Educational Reform is on the way
- Article 3 of 5
- Action Network, October 2009
Just about everyone thinks there’s something wrong with Britain’s education system. What is wrong is something that everyone argues over, however, so it’s no surprise that every government has its own ideas, and spends most of its time in office reforming education time and time again. As one teacher puts it, “Like anything, education goes round in circles. Someone cries out ‘Kids can’t read or write,’ so someone at government level sets targets. Teachers teach to try and achieve these targets, lessons are boring, Ofsted criticise teaching and teachers, the unions kick up. Kids still can’t read and write, someone else says ‘make the lessons less prescriptive, give teachers more freedom in what they teach.’ So it starts again."
The latest effort by the government to bring our education system up to scratch has been the ‘Rose Review’. Published at the end of April, this is an independent review of the primary curriculum by Sir Jim Rose, the former director of inspection at schools regulation body Ofsted, intended to answer two questions: “What should the primary curriculum contain?”; and “How should the content and the teaching of it change to foster children’s different and developing abilities during primary education?” A public consultation on the report will continue until the end of July and then the final recommendations implemented in September 2011.
Rose says that his proposals are intended to ensure that primary children are able to enjoy their childhood, and are inspired to “learn and develop the knowledge, skills and understanding which are the building blocks for secondary education and later life”. His main ideas are to: provide a stronger focus on curriculum progression; “strengthen the focus” on ensuring that by the age of seven, children have a secure grasp of the literacy and numeracy skills they need to make good progress thereafter; strengthen the teaching and learning of ICT to enable them to be independent and confident users of technology by the end of primary education; provide a greater emphasis on personal development through a more integrated and simpler framework for schools; build stronger links between the Early Years Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1, and between Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3; and offer “exciting opportunities” for learning languages for seven to 11 year olds.
All of which sounds good, but given his report runs to 154 pages, there’s a considerable amount of additional detail, in which some devils, as well as angels, might be found (see box). “You can find the references to ‘learning by doing’ and ‘experiential learning’ in the Rose review, but quite often they’re in the small print,” says David Harbourne, director of policy and research at Edge, an independent education foundation dedicated to raising the status of practical and vocational learning. “But it’s a very long report and I had to work quite hard to get to those points. Because they’re in the draft descriptions of programmes of learning rather than the main bodies of the report, I’ve got this slight worry that when it comes to implementing, it would be possible to gloss over those bits rather more than I would like.”
Nevertheless, reaction has been largely positive, with many people and organisations offering a cautious welcome to its overall intents. Professor David Wray, deputy director and professor of literacy education at the Institute of Education, University of Warwick, feels that placing ICT at the core of the primary curriculum alongside literacy and numeracy is a step in the right direction. “In the world outside school,” he says, “literacy is changing. Technologies like podcasts and blogging involve new forms of literacy and ‘digital literacies’ are becoming as important as traditional print literacy.”
The National Association of Advisors for Computers in Education (Naace) welcomes the emphasis on ICT, too, as does Stephen Crowne, chief executive of Becta, the government agency for technology in learning: “Without an appropriate emphasis on technology from an early age there is the risk of a digital underclass developing.”
However, Teresa Cremin, president of the United Kingdom Literacy Association, criticises the lack of emphasis on reading for pleasure: “We are pleased that speaking and listening is widely profiled for learning across the curriculum... but while [Rose] refers to ‘word poverty’, he does not immediately connect it to the possibilities in the wide world of children’s literature.” The report mentions the enjoyable role of storytelling and literature, “But there is almost nothing else on children’s attitudes, desire and motivations to reading”.
Sir Alan Wilson, the chair of SCORE (Science Community Partnership Representing Education), a body representing science education organisations, said, “We commend the emphasis the report places on the importance of science, as a crucial means to help young students constructively explore the world around them. However, the success of these proposed reforms will depend heavily on the assessment tools that are put in place.”
Anne Stewart, assistant principal of ACS Cobham, a London-area school which tries to offer the best of international approaches to education, says, “I like some of the key principles, particularly on speaking and listening. I also like the fact phonics is seen as an aspect of reading and writing, but it’s not all of it. The only piece that’s difficult for us is when they’re saying phonics should be introduced.” However, the decision to encourage all children to start formal education in September is “outrageous” according to Stewart.
For many people, it’s not what’s in the report that is at issue: it’s what isn’t. The ‘elephant in the room’ are the standard assessment tests (SATs) that all children sit at the end of Year Six. “Rose doesn’t give the game away, but he makes it obvious he’s written the report with one hand tied behind his back,” says Edge’s David Harbourne. “It doesn’t make sense to talk about the curriculum without talking properly about how it’s going to be assessed. It’s just bizarre, but it’s because we have politicians fixated on measuring something and what they measure is terribly narrowly drawn at the moment.”
Score’s Sir Alan Wilson adds, “We share the concerns of many other organisations about the appropriateness of the current science tests and their impact on children in Year 6 and earlier years due to the high stakes use of the results. SCORE continues to recommend a move towards teacher assessment throughout the primary school.”
With the public now to be consulted on the report, it’ll be parents who might raise the biggest objections, however. Novelist Julia Williams, whose children are 13, 11, 9 and 7, thinks that Rose’s conclusions are basically sound, but is “deeply sceptical of the emphasis on IT – infants don’t need to use computers, they need to learn how to read and write and count.” Where the report also fails is the “middle range of kids”. “The special needs ones usually get help and the bright ones are okay, but because they have to achieve the average marks to get the school the right value added in the league tables, the middle range loses out hugely.” And SATs? “They have no educational benefit whatsoever as far as I can tell. It’s like getting lab rats to press the green or red button.”
Rose may have done the best he could with the remit he was given, but despite his work, there will still be plenty of reform in primary education to come.
The Rose Report’s chief recommendations
Sir Jim Rose recommends:
- All children should start primary school in the September after their fourth birthday, so summer-born children no longer wait one or two additional terms before they start
- Parents who would prefer greater emphasis on play will be able to send their children to nursery at this stage.
- The current curriculum, including its 11 separate subjects, be replaced with six “areas of learning”, freeing teachers to pick and choose lesson content and do more cross-curriculum teaching, making links between science, maths and history.
- A new section of the curriculum entitled “primary personal, learning and thinking skills” to teach children how to be healthy and happy and develop their social skills
- At least one or two foreign languages – probably French and German – should be taught from seven years of age.
- ICT to be on an equal footing with English and maths – children should be able to use Google by the time they’re seven and publish websites and podcasts by the time they’re 11.
- A greater emphasis on speaking and listening skills as well as reading and writing to combat the fact that children from disadvantaged homes will have heard a million fewer words by the time they start school.
- Children will be given their own personal tutors in the final years of primary school: these will be secondary school teachers who will help the pupils adjust to life in secondary school.
- Increased use of drama in other lessons, such as history which might include role-playing to dramatise key moments
- Ten to 11 year olds will be encouraged to take part in essay-style extended projects to give secondary school teachers an insight into their thinking skills.
- Children should study their home town in geography
- History lessons to look at at least two distinct periods of history and include a broad chronology of British and world history
- The targets of children being able to use phonics to write simple words by age five should become “ambitions” instead.