Examination of Witnesses (Questions 500-519)
MICK WATERS,
TERESA BERGIN,
PROFESSOR DAVID
HARGREAVES AND
TIM OATES
17 NOVEMBER 2008
Q500 Mrs Hodgson: Yes; he said
nurture the unique talents of every single pupil. I think that
the use of personalised learning is valid, and we can still benefit
from talking about it. It is a shame if it is starting to be dropped
in the language used in some of the stuff going out. My specific
question is: what are the prospects for and do you have any examples
of innovative practice of personalised learning in our schools
at present?
Chairman: Who is the expert on that?
Mick? What were you chuntering about then? You are being very
naughty today.
Mick Waters: Am I? I am just taking
a more personalised approach.
Chairman: You were talking when the teacher
was talking. You seemed to go off a bit when you heard the words
"David Miliband".
Mick Waters: What I said was that,
when I gave my definition, I said that it was the one that was
originally used, and it was the one that David Miliband originally
used. So when Sharon said it sounded like David Miliband, I simply
said that it was.
Q501 Chairman: Which phrase was
that?
Mick Waters: The idea that personalisation
is the link between achievement and social circumstances to create
equity within the system and drive every youngster to their better
potential.
Chairman: So now we have cleared that
up, you can answer Sharon's question.
Mick Waters: As for examples,
since I do not use the word often—as little as possible—I
will just point you to somewhere. I will say two things: first,
we were earlier talking about the danger of the collective noun
"children"—all children. Whenever people talk
to me about all children, I say, "Would that be the asylum
seekers, the refugees, the newly-arrived, those with English as
an additional language, the disabled, the gifted and talented,
those with special needs, the Travellers, the looked-after, the
pregnant, the self-harmers"—and you can just keep going
like that for ages. When you start looking at diversity like that
and realise that diversity lays itself on top of itself—you
can be gifted and talented and disabled and a looked-after child—the
phrase you choose first out of those three will indicate, often,
the way in which a youngster is taught and the way that learning
is offered. I think that the challenge with the curriculum is—instead
of stretching children to cover it, as I think we did in the '80s—to
say, "How do we wrap the curriculum round the child, so it
touches their learning nerves, but also so that, a bit like bubble-wrap,
when they fall over it makes them bounce up again, so they do
not drop out of history, languages or arts? We keep believing
that they are going to succeed, and we keep showing them evidence
that they can." That means turning some of it back into what
David has developed with schools across the country in terms of
asking youngsters what progress they are making and the best way
that they can be helped. So I would take Southmoor School in Sunderland
as an example of a place where they have done a lot of work with
the students themselves, asked the students what are the 10 most
important things that make a difference to their learning, and
asked the students to grade each department on the progress their
department is making in helping learning to succeed. They are
seeing enormous steps forward in the outlook of the youngsters,
the outlook of the teachers and the progress children are making
across subjects. It is not about how we can tailor it, in the
sense of cutting it to meet every child's preference, but how
we can help them all to make the most progress possible across
the broad range of working. It is not just about the curriculum,
as we were saying earlier, but about many aspects of school coming
together. So I have got a lot of examples like the one that I
have just given where you can see a really disciplined innovation.
Innovation is one thing, but it has got to be disciplined, thought
through and measured. Places like Southmoor School in Sunderland
are making progress, because they look at what youngsters think
will help them to learn, negotiate with youngsters and help them
to move forward in a structured and disciplined way.
Q502 Mrs Hodgson: I wonder whether
anyone else has examples.
Professor Hargreaves: These documents,
which I have helpfully brought for the Committee, are full of
them—full of case studies.
Q503 Chairman: You more or less
told us that they are not worth reading now.
Professor Hargreaves: No, I did
not say that.
Q504 Chairman: What did you say?
Professor Hargreaves: I did not
say that.
