The importance of school ethos

Jun 13th, 2011
by James Park .

Research on school effectiveness indicates that students’ behaviour, well-being, and relationships – and the extent to which they take advantage of the opportunities to learn and grow through education – are significantly influenced by the ethos of their schools. Schools vary dramatically on such crucial dimensions as:

  • Having warm and trusting relationships among students and staff;
  • Encouraging participation by the whole school community;
  • Supporting the autonomy and sense of responsibility of every individual;
  • Establishing, sharing, communicating, and reinforcing a coherent set of values and expectations.

The Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) strategy was developed in the UK over the past decade with an understanding of the significance of these dimensions of school ethos. Yet, the extent to which this understanding has been carried through into schools’ implementation of SEAL is variable. As we look to the future of social and emotional learning in schools, we reflect on the opportunities – and the challenges – posed by a consideration of the whole-school processes that relate to school ethos.

Both Primary and Secondary SEAL involved the development of curriculum materials to help staff create ‘learning opportunities’ to promote social and emotional skills. These materials were accompanied by guidance, additional resources, and training for staff; indeed, in the case of secondary SEAL, guidance on key principles was the central driver. Particular emphasis was placed on building a supportive school ethos, with warm personal relationships, clear boundaries based on positive behavior management, engagement of all pupils, participation at all levels, the encouragement of autonomy, and clear leadership from the top. Thus, from the outset, the guidance pointed out the importance of school ethos and whole-school engagement in the delivery of the strategy, and also recognised the potential value of SEAL work in strengthening school ethos.

Given this likely bi-directional link between school ethos and the implementation of SEAL, an understanding of variation among schools becomes absolutely critical. In fact, SEAL guidance has from the beginning emphasised the need for flexibility in schools’ approach to promoting social and emotional skills in children and young people: “The SEAL resource is built on the premise that each school or setting should find its own way into, and use for, the materials” (p. 11 of Primary SEAL guidance).

In fact, the findings of two recent investigations of SEAL published last year ( Banerjee, 2010 ; ) show exactly why attention to variations among schools is essential for probing the development of SEAL work across the UK. Across both studies, there was a clear convergence of data showing that the delivery of SEAL varied dramatically from school to school. This heterogeneity means that searching for overall conclusions about the impact of ‘being a SEAL school’ is likely to lead us to a dead end. Some schools may have started out with a strong ethos, and SEAL may have helped them to build an even stronger one within which pupils’ social and emotional skills could be effectively supported. Yet, we also know that other schools started with SEAL but found it very hard to sustain positive action to develop a coherent strategy, while others still have undertaken isolated or fragmented ‘SEAL’ activities without grasping the underlying whole-school principles that need to underpin such work.

These variations matter a great deal. The investigation reported by Banerjee (2010) last year showed that: a) pupils and staff rated their school ethos more highly where SEAL was implemented as it was intended – in a sustained way across the whole school with real leadership support, engagement of all staff, and universal provision for all pupils; and b) these patterns were correlated with key indicators of behaviour, attendance and attainment. These associations are only a starting point. More careful and systematic work is required in order to understand the complex range of factors that influence the implementation of SEAL work, and the diverse ways in which over time this has an impact on how staff and students interact with each other, as well as on the wider outcomes of behaviour, well-being, and learning.

And we should be clear that this might involve work over a long period of time. As noted above, schools have to work out their own way of implementing the principles provided by SEAL. They have to go at their own pace, build on their own history, respond to their own situation, and find effective ways of deploying their own resources. The full engagement of staff in delivering the programme has to be built up, sometimes against resistance and cynicism. So, in many schools, effects of such an evolving programme of activity, with such a potentially wide scope, may take a great deal of time to appear.

As we grapple with a whole raft of changes to our educational system, we inevitably – and rightly – scrutinize existing strategies, and look for things that work. Some people dismiss SEAL because they personally dislike the idea of taking part in such ‘lessons’, because they think those lessons don’t work, and/or because they assume that this work takes time away from the academic curriculum. Is it too risky to stick with an approach that leaves too much up to the school to decide for itself how to interpret the key principles and how to develop a whole-school approach? Should we instead be pushing for a strictly-defined set of ‘proven’ teaching resources, restricted to classroom-based scripted and manualised activities, and requiring fidelity to ‘the programme’?

