Research from university education faculties played no role in the “quiet revolution” in English schools which saw pupil achievement levels soar in maths, science and literacy over the past 15 years, the long-standing schools minister behind the reforms has claimed.
Criticising outputs from the UK’s numerous education departments and teacher training centres as out-of-touch, ideological and lacking rigour, Nick Gibb told?Times Higher Education?that the reforms he oversaw in office – widely regarded as successful and, for many, the greatest achievement of the 2010 coalition and 2015 Conservative governments?– went against dominant views in UK academic research, rather than with them.
The teaching of?for literacy – which Gibb made mandatory in all English schools under education secretary Michael Gove, and is credited?with improving the reading comprehension of children – is a good example of where UK educational research let down schoolchildren by??the technique’s obvious merits, he explained.
It was “absolutely convincing” research from psychology departments that helped build the case for the change instead, Gibb said, citing a??in Clackmannanshire, in Scotland, led by academics from the universities of St Andrews and Hull, which reported in 2005.
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“That study had three groups of 300 pupils – two groups doing similar systems to those in place but the third group doing phonics. After 16 weeks, they had to start moving children into the phonics group because they were seven months ahead of the others on word reading. By 11, the reading age was three-and-a-half years ahead of the control groups and 1.9 years ahead in spelling.”
Gibb – who served three prime ministers and seven education secretaries while schools minister over a total period of 12 years – said he drew inspiration from other parts of UK academia, and educational research from the US and Singapore or directly from teachers.
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“None of the debate on educational reform came from the UK university world – or at least from educational faculties,” he said.
In power, Gibb was criticised for sidelining education departments from teacher training and attempting to impose what many saw as a de facto national curriculum that critics said focused too much on the science of learning and not enough on creating well-rounded teachers.
The former minister, whose new book?, co-authored with headteacher Robert Peal, is published by Taylor & Francis this week, said he became “sceptical of research in educational faculties” while serving as a shadow schools minister from 2005 to 2010.
“That is why we set up the Educational Endowment Fund,” he added, referring to the charity established in 2011 that aims to improve the educational attainment of some of the poorest pupils in England’s schools.
“University education research was, and it still is, very abstract, not decipherable to policymakers and not of the quality that you saw with scientific research; it didn’t have control groups and the number of children studied was often very small,” he said.
“There has been a quiet revolution in English schools in the past 10 to 15 years – educational faculties have not been part of it.”
As well as the mainstreaming of phonics, Gibb oversaw the creation of an additional 10,000 school academies to ensure “teachers were not beholden to local education authorities and their advisers” and the introduction of public accountability and incentive systems such as the creation of school league tables and the – a measure that ranks schools based on the proportion of pupils gaining passes in five key GCSE subjects: maths, English, two sciences and a modern language.
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Within this new system teachers are increasingly using classroom experiences to lead research efforts rather than university academics whose focus is “very sociological”, said Gibb.
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“Educational research used to be a secret garden dominated by those from education faculties; now the garden is wide open. We have really bright teachers writing blogs, creating their own teaching materials and organising their own conferences,” he continued, noting how more than 1,000 teachers will be heading to a ResearchED event on 6 September led by the writer and teacher Tom Bennett.
This type of grassroots research has helped to shift what the US academic Barbara Oakley calls the “paradigm cartel”, explained Gibb.
“One viewpoint tends to dominate; if you don’t have diversity [in faculties] then the progressive ideology takes hold. In 2010 it dominated faculty committees, local education authorities and the Department for Education, as well as quangos like the qualification agencies.”
Gibb points to the sustained improvement in England’s PISA performance to support his case. England fell from 7th?in PISA’s reading table in 2000 to 25th?in 2010, dropped from 4th?to 16th?in science and 8th?to 28th?in maths over the same period. “We are now 4th?in the world for reading and have gone from 27th?to 11th in maths,” he said.
He said one regret was that the uptake of modern languages was still too low for his liking. “The problem was, in 2004, the government stopped making languages compulsory for schools; at that point 80 per cent of students did a GCSE,” he explained.
“We tried to tackle that with the EBac performance measure and it went up from 40 per cent to 45 per cent but it’s stayed there. There is a case for saying it should be compulsory again but give it a long lead time – by 2030 we should make languages compulsory in all English schools,” he said, noting how “England is a global trading nation; the idea that we do not attempt to speak the language of our customers and suppliers is odd.”
Even with potentially radical education reforms on the horizon in the form of the?Becky Francis review, due next month, Gibb is confident that his reforms will not be rolled back.
“Initially it seemed like she wanted to make big changes but the recent schools bill had a very bad reaction so [education secretary] Bridget Phillipson has thought twice, and Downing Street has stepped in,” he said.
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Things are heading in the right direction, Gibb insists. “Why would you want to damage that?”
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