Q505 Chairman: I am totally confused
about this. This is probably the most difficult inquiry that the
Committee has undertaken since I have been the Chairman. A fog
seems to come up as soon as you chaps, or generic chaps—sorry,
characters—come to the Committee: first, it is not useful
to have personalised learning any more, although the Department
has been pushing this stuff out for years.
Professor Hargreaves: We are
saying that the language might now be much less appropriate to
describe the phenomena with which we are concerned. In 2004, when
we began, we were following the Prime Minister and David Miliband
and working with the Secondary Heads Association. So the language
in the first block is used quite a lot. As time has gone on, the
language of personalisation has tended to fade a little, as people
have become more concerned with the details that they got into.
For example, very early on, we thought that student voice was
crucial to personalisation—it was one of the nine elements.
At the end of the first series, when we worked with head teachers
and said, "Which is the most powerful way forward in personalisation?",
twice as many voted for student voice as for any other area that
we were tackling. At next week's conference, one of the central
issues will be how student voice has evolved into student leadership,
which has become a really important area. Students are given more
responsibility and are offered opportunities to lead in various
ways. We could not have predicted that in 2004. Heads began to
tell us that it was the way forward. Since 2004, huge amounts
of stuff has happened. As we had last year, we will have students
at the conference presenting to head teachers, because there has
been so much movement in that area. I remain convinced that it
is important, but I am happy to drop the word "personalisation".
One of the exciting things that has emerged is the question of
how we cultivate student leadership. That is part of personalisation,
but we do not necessarily have to use such language. We can say,
"This is part of how we are reframing, redesigning or reconfiguring
schooling to get the best out of young people". That is what
is driving us. Personalisation was a useful concept that got us
from where we were to where we are today.
Mick Waters: If you took that
further, the personal learning and thinking skills in the new
curriculum feed off the needs of employers and business, who say
that youngsters need to develop soft skills to equip them for
a range of studies in diplomas and on to higher education. Actually,
the curriculum is not just about the transmission of knowledge
in subjects, but about the teaching of skills in context and concepts
that they need across their educational experience.
Q506 Mrs Hodgson: Might some children
not need specialist teachers? Would that be allowable? I always
give the example of special dyslexia teachers, who come under
my definition of personalisation. Is that happening?
Tim Oates: In a sense, the problems
that we tackle run much deeper than that. We have heard already
this afternoon about the importance of social and economic status
and the extent to which social background determines so much of
educational attainment. When we look at data on qualifications
and attainment, we see that other factors are swamped by the issue
of social and economic status. It is the principal determining
factor in relation to attainment. That bothers the research community
hugely. We worry about the extent to which flexibilities open
up the kind of problems that you outlined, John and Fiona. I said
that it is more structural than just the idea of the provision
of specialist teachers. Comparisons with Asian pedagogy have thrown
up something very important. In a US and English context, we tend
to label kids as being at a particular level or in a particular
category of learner and so on. However, if you ask an Asian teacher,
"Why has that person not yet grasped that bit of mathematics?",
the teacher will say, "Because I have not yet presented it
to them in the right way." They are not labelled as being
at a particular level or as having certain difficulties, intrinsic
to them, in acquiring the material. It is about how the material
is presented and how to adapt the curriculum to the context, to
ensure that the construct is understood. It is clear that the
huge overloading in the national curriculum since its inception
has bred a generation of teachers happy just to get through the
content—"Move on, move on! We must cover it."
Mrs Hodgson: Without grasping whether
the children had picked it up.
Tim Oates: Exactly—without
due attention to deep learning, associated with an assessment
model that tended to label children. Indeed, some intervention
strategies were predicated on labelling: "We will target
the borderline C-grade candidate and do enough to get them up
to a C." That strategy was advocated by the Department. We
know that leads to the neglect of the most able and the least
able, so you have put your finger on a very deep and structural
issue.
Chairman: We have to give David Chaytor
a chance to ask some questions on assessment for learning.
