Sal Riordan – Little Boxes

Increase of the Progress 8 gap in England since COVID-19

Unsurprisingly, P8 gaps have increased between 2019 and 2022. We anticipated that before last week’s results were released by the Department for Education. What is interesting to interrogate the data release is: just how much is the increase, and is it uniform across schools?

How much has it increased by? Quite a lot. The P8 gap (whether measured at school level or nationally) has increased by 25% since 2019 and is the largest gap since the P8 measure was introduced in 2016. Because of changes to measures, it is more difficult to compare further back but the indications are that COVID-19 has eroded the gains narrowing attainment gaps in secondary schools that have been made since the introduction of the pupil premium in 2010.

Is the increase uniform across schools? Not at all. It is not the case that schools in general have seen the same gap increase since 2019. The 2019 gap data is actually a very poor predictor of schools’ attainment gaps in 2022…

Why ‘quality first teaching’ won’t necessarily work for children living in poverty.

There’s a common idea in schools that the best way to get kids who are living in poverty on track academically is simply to teach them better. Sometimes we over-complicate things in schools. But in this case, we’re over-simplifying them. It is obviously a good thing (although not easy) to improve teaching in a school. But it is not obviously going to reduce the attainment gap between kids who are eligible for free school meals and those who are not. Here’s why not….

Post Corona, New Ofsted?

Time for Ofsted to reinvent itself? #PCNO

The peculiarities of randomised controlled trials in education

For as long as anyone can remember, there have been calls in educational research to do more randomised controlled trials. The RCT is often heralded as the gold standard for the field. One reason for this is that educationalists believe that the rise of RCT methodology (beginning in force in the 1940s) is what created modern medicine, a far more successful discipline than education has ever been. It is obvious enough what potential RCTs have for education. They are underused and we lack the resources and and expertise in education to put that right quickly. I am all for RCTs. But there are deep differences between the application of RCTs in medicine and education that means that this isn’t the fix that will finally modernise education or bring it in line with other more ‘scientific’ endeavours. Education is a speciality all of its own. Here are four big reasons why RCTs are different in education than elsewhere…

Flowchart of the Phases of a Randomised Controlled Trial.
Adapted by PrevMedFellow from CONSORT 2010. CC BY-SA 3.0

Give pupil premium funds directly to the families of students

What should we do, to improve the educational outcomes of children who live in poverty? The question faces every headteacher of England’s state schools and plays on the mind of many school leaders and teachers alike. Coming to the end of a large study into the use of pupil premium funds, I’ve come to see how difficult and even bizarre it is to want to equalise the qualifications of children from the poorest homes in England with those of the richest. It sounds like a moral and just aim, but it is conceptually broken and messy. We’re running to fix something we don’t understand, like paying for a barber-surgeon to take away a tumour with leeches.

Dying because our leaders don’t understand how science works

At the government’s daily press briefing about COVID-19 on the 11th April, the government’s spokesperson, Priti Patel, repeated the mantra first put forward by Boris Johnson, and repeated ad nauseam by ministers since: “We are following,” she said, “the expert scientific and medical advice and taking the right steps at the right moment in time.” Patel was careful with her emphasis. The right steps. At the right moment in time. How does she know? The science says. It’s a bit like that game of Simon says… If Science says so, we do it.

Priti Patel, UK Government Press Briefing, 11 April 2020.

What Patel does not understand, or is not acknowledging, is that Science doesn’t speak to us like that. There is no single guiding voice, providing us with ‘the evidence’, making it clear what we should do and when. Doing-the-right-thing-at-the-right-time is little more than a political slogan, a ditty for us to sing as we merrily dig our graves. The message may provide some comfort—we all want to feel that the government is in control—but it is a false comfort at best. It is not a sign of good judgement and wise decision-making. It hides the details that we so desperately need to debate. It reveals a failure of our society to place the right people in the right positions, a failure of our education system above all else. We don’t need a government which can meekly defer to a scientist standing on the side to answer the difficult questions, but one that understands how to incorporate scientific evidence into policy making. This is not a matter of doing what The Science says. We are lacking leaders with a scientific attitude and an understanding of how science works. Why?

What secondary teachers should know about what it’s like to be a pupil premium student in England in 2020

This post is based on ongoing research in 32 secondary schools across England. So far we’ve talked to over 100 students, and we’re learning more all the time about what it’s like to be on the other end of schools’ pupil premium policies. Here’s a few things we’ve found so far…

1/ Even small sums of money are very meaningful to some families. It matters to get the three pounds back for the materials for the tech lesson.

A ‘knowledge-rich curriculum’ can mean so many things…

If the space in this room represented all the useful, interesting, well-evidenced knowledge we’ve accumulated in human history, each piece wrapped up into a tiny, tiny pinpoint, the disciplinary knowledge we teach in schools would fit into the space of your little finger. How do we know this is the vital bit to teach our kids?

In the 1980s, education in England took a turn away from rote-learning and memorisation: the O-level was replaced with the General Certificate of Secondary Education. The point was to make the qualification accessible to all, there being a general feeling in the air that rote-learning and memorisation didn’t deserve the importance that O-levels attached to them. The new qualification would include coursework and would attempt, as best it could, to assess skills.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, England took a turn away from coursework and skills assessment. The GCSE was to be made more rigorous and to mark the change it was rebranded with a new grading system. There was a general feeling in the air that the qualification had become too easy, that coursework grades could be manipulated and were all too often meaningless.

Call for a New GCSE in Comparative Languages

Ofsted has a very narrow view of what counts as a broad and balanced curriculum. We need more GCSEs to combat this. How about we start with comparative languages?

I have had the honour of visiting many schools up and down the country in the last few months. One of the common features of these visits is the challenge I’m hearing about facing modern foreign language teachers: how to engage young people in languages? In South-East Cambridgeshire: “The children here aren’t interested in French”. In Gloucestershire: “We had such resistance when we made a language compulsory for the highest attainers, now we’re just sending a strongly-worded letter to suggest they choose it.” In Lincolnshire: “We don’t make all students do two languages now, it was better to let them drop it.”

The SAT Suffocation on Secondary Schooling

Year 6 SAT results have a long-term impact on children throughout their secondary school career, most especially during their GCSE years. Decisions about who gets extra support and who takes higher-level papers will be unwittingly determined according to tests done in primary school.