DfE has “sufficient systems and resources to oversee the [academies] programme programme as it continues to expand”. The “wider reductions to central resources and headcount which the Department has recently announced” increase the Committee’s concerns on this score.

Third, the Committee is not convinced that there is sufficient clarity about “who is accountable for performance monitoring and intervention in academies, nor how the Department can know whether the system is operating consistently, effectively and with minimum bureaucracy across different localities and academy structures”. The report says that this risk  is likely to rise as more schools  that are “less high-performing” join the academies programme.

These are telling criticisms and reinforce the need to rethink the scrutiny and oversight of academies – while preserving the principle of school autonomy. However, the Public Accounts Committee’s critique presents a major opportunity not just to tinker with the existing system but to rethink the educational governance landscape more radically. Here are eight reforms that could be made:

1. Introduce proper and transparent accreditation of all organisations and schools that want to become academy sponsors. This role is best undertaken at a national level.
2. Ensure that the allocation of schools to sponsors is competitive and transparent and examines thoroughly the capacity and due diligence of the proposed sponsors.
3. Move the emphasis of the academy conversion programme towards schools converting in groups or in partnership, with multi-academy rather than individual trusts becoming the norm. A  strong school should be an integral part of all such trusts to ensure that there is sufficient education DNA in each trust.
4. Devolve the holding of funding agreements from the Department of Education to education commissioners appointed on a sub-regional basis. Commissioners to be appointed jointly by local authority lead members in the area and the Secretary of State for Education.
5. Make funding agreements real – i.e. like the authorisation of charter schools in the US with powers for commissioners to reassign and terminate agreements when educational and financial performance seriously and persistently falls below acceptable levels.
6. Publish data on the financial and education performance of chains in a standard format. The government has made available a huge amount of performance information on an individual school basis. It is possible to aggregate this data to assess the performance of academy chains but it is complex to do and not readily accessible to the public. The data published should include financial as well the educational performance of academy chains.
7. Regional commissioners should work with local authorities to challenge the performance of all schools, including academies, that are not making the progress expected. The responsibility for school improvement, however, should continue to rest with school leaders and governors of schools/academy trusts, unless the performance is such (e.g. a school is in an Ofsted category or below the floor targets) that more radical intervention is needed.
8. Ofsted to inspect academy chains with five or more schools in their chain – but for those chains found to be operating at an ‘outstanding’ level then Ofsted would cease to inspect the individual schools in the chain unless data showed particular cause for concern in  individual schools. Those chains found to be inadequate should be given notice of the possibility of their schools being transferred to an alternative provider.

Radical reforms along these lines will help ensure that children and young people receive the quality of education to which they are entitled and enable the public to judge value for money. Some will argue that the introduction of commissioners represents an unnecessary level of bureaucracy but the reforms  should be seen in the context of a major downsizing of the the DfE and its role. High calibre commissioners will also be able to relate the mission and work of schools to the wider sub-regional economic agenda and address the wide variations in the performance of local authorities which local government enthusiasts are prone to overlook. The principle of academy autonomy would be retained but operate within a more accountable framework with an incentive for academy chains to raise their game for all the schools in their chain.

Robert Hill (@Robt_Hill) is an education writer and analyst, Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Kings College London, and an ex-adviser to Tony Blair and Charles Clarke.

This is a cross-post from the Local School Network.

[There are other suggestions on this site for Stephen Twigg from John Blake here, Emma Ann Hardy here and Dave Mingay here.]

The Observer newspaper carried a couple of  articles at the weekend about an alleged mid-term wobble  for Labour. This seemed to be largely based on a slight drop in the opinion polls, a few attacks from  ageing Blairites and George Osborne’s intervention in the welfare debate using the horrific story of the Derby benefit claimant who set fire to his house and children. In a leader column the paper also conceded the strengths in Ed Miliband’s leadership with which I would agree . He has held the party together in opposition ( often not the case in Labour history), he has shown courage and caught the public mood on some key issues and he has proved resilient, ignoring the vicious and at times silly personal criticism of his appearance, voice etc. Would Churchill be electable today I wonder, now that politics appears to have become a beauty contest as much as about making serious changes to the way the country is run?

And there are signs that the party is starting to develop some interesting ideas about the economy, business, housing and welfare. But the Observer is particularly scathing in its assessment of the Labour education policy, saying:

“What Labour really thinks about Michael Gove’s education reforms is a mystery. Stephen Twigg, the shadow education secretary, has said that he won’t close successful free schools and academies, but he will face pressure before the election to say if he would open new ones. Twigg’s position will be that Gove’s free school project is irrelevant and dangerous at a time when there is a serious shortfall in primary school places. But Labour still lacks conviction on school policies.”

I am not sure why the points raised in this quote are so difficult for the party to address. There seems to be a widespread recognition that the rapid fragmentation of the school system under Michael Gove could impede further school improvement, lead to unfairness in admissions and funding  and fail to provide school places in the areas where they are needed. Moreover addressing these points may be easier than the challenge of reforming the coalition’s proposed curriculum and qualifications changes, which are also causing widespread concern. Further changes to what is taught and how it is assessed would need to be done carefully without loading further turmoil on an already weary and demoralised profession, as I wrote here for the Fabian Society earlier this year.

So here are a couple of suggestions.

1. The party makes clear that it will undertake widespread consultation with professionals about the curriculum and qualifications, building on the work of groups like theHeadteachers’ Roundtable , and the coalition being brought together by teacher Debra Kidd with her petition “Calling all Teachers”. It will not rush into any further changes without seeking consensus.
2. Then it explains it will not be closing down any schools. Instead it would gradually move to a position where ALL schools, whether maintained, academy, community , trust, foundation or voluntary aided are bound by the same regulatory framework when it comes to funding, curriculum,  admissions, SEN, exclusions and pay.
3. No more academies or free schools would be opened. Instead a community or co-operative trust school model would be favoured – semi autonomous but maintained , funded through the local authority and part of the local family of schools, rather like the current foundation or voluntary aided school model. AGAIN the structure should be largely irrelevant as all schools will have the same freedoms and obligations.
4. Responsibility for planning places and holding schools to account would return to the local authority, unless there is a very good reason why they are not competent to do it. Today’s PAC report about the shambolic, poorly regulated funding of academies by the DFE only serves to illustrate again that central government is not suitable or equipped to manage thousands of schools. If local authorities are not good enough, make them better and encourage more federations and collaboration between schools in the local area to strengthen improvement and high quality teaching.