Q507 Mr Chaytor: Teresa, in the
work that you have been doing on the development of the 14-to-19
diplomas, what part does assessment for learning play? Is that
a major theme of your development work?
Teresa Bergin: It is an important
part of the approach to teaching and learning within the diploma.
As you know, the diploma is a composite large qualification, so
one of the things we wanted to ensure is that a young person can
understand where they are at any one point in that qualification.
Therefore, getting feedback from teachers as part of the young
person understanding where they are at and what they need to do
is a very important part of the diploma and, in particular, within
the principal learning for the diploma. One of the strategies
that we have worked very closely on with awarding bodies has been
integrating personal learning and thinking skills within principal
learning itself and in the assessment criteria for principal learning,
but also looking at how a young person might understand their
own acquisition of the personal learning and thinking skills.
Clearly, you cannot look at what skills you are achieving unless
you get feedback, so assessment for learning is very much integrated
into that.
Q508 Mr Chaytor: This is not exactly
a revolutionary concept, is it? So what interests me is this:
why is it only in the last four or five years that assessment
for learning appears to have been a topic that has become more
talked about? Is it the right terminology or should we be rubbishing
assessment for learning as we have rubbished personalised learning,
and concentrating on what lies underneath it? Why does it appear
to be so poorly embedded in what schools are doing? I gather there
has been an Ofsted review of this that is very critical of the
role of head teachers who are not giving sufficient attention
to it or not following through the development of AFL. Perhaps
David and Mick could make a quick comment on that.
Professor Hargreaves: The concept
is quite old. It was developed in the mid-1990s by Professors
Dylan Wiliam and Paul Black at King's College London. It was developed
by them not just in a university setting, but in classrooms as
a joint partnership between researchers and teachers in Oxfordshire
and Medway. They found two big things. One was that it was not
about conventional assessment as we have usually understood it.
It involved teachers changing their practices. The two that were
most striking were how teachers question students—often,
teacher questioning is just a kind of mental test; it does not
advance learning—and how teachers mark work. Again, there
was experimenting with giving children not grades and numbers,
but comments that would help them to improve the quality of what
they did. As time went on, that was developed at school level
and it was greeted with a lot of enthusiasm by teachers. They
produced some highly influential pamphlets, which is partly why
I began writing pamphlets—because they were read. They produced
hundreds of thousands of those, which have gone out to schools.
The change came when the Department adopted it. It was originally
adopted in 2004 as one of the four components of "A National
Conversation about Personalised Learning". Unfortunately,
what they put in this document was a superficial or debased version
of the Black and Wiliam model. All the radical stuff about how
teachers teach was removed or substantially removed and it began
focusing on targets and assessment. In other words, it was transformed
to fit current Government policy on it. I fear that is still true
today in this document, where they have dropped the term "assessment
for learning" and they have now called it focused assessment,
for some mysterious reason. I do not understand what has gone
on. I have talked to Professor Wiliam and he said publicly that
he cannot recognise much of what is passed as Government policy
on assessment for learning as what he has been doing in schools.
I repeat my earlier point, you cannot pass it on in a booklet.
Professor Wiliam says that you have to substantial continuing
professional development because teachers have to change their
routine classroom practices. For the life of me, I cannot understand
why the Department is not pushing something—one of the very
few things—on which we have a pretty good research base.
Teresa Bergin: Very much at the
heart of the CPD programme for teachers on the diploma is assessment
for learning. All the CPD materials and the training have a focus
on assessment for learning, as you have described, David.
Tim Oates: I endorse what David
said about the position of assessment for learning. Briefly, I
want to say that something fundamental has been missed, and David
alluded to it. As an assessment agency, we are about assessing
failure to agreed standards. That is really vital to summative
assessment. Formative assessment from the 1960s onward was highlighted
by the inspection service, now Ofsted, as one of the weakest aspects
of the English education system. Recently, we have examined assessment
for learning and found similar weaknesses in the implementation,
which hinge on one crucial point. At the centre of the assessment
for learning approach, which was encapsulated in the "Inside
the Black Box" leaflet—the leaflet summarised an international
synthesis of research—lies a fundamental switch from external
referencing of the individual's attainment to self-referencing.
