As we approach the end of the academic year, teachers, parents and children will all be thinking back on a unique experience that will have consequences well into the future.
Schools have demonstrated that they are absolutely at the centre of community life. Headteachers have been recognised by the general public as the civic leaders they rightly are. Parents have grown to appreciate the complexity of teaching and have gained an insight into the sophisticated array of skills that teachers apply in the classroom. It is surely time to restore the profession of teaching to the high status it once enjoyed.
The Covid-19 crisis has given us an opportunity to pause and take stock. This is a unique occasion to reflect on the current eco-system of schooling and to reappraise aspects of education policy. This paper considers four areas: school funding, accountability, the schools system and the curriculum.
School Funding
The first area for consideration is school funding. When Boris Johnson became Prime Minister he used his first speech to announce that school funding would be levelled up in 2020/21 with minimum funding increased to £3,750 per primary pupil and £5,000 per secondary pupil. Minimum primary funding would further increase in 2021/22 to £4,000 per pupil. These increases are part of a £14 billion increase in school funding pledged by the former Chancellor in the 2019 Spending Round. The effect will be to return school spending in 2023 to its 2010 level. The Institute of Fiscal Studies’ 2019 annual report on school funding concludes: “No real terms growth in spending per pupil over 13 years represents a large squeeze by historical standards.”
The problem with the proposed levelling up of pupil funding is that most increases will be targeted on schools in relatively affluent areas that have the lowest proportion of disadvantaged students. For example, Bedford will receive the highest per pupil increase (8.5%) but ranks 103rd out of 149 local authorities for its rate of free school meals. Conversely, London’s Tower Hamlets, which has the highest rate of free school meals in England will receive a funding increase of only 1.84% per pupil, the third lowest increase. This may reflect a historic favourable rate of school funding in parts of London, but in overall terms the regions receiving the highest increases in funding have the lowest incidence of children on free school meals.
The Education Policy Institute has observed that the disadvantage gap for pupils eligible for Pupil Premium funding grows from early years to GCSE, so that disadvantaged pupils are on average 18 months behind their peers in academic progress by age 16. On current trends it will take over 500 years to close the gap. The gaps are particularly wide for children with special educational needs/disability statements and those with educational health care plans and for children from some minority ethnic backgrounds, notably Black Caribbean, Travellers and Gypsy/Roma children.
A report by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) now says head teachers believe around a third of pupils are not engaging with set work during the lockdown. Around a quarter of pupils have limited or no access to technology for online learning. There are serious concerns that disadvantaged pupils will fall even further behind. Notwithstanding the government’s £85 million scheme to purchase laptops and devices for pupils with no access, and its recent U-turn to provide free school meals over the summer holidays (a package costing around £120 million), together with the £1 billion catch-up funding, the government could do well to revisit how it plans to allocate the remainder of its £14 billion additional funding envelope for schools up to 2023. Retargeting a significant proportion of this onto the most disadvantaged pupils would truly help to address inequality of funding. But returning school funding to its 2010 level is not enough; significant new investment in schools is needed to address all the inequities in the system and invest in world-class twenty-first century provision.
Accountability
The second area of policy for reconsideration is accountability. Heads have largely welcomed the new Ofsted framework focusing on curriculum but there are dissenting voices. Two CEOs of major trusts have questioned the focus on a broad curriculum, one believing that “This is a middle-class framework for middle-class kids.” Ofsted had appeared to question GCSE courses over three years (to help disadvantaged children gain their qualifications) since this reduced curriculum breadth in Year 9.Whatever view is taken, inspections cannot simply return to normal next academic year as if nothing has happened. The focus for schools for some time will need to be pupil wellbeing and mental health and in addressing the inevitable learning gaps accrued during the lockdown. Many more children will be living in poverty.
Ofsted has become feared by many headteachers. Why so? It is not simply that an inadequate inspection can end a career, it is also — whether Ofsted likes it or not — that it is perceived by many not to be an independent regulator but a politicised arm of the state. The Education and Adoption Act 2016 gives the Secretary of State for Education, through the Regional School Commissioner, a statutory duty to issue an academy order to any maintained school with an inadequate Ofsted judgement. The school has no meaningful choice over its sponsor and there is no requirement for consultation about the transfer.