Both Ofsted reporting and analysis of the DFE data increasingly show that there is no discernible “academy” ( or indeed “free school”) effect. It is embarrassing for Labour to have started this unnecessary experiment but equally it would be justifiable to say that the Tory/Lib Dem coalition has developed the concept, which in its day had a very different core purpose, in a reckless and irresponsible manner.  Labour has no alternative  but to restore some order and rigour to both funding and quality and curtail what could be a Trojan horse for the rapid introduction of for profit schools after the next election.

Time is getting tight and schools, parents and governors rightly want some idea of the general tenor of Labour’s proposals. None of this will frighten the horses too much as it is a logical response to the muddle Gove will bequeath.

I will be posting this article on the Labour Party Membersnet website as well to try and stimulate debate within the party.

Fiona Miller (@schooltruth) is a writer and journalist specialising in education and parenting issues, and a founder of the Local School Network

Cross-posted from Scenes From The Battleground

There is no shortage of reasons to be against performance related-pay for teachers. The video which I have shared here is a good starting point. Another might be the brief summary of its history and general ineffectiveness as a method of raising results given here by Diane Ravitch or an evaluation of the research can be found here.

However, my opposition to performance related-pay for teachers is not based on whether it can be empirically established if it would raise grades or not. I object to it for more fundamental reasons.

1) I do not want to compete with my colleagues.

If the best teachers are to be rewarded with extra cash, particularly if it is to be distributed by schools, then it would be foolish to try to help your colleagues get better at teaching. A teacher who did so would risk losing money to those they helped. It would be better to surround yourself with weak and inexperienced teachers and let them flounder.

2) I do not want to be formally judged.

Attempts to assess teachers through observations, results, performance management interviews, inspections or student feedback are already a nightmare. Rarely do they actually judge the right things. SMT or OFSTED are not better teachers than those who stay in the classroom. There is little reason to think they are good at judging teachers or interpreting data. All they are good at is generating tick-lists for teachers to comply with. This creates more work for teachers and actually reduces their effectiveness. Why make a bad situation worse by making money depend on it?

3) I do not want to chase money.

If I cared about the cash that much then I wouldn’t be a teacher in the first place. The only people who are in teaching for the cash are usually those who are too incompetent to have ever made a career in a more lucrative profession. This will not reward the competent, it will reward the greedy. The system will be gamed like every other system in education by those who have the time and the inclination to do so, meanwhile those of us who just want to get on with the job will stay out of it.

4) It’s insulting.

Seriously. I really want my students to learn. That’s my motivation. Giving me a cash prize when that happens would actually make me feel like it was an added extra, like doing a lunch duty or private tuition, not the reason I joined the profession in the first place. Being paid for what you do out of love (here I refer to the extra effort to make sure students do well, not the whole job) can only diminish it. If a teacher lacks the motivation to do the job then they are better off leaving the profession than having money thrown at them until they reacquire it. I find it rude to suggest I need to be offered money to work as hard as I do. It’s not that I don’t want teachers to get what they deserve, it’s that a cash bonus is not it. In teaching, respect for being good at your job is in short supply, but it is not the lack of rewards that damages motivation. The real problem is the way the system obstructs good work and good teaching. That is what needs to change. It’s the disincentives that are the problem for teacher motivation, not a lack of incentives.

Ultimately, performance-related pay is the technocratic outsider’s solution to poor teaching. Those of us in the system know that the solution to poor teaching is to stop encouraging it. Classroom teachers are still a better judge of good teaching than anyone else in the system, any attempt to manipulate them from far away will undermine, rather than improve, their effectiveness.

Old Andrew (@oldandrewuk) is a Labour Party member, teacher and blogger

This week’s Westminster hall debate on changes to exams at 18 highlighted the opposition to Michael Gove’s proposal to divorce AS Levels from A Levels. Labour regards this decision as one of the least evidence based, most captious and casually damaging decisions that he has taken.

While there may be a need to reform and strengthen A Levels, Michael Gove’s plans would reverse decades of progress. Just like his now abandoned plans to overhaul GCSEs, his proposals are backward looking and risk exacerbating educational divides.

Instead of reducing options for young people, we want to see a broad and balanced curriculum and exams for pupils up to age 18.

Labour has developed our proposals for a gold standard vocational qualification at 18 – a Technical Baccalaureate. And at the same time we want to make sure that young people have a firm foundation in core subjects. We will ensure that all students continue studying English and Maths to the age of 18.

Nobody outside the bunker in the Department for Education thinks that divorcing AS Levels from A Levels is a good idea.

Despite the Government trying to claim their support, the Russell Group of Universities has said that, “the current AS-level provides a useful indicator of progress, which is invaluable for university admissions. We worry that without these results universities will have to place more emphasis on A-level predicted grades – of which more than half are wrong – school references, or older GCSE grades. From our experience these are unreliable, and would unduly prejudice disadvantaged students who receive less help when applying to university.” 

They are supported by the 1994 Group and Universities UK, as well as the Association of Colleges and Sixth Form Colleges.

The most trenchant opposition to the proposals came not from the Labour Party, teaching unions, or even the “blob” as the Secretary of State calls educationalists, but from the admissions tutors at the University of Cambridge.

As long ago as July 2010 Cambridge University’s Director of Admissions, Geoff Parks, wrote to Gove warning that the University could lose many gains made in terms of fair admissions and widening participation made in the last decade.

He went on to add that it was no coincidence that, “our utilisation of AS scores as a core component of admissions decisions has been accompanied by a noticeable reduction in the number of complaints we have received from schools and colleges about the fairness of our selection process. The same period has also seen marked improvement in Cambridge examination performance.”

