I’m afraid I have rather neglected my blog during this last half term. Some of this has been due to the distractions of ordinary life, but a lot of it has been due to taking some of the opportunities that have come up as a result of blogging. There will be various announcements to come, but one that is relevant to this post, was my brief interview about OFSTED, from the weekend before last, on the Chalk Talk Podcast, which can be found here.
Hopefully, I will now be able to return to regular blogging, but inevitably I will recommence blogging with some comments and news about OFSTED. There’s been a few developments worth noting or commenting on.
1) Bloggers (but not me) meeting OFSTED
A delegation of bloggers were invited in to meet Mike Cladingbowl, OFSTED’s director of schools, in half term. Their accounts can be found below:
I can’t fault those they invited, and I’m particularly happy to see Shena there who, while probably less well-known than the others, has been invaluable to me (and no doubt to many others) in pointing out certain OFSTED developments. But, I’m not going to let false modesty (or any other kind) stop me making the obvious gripe that I wasn’t invited. David commented that:
We have tentatively agreed that a further meeting would be a positive step. Several of us raised the glaring absence of the education blogger most synonymous with holding Ofsted to account. Like Banquo’s ghost, Old Andrew palpably haunted the meeting somewhat. We were told that Ofsted were wary of engaging with anonymous bloggers but now that Andrew has revealed his secret identity in a recent Radio 4 interview maybe they can see their way clear to inviting him (and very possibly others) next time.
I can’t help but point out that it is a little difficult to accept that OFSTED were unaware that I was no longer anonymous, given that the Radio 4 interview David mentioned was actually part of a programme about OFSTED.
That said, I’m slightly more positive about what transpired than many have been. While a good number of people have made comments to me along the lines of “who are OFSTED trying to kid with this stunt?”, it does sound as if Mike Cladingbowl is doing something important. The accounts suggest that he is, as far as I can tell, actually following the same line as the Chief Inspector. My past experience of OFSTED employees was that they simply ignored everything that Michael Wilshaw said about schools, so I’ll happily take that as progress. The other positive development was the announcement (first at the meeting then in this document) that inspectors shouldn’t be grading individual lessons. Graded observations have been key to the enforcement of the “OFSTED teaching style” and this could make a huge difference. Although, it also raises the rather obvious question as to why OFSTED’s director of schools was completely oblivious to how inspectors have actually been operating.
2) The Policy Exchange report “Watching the Watchmen”.
This can be found here. I rate it highly, simply because it seems to focus on what I, and I think many teachers, see as the key issues. It discusses the saga of the “OFSTED teaching style”, (with my NUT article quoted as a source). It criticises the unaccountable nature of the inspectors and, particularly, the arms length employment of most of them through private companies. It also highlights the unreliable nature of lesson observations. All of these have been common enough topics on social media, and among teachers, but the reaction to the report suggests that this report has indicated them to a much wider audience. That said, the most prominently discussed proposals were those aimed at reducing the burden of inspection on “good” schools. I am not particularly convinced that this will help matters. The issues with OFSTED are to do with the unfair and unaccountable nature of their decisions, and the absurd nature of the incentives they provide, and while many critics of OFSTED are reluctant to emphasise this point, this is as much a problem with declaring the unacceptable to be good as with attacking the excellent.
3) Michael Wilshaw’s ASCL apeech
This can be found here. Again, the proposals for less inspection of “good” schools, similar to the Policy Exchange proposals, got the most publicity. What interested me most were the remarks about the private companies involved in inspection:
…Ofsted needs to undertake a root and branch review of outsourced inspection. Inspection, as far as I’m concerned, is just too important for Ofsted to simply have oversight of third party arrangements.
The tendering for the contracts is up for renewal fairly soon and I’ll make my decision about the future of outsourced inspection when that time comes.
There are a number of other suggestions and observations that suggest the Chief Inspector is finally grasping the nature of the organisation he is attempting to lead. That said, I think Rob Peal has it about right here in pointing out that he seemed to deny the very problems which elsewhere he had promised to address.
4) Tribal’s letter to inspectors
This can be found on John Bald’s blog here and I suggest reading it. If genuine (and I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t be) it would indicate that Tribal, a Regional Inspection Provider, is sufficiently worried about scrutiny from above leading to financial penalties, to warn its inspection teams to do everything by the book. In practice, this could mean even more in the way of check-lists and bureaucracy and I’d be amazed if OFSTED did have the nerve to stand up to a contractor, but it would seem to indicate that a shift in power is occurring in OFSTED and the centre is now asserting itself. As ever, it does nothing to reverse the damage already done, but at least it provides some indicator about a seriousness of intent within OFSTED’s leadership.
5) Civitas Call for Evidence
The think tank Civitas are interested in hearing (in confidence) from people who have been inspected since last December who can answer the following questions:
• Were particular teaching styles criticised or praised in your written inspection report?
• Were particular teaching styles criticised or praised in your verbal feedback?
• Have you being told by senior leaders or CPD providers to teach in a certain style to suit Ofsted?
• Were you graded on the basis of an individual lesson, as opposed to a wide variety of evidence?
If you are able to help, then there are full details here.
