As Albert Einstein almost certainly did not say, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. This is hardly a criticism that could be levelled at the efforts to achieve school improvement in England over the last two decades, given the multiplicity of attempts at change, often competing or conflicting, launched by successive politicians. The aftermath of a general election is perhaps as good a time as any to reflect on what this has achieved in the perhaps vain hope that some lessons may be learned.
It’s not as if schools have exactly been standing still in recent years. The rate of change in the overwhelming majority of schools has been huge. In England, for a mix of reasons, mostly at least well-intentioned, we have as a country and as educators, devoted immense effort over two decades to school improvement and what we have been pleased to call ‘the standards agenda’. And there have been some real gains as a result.
The school improvement movement has encouraged us to raise our expectations, to be less willing to settle for second or even third best, and to challenge the self-fulfilling prophecies of local determinism. It has been right to insist that local circumstance is not an excuse for failure and to highlight the extent to which young people in similar difficult circumstances can achieve very differently according to the school they attend. The standards agenda has given us, at least at one level, a clarity of expected outcome and a means to measure, compare and contrast, as long as we understand properly how to do that. Targets have focused our attention on certain specifics and rewarded the achievement of these as well as punishing failure to meet them. Being human, we have mostly risen to the challenge. Countless teachers and school leaders have worked unbelievably hard, and managed, with great striving, overall to make steady incremental improvement against those chosen measures.
The question is, so what? What has been the overall impact of all this expenditure of effort and resource on the actual level of overall performance of the education system? Consider firstly the number of structural and other changes you can recall having taken place over the last 10 years in English education. Then consider the impact they have had on school performance from the following perspectives:
Although four out of five children now achieve the expected standards at primary school, one in five still does not, and around two in five young people leave secondary school without five or more A*-C GCSEs or equivalents including English and Maths. Poor children still have worse educational outcomes at every stage and we have a long tail of low attainment.
Educational Excellence Everywhere – DfE 2016
The attainment gap between FSM and non-FSM secondary students hasn’t budged in a decade. It was 28 percentage points 10 years ago and it is still 28 percentage points today. Thousands of poor children who are in the top 10% nationally at age 11 do not make it into the top 25% five years later.
Sir Michael Wilshaw HMCI, 2016
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