In fact, these are not mutually exclusive options. In both primary and secondary phases, SEAL was never intended to just be a curriculum or collection of learning activities for teaching social and emotional skills in a set of dedicated lessons. Rather, from the beginning, SEAL was also presented as a set of key principles that provided a clear framework for action, incorporating its own materials but also allowing the flexibility to draw in other activities, resources, and programmes. And there clearly is a place for programmes that target particular needs, develop particular skills, or address particular problems. But SEAL offers the opportunity for such work to take place within a broader set of key principles and a framework that places social and emotional skills – and the relationships and values that embrace them – at the heart of the school community.

The benefits of social and emotional learning programmes cannot be said to be truly sustainable in school until the work is embedded within a supportive ethos that permeates the whole school community, rather than restricted to the knowledge and skill of particular members of staff who have been on the right training course. With this understanding, schools need to work actively to engage their staff – the resistant as well as the enthusiastic – their students, and the wider community in shaping warm relationships, providing opportunities for participation, stimulating autonomy and responsibility, and developing and communicating a shared set of values. Keeping sight of this bigger picture may be the most important platform for success in future efforts to promote pupils’ social and emotional learning.

Posted in: Schools .
Tagged: behaviour · culture · ethos · learning · programmes · relationships · Social and emotional skills · wellbeing

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Ignore the nay-sayers: commitment to enhancing relationships will lead to improved behaviour and learning

Jan 19th, 2011
by Marilyn Tew .

This autumn saw the publication of two investigations into the Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) programme.

One study showed a significant correlation between whole-school, universal implementation of SEAL, pupil/staff ratings of social and emotional ethos, and key indicators of behaviour, attendance and attainment. The other found that the programme failed to impact significantly on pupils’ social and emotional skills, general mental health difficulties, pro-social behaviour or behaviour problems.

The apparent contradiction between these two sets of results is alarming. If different research methodologies lead to wildly different results, how can one say anything meaningful about this sort of approach? If one report supports the arguments put forward by promoters of an emotionally literate approach to education, and the other supports their opponents, how we can ever escape sterile ding-dong arguments.

In reality, though, the fundamental difference between the two reports lies in the schools they were looking at.

Robin Banerjee, who is based at the University of Sussex, deliberately chose primary and secondary schools where there had been whole-school implementation of SEAL which was supervised by a SEAL Regional Adviser. These were schools that had a designated SEAL lead, one who put time, energy and resources into implementing the programme.

By contrast, the 22 secondary schools whose results were analysed by Neil Humphrey at Manchester University were often lacking in the ability to sustain interest in the programme. Many schools seem to have selected pockets of activity or development to focus on at the expense of the ‘bigger picture’. They reported difficulty sustaining the effort required to drive SEAL forward, especially in the face of competing pressures. They tended to become disillusioned when results did not come quickly.

Ultimately, then, the two reports do generate one clear message. This is that if a school takes on the development of an emotionally literate ethos as a whole-school, long-term enterprise, allocates adequate time and resources, leadership, skill and will, then the outcomes will be positive and beneficial. If, on the other hand, the approach is adopted piecemeal and without enthusiastic support from ‘the top’, the outcomes will be minimal, or even somewhat destabilizing to the ethos of the school.

For those schools that can maintain enthusiasm and energy through time, the prize is significant. Banerjee finds that strong whole-school universal ratings of SEAL implementation and better ratings of social and emotional ethos are associated with better Ofsted ratings of behaviour, lower levels of persistent absence and better Key Stage 2 SATs and GCSE results.

A striking finding is that attainment results show a direct link with ratings of how well schools integrate SEAL into learning. The report estimates that 49.8% of school-level variance in the attainment results could be accounted for by differences in the social and emotional ethos and implementation ratings. It also shows that Ofsted ratings of behaviour, pupil/staff ratings of social and emotional ethos and Regional Adviser ratings of SEAL implementation all independently predict attainment results. This shows a direct relationship between school ethos and attainment alongside an indirect connection with attainment via the link with positive behaviour.

Posted in: Schools , Uncategorized .

