[Education For Tomorrow: No 100, 2009]

Rearranging the deckchairs on New Labour's SS Education

 'SIR JIM ROSE PRESENTS FINDINGS OF MOST FUNDAMENTAL REVIEW OF THE PRIMARY CURRICULUM IN A DECADE' So says the banner headline of the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCFS) press release1following the publication of the Rose report.2

This is shortly followed by: 'Education expert Sir Jim Rose today published the findings of the most fundamental review of the primary curriculum in a decade, and a series of recommendations to modernise it for 21st century pupils.'

One might then be forgiven for thinking that this document, commissioned in January 2008 by Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, took a good hard look at what primary education was all about. This impression may be reinforced by glancing at the cover page of the report, where the words 'Independent Review of the Primary Curriculum: Final Report' sit as its grand-sounding title amidst a set of lovely photographs, some of which are of the very things that this government (following on from the fine example set by the Tories) has been instrumental (the pun on music is intended) in destroying.

Sadly, but unsurprisingly, this report is neither a review nor is it independent. In fact the only thing in the title which is true is probably the word 'final'. The Interim report, for which great claims are made by Rose in his 'Dear Secretary of State' letter3 at the beginning of the final report had been published in December 2008:

'The interim report drew a wide range of responses which, together with further information gathered from visits to schools, consultation conferences, evidence of international best practice and meetings with expert groups, have been used extensively in forming the final recommendations of the review.'

What is the reality?
As you will all doubtless have your copy of the final report to hand, just turn to the Appendices at the back. On pages 142-3 you will find the letter of remit from Ed Balls to Sir Jim. This is in itself a fine example of gloss and obfuscation, which relies on anyone reading it to have forgotten just what has been happening to education in this country over the past decades.

It contains things like: 'some tell us that the number of subjects and the amount of prescription in some of the current programmes of study restrict their flexibility'. This might make it sound as though some of the real concerns of teachers and educationalists are going to be addressed. But we all know that the reason this has come about is nothing to do with the 'number of subjects' per se, but rather the insistence on rigid classification associated with imposed quantification of time spent, testing and league tables — all designed to produce figures that support market forces and competition between schools. Further, that this has led to a great system of 'choice' for the few at the expense of the many. No amount of fiddling around between 'subjects' (or whatever you want to call them) affects this one iota.

This point is reinforced by the following key sentence:

'A key objective of your review is to enable schools to strengthen their focus on raising standards in reading, writing and numeracy.'

Again, at first sight this seems to contain an element of common sense, in that we know these basic skills are necessary for effective learning. But these are the areas which are dealt with by imposition of specific amounts of time devoted to specific 'one size fits all' methods. And teachers know that you don't just teach literacy by having reading and writing lessons, let alone using a restricted diet of method. But this is exactly what Ed Balls means when he uses the word 'focus'.

And as for the testing regime, for which this country (England!) practises just about the most extreme form anywhere in the world, the message is clear:-

'Your review is focused on the curriculum and is not considering changes to the current assessment and testing regime. However, as your review of the primary curriculum progresses you will need to take account of the Making Good Progress work and the development of single level tests.'

The result of all this will be increased focus on a narrow curriculum in order to serve the interests of market forces. As Professor Colin Richards of Manchester University, writing in Education Journal, says of the report:

'Most significantly of all it fails to address the disproportionate amount of curriculum time taken up by numeracy and literacy (which the review reinforces rather than challenges) and it fails to challenge that elephant in the curriculum — national testing — which it obediently but disingenuously avoids as required by its political masters.'4

Dodgy pedagogy
Recommendation 8 makes things pretty clear:

'(i) Literacy, numeracy and ICT should form the new core of the primary curriculum.

(ii) Schools should continue to prioritise literacy, numeracy and ICT as the foundational knowledge, skills and understanding of the primary curriculum, the content of which should be clearly defined, taught discretely, and used and applied extensively in each area of learning.

(iii) The DCSF expert group on assessment should give consideration to how the new core of literacy, numeracy and ICT should be assessed and these aspects of children's performance reported to parents.'5

This is a curriculum designed for the testing regime. It assumes a one-way process: you teach the '3 Rs' (that really matter) then apply them to the other 'bits'. No understanding that learning is integrated, merely “How can we do it so we can test 'em?”

Rose uses parents' views from his sample to back this up. Now let's be clear — most parents of children in primary education (and beyond?) have never known anything apart from the regime of testing, league tables and market forces, all based on this government's flawed philosophy and warped view of the primary curriculum. The conditions in which parents are giving their views are geared towards the required result. (This is not to criticize parents, and certainly not to deny their important role as partners in education, but merely to state the obvious.)