Research undertaken by the Cambridge University found that AS level grades were easily the best predictions for degree performance proving to be “sound verging on excellent” in every subject bar maths .

40 Cambridge Admissions tutors signed a letter to the Daily Telegraph in January calling for a reversal of the decision saying: “Good results give students from all backgrounds the confidence to compete for a place at highly selective universities, including our own. They reduce reliance upon grade predictions and enable schools to hold the line in the face of pressure to raise predicted grades unrealistically.

Put simply, they said, “If AS levels disappear, university entry will become less fair.”

So I challenged the schools minister David Laws in the debate as someone who says he’s committed to fairness, and has enjoyed the privilege of a fee paying education and Cambridge university degree to defend this policy in the light of the clear and thoroughly researched evidence from his own alma mater that it will result in university entrance becoming less fair.

Sadly, it seems David Laws wants to draw up the ladder behind him, making access to our top universities less competitive for state school pupils.

I asked him to go away and speak to Michael Gove and try to make him listen to the evidence.  I’m afraid his response gave little hope that he will.

We know that AS level is the best exam tool to predict how state school pupils will perform in University and yet the Secretary of State is determined to discard it – we won’t and he shouldn’t.

Kevin Brennan MP is Labour’s Shadow Schools Minister
@KevinBrennanMP 

This post is cross-posted from Left Midfield.

Michael Gove the Secretary of State for Education came in office promising to shake up the teaching establishment.  From the moment he took office, he has implemented a programme of whirlwind change, as the academies programme was accelerated, and he introduced ‘free schools.’ But he also had a burning ambition to do something about the curriculum, and history in particular seems to have been a target.
As a history teacher myself, I was naturally interested when the new curriculum proposals were published. However, I also felt it was important to get Mr. Gove’s view, so I wrote to him as I felt it would be important to understand his thinking as he attempted to change history teaching.

I received a reply from Mr. Henry De Zoete a special adviser to the Secretary of State, for which I am grateful, even if he might not agree with my analysis of the new curriculum as proposed. He opened up explaining that the new curriculum would, ‘ensure that pupils are taught about Britain’s place in the world – and how its past influenced its present.’ Now this sounds reasonable, I think it’s important to clarify that I’m not against change, but it needs to be the right kind of change.

In fact, despite the the rhetoric coming from the Department for Education, and its supporters in the media about the radicalism of Mr. Gove’s reforms, they aren’t new even for the Conservatives. In 1992 the then Secretary of State, John Patten,also wanted to radically reform education by severely reduce the role of local education authorities, examining bodies were to be merged, the Secretary of State would have wide powers of intervention, and complained that they had been ‘education without grammar and spelling.’

This all sounds remarkably familiar to nearly three years ago when Mr. Gove walked into the, newly renamed, Department for Education, determined to return education back to its ‘glory days.’ Although as David Cannadine argues, this is a time that only exists in the minds of those who didn’t experience it.

But it is in the changes proposed to the curriculum that I see substantial echoes, with more Shakespeare for 14-year-olds in English, and for our purposes as history teachers, studies of the British Empire and more facts and dates.

At the start of Mr. De Zoete’s reply he says they would be seeking to, ‘(Teach) the subject chronologically – rather than as a series of disjointed topics – will mean pupils understand how key events and people link to and follow one another.’

As a starting point there’s not a problem here, it would be easier for pupils to pick up themes and links if topics are covered in a more linear fashion. However, history is more than a list of dates , it is also about acquiring skills for analysing events, causes and consequences.

The skills to properly engage with history at that level need to already be in place, they can’t suddenly be picked up adequately at that stage, without a firm grounding in analysis, source work, and constructing an argument as examples.

Learning history in school is as much about skills as content, and although the preamble rightly outlines these in the aims; continuity and change, cause and consequence, analysing trends, differences and similarities, because the lessons would have to maintain a breakneck speed, the time for real investigation will not be there.

This is why the second sentence of the section does worry me greatly, ‘As well as increased rigour, there will be far less focus on the teaching of abstract concepts and processes in history.’ This means that by the end of key stage three, those who have decided to continue with history to GCSE level, will be severely lacking the analytical skills required to succeed at that level.

Nobody has a problem with rigour, in if it would be all encompassing and consistent, but in a classroom it can mean, ‘ instruction that requires students to construct meaning for themselves, impose structure on information, integrate individual skills into processes, operate within but at the outer edge of their abilities, and apply what they learn in more than one context and to unpredictable situations.’
However, because there will be less emphasis on historical skills teaching, the ability to make the judgements Robyn Jackson talks about in How to Plan Rigorous Instruction will be lacking.
Naturally the historical community is split, with the likes of Niall Ferguson, Simon Sebag-Montefiore and David Starkey in favour, and Richard Evans, Steve Mastin and Peter Mandler taking an opposite view.

In an article in the Guardian on 15th February Professor Ferguson claims that the current history teaching leaves young people’s knowledge in a ‘parlous state.’ He bases his claims on his own experience, in which he seems to have only ever met history teachers who think the same as he does, and an points to an essay by Matthew Hunter, a history teacher, in Standpoint magazine.

Matthew Hunter is, of course, entitled to his view, but I feel his point about the Napoleon portrait says more about him than the curriculum or the topic.. There are at least two ways he could of done this, the first being the way he did, though not deliberately, in which the pupils formed a view based on the picture, which he then followed by giving the pupils some context, which would have taught them that you can’t always infer from a source like this without some background knowledge.Getting angry with the pupils when they are only doing what he has asked them to do, is not going to encourage them to be confident in putting forward their opinions.

On the other hand, he could have taught them some background first, so that when they came to look at the portrait, they would have a context in which to put it, providing they were also aware that David was Napoleon’s official portraitist, and therefore the picture may well have been painted with an agenda of its own. This is what makes history teaching so wonderful, as pupils become aware of the many questions, answers and ways of investigating and understanding. I am not using this to criticise Matthew particularly, but really to demonstrate that there are different approaches which can be employed.