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Reasons for doing PROGRESS

Nov 23rd, 2010
by James Park .

The other day I heard Slough’s Director of Children’s Services, Claire Pyper, give an excellent account of why the PROGRESS Programme is so valuable for schools – without mentioning it, of course.

She was speaking at the annual gathering of the authority’s headteachers in Poole’s magnificent Sandbanks Hotel. I was last there to give a presentation on emotional literacy to Hampshire’s educational psychologists. On this occasion, my role was to answer any questions that people might have about Antidote’s display on PROGRESS; so I had to resist the temptation to jump up and down as a way of calling Claire’s attention to my presence in the room.

What headteachers have to deal with nowadays, she said, are ‘wicked problems’. You cannot take a plan down from your bookshelf, or dream one up through solitary reflection while driving home from work. That’s because ‘wicked’ problems don’t have ‘solutions’ as such. What you should be aiming to develop is a shared route through the traps and opportunities that arise.

The first step in addressing a ‘wicked’ problem, Claire said, is to come up with useful ‘open’ questions. To do that, you need to start with an accurate diagnosis of the situation you are in, and a clear sense of where you want to be heading. That will only happen if you bring together a good group of people – including those who think differently from you – to shape those open questions.

You then need to ensure that you take everyone with you; so time spent on building, maintaining and strengthening relationships is key. They ensure there is the collective and individual resilience needed to negotiate the storms that will inevitably arise. And, as you set out, you need to have a firm eye on the things that are important to you, to keep scanning the horizon for the unintended consequences of your actions and to listen to the experience of everyone in your community.

Every point that Claire made highlighted another aspect of what PROGRESS facilitates. Unfortunately, the headteachers in the room were too busy discussing the challenges they face to spend much time at the Antidote stall.

Still, I left Dorset more than ever committed to ensuring that one day they and others will discover how PROGRESS can help them provide young people with the best possible opportunities to learn and grow.

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Will PROGRESS happen in Central Europe?

Nov 22nd, 2010
by James Park .

This weekend I attended a conference in Brasov, Rumania, to talk about PROGRESS and explore its potential value for educators in that country.

The event was billed as an opportunity to look at ways of preventing violence in schools. This is not, of course, how we bill PROGRESS. We do, though, recognise  that giving people a democratic voice is the best way of defusing aggression.

My preference for promoting positives rather than reducing negatives was a habit I shared with the other delegate from England, Colin Moorhouse of the Metropolitan Police, who spoke before me, about the strategies being adopted across Europe to promote ‘safer schools’.

Many came up after our joint workshop to say how much they enjoyed, valued or were excited by what we had said. But when two of them described the proceedings later in a plenary session, their repeated references to ‘preventing violence’ suggested a disconnect between what we had said and what they had heard.

I found myself wondering why violence was people’s main preoccupation here. Was it a response to a few dreadful incidents, or was violence rather an undercurrent that ran through their everyday experience of school? What links, if any, were there to the violence of the Ceasescu era that ended in 1989, or their more recent exposure to batterings from the market economy?

A researcher from the Institute of Educational Sciences in Bucharest observed that many aspects of how schools are organized can stimulate aggressive feelings and actions. Another speaker talked about how teachers themselves provoke violent acts by their own aggression, and it was tempting to wonder how much aggression on the part teachers derived from the lack of status reflected in their already miserable salaries, which have recently been cut.

But, given the theme of the conference, it was intriguing that almost the only reference to actual violence came from a local gendarme as he described the shocking behaviour of Liverpool football fans on a recent visit to Bucharest. It felt as if the real issues around violence in Rumanian schools were too raw for anyone to properly address them.  ‘We don’t have a problem with violence here’, said the Principal of a High School we visited before the conference. ‘Our interest in the subject is purely preventative.’ I found myself wondering why he could not be more honest.

In the space between the sessions, I talked to teachers about the extreme pressures on young people that come from their being regularly graded by their teachers, both on academic performance and behaviour. A consistent low grade on the latter apparently rules out a job in the police or the military – a strangely self-defeating rule.

The teachers in our workshop were intrigued to hear that our comprehensive system means students with widely different abilities are educated in the same place. How did teachers manage a class? they asked. What did a typical lesson look like? In Rumania, students are segregated on the basis of their grade performance over three years.

