The Christmas Blog
Welcome to the now traditional (i.e. we’ve done it before) Xmas Enews and Blog. Once again, we try to offer uplifting and provocative messages with some kind of loose association with CUREE’s activities, namely professional development and evidence-informed practice. Normally written by Philippa, this edition has been delegated to the rather more mischievous MD with permission to Puck it up a bit. So can we feel uplifted in our Education system this Christmas? I think we can despite the continuing baleful influence of Trumpxit.
What have the romans EVER done for us?
This famous scene
from the epic Life of Brian, with its list of the benefits from the Roman Empire, left the most important one out; a system of rules, procedures, recording and communications and a cadre of skilled people to operate it - AKA a bureaucracy! Hold that thought as I’m going to come back to it.
Firstly, let’s reflect on what a good year it’s been for women in high profile education roles. Justine Greening holds the top job at the DfE and Amanda Spielman took over as Chief Inspector. Alison Peacock became the first Chief Executive of the Chartered College of Teaching. In fact, at least eight of the eleven executive agencies reporting to DfE are led by women. Women are also prominent education academics holding the top jobs at London, Oxford, Warwick, and Birmingham to pick out just a few. Both education trade rags are headed by women [but, stop press, I’ve just seen that Laura McInerny is stepping down from editing Schools Week]. Oh, and did I mention that CUREE is headed by a woman? We wouldn’t have had any of this in the Roman Empire
Second, and it may be no coincidence, we are seeing a shift to supporting the educators and away from kicking or reorganising them. Threats to the system were softened and both rhetoric and resources are beginning to focus on development. The Chief Inspector is steering Ofsted in the direction of offering more time for schools to recover from Measures and some support for getting there. Greening chiselled out some more cash to substantially reduce the impending shortfall in school budgets and returned some of the money the Treasury had pulled out of the system by hacking the Education Services Grant in the form of a raft of funding streams focussed on professional development and school improvement. Those of you with a Transactional Analysis perspective on this might see it as the transition from Chastising Parent (Gove) to Nurturing Parent and it’s not a moment too soon.
Third, it’s been pretty good for those of us who evangelise about evidence-informed policy and practice. There are good signs of the DfE actually taking notice of the evidence they’re offered though we still haven’t seen the results of the ‘grammar school’ consultation – despite the relentless efforts of the aforementioned Laura McInerny to prise it out of them. They are certainly demanding evidence from those in the system stepping up to the invitation to put together school improvement and professional development programmes. But here’s where my relentless optimism fails me – and where we get back to the Romans. Evidence is good – the public want some confidence that the dosh invested in your scheme stands a chance of a beneficial outcome. We also want to know what the outcome actually was. The trouble is that, on the former, we have become overly dependent on the work of the Education Endowment Foundation and it can’t actually live up to the central role it’s been given. For instance, if my local strategic problem is literacy, I’m going to look for guidance in EEF’s Toolkit on what I can do about it - and a cornucopia awaits. But what if it’s maths at Key Stage 3 and I want to know what actions or interventions have been tested by EEF and judged effective? The difficulty is that the Toolkit can’t answer that question, at least not in relation to particular maths interventions as the review hasn’t been published yet. In the meantime, EEF are offering some common sense (and evidence informed) guidance about the kinds of things which might work. Science is in roughly similar position but without the practical guidance overview. My point here is that it’s really not helpful setting EEF as The Font Of All Knowledge to find in some key subject domains a slightly soggy note in the bottom saying ‘Please Come Back Later’. This is the hazard of trying to use the slowly accumulated product of a long term project for short term instrumental purposes.
Last, and this where the Romans re-enter, a supervisory apparatus has been quickly assembled by DfE to monitor the growing number of school improvement schemes being funded by the Strategic School Improvement Fund (SSIF) and the like. For those officials – and for us – the problem is that there is as yet nothing to evaluate so instead they audit and they audit a lot! This is an understandable response to a sense of risk but it is distracting them and the projects they supervise from setting up and properly implementing really effective evaluations – which would help the whole system and not just the direct participants learn from the experiences.
The Romans bequeathed us a bureaucracy and anyone involved in a complex project will recognise what an important bequest that was. But the reason that ‘bureaucracy’ is so often used pejoratively is that the records, processes and systems can become ends in themselves. The Romans used their bureaucracy to build roads, aqueducts, sanitation, public order and the other components of civilisation. We want our education leaders to use the positive power of bureaucracy to improve the lot of our 21st Century children.
Felicem Natalem Christi
Paulus Maximus Crispus