Politics may stifle primary reform

Rival reports champion breadth and creativity - but will anything change in the classroom?

By Judith Judd

Ever since the Victorians set up elementary schools, primary education has been a battleground. Put crudely, the fight is between the "traditionalists" who back a focus on the three Rs and chalk and talk, and the "progressives" who favour play-based learning and creativity.

The discussion about the two latest reports on primary education - one by Sir Jim Rose and one led by Professor Robin Alexander - has been true to form. Sue Palmer, a literacy specialist wrote in support of Alexander's review:  "Children need time to grow, talk, sing listen to stories and enjoy that most vital ingredient of childhood, play." Michael Gove, shadow education secretary, called for a new emphasis on reading and warned that the Rose review threatened a return to the "fuzzy and abstract learning" of the past. Professor Alexander appealed for the debate to be taken out of the hands of "the mythmakers" and placed in those of the professionals.

In some respects, the two reports are very different. Rose was commissioned and funded by the Government, confined to the subject of the curriculum and took 14 months. Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, left testing out of its remit. Alexander's Cambridge primary review was independent, funded by the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation and took six years. Its 580 pages tackle the curriculum, assessment, league tables, teacher training, funding and the role of teachers in driving up standards.

Both want a shift away from a subject-based curriculum to an emphasis on themes and skills: Rose listed six areas of learning, including health and physical development and six life skills ranging from literacy to personal and emotional. Alexander wants eight "domains" including arts and creativity and oracy alongside literacy. But there are differences. Rose does a careful balancing between knowledge and skills, single subject teaching and cross-curricular work. He gives priority to literacy and numeracy, but says primary schools should also be about moral, cultural and social development. He adds ICT to the core of literacy and numeracy.

Alexander says all the domains are equal but accepts that language and literacy would have undisputed priority. He lists 12 aims for all pupils such as empowerment, engagement, respect and reciprocity and points to the wealth of evidence that shows that the most successful primary schools are those with broad curricula. One of the themes of his report is the need to return primary education into the hands of teachers. He proposes that 30 per cent of the curriculum should be decided locally.

The two differ sharply on the best time to start formal education. Rose says that four-year-olds should go straight into primary reception classes unless their parents wish to defer formal schooling. The best publicised of Alexander's proposals is that children should continue to follow the early years programme, which concentrates on learning through play and activity, until they are six. They would then start formal schooling. That would bring England into line with most other European countries. Children in Finland, where literacy standards are the highest in the western world, start school at seven.

Rose's enforced silence on testing raises questions about how much his proposed curriculum would change primary schools' offering. Teachers say that while league tables and tests for 11-year-olds remain in place, the chances of teaching a broader range of skills and a more imaginative approach are non-existent. Alexander would tear up the assessment regime of external national tests at 11 backed by Conservative and Labour governments for the past 20 years. Children would be tested by their teachers, but the results would not be used to measure schools' progress in league tables. Instead, a sample of children in each school would sit a separate test in a wider range of subjects than the three Rs.

Will any of it happen? Labour has roundly rejected Alexander, but Rose's proposals are set to be introduced in 2011. The Conservatives have doubts about both. They may say, like Alexander, that they want to free teachers from bureaucracy and control, but that will be difficult to square with their enthusiasm for traditional single subject-teaching. Gove told a conference this summer that they feared that Rose "presages a further abandonment of subject disciplines and a retreat into fuzzy and abstract learning."

Alexander may want more subject specialist teachers in primary schools but it's hard to see a Conservative government signing up to "domains" even less to "respect and reciprocity".  The plan for teachers' freedom does not sit easily with Gove's promise to "overhaul the curriculum to ensure the acquisition of knowledge is properly valued." or his determination that schools will teach "the proper narrative of British history?"

Then there is the replacement of the tests for seven-year-olds with "a simple reading test". Gove's conference message that "there will be a relentless focus on getting every child to read quickly and fluently" doesn't sound much like a pledge to let teachers get on with it or to roll back the testing regime. Margaret Thatcher, too, wanted to curb central government and bureaucracy but, like Gove, wanted pupils taught "proper" history. The Conservatives' 1988 Education Reform Act gave Kenneth Baker, her education secretary, more powers than his predecessors could have dreamed of.

Alexander and Rose are trying to nudge primary schools forward, to encourage them to think creatively, to value skills as much as knowledge. Professor Alexander says that research shows higher standards and a broad curriculum are linked. "The evidence may be politically counter-intuitive but it is also well established, consistent and unequivocal."  The same is true of a later start for formal education. But, as he acknowledges, politics has its own agenda.

9 November 2009

Judith Judd. Former editor of The Times Educational Supplement,