Like teachers in France, Romanians are very focused on their subject specialisms. The Chief Inspector for Brasov said it was difficult to develop a curriculum that felt relevant to students, because teachers prefer sticking to the subjects they know, not finding out what and how they students want to learn. Those trained during the dictatorship find it particularly difficult to embrace notions around student voice and interactive forms of pedagogy.

Another intriguing discovery was that headteacher in Rumania have very little scope to develop a team of teachers; jobs are assigned through a complex points system, and headships are generally political appointments. But someone remarked that heads did have freedom, it’s just that they are not generally disposed to use it.

Some insight into their key preoccupations can be gleaned from the questions they hoped that Colin and I could help them answer:

  • What aspects of the British system would you recommend for Romania?
  • What are the most important motivations for teachers?
  • How can we impress on politicians the impact that teachers have society?
  • What do teachers in England do to recharge their energy?
  • How long does it take for teachers participating in Antidote’s PROGRESS Programme to have a positive attitude to collaborating with each other?
  • How can you persuade headteachers to admit there is a violence problem in their schools?
  • What has the most powerful impact – work between children, or work between children and adults?

As the conference went on, I became increasingly convinced that PROGRESS had a great deal to contribute in Romanian schools, but less clear about where it might find a foothold. Then, at the final lunch of the conference, the person responsible for inviting me suggested he might ask schools in his own region of TImisoara if they were interested in  trying out PROGRESS. When he saw how enthusiastic I was, he said he could also propose it also to schools in Hungary, Serbia, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

So watch this space to see if PROGRESS finds a foothold in Central Europe.

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How the PROGRESS Programme can help Michael Gove deliver better schools

Nov 9th, 2010
by James Park .

Every Teacher Matters , the latest report from centre-right think-tank Reform, is not a statement of government policy. However, its thinking feels sufficiently aligned with Michael Gove’s to make the exercise of spotting its non-sequiturs as good a way as any of identifying where the learning from Antidote’s PROGRESS Programme might assist the current regime.

We wholeheartedly agree with the report’s central message – that teaching improves when teachers have the freedom to learn from and with each other. The statement that ‘the schools that are most successful have an open culture’ could have come from marketing material for the PROGRESS Programme, as could its recognition of culture’s role in determining whether teachers are as good as they can be.

To us, though, the idea that an ‘open culture’ can most usefully be defined as one where senior leaders are ‘always informally popping into classrooms’ is almost as bizarre as thinking that the best way to improve a school’s culture is by putting a few teachers through capability proceedings: what Antidote has developed is a way of engaging the whole school community in a positive conversation, informed by data, that leads to teaching and learning becoming as good as they can be.

Even odder is the report’s argument that the best way to ‘strengthen the accountability of schools’ is by ‘stripping back the accountability regime’ and removing all restrictions on the setting up of free schools. This is where ideology fills the space created by the absence of any evidence. As the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) showed only last week, the biggest impact of parental choice is to boost ‘traditional’ teaching and expenditure on marketing.

Antidote’s argument in Freeing Schools: Shaping the Big Society is that the real ‘consumers’ of education are students: it is their choices, not those of their parents, that need to impact upon teaching in the classroom. The Reform report, though, never once alludes to the work that has gone on over the past 15 years to develop student voice as a way of informing even better teaching.

The enthusiasm for ‘full deregulation’ leads to another blindspot. After having hacked away at the ‘central bureaucratic apparatus’ so as to put the improvement of teaching totally in the hands of headteachers, no opportunities remain for external agencies to disseminate good practice or facilitate creative thinking.

And while the report talks about ‘stripping down’ Ofsted, it proposes that we leave in its hands responsibility for monitoring teacher quality, thus failing to recognise that  school inspections carried out with reference to one agency’s idea of what a ‘good lesson’ looks like are currently the biggest constraint on the freedom of those teachers the authors say they seek to liberate.

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Can we persuade Gove to back Philosophy

Nov 6th, 2010
by James Park .