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Scenes From The Battleground 
Progressively Worse – A Subversive Text
April 28, 2014This book review is a (very slightly edited) version of the foreword I wrote to Robert Peal’s Progressively worse: The Burden of Bad Ideas in British Schools
. It should make it clear why I think the book is worth reading.
Few publications can claim to be subversive, but that is a fitting description for Robert Peal’s book. He has related a piece of educational history and described a debate that many educationalists, managers and inspectors will not want teachers to be aware of. It is not simply that his arguments against the influence that progressive education has on our education system will challenge many of those in a position of undeserved power and authority; he also provides the context that is lacking for so many of those who are, or soon will be, a part of our education system.
While academics and journalists (or even bloggers like myself) might talk of an ongoing and established debate over education methods between progressives and traditionalists, it is not something that one can expect to hear much of when one becomes a teacher. It is entirely possible to be trained as a teacher in a university and in schools and teach for several years without ever hearing that there is any doubt over whether teacher talk is harmful; discovery learning is effective; or knowledge is less important than skills. To inform teachers that these disputes exist is to cast doubt on the expertise of most of those who train teachers; many of those who run schools; and also those with the greatest power in education: the schools inspectorate – OFSTED. For at least some readers, this will be the first time they have heard that certain orthodoxies have been, or can be, challenged.
Of course, for the informed reader this may not be the first time such challenges to the progressive consensus have been encountered in print. The last few years have seen the publication of titles such as Daisy Christodoulou’s Seven Myths About Education, Tom Bennett’s Teacher Proof and Katharine Birbalsingh’s To Miss With Love, which have demonstrated the existence of influential voices in education expressing views many teachers have never heard before. This has been supplemented further by many, many bloggers who have been hostile to the ideological status quo. Additionally, it has also been informed by influential books from the United States by individuals such as Daniel Willingham, Doug Lemov and E.D. Hirsch. These writers, while not necessarily writing polemical or ideological tracts, have nevertheless confidently explored ideas about the curriculum, teaching methods and the psychology of learning that fell far outside the comfort zone of the English education system.
However, I believe Robert Peal is now making a unique and essential contribution to this debate by providing the political and historical context of the arguments. Neither progressives nor traditionalists can claim to represent a new development in education. With the possible exception of some of the latest evidence from cognitive psychology for the effectiveness of traditional teaching, almost all the arguments described here have been part of the history of our education system for more than five decades. Generations have fought these battles, proved their points and bucked the system, only to be airbrushed from history by an educational establishment only too keen to recycle ideas from 1967’s Plowden Report as the latest innovation. The historical chapters here analyse and present the history of those arguments in a way which perhaps most closely resembles Left Back, Diane Ravitch’s magisterial recounting of the ‘education wars’ in the United States. If this causes teachers to realise that they can find ideas and inspiration, not just in the contemporary critics of progressive education, but in the writings of Michael Oakeshott or R.S. Peters, then the educational discussion will be thoroughly enriched. The debate on education is not one limited to the present generation; it is not a scrap between, for example, Sir Ken Robinson and Michael Gove. It is a conversation that dates back, at least to the nineteenth century, in which figures such as Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens, G.K. Chesterton, D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Dorothy L. Sayers and C.S. Lewis have had something to say on one side or the other. We should not let the latest iteration of the disagreement, with its talk of ‘21st Century Skills’ and ‘flipped classrooms’, blind us to that wider perspective.
A historical perspective should also save us from being convinced that this row is one conducted along narrow party political lines. While their efforts to stem the tide of progressivism may have faltered in office, it is impossible to miss the extent to which some of the voices speaking out against the education establishment were those of Labour politicians such as Callaghan, Blunkett and Blair. While the influence of progressive education seems to have been greater on the left than the right, the case against it can be made on egalitarian grounds as easily as conservative ones. Robert Tressell, the undoubtedly working-class political activist and author, wrote in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists:
If this point is then accepted, education, in the sense of the full entitlement to the best of our society’s culture and knowledge, is not a relic of a discredited tradition, but wealth that should be distributed to all. Comprehensive education, when viewed as an academic education for all, might represent a core principle of the left. By contrast, progressive education, with its contempt for the accumulated knowledge of mankind, is likely to work only to deprive the disadvantaged and excluded of an asset that will remain the exclusive property of the privileged and powerful. Middle-class partisans of both right and left would happily misrepresent the education debate as a mere reflection of wider political disagreements. However, many of us who identify our politics most closely with the aspirational, working-class tradition within the Labour Party are happy to campaign as firmly against the excesses of progressive education as we do against the excesses of free-market capitalism. This is for fundamentally the same reason; it increases the deprivation of the less fortunate for the sake of an ideological experiment conducted at their expense by those with little to lose personally.
So with this in mind, I welcome what Robert Peal has achieved. He has provided a much needed perspective on a debate that has been at best narrowed, and at worst hidden. It should be essential reading for anyone who wishes to engage with an argument that has raged for over a century, and shows every sign of continuing. For those unfamiliar with educational politics, appropriately it will be an education. For those who have only seen the disagreements over education described from the perspective of progressive educationalists, it will be a shock. For those within the education system who are already sympathetic to his cause, it will be a call for subversion.
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