The concept of school accountability to the state becomes more problematic when school context is considered. It is clear that social and economic background, parental support and interventions in early years do matter and make a difference. Research into 3000 secondary schools by the Nuffield Foundation found that “attending a ‘good’ secondary school only adds a small amount more value than attending a ‘bad’ secondary school… school choice may not be as important as the policy debate sometimes suggests”.
Inspection is important in ensuring that children and young people have an entitlement to a good education, but its focus has become too narrow. Post Covid-19, there is a strong case to broaden the range of performance indicators to provide a more holistic view of schools as human organisms that are inextricably linked to their local contexts. Inspection should not only focus on outcomes and curriculum but also on how schools relate to their communities, build social capital and promote community cohesion. Accountability measures should be recast to consider moral purpose and how schools support the most vulnerable pupils. Teacher creativity and innovation should also be considered. An element of peer review would help to strengthen local partnerships.
There is a more substantial issue with the notion of school accountability. This concerns the structural misalignment between teacher aspiration and governmental expectations. Most teachers and support staff have entered the profession because they have a vocation to help young people. However, since James Callaghan’s 1976 Ruskin College speech, successive governments have viewed education as a largely economic construct whose purpose is to power national prosperity. Governments have dealt with this misalignment of purpose by imposing accountability measures designed to compel schools and teachers to conform to national expectations. The marketisation of education begun under the 1988 Education Reform Act, which introduced the local management of schools, has been extended through subsequent legislation, including the growth of the academy sector. The premise is that an internal market will increase parental choice and drive up standards. Yet parental choice is limited by several factors, not least geography, and test results provide only a partial view of a school’s strengths.
Accountability measures include inspections, published league tables (introduced in 1993 as part of John Major’s ‘Back to Basics’ campaign), ‘coasting school’ regulations, academy orders and a panorama of metrics. The effect has been to create a high-stakes exam culture and various perverse incentives. Several schools have ‘gamed’ the system, such as making a strategic use of exclusions as described in the RSA’s Pinball Kids report. “We need more data, not less,” former Education Secretary, Michael Gove told the Association of School and College Leaders in 2012.
For good or ill, Britain’s standing in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) league tables has been regarded by governments as almost a totem of international prestige and as a bellwether for the efficacy of national education policy. Education has been turned into a quasi-industrial process and teachers have found their creativity constrained. It is not surprising that so many teachers have left the profession. A 2019 House of Commons Report notes that “around 42,000 full-time equivalent qualified teachers left the state-funded sector in the 12 months to November 2018, a ‘wastage rate’ of 9.8%”.
Vertical accountability measures are important, but so are lateral ones. Since this year’s tests and examinations have not taken place, now may be the time to reform the whole system of accountability. This is not about ‘dumbing down’ or embracing what Gove once described as “the soft bigotry of low expectations”. Rather, it is about releasing teacher professionalism and forging a new compact between schools and state, with the latter adopting a more facilitating, less controlling role. This compact should be focused on promoting collaboration, partnership and mutual support, and not competition between schools. At their best, school federation and trusts embody such collaboration, but there is still a long way to go to developing a more widespread culture of co-operation across the system.
The Schools System
This leads on to a third area of policy for examination. The current schools system in England is fragmented and broken-backed. Statistics published by the Department of Education for April 2020 show that there are 9,201 open academies, representing 42% of all state-funded schools. About 58% of schools in England continue to be maintained by their local authority. There are 2,672 academy trusts, so a simple calculation demonstrates that the average size of a trust is 3.4 academies. In fact, there are 1,478 single academy trusts, and, overall, about two-thirds of all academies are in trusts with up to 10 academies. For small trusts there are questions about capacity and long-term sustainability.
In January 2019, the then Secretary of State for Education announced that “More than 50% of children in state-funded schools in England are now taught in an academy or free school.” Up to the present date, trends for schools converting to academy status suggest that all schools might become academies by the end of this decade. That process may now have stalled somewhat. In the light of current conditions, it is unlikely that the 58% of local authority-maintained schools will see conversion to academy status as a strategic priority in the immediate future.