I went to a meeting this week to talk about my friend Roger Sutcliffe’s idea of creating a curriculum subject called Personal and Social Philosophy (PSP) to replace Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE). The more I think about it, the cleverer I think this is as a strategy for incorporating this subject area at the heart of the curriculum. These are my six reasons why.

1. It would transform something that looks new-fangled into something that has its roots in the oldest traditions of education, as witness the fact that it was studied by the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition at university.

2. It might help to calm those who fill the postbags of MPs with their fears that the PSHE is an opportunity to encourage sexual freedom, drug abuse and licentiousness by making it easier to present the subject as being about the conditions for human flourishing, living the ‘good life’, realising our positive potential.

3. Any government that was serious about creating a ‘Big Society’ would want to provide opportunities for children and young people to think deeply about themselves, their relationships to others and the responsibilities they have to their various communities, and to do so in ways that might lead to changes in their position achieved through discussion and dialogue.

4. Even more than history and geography, philosophy is an activity that students engage in. While it might be possible to reduce the subject to facts (bullet-pointed lists of the big philosophers’ big ideas), that’s a pretty silly way of doing things when Roger and his colleagues at SAPERE have shown with Philosophy for Children (P4C) how powerful it can be to get children as young as four ‘doing philosophy’.

5. The study of philosophy invites students to draw on all their knowledge, opening the door not only to cross-curricular thinking but also to exploring what it means to think, learn and know. And even ministers who fret about students being diverted into such activities rather than acquiring ‘knowledge’, (by which they mean facts) might be willing to allocate some sequestrated time to a topic with such a venerable tradition.

6. If there was any doubt in ministers’ minds about the value of children doing philosophy, it should not be hard to persuade them by taking them along to witness a Year 4 class in action, and then giving them an opportunity to take part in a session themselves. It might take a while for a hard-bitten political combatant to enter the sort of reflective, dialogic space that makes a philosophy session work well, but that would be part of the learning in itself.

So, if anybody has any ideas about how to persuade Michael Gove, Nick Gibb and Sara Teather to take part in a philosophy for children session – anytime, any place – I am more than happy to arrange it.

Posted in: Politics and policy .
Tagged: Curriculum · Philosophy · PSHE

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Moving beyond disappointment with secondary SEAL

Nov 1st, 2010
by James Park .

Everyone who recognises the importance of ensuring that children and young people are motivated to learn and able to work collaboratively with others will be disappointed to discover that evaluation of the secondary Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning Programme (SEAL) indicates ‘completely null quantitative findings’ of impact on pupils’ social and emotional skills, general mental health difficulties, pro-social behaviour or behaviour problems.

Clearly, this result will delight those who dismiss the importance of what they call ‘therapeutic education’, and will make it yet more difficult to persuade government ministers who are anyway more inclined to see teachers as transmitters of knowledge than as facilitators of learning to allow scarce time and money to go into developing  social and emotional learning.

There is some comfort to be found in the researchers’ insistence that ‘the findings of this evaluation in no way undermine the promotion of social and emotional learning.’ ‘There is clear evidence’, they say, ‘that social and emotional learning programmes can impact upon a variety of key outcomes for children and young people. However, as delivered by the schools involved in our evaluation, the SEAL programme did not follow this trend.’

The report argues that SEAL provided schools with too loose a framework for generating the change it sought to bring about. Teachers tended to focus on particular groups of students, rather than on addressing the ‘bigger picture’. Initial bursts of enthusiasm tended to wither under the weight of other curriculum pressures. Pockets of resistance among teachers were not addressed, and insufficient resources were available for training and development. For each school, SEAL was what they decided it should be, rather than evidence-based practice.

The authors of the report suggest that the way for schools to go is towards more structured programmes like PATHS and Second Step. These provide teachers with a ‘coherent, structured and explicit model to follow from the outset in order to maximize outcomes.’ It was the prescriptive nature of these US programme that led to the last government’s decision to develop SEAL, rather than simply recommending their implementation across UK schools.  There was a feeling that, even with substantial adaptation, they would not be owned by teachers, and therefore that any impact they achieved would not be sustainable.

Antidote’s approach is to provide in the PROGRESS Programme a structured and sustained way of addressing the cultural issues that the report attests got in the way of SEAL being implemented successfully. It recognizes that staff and students do need to be going in the same direction, working together to create an ethos that allows emotional understanding to grow in a way that contributes to improved attainment.