No longer would the most able say, "I am an A-grade candidate,
and have always been an A-grade candidate; I am top of the class;
I always get 90%." Instead, they would say, "I have
not grasped that bit. What is the next challenge for me to understand,
and how can I tackle these key areas in which I am not yet successful?"
The labelling approach, which relates individuals' attainment
outwards to the group and to norms, encourages dysfunctional learning
behaviours, as the research suggests. The self-referencing aspect
of assessment for learning, which is at the heart of it, was absent
from the way in which it was rolled out institutionally from the
centre. It is unsurprising, therefore, that none of the gains
that were promised in the original research were realised in the
practical implementation in the field.
Mick Waters: In the last four
years, the QCA has been developing the programme "Assessing
pupils' progress", which builds from the assessment for learning
model, but encourages teachers periodically to review their youngsters'
progress. From that, they change their practice to help them develop
further. The feedback from the very controlled trials over the
four years is absolutely phenomenal. Teachers recognise that they
need to change their practice and the impact that it has made.
That practice is in virtually every primary school at some stage
in its introductory process and in many secondary schools. It
is absolutely allied to the work that David was talking about.
It is a model of assessment that will take us forward and provide
better outcomes for youngsters.
Q509 Mr Chaytor: So we have got
the old, pure form of assessment for learning, as emerged from
King's College in the 1990s. We have the new bastardised form
of assessment for learning that the Department is trying to drive
through. We have some counterweight from the QCA through the "Assessing
pupils' progress" pilots.
Mick Waters: Yes.
Q510 Mr Chaytor: This is work
done in certain parts of the country. I am curious to know why
nothing happens unless the Department produces a green book. Are
there no other agencies that are promoting this in a system-wide
way?
Professor Hargreaves: It did
happen. It gets complicated when the Department takes a particular
model and tries to push it. In my experience, the impact was to
confuse people who had the original good model. They got confused
about what they were doing. It is one of the great tragedies of
recent policy that instead of following something that was so
well based in research and that we know worked—
Chairman: And was bottom-up.
Professor Hargreaves: And was
bottom-up. If you talked to Dylan Wiliam, who is now at the institute,
today—
Chairman: He is a special adviser on
some of our inquiries.
Professor Hargreaves: Indeed.
What Dylan would say to you if he were here is, "We are still
evolving assessment for learning in its full form." You have
got to remember that they started at Black and Wiliam because
they were science and maths people—they worked in that area,
the secondary sector. It is still to be evolved across the whole
curriculum and they are still learning ways of doing it. In particular
Dylan would, I think, say to you, "We need the newer models
of CPD if we are ever going to embed it properly." The inspectors
are right—we have got a superficial, bastardised version,
which is not doing what it could do.
Chairman: David, if you do not mind,
I will get Tim to answer your question and then I am going to
switch to Douglas, because he has been very patient. But if there
is any extra time, then I will come back to this.
Tim Oates: You have to ask the
question, how may times has the power to innovate been invoked
under the legislation? In the majority of contexts under which
these things have been trialled, existing national assessment
arrangements have not been suspended. So the whole orthodoxy of
national curriculum assessment and the extent to which that permeates
the curriculum in its certain forms and stages, modes of learning
and assessment, continues to predominate in the culture of the
institution. It is therefore almost impossible—when the
inspectors come in, what is it that people prioritise? Of course
they will prioritise the existing top-down required arrangements.
In the Single Level Test trial, powers to innovate were not realised,
so the existing assessment arrangements existed alongside the
SLTs. It would be interesting to see whether APP—Assessing
Pupils' Progress, to which Mick referred—if it was evaluated,
was realising the aims of assessment for learning, but we do not
yet have an evaluation that suggests whether it is or not. It
needs to be thoroughly evaluated to see whether it is effecting
a fundamental switch of culture towards the self-referencing that
is at the heart of AFL.
