University faculties and departments of education… too small, isolated, underfunded, prone to fads, and ineffective at driving forward education strategy in the U.K.
It was a Labour government, empowered by socialist ideals, that significantly reduced grammar-school education in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is a Conservative government, striving to meet the demands of middle-class families, that is now reversing this long-standing decision. So the pendulum swings once more, from non-selective to selective schooling… from more coursework to more exams, from less setting to more setting, from separating students with special needs to including them in mainstream schools… Teachers who grow old in the system get used to the state of things returning to a time gone by, before the first grey hairs had appeared and the wrinkles set in.
What is particularly frustrating is that the pendulum isn’t much governed by evidence, but by argument, conviction and intuition. There is also a stubborn naturalness to the swing: any prolonged time spent in one position will accentuate its disadvantages (“There’s too much cheating with coursework!”) and the arguments for the other side will grow louder. As a nation, we’ve been taught only too well how to argue any position—generations of English teachers have been telling children it doesn’t matter which position they take, only how they argue for it. “There’s no right answer!”
In education, there often is a better answer, albeit unavoidably black-cloaked in our ignorance. There are social, economic and cultural effects of grammar schools, special schools, setting and streaming, coursework or examinations. What kind of society we create depends on the choices we make. We won’t agree perfectly on what this society should look like, but we will achieve a bigger consensus on the larger questions of equality, harmony, crime, opportunity, happiness, health and justice than we would on the smaller questions of whether or not, for example, to segregate school children. As good as we are at arguing for our position and even recognising another’s right to theirs, we need to get better at focusing on translating the choice before us into the bigger picture.
In the case of grammar schools, it seems reasonable to make the link between the smaller question and a larger worldview of society by fixing our sight on the average progress of all students—and then paying particular attention to disadvantaged students—within grammar systems and without. The reduction of the problem to a question of this nature determines our priorities. Having agreed that the advantages gained by grammar-schooled students should at least outweigh the disadvantages of those in secondary moderns, for example, the fact that grammar schools are good for some is now no longer an argument that can be used to prop them up.
There is, in fact, an emerging consensus within the education sector that grammar schools have little effect on overall student progress and create advantages for children from higher socio-economic groups at the expense of those from lower groups. Sadly, it is still merely an emerging consensus, because no establishment has been given the responsibility to conduct high-quality, large-scale research and communicate its conclusions carefully and widely. It is extraordinary, given that we have had decades in which to compare the effects of grammar-school counties with non-grammar counties that the general and even educated public don’t have a firmer hold on the facts. It’s ridiculous, for example, that many of us believe that grammar schools improve social mobility—that, after all, has a ring of truth about it—despite the evidence showing this is not the case. Our collective knowledge of the grammar-school question is yet better than of most others: the data is less clear regarding the table-setting of reception students, the segregation of the sexes for progress in STEM subjects, the effects of the ratio of coursework to examinations,… Despite the majority of secondary schools practising setting of Y7 students in English, Maths and Science, we know, collectively, very little of the effect of this.
So much of education research is piecemeal: studies are small in their size and their questions and they are not driven or integrated into government educational strategy. A paper examining whether a child’s anxiety could be reduced by a mindfulness activity is a typical example of work from The Journal of Education Research. The majority of postgraduate students in university education departments, after all, are training to be teachers. Furthermore, the model of what research is—a “paper” authored by a very small group of people—has been handed to education via the social sciences that ultimately traces back to Victorian dissertation on Greek literature, now complete with tables of data collected via quasi-scientific methods and wrung through with statistics and obvious commentaries. Educational think tanks exist to plug the gap, but their reach is hopelessly small compared with the task before us, to create an education system that generates happiness, confidence, worthwhileness and fulfilment for all of us.
The field of education research doesn’t even have a proper name in English. The person conducting research in physics in a faculty of physics is a physicist. But the person conducting research in education at the faculty of education is… nothing more than a researcher in education. The field is frequently forgotten from lists of the social sciences, as happens in the concluding chapter of Thomas Piketty’s great work. The field of medicine faces a similar lexical challenge, but it does so from a position of much greater prestige and, most importantly, with a much stronger link (albeit one that could of course be improved further) between the practice of doctors and medical research.
Back in 1998, Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam lamented the lack of political and strategic focus—in the US and elsewhere—on what happens inside the classroom.
Certain inputs from the outside ‐‐ pupils, teachers, other resources, management rules and requirements, parental anxieties, standards, tests with high stakes, and so on ‐‐ are fed into the box. Some outputs are supposed to follow: pupils who are more knowledgeable and competent, better test results, teachers who are reasonably satisfied, and so on. But what is happening inside the box?
There has been a flurry of activity in the UK on seeing inside “the black box” since then. Teachers are encouraged to conduct classroom research as part of their training and later as part of their ongoing professional development. As brilliant and as instructive as this may be, for a teacher to figure out what works for them, it doesn’t tell us whether setting Year 7s is good for society or not.
Black and Wiliam’s insightfulness directed attention to where it was needed, but it also created an image of what educational research is that reduces it to a professional’s preference. There is another avenue in which attention—money, skills, wisdom and energy—is needed. Society needs to damn well find out the answers to the bigger questions and in this way prevent government from supplying their own preferred doctrines as they like it.