Our experience is that it is much harder in secondaries than in primaries to bring about the sort of shift that leads to a more learning-friendly culture. There tends to be more resistance to hearing what students and staff have to say; more fundamental disagreements across the staff body that have to be addressed; more hard messages for staff and students that need to be delivered and negotiated.

Given these difficulties, it is perhaps no surprise that secondary SEAL does not seem to have succeeded quite in the way primary SEAL did.  But the fact that bringing about culture change is hard, does not mean we should give up attempting it.

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Keeping schools at arm’s length, with one foot on their throat

Oct 27th, 2010
by James Park .

As I follow the latest news coming out of the Department for Education (DfE), and scan the occasional speech by Michael Gove or one of his junior ministers, I find myself wondering what ministers think is the chain of causation that will lead from their strategies to an improved education system. While I understand that, in reality, there’s actually nothing rational or logical about the policy-making process, I feel there must be some story that ministers and civil servants tell themselves to explain the course on which they are embarked.

As readers of our latest report, Freeing Schools: Shaping the Big Society , will know, Antidote agrees that teachers and headteachers need the freedom to innovate if they are to respond effectively to the learning needs of their students. We agree too that the endless flow of initiatives from the last government tended to constrict that freedom.

So we appreciate the enthusiasm for freeing schools from ‘bureaucratic’ burdens and prescriptive requirements, even where the rush to ‘scrap’ the new primary curriculum and ‘abolish’ the self-evaluation form (the SEF – never meant to be anything other than a resource which headteachers could use or not, as they saw fit) suggests a stronger desire to prescribe what is okay, and what is not, than the rhetoric otherwise suggests.

The argument for ‘freeing’ schools from local authority control was clearly overstated by ministers: only Tory MPs who haven’t engaged with the reality on the ground could talk about schools finding themselves in an LA ‘straitjacket’. However, I can see there’s something to be said for giving schools the freedom to go wherever they like for advice, support and services – even if that does weaken the power of local authorities to bring about school improvement. (I also accept that Antidote’s position on this issue is not entirely disinterested.)

The idea behind Free Schools is, as I understand it, that being given carte blanche to do anything and try anything – unqualified teachers, compulsory Latin or whatever else – will lead to innovations that are so successful they trickle through into the mainstream, and that the success of the new schools creates competition that will galvanize everyone else’s performance.

In a way, the intention of this government is little different from that of the last when it set up Education Action Zones and the Children’s Fund, saying, ‘here’s some money to try out some new ideas in your area and see if they work’. The problem for Labour was not only that a lot of things actually didn’t work, but that there was no obvious mechanism for rolling out what did . I cannot see how it is going to be different this time: some free schools (and academies) will be good, some will be bad; many of their innovations will be idiosyncratic and their impact dependent on contingent factors. In the area where my daughter goes to school, there are already Jewish, Islamic, Christian and low-budget private alternatives on offer; and I don’t think anything they are doing either has an impact on her large maintained primary or affects my decision to keep her there.

What then of the traditionalist agenda, the call for a return to a knowledge-based curriculum, ‘strong’ discipline and teachers in suits? What happens if this is something more than rhetoric tossed out for the party’s base; that the next move is a requirement for teachers to abandon their interest in motivating young people to learn, to stop building relationships that enable their students to feel valued and cared for and to wear clothes that are entirely inappropriate to supervising a PE lesson? The answer, of course, is that the inconsistencies of the government’s position will become glaringly apparent to everyone, as was memorably suggested by the civil servant who was quoted in the Financial Times as saying that Michael Gove’s policy was to keep schools ‘at arm’s length, with one foot on their throats’.

Many people have already asked why, if ‘freedom’ is so valuable, it is only being offered to new establishments or those that chose conversion to academies. It was, after all, the policy of the liberal democrat part of the coalition to extend academy-style freedoms to all schools. And I do wonder how much passion is going to go into the development of a National Curriculum, when the government is trying to free as many schools as possible from its yoke. If it is not intended as a minimum requirement for all schools, then what’s the point of having it in the first place?