What should the government do? The Conservative Party Manifesto was vague on schools policy but suggested that previous policy initiatives should be continued. A process of consolidation of existing trusts is certainly needed to increase capacity and sustainability, but trustees are generally wedded to their own autonomy and are reluctant to relinquish control. Regional Schools Commissioners cannot force mergers and can only act where they have a statutory right to intervene.
As for the thousands of maintained schools, four years ago, the Cameron government’s white paper, Educational Excellence Everywhere, set out a radical plan to ensure all maintained schools had converted (or were in the process of converting) to academy status by the end of 2020. The government had declared an intention to bring a “definitive end to the role” of local authorities in maintaining schools by 2022. That ambitious plan encountered immediate political resistance, including from within the Conservative Party itself, and was dropped within a few weeks.
Multi-academy trusts are now the preferred model for collaboration. However, there is another mechanism for collaboration, which exists in some parts of the country. This is the concept of a local collaboration trust (LCT). Several separate institutions could establish a small trust together (owned by the group jointly), enabling them to support one another and to share resources without compromising their own separate governance arrangements. Independent schools could be part of such trusts, as could any incorporated body. Community schools, whose governing bodies are not charities (unlike academies and voluntary/foundation schools), could also join by creating their own small charitable trust to become a member of the local collaboration trust.
The concept of the local collaboration trust should now be revisited to address fragmentation in local areas and to form a bridge to the future in promoting local collaboration between separate institutions. The RSA has already called for new collaboratives to be established by schools, public services, and voluntary and community organisations, creating child-centred support systems that ensure all children’s needs are met. Over time, collaborative working practices could become well established, and might then evolve into a new multi-academy trust or partnership arrangement. A new spirit of co-operation will require schools and trusts to look beyond their own boundaries to consider the whole provision of education in an area and how this can best serve the needs of all young people. More systematic collaboration is an imperative for the future.
The Curriculum
The final area of policy for discussion here, and — taking a long view — probably the most important, is the curriculum. Arguably, with some variations of emphasis from time to time, this has remained largely unchanged since the end of the Second World War. The primary curriculum is mainly focused on literacy and numeracy with a broad and balanced curriculum that introduces children to a range of disciplines, whilst the secondary curriculum has been largely subject-based.
Tony Breslin has written eloquently about the need to create “breadth and balance” within the curriculum and to mobilise new alliances supporting deeper learning experiences. “The total learned experience of every child needs to be richer and broader if we are to successfully prepare young people for a less predictable future.”
Recent reforms have sought to bring greater challenge and rigour into the curriculum, so that nine-year olds are now expected to know their times tables by heart and 11-year olds understand the subjunctive. The new primary curriculum introduced in 2014 placed a stronger emphasis on vocabulary, grammar, punctuation and spelling, mathematical and scientific skills, programming and a foreign language. The reforms were not met with universal approval. A group of academics, writing in the Independent (20 March 2013), argued that: “The mountain of data will not develop children’s ability to think… The learner is largely ignored.” Gove, responded three days later in The Daily Mail, labelling this “network of education gurus” as “The Blob, in thrall to Sixties ideologies”. He asked: “What planet are these people on?” “A red planet,” he himself retorted.
What this spat reveals is a debate about whether the curriculum should be based on learning content and acquiring knowledge or developing habits of mind around creativity and problem-solving. The two are not mutually exclusive but a utilitarian view of education is certainly in the ascendant. The editors of Prospero: the Journal for New Thinking in Philosophy in Education see education as having been narrowed to the concept of ‘training’ since the 1980s: “What we have today is a majority of under 50-year olds who were, if anything, ‘traincated’ during their school years.” They see hope, ethics, creativity and problem-solving as being largely absent from the structure of the curriculum.
