Untitled

Contents

Foreword 1

Executive Summary 5

Part One 14

Chapter 1: The world beyond the school gates 15

Chapter 2: Gamers and Missionaries 19

2.1 The Gamers 20

2.2 The Missionaries 28

Part Two 31

Chapter 3: Deﬁning and embedding the mission 32

Chapter 4: Pursuing the Mission: challenges relating to practice 36

4.1 Areas of agreement…and disagreement 37

4.2 Challenges for schools that seek to develop skills through

student-led, project-based learning 41

4.2.1 The scientiﬁc challenge to student-led, project-based

learning 41

4.2.2 The limits of science 54

4.3 Challenges for schools that seek to teach knowledge

through teacher-led, didactic instruction 56

4.3.1 The philosophical challenge to teacher-led,

didactic instruction 56

4.4 Challenges for all mission-oriented schools 76

4.4.1 Building an inclusive school 76

4.4.2 Building a networked school 88

4.4.3 Building a deliberately developmental school 92

Part Three 95

Chapter 5: Calling time on the game 96

5.1 The road to hyper-accountability 97

5.2 Back to the secret garden? 100

5.3 Improving assessment 102

5.3.1 Making tests harder to teach to 105

5.3.2 Teaching teachers about the use and misuse of

assessment 10 9

5.4 Improving accountability 111

5.4.1 A new role for Ofsted 112

5.4.2 More data, more nuance 115

5.4.3 Mandating adequacy, unleashing greatness 116

5.5 A teacher-led renaissance 124

5.6 Summary of recommendations 128

Chapter 6: Education in an age of ‘unreason’ 130

About the RSA

The RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures

and Commerce) believes that everyone should have the freedom and

power to turn their ideas into reality – we call this the Power to Create.

Through our ideas, research and 28,000-strong Fellowship, we seek to

realise a society where creative power is distributed, where concentrations

of power are confronted, and where creative values are nurtured. The RSA

Action and Research Centre combines practical experimentation with

rigorous research to achieve these goals.

This report forms part of our growing body of research on modern

work. Recent RSA studies have explored the rise in self-employment, the

nature of the gig economy, and the drivers behind the informal economy.

In each case, we have sought to dig behind the headlines, unpick the

nuance of debates, and canvass views from across the political spectrum.

Our goal is to ﬁnd new solutions that will give more people greater

economic security, meaning and dignity at work.

About the author

Julian Astle is the RSA’s director of education. Before joining the RSA, he

worked for four years in No. 10 Downing Street, ﬁrst as Deputy Director

of the No. 10 Policy Unit, then as a senior advisor to the Deputy Prime

Minister, Nick Clegg. Prior to that he was Director of CentreForum, a

liberal public policy think tank. In addition, he has held a number of

other political and policy advisory roles both in the UK and abroad where

he focused on post conﬂict reconstruction and democratisation.

Acknowledgements

I am immensely grateful to everyone who has contributed to this report

and the thinking that informs it.

To current and former colleagues at the Royal Society for the

Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) – to

Matthew Taylor, Anthony Painter, Mark Londesborough, Laura

Partridge, Sam Grinsted, Naomi Bath, Alison Critchley, Kenny McCarthy,

Tom Proudfoot, Amanda Kanojia, Janet Hawken and particularly

Marcello Newman who accompanied me on each of the 26 school visits

made in the process of preparing this report.

To Sam Freedman, Bill Lucas and Martin Robinson for commenting

on early drafts and for their advice and encouragement throughout.

And to everyone else who gave me the beneﬁt of their time and wisdom,

including Amanda Spielman, David Didau, Nick Rose, Rob Coe, Tim

Leunig, David Laws, Toby Greany, Becky Francis, Daisy Christodoulou,

Dave Thompson and Tom Sherrington.

But above all, I am indebted to the headteachers whose mission-

oriented schools are the focus of this report – to Peter Hyman at School

21, Ed Vainker (and his co-founder John McIntosh) at Reach Academy,

Katharine Birbalsingh at Michaela Community School, Keith Budge at

Bedales, Mike Fairclough at West Rise Junior School, Gwyn ap Harri at

XP School, Hywel Jones at the West London Free School, Mark Grundy

at Shireland Collegiate Academy, Duncan Bathgate at Bealings Primary

School, Heather Jackson at Ashgrove Primary School, Dave Strudwick at

the Plymouth School of Creative Arts and Malcolm Drakes at Broadford

Primary School.