Professor Ferguson’s other main gripe seems to be that current curriculum is too ‘politically correct,’ and that the new proposals are still a model of that because of the inclusion of Mary Seacole and Olaudah Equiano, ‘hardly escapees from our island story,’ so has difficulty understanding why many historians, and teachers like myself, are unhappy with the new proposals. It’s as though he thinks offering us a sop is enough to keep us happy. The argument has always gone much deeper than who is in there, it’s about a politician deciding who is relevant and not historians.

On the other side of the argument is Professor David Cannadine who like Ferguson lectures at an American university, in this case Princeton and opposed to Harvard.Cannadine decided to undertake a research project into teaching in schools in order to get first hand knowledge,the results of which were published in 2011 under the title The Right Kind of History: Teaching the past in twentieth century England. 

Cannadine concludes that the vision of a ‘golden-age’ of history teaching, and wasn’t taught to anything but a small elite, and wasn’t a mainstream subject until after the Second World War. He believes the real issue isn’t the curriculum or the subjects it covers, but that there’s too much to teach, and not enough time to teach it in.

Indeed, Steve Mastin, head of history at a Cambridge school, points out that the trend has been towards teachers having more freedom, which Mr. Gove has insisted they need, hence academies and ‘free schools’ have more discretion when it comes to following the curriculum.

Ferguson also says he has taken an interest, and written ‘popular history’ books, so what we have here is two professors who both have some first hand knowledge, if not experience, and reaching different conclusions, which in many ways is what history is all about. Do the research, analyse the evidence, and reach a conclusion, using the evidence to back it up. Who is right is for the reader to decide, not for the teacher to direct.

At the foot of this blog is a debate between David Starkey and Richard Evans, both well-known historians (though I suspect Starkey is better known to any non-historians who read this because of his programmes on British monarchs), who take diametrically opposite views on history and how it should be taught.

Evans argues that the proposed new curriculum is overly prescriptive, a conclusion which both Ferguson and Mastin agree with, and as advisers had advised Mr. Gove against. If the pupils are only being taught a narrow curriculum designed to promote ‘Britishness’ will they also be allowed to question the validity? Is Oliver Cromwell a hero or a villain?

As historians, and teachers, we like to believe that the purpose of studying history is to cast light on events, and to help the readers to understand the chain of events that led to a particular outcome. But the problem with this narrow, parochial, ‘great men’ view of British history, is that it will present it as a series of myths, designed to promote an Anglo-centric view, in which our influence has been mostly positive.

As set, the curriculum would be ‘an island story’ in which pupils miss out on the wonders of the ancient civilisations of Greece and Egypt. They get Rome but that is it, it’s a ‘depressingly  narrow history syllabus,’ as David Priestland, an Oxford history lecturer said recently. The nearest the pupils will get to world history is ‘new world colonisation,’ conflict with Spain (the Armada basically), Clive of India, the American and French Revolutions. It is only really in their contact with, and effect on Britain that would be taught. As Mandler asks, if Clive is a hero, who is he a hero to?

One of the reasons the pupils will not be able to question these events could is the sheer scale of the proposed new curriculum which means that teachers just will not have the time to properly examine the positive and negative effects. This is a curriculum written by those who do not understand that in many schools, pupils get an hour a week on history, and in some the subject is split with geography, spending half a term studying it at a time.

There are also many issues with the Key stage one and two curriculums, not least of which is that teachers who are not specialists, will be expected to try and get their pupils to understand difficult concepts such as democracy, nation (and nationalism) and civilisation, when it is possible they may not understand themselves.

For instance, the rivalry between Henry II and Thomas Becket, the Black Death and the Peasant’s Revolt are currently taught at year 7, so during the first year of secondary education for most pupils. At this stage, the pupils can begin to really understand that events have multiple causes and consequences, short, medium and long term.

A crowded year 6 curriculum would not enable the different aspects to be covered adequately, and would be difficult for subject specialists to get across, let alone a primary teacher who might have an hour a week, or less, to explain something that they only understand vaguely themselves.

This is demonstrated starkly, as I said earlier, as the new curriculum would deal with less of the abstract, yet at Year 7, the pupils will be expected to try and understand ‘The Enlightenment’ in England, so they get Locke and Smith, but not Rousseau or Diderot. If you’re going to ask children to understand that period, they might as well get a sweep of ideas.

Richard Evans said in the Sunday Politics debate with David Starkey that the problem is, ‘it just teaches a chronicle, it doesn’t teach the kind of historical skills you need to analyse the past, to make up your mind, shoving facts down schoolchildren’s throats without giving them a chance to debate and make up their own minds.’

David Starkey on the other hand agrees with Niall Ferguson and  believes that there is ‘profound ignorance’ about historical events, and that the skills debate gets it the ‘wrong way round’ as you can’t debate without knowledge. Of course, Dr Starkey isn’t totally wrong in that argument, but teachers need to be given the space to teach both skills and knowledge.

Now very few doubt the Holocaust was other than truly terrible, but there have been other cases of genocides, Rwanda being an important recent example. In the 12th century Richard I also persecuted Jews, and indeed that is when the word holocausti was first used in relation, so persecution of the Jews isn’t unique in itself.

This takes us back to the issue of prescription, which even Ferguson concedes having advised Gove against making that error, and the job of a teacher (if not a politician) is to get the pupils to understand that history often has two sides to an argument.

In the new curriculum it is proposed to teach the Holocaust as a ‘unique evil.’  David Starkey asks Evans whether it should be taught as a ‘moral fact’ which is exactly the problem I’ve been outlining, is it the job of teachers to decide on the pupil’s behalf what is and isn’t ‘moral.’. The biggest problem with Starkey’s argument though is he believes the curriculum should change because it has a ‘left-wing skew’ brought in by a Labour government.

Now this could have been a valid argument, if he had been prepared to acknowledge the wrongness of the conservative bias in the proposed new curriculum. The two principle political figures that year 7′s are supposed to learn about are John Locke, one of the founding fathers of liberalism (in its classic sense) and conservatism, and Adam Smith the author of The Wealth of Nations,a classic liberal text and there is no space to balance these views later on,with a study of Marx, for instance, who also had a profound effect on thinking.

