by Guy Claxton
Perhaps what is objectionable is not the temerity of mentioning the 95% of children’s characters, accomplishments and interests that are ignored by much conventional education, but the very neglect of those qualities by so many schools. By the way, both the achievement of pupils and the quality of teaching at Barrowford was ‘good’ at the last Ofsted inspection, and the inspectors were moved to comment approvingly:
Spiritual, moral, social and cultural awareness is a strength of the school. The curriculum continuously reinforces positive attitudes towards learning and the development of skills and qualities such as perseverance, reasoning and empathy.4
How many times do we need to be told that the systematic development of positive learning dispositions is perfectly possible, and perfectly compatible with a commitment to literacy, numeracy and good test scores?
Being resilient has helped me try things; like, if I don’t know a question in SATs I’ll now have a go – and I might get it right! Also, if I don’t have a pen or pencil or something, instead of sitting around waiting for one I’ll go to the back of the classroom and get one! To start with I didn’t like being asked to be reflective; I didn’t see the point. But now I understand that it’s better to find your own mistakes, because then you’ll never do it again. And being reflective has helped me write better stories with more detail that have all the good things in!
Hugo, Year 6
In Year 5 I wasn’t very resourceful. I would come in in the morning and wait to be told what to do. Now I come in and get on with the task that is set. And BLP has taught me to check my work through and learn from my mistakes. When I play games I am not a sore loser any more; I just think about what I need to do to win next time. Overall I think BLP has had a massive effect on me.
Jake, Year 6
Before BLP I was never able to finish what I had started. Now I can finish my work, I pay attention more and I am not distracted any more. I notice more things – connections etc. – during the lesson. And before, I never asked questions and I never dreamed of trying to look for links between the topic and what I already knew. But now I ask more questions, get my resources sorted and basically don’t fuss!
Elsie, Year 6
Let’s stay in the north of England and travel back over the Pennines to North Shore Academy in Stockton-on-Tees. North Shore is a challenging secondary school. In January 2012 it was placed in Ofsted’s lowest category, ‘special measures’. The GCSE results that year were dire – just 22% of pupils achieved five good GCSEs including English and maths. A new principal, Bill Jordan, was brought in to turn things around – and he decided to continue with the work that his deputy, Lynn James, had already started to champion to build students’ ownership of learning. They predicted, a year later, a GCSE success rate of 47%. In fact, 53% of students in 2013 hit that GCSE target. In the same year, three other local secondary schools, none with as tough a catchment area as North Shore, achieved 33%, 35% and 47%. This is an astonishing turnaround.
What is Bill and Lynn’s philosophy? They have posted a list of the ‘commitments’ which North Shore now makes to all its students on their website. Here are two of them:
● Outstanding learning and teaching which engages pupils and is active, collaborative and encourages independence.
● Student voice intended to empower and involve young people in the development and delivery of their own education and the life of their academy.5
As school leaders, they have aimed to establish a culture of good behaviour, and then asked the teachers to develop their teaching so as to give the students progressively more independence and responsibility for their learning. To pull this off takes time and support, of course, and Lynn has asked BLP principal consultant Graham Powell to work with staff on a regular basis to help them shift their practice. To begin with, some of the teaching was spoon-feeding the students too much, and they had become used to adopting a rather passive role in the classroom. In his early observations, Graham noted:
Students are compliant and attempt tasks set but their engagement is limited and teachers are the focus of attention for too long before setting them to work on their own. In too many lessons students comply but aren’t encouraged to enjoy the struggle of learning which assures progress and engagement. Students are not always required to think sufficiently for themselves. Teachers do too much of the thinking for them. Teachers might make more use of activities that require students to ask questions of themselves, each other and the resources that are before them.
Over time, teachers have changed their ways, and now students have become more active in managing, researching, designing and evaluating learning for themselves and – though we are sure you don’t need reminding – their results are rocketing up as well. In their latest Ofsted inspection, North Shore got a ‘good’ for teaching and learning. The report noted: “Since the last full inspection, the overall quality of teaching has improved significantly” and “Students … have good attitudes to learning.”6
In various situations outside of school BLP has helped my thinking to be more logical and analytical. If I get lost I now think through all the possibilities of who to contact, how to contact them, where to go, why I would go to that place and how that would help me.