Q511 Mr Carswell: Mr Waters, what
is the division of labour between the Department's own curriculum
team and the QCA?
Mick Waters: The division of labour
in what sense?
Q512 Mr Carswell: You have specialists
working on the curriculum, a Department with its responsibilities
to the curriculum and the QCA. Is there not a duplication there?
Mick Waters: The QCA is commissioned
by the Department to carry out roles in respect of advice to Ministers,
Government and the Secretary of State in order to fulfil certain
policy commitments. For example, we were asked to review the secondary
curriculum within certain parameters. At the moment we are supporting
Sir Jim Rose on the independent review of the primary curriculum.
We have been asked to build an evidence base to support Sir Jim's
inquiry, to propose an architecture for the primary curriculum,
to populate that architecture within the programmes of studying
and to carry out the consultation formally at the end of it. We
take on that sort of role. Beyond that, within the emerging statute
of QCDA and the work that we are currently doing, we are asked
to do such things as help schools to understand the curriculum
and to make sense of it by working with different partners, for
example. The Department has a curriculum team that you could describe
as producing documentation across the range of education policy—not
necessarily just curriculum—and trying to show where curriculum
fits with other developments.
Q513 Mr Carswell: So you think
that we need both?
Mick Waters: I did not say that
we need both, but you asked me what we do.
Q514 Mr Carswell: But do you think
that we need both the Department and its team, and you and your
team?
Mick Waters: In the way that the
organisation is currently structured, yes. The idea of QCA is
that it is at arm's length from Government. It does work commissioned
by Ministers and the Secretary of State in order to give advice
that is clear and built on a solid evidence base, and within a
strict remit. That is what we are asked to do.
Q515 Mr Carswell: You touched
on the review of the primary curriculum. It was handed to Jim
Rose, rather than being left with the QCA. Why was that?
Mick Waters: Typically, when the
Secretary of State decides that there will be a curriculum review,
there is an independent person who carries out that review. That
was the case when it was Sir Ron Dearing, and when it was Mike
Tomlinson and the secondary review. The QCA tends to do the work
that lies behind the initial critique. Mike Tomlinson said that
we needed to restructure the secondary curriculum in certain ways,
and we set about doing that. The difference now is that the time
scale of the review is 16 months. That is much more limited than
previously for the secondary review, when it was four years. We
are acting almost concurrently with Sir Jim, as opposed to successively.
Q516 Mr Carswell: Given that the
Department has its own curriculum team, should the QCA not be
more arm's length from the Department than it is?
Mick Waters: In what sense is
it not?
Q517 Mr Carswell: In future, will
the QCDA not be slightly too close to the Minister?
Mick Waters: There are two questions
there. One was about whether we should be as close as we are,
and then you asked about the future.
Mr Carswell: Sorry, I asked a question
and you did not seem to understand it.
Mick Waters: No, I did not.
Q518 Mr Carswell: I will try again.
The Department has its own curriculum team—you are with
me so far. Should the QCA not be more arm's length from the Department
than it is?
Mick Waters: I think that we are
as arm's length as we are expected to be and we act in an arm's
length capacity. We deliver on time, to quality and to the requirements
of the Secretary of State.
Q519 Mr Carswell: If you create
two regulators, is there not the danger that you will squeeze
out scope for autonomy or for the role of an independent assessment
agency? There is a lot of talk about being less prescriptive,
but might the change not do precisely the opposite?
Mick Waters: Do you mean the change
to QCDA? The expectation is that with the departure of Ofqual
from the current QCA, we will have a new organisation called the
QCDA. The remit for that organisation is currently being put on
to statute. We expect that it will become more of a development
agency and less of an arm's length, independent organisation.
We can discuss that when it becomes statute.
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