Pessimism has been the prevailing mood and guiding principle of education reform over the last decade. The 2010 Conservative manifesto stated that: “We are falling behind other countries.” A few years later, Dominic Cummings, then working within Gove’s team in the Department of Education, began his paper, Some thoughts on education and political priorities, by opining: “The education of the majority even in rich countries is between awful and mediocre.” The view from recent Education Secretaries’ desks has been that schooling is in a deficit mode. Children and young people have been seen as not learning enough (or as learning the wrong things). Progressivism has been viewed as impeding Britain’s economic progress.
The centralisation of ministerial power in the Department of Education has enabled the Secretary of State to remake the curriculum in her or his own image. For example, the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) accountability measure at GCSE calculates the proportion of children who secure a grade 5 or above in English, Maths, Science, a humanity and a language. This has been seen by some, such as the Durham Commission on Creativity in Education, as narrowing the curriculum and privileging an academic over a broader curriculum. Arts subjects are not included in the EBacc. Consequently, there have been big declines in GCSE entries in arts subjects, dance, drama, design and technology, music and performing arts. These are subjects that often appeal to disadvantaged students.
Tests and examinations have certainly become harder. There are concerns from some heads that GCSEs have become much more difficult, with scarcely enough time at Key Stage 4 to complete all the requirements of the syllabus. With the benefit of hindsight, in the light of the cancellation of this year’s summer exams, the removal of coursework from most GCSEs, replaced by terminal exams, does not look to have been a triumphant move.
How can it be that in 2018, nearly 100,000 students (18%) in England failed to gain five good grades at GCSEs or in the equivalent technical qualifications? We must ask ourselves if we are preparing young people for life in the twenty-first century or for life in a bygone era.
Part of the difficulty is that, for the last 70 years, the secondary curriculum has been dominated by the needs of universities. A’ Levels are essentially university entrance exams. GCSEs, which replaced O’ Levels (which they now more closely resemble), are a gateway to A’ Levels. The largely academic Key Stage 4 curriculum in England requires students to choose between academic and vocational routes at the age of 16. The effect, as Lord Baker has observed, has been to reduce options at the age of 14 and to reinforce the academic/vocational divide at 16.
Are GCSEs necessary? Lord Baker’s Edge Foundation has proposed a new Baccalaureate for 14–19 education, broadening the current EBacc at 16 and developing a new diploma at 19. The aim would be to refresh the curriculum, “building in the right mix of knowledge, skills, practice and team work so that young people are ready for whatever the Fourth Industrial Revolution throws their way”. Baker’s aspiration is for all young people to leave school or college at the age of 19 with qualifications appropriate to their aptitudes and then go on successfully to further or higher education, or into an apprenticeship or work. Students should also develop personal aptitudes such as confidence, resilience, adaptability “and above all, creativity”.
The World Economic Forum agrees. Its 2020 report, Schools of the Future, challenges global education systems to “shift from a process-based to a problem-based approach to learning”. It proposes transitioning from passive learning styles, in which students are the recipients of learning and teachers decant information into students, to active ones where students take ownership of their own learning and teachers are coaches and facilitators. This requires greater personalisation “including designing individual learning journeys, progression based on skills mastery and flexible learning environments”. Key skills for the twenty-first century include creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving and systems analysis.
There is cause for optimism. Despite its challenges, the schools system is fundamentally sound. Its workforce in England of nearly a million teachers and support staff is professional and strongly committed to its cause. We have some of the best schools, colleges and universities in the world.
Let us therefore take some time to rethink the purposes of education and reflect on how we can bring out the unique qualities of every single child. We should aim to develop pathways that play to each child’s strengths, especially after the age of 14. All children should be challenged and supported, whether their aptitude is academic or vocational (or a combination of the two), to achieve at the absolute limit of their capabilities.
We must aim for a greater personalisation of the learning experience. The curriculum should be developed to encourage habits of mind that are focused on creative thinking and problem- solving. We must truly celebrate diversity and address the injustices felt by so many black and minority ethnic communities whose experience of education is often negative. Issues such as class size, blended and modular learning, and the shape of the school day and year should all be debated. Above all, we need to enthrone creativity at the heart of the classroom and curriculum and find ways in which schools can collaborate more effectively for the benefit of all learners.
Colin Hopkins is Executive Director of RSA Academies