One of the odder aspects of the new proposals, is that the Boer War is brought in, not necessarily a bad thing, but the rise of China is removed. This seems a bizarre and incomprehensible decision as China is one of the new economic powers, and may well one day be the most important trading nation in the world, let alone the east. Ignoring a coming nation, or to be truthful, reinvigorated one for a short war that means little unless they are to study South Africa at GCSE seems very short-sighted.

So in seeking to return to what he believes is a ‘golden age,’ Michael Gove is also reviving subjects that schools stopped spending a lot of time on when I was there. Where are is the influence of the Mogul or Ottoman Empires? Where is the growth of the European Union? It is only Britain’s relations with the Commonwealth, Europe and the world that are the focus of this curriculum. Anyone would think looking at this, that not only is the growing influence of China missing, but that Japan hasn’t grown to be an economic superpower in the last fifty years. Yet there is space to learn about the election of Margaret Thatcher.

So what we have being presented to us is an overly prescriptive, as historians of all views agree, Anglo-centric, didactic curriculum, in which not only will the pupils have little space for questioning and analysis, they will be actively discouraged from doing so.

Change and renewal is not the issue, but it must be the right change. As Richard Evans and Steven Mastin remind us, Michael Gove eventually ignored all the advice he was getting, even from supporters like Ferguson, and practically wrote the curriculum based on a misunderstood version of history teaching from a time before he was even born.

So, I believe it would be better to go back to the drawing board, properly debate this with all sides, and come back with something that gives pupils a sound knowledge and the analytical skills required to do well not only in exams, but in the world beyond school and pub quizzes.

David Hough is a Labour Party member and history teacher
@Colchester1648

Education is what helped my parents escape the poverty of their upbringing and made them socially mobile. Labour has always understood this principle and it’s one of the reasons that I’m proud to be Labour.

John Blake’s article has provoked a fierce reaction. This is mine.

1. Give schools an equal chance and ‘level up’ social inequality.

Stephen Twigg has already announced that he will not bring academies and free schools back to the Local Authority. However, he has been able to identify the main sources of contention regarding academies and free schools, namely funding, admissions, teachers’ pay and conditions, local accountability and democracy, and the curriculum. It is wrong that academies are initially, or at any time, better funded than state schools. All our pupils deserve the same opportunities and experiences, and funding some schools more on the basis of ideology instead of need is grotesque. In the same way I find it bizarre that Gove can advocate a national curriculum, insist that it is needed to maintain “rigour’ and “standards” and then allow some schools to opt out of it. Also, teachers must be able to move freely between schools for their own CDP and changes in their lives, and having hundreds of separate pay and conditions in different schools will inhibit this. We therefore need equality in our system so every school can attract the most suitable teachers for their children.

My other issue with academies is the ability to determine their own admissions. If people want a return to grammar schools be honest and make the case, don’t advocate academies and then look surprised as a two tier education system is quietly established. This is a conservative policy not a Labour one. There have been some high profile academy failures and one of the root causes was the lack of accountability – which is something Twigg, and indeed Wilshaw, identified when they called for the Third Tier. Parents, children and local government officers need local accountability for their schools.So, please Stephen Twigg, level the playing field. If you want academies that’s fine but make them teach the national curriculum, give teachers parity of pay and conditions, make them subject to the same admissions policy as all other schools in the local area, fund them equally and make them locally accountable – maybe through a mechanism called a Local Education Authority.

2.  Have clear criteria for helping “failing” schools.

It is not enough that Ofsted can enter a school and declare that it is failing. As teachers, we do not tell children that their work is not good enough and then walk away. There needs to be a supportive system in place to help schools and to work in partnership with schools. This should be organised and run at a local level.  Again, you could call this facilitator of local support a Local Education Authority.  An LEA is the best at understanding the needs of the local area. The LEA can look at the bigger picture when developing intervention strategies and they are best equipped to facilitate advice and support from neighbouring schools.

3. Immediately bring failing academies under the control of the LEA and finally admit that  academies aren’t a ‘cure all’

There are a number of examples of failing academies, to name but a few see here, here and here. There are also academies that ‘fail’ to do as well as LA counterparts. This lack of local accountability needs addressing immediately and where they are failing they need the support of the LEA (see above.) There is also questionable evidence about the ability of an academy to ‘cure’ the problems of a school, as this article states: “the data shows that all disadvantaged schools are increasing their results. But the evidence is clear that, even with clearly under-performing schools, there is no evidence of better performance if schools converted to become an academy.”

4. Commit to the reform and character change of OFSTED and removal of Michael Wilshaw.

Ofsted at the moment has developed a fearsome reputation designed to send even the calmest member of staff into an unbridled panic and state of anxiety. To talk of the “spectre of Ofsted haunting education” is no exaggeration. This is not healthy. This is not helpful. This does not improve our children’s education. I know that as a teacher I have improved over time and I think most teachers would agree that the first few years in teaching are developmental. The pressure that Ofsted puts teachers under is sending them away in droves. How much better would it be for teachers to see Ofsted as a critical friend? There to help, encourage, guide and correct as HMI inspections used to do. I do believe that there should be accountability in teaching to an independent body, but teachers have an unhealthy relationship with Ofsted and that needs addressing. This brings me to my second point regarding Michael Wilshaw. In some ways I celebrate his work, he has removed unqualified teachers from being Ofsted inspectors and, as John said, he is allowing teachers to teach in a style that suits them. However, his PR team have made serious failings. His attempts at humour in his speeches have drastically backfired, and his rhetoric of support for teachers is lost amidst the “tough talking”. As a result, teachers have no respect and no faith in him. For Ofsted to be truly reformed into a supportive regime they need rebranding and therefore Michael Wilshaw has to go.

5. Make it a requirement of UPS that teachers should spend a short amount of time each year as part of Ofsted inspection teams in other schools.

I agree with John in principle – see here for more information, but I think the prospect is incredibly disruptive and expensive.