Everything is geared towards our modern technological society, irrespective of how that should relate to (particularly young) children's needs. Computers are useful tools, but digitalization carries with it many dangers, particularly for the young. These extend far beyond the well documented and researched issues of television viewing: digitalization is also a way of thought, one which runs totally counter to the needs of young children, and one which can deleteriously affect the architecture of the young child's brain. (This needs another article!)

Related to this is the use of the word 'seamless' to describe the moves between the phases of education:

'For the first time ever the proposed curriculum will set out what children should learn in three phases — taking them seamlessly from the Early Years Foundation Stage to Key Stage 1, and from primary to secondary education. The three phases show explicitly how the curriculum broadens and deepens to reflect children's different but developing abilities between the ages of five and 11.'6 And related to this is Recommendation 11:

'(i) The two early learning goals for writing should be retained as valid, aspirational goals for the end of the EYFS.

(ii) The DCSF should consider producing additional guidance for practitioners on supporting children's early writing and should offer practical examples of how this can work.'7 And related to all of this is the proposal to give parents the option of an earlier start date for primary education. This is done on the basis that 'some parents' asked for it in the Children's Plan consultation. Again, this is a predictable response of parents brought up in the paradigm of seeing children as vessels that can have anything stuffed into them at any age.

Rose is prepared to totally ignore the wealth of research that indicates not just that enforcing intellectual tasks in very young children is counter-productive, but that it is positively damaging. The only question in his mind is as to whether or not they can be made to meet targets, not whether or not the targets are pedagogically appropriate.

'Evidence' and 'consultation'
The evidence base for the Interim Report and the consultation on that report are found in Annex B of the final report.

This needs a lot of teasing out to see what was going on. The Annex begins with an impressive looking list of sources, but closer examination reveals a preponderance of non-practitioners (5,000 primary age children, online survey of 1,000 parents, conferences of nearly 2,000 head teachers and local authority advisors).

The list of oral evidence has 93 names of individuals and associations, including Professor Robin Alexander (Cambridge Primary Review), Professor Colin Richards (University of Manchester), the Early Childhood Forum (ECF) and the National Union of Teachers (NUT). Then again, it includes Sir Michael Barber, Sir Alasdair Campbell, Ford Motor Company, the Russell Group8 and Sir Cyril Taylor9.

There are two ways of looking at this. On the one hand you could say it was being even-handed. On the other hand you could say that it was putting a gloss on what was essentially picking the ideas you wanted — by using what one regular writer for this journal used to call 'censorship through proliferation'.

Written evidence comes entirely from 27 reports by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) and 4 reports by International Trends in Curriculum and Assessment frameworks (INCA — funded by QCA).

Also to be found in Annex B is a list of the members of the Advisory Group and of the Editorial Expert Group.

The Advisory Group 'of leading head teachers and some system leaders' (chaired by Jim Rose) includes some government, local authority and university representation, as well as a 'Gifted and Talented Champion', but none from trade unions.

The Editorial Expert Group, 'formed to assist QCA with the drafting of the programmes of learning', mainly has representation from subject interest organizations, local authorities and government.

To quote Professor Colin Richards again:

'It can scarcely be independent since it has been set up by the government's primary “fixer”; it is staffed by government-paid officers; it is published by a government-inspired brief; and it contains no direct or indirect challenge to any current government policies. To use an analogy from the recent past it has all the hallmarks of a report from a Zimbabwean electoral commission set up by Mugabe. Its report is essentially self-serving.'10

Those subversive Cambridge people
Compare the approach of the Rose report with the opening words of the Robin Alexander, director of the Cambridge Primary Review11 (CPR) in his article in the Times Educational Supplement (TES):

'There's little point in reviewing the primary curriculum unless one asks what it is for. Start from first principles. Take a fresh look at the world in which today's children are growing up. Look again at their lives and needs. Treat no practice or policy as sacrosanct.

'A curriculum review which does not do these things tinkers at the margins. It re-shuffles rather than reviews. Worse, while it may provide the stability that teachers understandably crave, it entrenches for yet another decade what is wrong with the current curriculum as well as what is right. Adding aims after the event, as in 1988 and 1998, merely ensures that aims march cosmetically in one direction while the curriculum slinks pragmatically in another.