Within school it helps you to persevere when you just want to give up! Recently, I had to produce an exact replica of a Picasso painting for DT homework. It took a very long time. I had to keep at it, until I got everything right – the proportion, the tone. BLP helped me with that, both consciously and subconsciously. When I finished it I felt really proud! And I set my standards really high! Dominic, Year 8
Next, we come south to another comprehensive school, Goffs School, an academy in the stereotypically leafy Home Counties. Although the levels of achievement, and the nature of the students, are very different from North Shore, the journey that the teaching staff have been on over the last two or three years has been surprisingly similar. Nigel Appleyard, a history teacher who has been spearheading the development of BLP at Goffs, describes his own experience with his sixth-form class:
I started to provide them with stimulus material that would get them stuck. I wanted them to generate their own questions and explore possibilities for themselves. I was determined to make them do the thinking! At first I met with some resistance. One student in particular intimated that it was my job to teach the group and give them the answers that they could repeat in the exam to get the grades they needed. I explained to them that that way of teaching wasn’t going to prepare them properly for the demands of the exam, or for their future needs.
I sensed that some of the group were not convinced. I didn’t give in, and gradually they came to expect to be challenged in lessons and to rise to it. They started to get disappointed if I didn’t set them something intriguing or problematic. Things have moved on, and they are much more actively engaged and now regularly involved in the planning and delivery of lessons. They have taken on responsibility for creating provocative, relevant and stimulating starter activities to ‘warm up their learning muscles’ and they lead the discussions that distil what they have learned and what they need to learn. They have become a different group: they have transformed themselves into students who no longer depend on me to provide them with all the answers.
And the exam results are improving year on year. In 2014, there was a 99% pass rate at A level, and the school’s own target for A and A* grades at A level was exceeded by 11%!
At the school I’m in now, the economics teacher had walked out – so these kids were scheduled to have economics lessons, but without any teacher. I kind of adopted this class. I held back one guy at the end of the lesson and gave him a book to read. I put it in his hands, so that everyone could see. The next day, another student who’s usually really nice was giving me a little bit of attitude. At the end of the lesson, everyone left but she kind of hopped around, and finally said, “I want a book too.” And this is what I was going for to begin with. I, of course, had the ex
act book I wanted to give her. Over the next week, every one of my kids came in and asked for a book to read. So here are kids who are probably not going to pass the exam – most of my students have known their predicted grades of E and D for so long that they have no aspiration to go to uni – who are intellectually curious enough to want to be challenged.
Rob, economics teacher, London secondary school
Our final example is Honywood Community Science School in Coggeshall, Essex. Its head teacher is a passionate advocate of using digital technology to give students more responsibility. They are encouraged, following clearly laid out schemes of work in maths, to plan their own learning pathways, and are coached in how to do this by higher level teaching assistants. There is also a library of high quality online resources. Honywood is a BYOD (bring your own device) school and students are expected to be able to switch between the online learning which they are leading and more traditional teacher-led instruction. Honywood does not follow any one approach to learning but has built its own well-thought-through approach called HonySkills.
HonySkills at Honywood
● Communicate in writing, orally, physically, graphically and by using ICT.
● Solve problems.
● Cooperate and collaborate with others.
● Analyse information and draw conclusions from it.
● Synthesise information, evaluate and form judgements about it.
● Empathise.
● Be creative.
● Gain the knowledge and skills to be healthy in body and mind.
● Persist when times are hard.
● Acquire the knowledge that valuing the struggle to learn will make you more successful.
● Think for yourself.
● Learn independently.
● Be competitive, never being content that you have done your best.
● Conceive of things in abstract as well as concrete form.
● Criticise constructively.
● Take responsibility for your learning and your life.
Head teacher Simon Mason is a driving force and a prolific communicator with his staff. Here is part of what he wrote as a guest blogger on the Expansive Education Network website.7 (There’s more on expansive education on page 135.)
As part of a new curriculum we introduced in September 2011, we have focused on sixteen skills, attitudes, dispositions and behaviours which we feel are essential for people to master if they are to be happy and successful in their lives. Our teachers design learning in two ways; they don’t just think about subject content; they also design learning opportunities that encourage mastery of these skills, attitudes, dispositions and behaviours. Central to our pedagogy is the notion of choice. Currently youngsters are given choices about how they learn, where they learn and how they present their learning. As we develop, we will be offering choices about what youngsters learn and about the length of time they spend on their learning. By offering authentic choice, we have opened up the possibilities for collaboration in learning. We have become used to seeing youngsters learning in self-directed teams, with learning spilling out into our corridors and stairwells as youngsters take ownership and show real responsibility for their learning.
Honywood’s approach to engaging parents is similarly thoughtful:
All research and advice tells us that there is no right way in which to parent. Each of us has a different family background and a unique set of personal circumstances which shape our parenting. Each child is also different: what will ‘work’ for one child may not ‘work’ for another.
A problem shared is a problem halved and having someone to talk to can prove invaluable.
We aim to establish an atmosphere in which situations and problems can be discussed in a confidential and supportive way, hopefully empowering you to be able to return home to your own individual situation armed with ideas and the knowledge that there are people out there, particularly the Family Learning Team and the Cohort Leaders at Honywood, who can support you.