6. Commit to developing an effective and open relationship with all teaching unions.

As teachers we can represent our national views at the ballot box and through our union representatives. To advocate that any government, let alone a Labour Government, should refuse to listen to a union is abhorrent. The NUT represents over 300,000 teachers; cutting off their voice to government is simply wrong. If members genuinely want a change of direction in the NUT executive then there is the means to do so: at the ballot box. We should not advocate removing voices from the education debate just because they don’t reflect your own. By recommending that Labour should “refuse to take the NUT’s calls” is advocating a disenfranchisement of thousands of teachers. We, the teachers represented by our unions, are the experts when it comes to education and an effective Labour government would seek to harness this expertise when forming education policy.

7. Enshrine in law full-time facilities time for teaching staff.

I first got involved in my union when there was a redundancy situation in my school and I met the previous division secretary, Brian Swinton. Brian embodies all that is great about the NUT; he became part councillor, part fighter, part negotiator, part local hero, and fully committed to providing the best education for our children by ensuring that teachers have all the support they need. The work of the division secretary is consuming, relentless, sometimes satisfying and sometimes depressing. To recommend taking away ANY of this support from our overstretched division secretaries is deeply misguided and financially short sighted. Our current acting division secretary has taken a pay cut to do the job because she wants to support teachers and give something back to her union. It’s insulting to think that these dedicated professionals should lose any of the precious time they do have. The result would be further expense for the schools as teachers, without a support network, will either abandon the profession or spend more time away from work. Every system needs checks and balances to make sure it acts in the interests of both the employer and the employee and of course in education, the children.

8. Scrap the new national curriculum.

I agree with John – see his post. I would add that we do need a new curriculum. But it needs to be developed and then embraced by teachers because ultimately they are the ones that will determine if it succeeds or fails.

9. Set up a Royal College of Teachers and put union representatives on the governing body.

I agree with the idea of a RCT and a general council of some kind has always been NUT policy and I would like it to be a forum for deciding the best education policies for our country. To bar union representation is to dismiss all the work the unions do on educational research. You need only to look at the current work being done on Gender Stereotyping by the NUT to acknowledge the positive impact shared union knowledge and expertise could have on truly finding the best ways forward for our children. There is an important regulatory function of any general council to which experienced union representatives have a lot to contribute

10. Get rid of free schools but learn lessons from them. Stop academy chains from expanding.

For an interesting analysis on free schools click here. This article identifies some of the strengths of the free school system, we should take what has worked from the Free School model and use it to improve local state schools, see point 1 – Make our schools equal.

11. Maintain the national pay structure and progression for teachers, force schools to adopt a union agreed model on appraisal and capability. Reject Performance Related Pay for Teachers.

Unfortunately I do not have the space or time to develop this point further but I do know that appraisal should be about helping each teacher to achieve their potential and this should not be linked to capability. See here for the NUT argument and here for the NASUWT.

As my MP, Alan Johnson said, a reason for rejecting Performance Related Pay is that it will ultimately damage the education of our children.

12. Endow the RTC to allow teachers to expand their own knowledge and research.

I think John made an interesting point in his previous blog which really made me think about CDP available for teachers and the best way to secure funding for research. However, I think this would be an issue best left to the new RTC, as part of its remit to look into what actually works in education. 

13. Explicitly state that for-profit schools are NOT Labour Policy.

In the past, the Tories have claimed poll tax as the next big thing, also pasty tax, caravan tax, bedroom tax… I could go on. The fact remains that we are not the Conservative Party and what the Conservative Party see as the “next big thing” often results in the “next big U turn” shortly afterwards. We are Labour and being Labour means that we have principles. At the moment, the movement in favour of  the renationalisation of our railways is gaining popularity  across the UK as privatisation is becoming discredited; it therefore seems ridiculous that we would tamper with our children’s education to disprove a system that we don’t believe in. It might be easy to make the suggestion that we should “trial for-profit provision of schooling”, but it will be considerably harder if we were forced to allow our own children to be subjected to it. I refer back again to point 1 – make our schools equal.   

14. Unite us.

Admittedly this could be Stephen Twigg’s greatest challenge, and I do wonder if behind the closed doors at Labour Party headquarters they have to draw straws to see who lands up with the “bl***y teachers.” One problem is that, with teachers, we are used to telling people what to do and we all think we know best. The other problem with education is that everyone has their own “truths” about what works and this is becoming increasingly divided along political grounds. This is not healthy and it undermines real debate. The Labour Party should be getting involved in projects like Research Ed. In education, as in the classroom, government needs to acknowledge that “one size doesn’t fit all”. By strengthening the LEA, the government can give them space to develop interventions and polices that are specifically targeted for individual areas, whilst being evaluated and supported by a new style Ofsted.

My apologies for the many things I have missed. I look forward to hearing your views and comments.

Emma Ann Hardy
NUT and Labour Party member.
@emmaannhardy

With the sharp increase in the number of academies, do local education authorities still have a role to play? Anthony Painter investigates. This is a cross-post from Progress.

LOCAL education authorities have almost 200 statutory duties but lack purpose in the modern education landscape. The simple fact is that more than half of secondary schools are now academies. In the process of expanding their number, education secretary Michael Gove has turned academies into more a description of one governance and legal structure than a brand. What matters now is the quality of the school, its curriculum and ethos rather than its type whether it is an academy, community, voluntary aided, free, studio or university technical college school. This marks a significant change – one that is confusing for parents and pupils alike.

Gove and Labour secretaries of state before him have fundamentally altered the balance of power and responsibility between schools’ leadership and LEAs. There is no point carrying on as if these changes have not happened. Instead, some serious consideration now needs to be given to what role local education authorities have. It is pointless to continue pretending that the hybrid system of local education that has evolved (albeit at lightning speed) is in any way suitable for the education needs of today’s secondary-age pupils. Instead, reform is necessary and it should be soon.

Right away, it is important to state that LEAs do have a role. Abolishing them would not make any sense, as, properly focused, they can have a significantly positive impact. The key to high-quality education is leadership and yet it can emerge in many different places at once – school leadership, governance and at the local authority level. Any change that is made to LEAs needs to acknowledge this. For example, despite relative deprivation, 95 per cent of pupils in Wigan attend good or outstanding schools according to Ofsted, as do 87 per cent in Southwark and 86 per cent in Oldham. One size does not fit all, by any means.