'The Cambridge Primary Review has brought forward its proposals on the curriculum to contribute to the debate about the government's Rose Review. Yet Towards a New Primary Curriculum is no mere knee-jerk reaction to Rose. It is part of a three-year enquiry into primary education as a whole, the most comprehensive for 40 years. It draws on its own considerable evidence, provides its own analysis, proposes its own solutions, and above all keeps in view that basic question: what is primary education for? Rose says that the problem is 'quarts-into-pint-pots': finding ways to cram 14 subjects into a finite week or year. We say that this is a problem only if we assume, in the absence of clarity about aims, that we must continue to teach, albeit repackaged, the unargued accretion of decades without genuine reform.'12

Behind the CPR, which was launched in October 2006, lies good, solid research into the issues surrounding primary education, conducted in the very best of academic traditions. The series of interim reports that resulted were mostly 'comprehensive surveys of published research and other evidence which we have commissioned from our 70 research consultants in 22 universities.'13

The CPR also made 'community soundings' through 87 meetings. In fact, the evidence base for the CPR is of a totally different order from that of the Rose report:

'The evidence base of the Cambridge Review is extensive: 820 written submissions, many of them from major national organisations; reports on 87 regional and 9 national soundings sessions and over 140 other meetings; and 28 surveys of published research commissioned from leading academics and drawing on nearly 3000 published sources. In much of this evidence the curriculum had a high profile.'14

The CPR interim reports produced a predictably antagonistic response from the government, which then put its own views forward in the Rose report. This response to the CPR is hardly likely to be positive in, even if one just looks at what Robin Alexander has to say about Children's well being:

'On the basis of our regional community soundings, supported by many of the written submissions to the Review and some of the research surveys, we have reported a widespread concern that many primary-aged children are under excessive pressure: inside school from an overcrowded curriculum, a high-stakes national testing regime and the backwash of teachers' anxiety about league tables, inspection and the public and somewhat punitive character of school accountability; outside school from the degrading of children's values and aspirations by consumerism, the cult of celebrity and pressure to grow up, or indeed adopt the trappings of adolescence, too soon.'15

One of the most disingenuous acts on the part of Rose is to seize on Alexander's point of the 'overcrowded curriculum', and to use it to reinforce the government's approach. The fact is that the CPR is approaching the whole question of primary education from a totally different standpoint.

Central to this is the concept of 'domains'. Rose uses 'areas of learning' instead of 'subjects', but the reality is that this is just one more example of obfuscation as there is no basic pedagogical difference in operation. My first response to Alexander's use of 'domains' was one of scepticism towards the use of just one more word to describe the same thing. But nothing could be further from the truth. The essential difference, as expressed by Alexander, is that

'The aims interlock with eight “domains” . . . The damaging division between core and non-core disappears, for though time allocations will of course vary, all eight domains are essential and all must therefore be taught to the highest standard. A domain, incidentally, is a professional concept' to be translated by schools and not necessarily timetabled as it stands'.

This concept can then do away with the idea that things are taught in fixed timetabled chunks. Seen in this light, the CPR might have been able to lead us forward to an exciting primary curriculum founded on, and in its turn encouraging, the best of primary practice from the past whilst not permitting a return to the 'ad hoc' arrangements (not dinosaurs again!) that could be rightly criticized.

But no, the government is totally entrenched in its ways. Ways that have no educational worth. If it were just New Labour's SS Education that were to sink, we could raise a hearty cheer for the Cambridge iceberg. The trouble is that the damage done by New Labour's own Iron Maiden on its far from maiden voyage is truly horrendous, and the ones to suffer most are, as ever, the most vulnerable, to be dragged down with it. The vessel needs rebuilding, and fast.

By the way, how is SS Economy doing?

Andy Dyer

1. Press Release
2. Independent Review of the Primary Curriculum: Final Report dcsf. Available as a download at above website.
3. Ibid Annex B (pages 142–145)
4. Education Journal issue 115, February 2009.
4. TES 20 February 2009.
5. Rose Report p.21.
6. Press release, see note 1.
7. Rose Report p.21.
8. "The Russell Group is a collaboration of twenty UK universities that receive two-thirds of research grant and contract funding in the United Kingdom. It was established in 1994 to represent their interests to the government, Parliament and other similar bodies. It is sometimes referred to as the British equivalent of the Ivy League of the United States. The Russell Group contains many of the United Kingdom's leading universities with 18 of its 20 members in the top 20 in terms of research funding." (Wikipedia)
9. "For 20 years, Sir Cyril had the absolute confidence of three prime ministers: Thatcher, Major and Blair. He was therefore listened to closely by all their education secretaries, from Kenneth Baker in 1987 all the way through to Alan Johnson in 2007. All these education secretaries made him their adviser on specialist schools, and he had the ear of all of them whenever he required it." (Francis Beckett in The Guardian 24.12.07 — on Taylor's sacking from the Chair of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust).
10. See note 4.
11. All CPR documents referred to can be viewed/downloaded at www.primaryreview.org.uk
12. TES 20 February 2009.
13. "The Cambridge Primary Review: Emerging Perspectives on Childhood": Keynote lecture by Robin Alexander presented at the conference on "Childhood, Well-being and Primary Education" organised by the General Teaching Council for England in conjunction with the Children's Society Good Childhood Inquiry and the Cambridge Primary Review. Central Hall, Westminster, Monday 17 March 2008. p.1. See note 8.
14. CPR Curriculum Report Briefing. See note 8.
15. As note 9.

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