We are happy to help you with a range of problems including:
● Supporting your child through friendship challenges.
● Communicating with my adolescent.
● My adolescent can’t cope with exam stress, is there any help?
● Bereavement and loss.
● Internet safety.
● Who you can turn to when things get tough.
You’ll remember that the CBI called for closer cooperation between schools and families, as one of their headline recommendations. Here it is in vibrant, successful action.
Scaling up
Each of these very different schools has in some real way demonstrated that it is possible to offer educational experiences that systematically develop confident and agile minds – and get great results. But a smattering of schools, you might argue, can hardly change the world. In addition to these living examples of the way forward we need ways of disseminating and scaling up what they are doing. And there are indeed tried and tested ways in which such good ideas can and do get magnified and broadcast. Here are a few.
One of the simplest is called a school cluster. Clusters were originally developed in the middle of the 20th century as a means of sharing resources across schools, especially in rural areas. Schools could share expensive resources – a swimming pool, a theatre or a specialist facility. But these days it’s increasingly how schools are organising their own professional development too. (Maybe your school is part of a cluster, sometimes also called an academy chain.)
Under the Blair government, clusters of schools were actively encouraged by the National College8 as a means of spreading ideas which might improve schools, and it is clear that they did have some success.9 Most recently, borrowing the idea of the teaching hospital from the NHS, successful schools were invited to become ‘teaching schools’ with the responsibility of gathering clusters of schools around them to share good practice. Specifically they were given the opportunity to organise initial teacher training and organise professional development for teachers. By November 2013, there were 357 teaching schools and 301 teaching school alliances in England. The idea of such alliances is to encourage locally led self-improvement. Sounds like a good idea.
But if we tell you that a school can only be a teaching school if it is graded ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted, then you can immediately see a problem. For if the main criterion for admission is Ofsted’s judgement, then the kinds of activities which such alliances promote may well be skewed towards the kinds of activities which are approved of by Ofsted, but not the kinds which we have seen at Miriam Lord or North Shore. We know hundreds of schools which would make excellent teaching schools that would be graded merely ‘good’ by Ofsted. Their ethos might well be more conducive to real-world learning than those which happened to have got the ‘outstanding’ mark.
In some cases teaching schools have set out their stall with an agenda that is closer to ours than to Ofsted’s. An example of this is St Ambrose Barlow Roman Catholic High School in Salford. Again there is a passionate and well-informed head teacher at work, Marie Garside. Over several years Marie has adopted her version of what she calls the creative curriculum – ‘developing in all students the creativity to be able to thrive throughout their lifetimes’. Recently the teaching alliance she leads has become a hub for expansive education in the north-west. Marie and her cluster of schools have chosen to focus on teacher research. She believes that student outcomes are likely to improve if schools can engage with deep questions about the subjects they teach. The alliance is linked to the two universities in Manchester, which help them to explore science and engineering, as well as research methods, and also has long-standing relationships with cultural organisations such as galleries and museums across the region.
But the reason we mention them here is that we know that clusters of schools working together are great ways of growing and nurturing more innovation. We just need to ensure that the goal of any imaginary ‘Mod School Alliance�
�� is to create more opportunities of the kind that we have been describing in this book, and not merely to improve test scores in a range of academic subjects.
In a small way we have been involved in developing an extended cluster of like-minded schools under the banner of the Expansive Education Network. The hundreds of schools and thousands of teachers, many from overseas, that are part of this group explicitly choose to associate themselves with three of the core beliefs which have run throughout this book. First, they seek to expand the goals of education beyond traditional success criteria to include the kinds of habits of mind we talked about earlier. Second, they want to expand young people’s capacity to deal with a lifetime of tricky things. Third, they want to expand their compass beyond the school gates. Expansive education assumes that rich learning challenges and opportunities abound in young people’s out-of-school lives of music, sport, community and family activities.
At this point you may be wondering whatever happened to local educational authorities. Weren’t they meant to be doing this kind of thing – supporting groups of local schools to get better? Indeed they were. But, sadly, too many of them became casualties of political warfare, were drained of financial support and shrivelled up, died out completely or became privatised. And some, truth to tell, weren’t very good. But a few remain and are thriving. One is the East London borough of Thurrock, which is small enough to gather all of its head teachers together in a large room to really think things through and large enough to have some capability to support schools to develop. Thurrock is flying a flag for expansive education, with all of its schools being encouraged to experiment with new and innovative ways of teaching children, and all the while engaging teachers in evaluating this. (We know, by the way, from the work of researchers such as Professor John Hattie that when teachers become learners again their teaching improves, as does the achievement of their pupils.) Thurrock has decided that it can create a climate in which children can be taught to be creative and resilient at the same time as improving test results. To make sure that teachers and parents understand what they are up to, they have launched an annual awards ceremony to make this point.