Where there is success and leadership it should be safeguarded. Too often there is a deficit of success and leadership, so reform is necessary – at the LEA, as well as the individual school level that we are used to seeing. How might an incoming Labour government approach this? First, it would make clear that the primary legal responsibility that LEAs have is to provide pupils with high-quality education choices that provide them with the knowledge and skills to progress on to good careers – usually via further or higher education. This will require securing the provision of a range of high-quality options.

A primary means of enabling parents and pupils to make these choices is good information and guidance. LEAs should be given responsibility for providing excellent advice and guidance to parents and pupils as they survey and choose their options throughout the system. This will usually be at age five, 11 and 16 but, with UTCs, studio schools and further education now supplying provision from the age of 14, the same legal duty should be applied at that age too. There should be open opportunities to transfer institutions after key stages two (11 years old), three (14 years old) and four (16 years old). Local authorities should have a statutory duty to provide information and advice to facilitate transfers.

In an excellent report entitled Outstanding For All, the Haringey Education Commission, chaired by the inspirational Anna Hassan (with whom I have worked over a number of years on the board at Hackney community college), argues that a ‘pupil passport’ should be introduced. This passport would ‘summarise key information about each pupil’s attainment, their strengths and weaknesses and other important information. It should be used whenever pupils move schools, including assisting with primary/secondary transfer and with pupil mobility within each phase.’ The passport will thus facilitate pupils changing between educational institutions so they can get the right experience and will help raise standards. Furthermore, the commission suggests the introduction of an ‘annual scorecard, using data such as family of schools [schools of a similar type], to compare the achievement of each school with similar ones outside Haringey’. These are exactly the types of responses that will give parents and pupils the tools with
which to make good choices. Once diverse new provision has also been secured, pupils will have a much wider range of options at their disposal. It is to Haringey council’s credit that it was willing to challenge itself in this way.

In order to ensure that every LEA is entirely independent throughout the system, the presumption should be that community schools will be placed in a separate trust with their own governance and leadership. This trust will have its own management which will buy services from the LEA like any other school in the area. Community schools will no longer be local authority schools. Where LEAs can demonstrate absolute independence and the highest level of provision of information, advice and guidance they would not be required to place their schools into a separate trust. However, the default would be that a community schools trust should be established in every LEA area. This is an alternative to forced academisation.

The purpose of the measure is very simple: to prevent a protectionist attitude towards certain schools in any local authority area. LEAs can have a tendency to view community schools as ‘their’ schools. However, any publicly funded school – and not just located in the local authority area – that meets the educational needs of a pupil resident in the area should be treated the same as any other. The most important function of the LEA will be to broker high-quality education on behalf of parents and keep them informed of their options and progression every step of the way.

Local authorities have a democratic function too. How is this expressed in the field of education if they do not actually have any control over the institutions themselves? By LEAs becoming the voice of parents and pupils: they will challenge underperformance through the provision of good information. And where parents or a group of parents have a grievance they should be able to raise it with the LEA. This grievance would then be conveyed to the individual school who would be required to reject it or accept it with a specified response. Where the LEA is not happy with the response there would be potential for referral to Ofsted, which may decide to follow it up. Parents would be kept informed throughout the process. Ofsted would remain the regulator of individual schools (and, indeed, of LEAs) but the LEA would be there to serve the interests of pupils and parents.

Once Labour passed the Local Education Act within months of returning to power, it should then give LEAs two years to meet its provisions. Ofsted would then begin inspecting every single LEA, with the worst-performing areas first. The purpose of this would be to assess compliance with the new act. Where an LEA was not compliant it would be given a period of time to adapt followed by a reinspection or the local authority would be required to find another provider of its LEA functions.

All these changes together achieve a number of things: a clear focus on parents and pupils; emphasis on quality and range of provision; a smooth transfer between different institutions; a greater local democratic voice within education; schools being judged by their excellence not by their legal structure; and an improvement in standards across the board. The current system is now unclear, unfocused and inconsistent. Parents and pupils have the right to expect the best. A refocused, reformed system of education can help them secure precisely that.

Anthony Painter (@anthonypainter) is a contributing editor to Progress. He is also Vice Chair of Hackney Community College, and Chair of Hackney UTC.

Tony Blair has laid down a challenge for Labour to avoid being a party of protest and show ourselves as an alternative government. Below, Michael has sensibly asked for Labour-led discussion about education policy. In that spirit, I offer the following suggestions in no particular order for Labour education policy (I explore each in a little more detail below):

1. Announce that successful academies and free schools will not be taken back under LA control. End of. 
2. Announce clear criteria for deciding who should run failing schools – and permit Outstanding Local Authorities to bid to run schools in neighbouring areas.
3. Permit LAs who show significant improvement to bid to regain any academies doing less well under their new situation than previously.
4. Commit to the retention of OFSTED, and commit to doing everything necessary to retain Michael Wilshaw at its head, and provide him with the necessary resources to iron out the variation in inspection practice.
5. Make it a requirement of UPS that teachers should spend a short amount of time each year as part of OFSTED inspection teams in other schools.
6. Refuse to take the NUT’s calls – and announce it publicly.
7. Make full-time facilities time for teaching staff illegal – maximum of 0.6FTE
8. Scrap the new National Curriculum
9. Set up a Royal College of Teachers and bar members of union executives from places on its governing bodies
10. Keep the free schools principle but improve the organisation
11. Take up the Sherrington Plan for qualifications
12. Announce criteria for limiting the over-expansion of academy providers
13. Endow a new Teachers’ Research Council specifically to fund further research for in-service teachers
14. Sanction small-scale, tightly monitored trials of for-profit provision of schooling. 

Continue reading →

From Loic Menzies, Director of the Think and Action Tank LKMco. 