The impression I’m left with is of a government going in two directions at the same time, giving astonishing levels of freedom to one set of schools, tightening controls on the rest. It looks like a big social experiment – comparing schools with too much freedom to schools with too little – and the government’s own arguments seem to indicate this cannot work. This is the bit I really cannot work out. Can anyone out there tell me why it might work?

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So schools are OK – what about the rest?

Oct 22nd, 2010
by Anna Brydges .

The government has announced in its Spending Review that the schools budget will rise from 35bn to 39bn over the four-year period, meaning an annual 0.1% rise in real terms. There will be change – funding that has previously come in separate streams (such as that for specialist schools, extended schools, and ethnic minority pupils) will be merged, which, along with the pupil premium, means a shake-up of the way funding is allocated to individual schools. Andy Burnham worries that this will see “huge winners and losers”. Maybe, but it seems too early to tell if this is justified, and given the drastic cuts seen elsewhere, on the surface, schools seem to have come out pretty well.

Thankfully, Sure Start is also safe. Funding is frozen for four years, meaning a decrease in real terms, and local authority ringfencing has been removed, so there will be challenges. But again, compared to other areas, Sure Start is lucky. Whilst Children’s Centres will be able to continue performing their valuable community-focused role, and providing targeted intervention for the most deprived, however, how will older children fare when it comes to these areas?

The DfE’s non-schools budget will be cut by 12% over four years. This means that vulnerable children are likely to miss out on essential support services. Then there are the swingeing cuts to local authority budgets. Schools rely heavily on the support they get from local authorities for all sorts of services, as John Chowcat recognises in Children and Young People Now’s expert panel response to the Spending Review . Scratch the surface, then, and maybe schools aren’t so lucky.

It looks like the government is to drop community cohesion from Ofsted’s agenda – a confusing message from the proponents of the Big Society. All those inspection-sceptics out there may well say that the tick-box approach was good for nothing anyway, but the shift in rhetoric is significant. We are in danger of schools moving back to being simply about the three Rs, with external provision of the other stuff shrinking too. Schools should be places where those who need it are fully supported, and where all young people get a rounded education and learn the valuable skills they will need for the world outside. This is especially important for the generation that will bear the brunt of the financial mess we’re in. A message to ministers – don’t let the good start made by Sure Start fade away.

Posted in: Politics and policy , Schools .

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Experimentation allowed only if success 100% guaranteed

Oct 18th, 2010
by James Park .

Writing about the pupil premium in today’s Financial Times , David Laws says that the coalition government should ensure that schools are ‘free to experiment’ in how the money is used. However, if they do not use the money in ways that ‘improve pupil performance’, they might be required to ‘use tried and tested pedagogical techniques.’

This is very similar to the line put forward by the Schools Minister Nick Gibb when he was asked during the debate on the 2010 Academies Bill how he reconciled his belief in synthetic phonics to his desire to give schools freedom to tailor the curriculum to the needs of students:

“We believe that schools should use best practice and we will not countenance schools that use methods that do not result in young people being able to read early in their school careers……There might well be other methods that … could be even more effective than systematic synthetic phonics. I would like to see what they are, but we cannot rule out teachers being innovative and using such methods, if that results in children learning to read sooner and more effectively.”

I wonder if ministers and would-be ministers recognise how constrained is the vision of freedom they are putting forward, and how unlikely it is to lead to the growth in the sort of innovative practice that will deliver the longed-for improvement in results.

You can see how they end up in this conceptual pickle. In reality, everyone knows you cannot have experimentation without failure. However, contemplating that the government might channel money to schools so that they can do things which do not result in a performance boost is clearly difficult. So schools are free to experiment as long as the experiment is successful and quick. If it is not, then they must go back to the ‘tried and tested’ or ‘’best practice’.

But if ministers already know what works, independently of the situation in which it is applied, then surely there is no need for experimentation in the first place.  If you want schools to take risks trying out new ideas, then you have to accept that some will stumble, and you have to communicate that this is okay.

Ultimately, the only way out is for ministers to set up an accountability system that takes an interest in why schools do the things they do and says that, if they can justify what they have done and say what they have learned from it, then the fact that it was not successful is unfortunate, but not something that will be used to judge them.

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