He previously worked as a teacher and youth-worker and is an Associate Tutor in Canterbury Christ Church University’s Faculty of Education

Loic is neither a Labour teacher nor any other {party}teacher and LKMco is a non-party political organisation

At the launch of his book, Incentivising Excellence: School choice and education quality, Gabriel Sahlgren made a number of proposals, the most widely reported related to school vouchers. Whilst at LKMco we generally pride ourselves on being constructive, I’m pretty sure you could work out what I think on many issues by taking whatever was said at the launch, and plotting whatever position was diametrically opposed to it.

Here’s why:

Proposal 1: “We should have more school choice because it will provide an incentive for school improvement and this will improve education”

I disagree because: Ask yourself what is the biggest limit on how good schools are… Is it?

a) Not wanting to be better

b) Not managing to be better

Incentives and choice are only good mechanisms if the answer is a. As far as I can tell the answer is mainly b: Schools don’t lack the will. They lack the way.

(The more I think about this question, the more I think this would be interesting to investigate – see note)

That’s not to say there aren’t some schools which lack will but these are generally:

• Coasting schools
• Schools below floor target/unsatisfactory or requiring improvement according to Ofsted.

There are two ways of dealing with these:

Market mechanisms: (which I have written about in the past and called ‘competition for survival‘). The theory goes that as pupils gradually drift away from a poor school, the school loses money and eventually dies. I think this is a bad idea because it takes a long time and causes upheaval for communities. It means that for many years, a few pupils are stuck in a gradually failing school.  It is also a huge waste of public money; setting up schools costs a lot, not to mention that having multiple schools co-existing requires extra sites. In many places like London, finding enough sites even for the schools we need is nigh on impossible, let alone for excess supply.

State driven mechanisms: As it stands, we already have mechanisms to deal with  lack of will when it occurs and these have already been toughened up. If a school is below floor target it will be taken over by another provider. If it is judged to require improvement it will be re-inspected. Some people think that this is Draconian but I’m unapologetic about being no molly-coddler; In fact I’d re-inspect schools requiring improvement sooner than two years on to check they are at least improving. As to the floor target, so long as it takes into account progress not just attainment (which it does) then I support it (although I think trends and whether the outcome was anomalous, as with #GCSEfiasco, should be taken into account).

Advocating a strong state driven mechanism for dealing with occasional failures of will does not require any particular position on who should provide schools. LAs and other providers could be equally adept. However this approach is the opposite of Gabriel and the CMRE’s market driven approach.

Proposal 2: “Parents should be in control and schools should serve them because freedom = ‘state bad, parents good’”

I disagree because: Parents can be a constraint on children and already have a huge influence on their child. Our problem isn’t making sure they have more influence but providing a counterbalance so that schools can liberate pupils from the constraints of their parents, exposing them to other opportunities and not accentuating inequalities. This is a complex subject and hard to summarise  but it is fundamental to LKMco’s ‘raison d’etre’. I wrote a whole blog about it here.

Proposal 3: “Teacher quality is what makes a difference so we should liberalise the market so that schools innovate around pay etc.”

I disagree because:

If our goal is to improve teacher quality, wholesale restructuring of the education system to provide choice seems a very roundabout way of getting there. It is hard not to think that it is an ideologically driven approach.

My controversial support for pay discretion is based on thinking it is fair, not on thinking that it will increase teacher performance through incentives. Teachers’ generally want to teach better but struggle to do so and Daniel Pink has made it quite clear that pay is not the best lever for teacher quality:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Given that schools can now set pay this proposal seems a bit outdated anyway.

Proposal 4: “So long as good information is available, parents will chose schools that most benefit their child”

Why I disagree: I don’t disagree that parents should have plenty of information available but I do not think that this will be enough to deliver equity.

Firstly, although I think most parents care deeply about their child’s education, I am worried about those most vulnerable of children whose parents don’t. I’d therefore want to hear proposals for protecting these young people.

Secondly, there is already a lot of information available but how many parents use it? Not all parents have the time, energy or expertise to access and sift information to make informed choices. How many parents realise for example that one of the best predictors of how well your child will do in a school (according to Burgess and Allen) is school composition?

Thirdly, do we even want parents to be making choices in this way (doesn’t it get circular anyway: who ends up in a school depends on a choice based on who is in the school) – not to mention Buckley and Schneider’s work on Washington DC oft cited by Laura which shows parents’ worrying tendency to focus on racial demographics when making choices.

I guess the free-marketeers would argue that it’s not for the state to decide how parents make their choices- That’d be fine if it were just parents who reaped the benefits/drawbacks. But it’s not: It’s children and society too.

Others might want to argue with a number of the research claims made including:

• School choice benefits poor pupils most.
• Failing schools rarely improve unless they get rid of 90% of their staff.
• Sweden’s falling PISA results are not due to market reform of schools (they are a result of a drop in teacher quality as a result of universally imposed progressive education) and drops would have been more dramatic if it were not for market reform.

However, I don’t want to get involved in a game of evidence ping pong so will leave that to those who are better informed.

But I would like to raise a few additional questions:

• How will this school choice model work in low population, rural communities?
• If schools become increasingly different won’t this reduce pupil mobility? i.e. If you begin studying a particular curriculum/qualification system in one school won’t it be harder to swap to another school if other schools are doing something entirely different?
• Improvements in (and around) early academies were given as examples of the success of competition – was competition really a key feature of the academies program?

 Note: I actually wonder about this question of how schools perceive themselves (i.e. good enough or not).  It would be genuinely fascinating to ask a large, representative sample of teachers and school leaders whether they think their schools are achieving ‘more/less or about as highly as can be expected’ in order to gauge their ‘will to improve’ (If anyone would be interested in funding that then do get in touch!)

Because we would be looking at how good a school *could* be rather than compared to current average it wouldn’t be the same as the well documented issue of illusory superiority (according to which most drivers think they are better than average). Nonetheless, I wonder whether schools are biased towards thinking they are better than average – if so it might limit their ‘will to improve’ – an argument, market reformers might use for competition (although I’d say it’s an argument for better information and feedback as more accurate self perception would benefit schools anyway.)

You can find a Storify of my live tweets from the event here

Loic Menzies // loic@lkmco.org // @LKMco

This blog originally appeared as an LKMco blog and should not be taken to imply any political affiliation by the author or LKMco