Thanks also to all the other headteachers who were kind enough

to let me visit their wonderful schools - to Steve Morrison (Kingsdale

Foundation School), Carolyn Roberts and John Nicholls (Thomas Tallis

School), Clair Morrell (Abbeyﬁeld School), Nick Hammill (Lyndhurst

Primary School), Richard Kieran (Woodrow First School), David Taylor

(Stanley Park High School), Kate Greig (King Ethelbert School), Leon

Walker (Meols Cop), Nick Osborne and Tiany Beck (Millennium

School), Sally Lees (Homewood School), Sam Gorse (Turton High

School), Gary Hickey (Adams Grammar School), Rachel Snape (Spinney

Primary School) and Sue East (St Andrews Church of England Primary

School).

The Ideal School Exhibition 1

Foreword

Focus

This paper is about a group of schools that are bucking a growing and

concerning trend: that of schools narrowing their focus, and hollowing-

out their teaching, in their desperation to meet the constantly shifting

demands of the government’s accountability system.

This trend is understandable. The risks associated with leadership

have become so high, with governors and trustees fearing for their schools

and headteachers fearing for their jobs, that the task of clearing the

latest threshold or hitting the next target has come to dominate almost

everything many schools do; proof, if it were needed, that in high-stakes,

low-trust systems, only those things that get measured tend to get done

(with too few questions asked about how they get done).

But there are some school leaders who simply refuse to play this

bureaucratic education-by-numbers game; leaders whose decisions are

shaped, not by the government’s agenda, but by their own sense of mis-

sion – by the higher purpose to which they have dedicated themselves and

their schools.

So I decided to go and meet some of these educational ‘missionaries’

to get a better understanding of what they are trying to achieve and how

they are trying to achieve it. Although their schools are highly untypical,

my hope was that they might nonetheless provide some lessons, and

inspiration, for others – for the vast majority of headteachers who are

neither ‘gamers’ nor ‘missionaries’, but hardworking pragmatists who try

to do the best they can by their students in the circumstances.

In trying to describe and analyse what it is these schools do, I have had

one big disadvantage and one advantage.

The disadvantage is that, by background, I am a policy analyst, not an

educator or an educationalist. It is therefore entirely possible, likely even,

that in discussing the merits of dierent school models and of how they

go about their core business – the unfathomably complex task of eecting

invisible changes in the hearts and minds of their students – I have occa-

sionally tripped over my own ignorance. That is why this paper is oered

up as a discussion document; it is intended to intensify, rather than settle,

the debate about how we can get schools focused on education’s primary

purposes, like personal fulﬁlment and societal progress, rather than the

proxy goals of tests and targets.

The advantage of being a relative newcomer to the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of

teaching and learning is that, when I visited each of the schools, I arrived

with few preconceptions and little ideological or professional baggage;

I am not invested in any particular approach to schooling, having never

argued for one model over another. So although each of our world-views

is coloured to some extent by our own values and experiences, I have

The Ideal School Exhibition2

sought, as far as possible, to approach the task with an open mind, judg-

ing everything I saw, heard and read on its merits. Doing so has been made

easier by one other important fact: that my views about what makes for

an excellent school are far more tentatively held than is my belief in the

importance of diversity and choice across the system.

Why? Because what parents look for when choosing a school varies

depending on their values, beliefs and aspirations. And, more importantly,

it varies, or should vary, according to the talents, interests and needs of

their children who, after all, will have to bear the consequences of what-

ever choice is made.

As a liberal, I don’t believe policymakers should seek to restrict or

even guide those choices – quite the opposite. Parents know better than

ministers who their children are and what sort of adults they wish them to

become.

That is why this paper is called the ideal school exhibition, not the

ideal school competition – because there is no single model that is ideal

for every child and family.

Structure

The paper is divided into three parts, which the following four quadrant

matrix should help explain:

Part 1

Chapter one (‘The world beyond the school gates’) describes how, at

a moment in human history when we desperately need to expand the

conversation about the purposes and essential character of a school-based

education, we have done the opposite: focusing on education’s narrow

instrumentalist value and obsessing over tests, targets and league tables

and the tactics for passing, hitting and climbing them.

Chapter two focuses on the dividing line that separates the ‘gamers’

from the ‘missionaries’ – ie school leaders whose priorities and practices

are shaped by the demands of the accountability system and those whose

priorities and practices are shaped by their own sense of mission. It asks

how widespread is the problem of schools gaming the accountability

system, how that problem manifests itself, and what eect it is having on

the character and quality of the education England’s school children are

receiving. And it argues that having a large number of schools on the left

side of this dividing line is a serious problem even if they are located in the

upper left, rather than lower left, quadrant.

The Ideal School Exhibition 3

Part 2

This part focuses on the upper right quadrant where the mission-oriented

schools I describe in this report are to be found.

Chapter three (‘Deﬁning and embedding the mission: values, aims,

design principles’) looks at how these schools stay focused on their own

aims and objectives despite the external pressures of the accountability

system, and how they go about translating their high level aims into a

practical project on the ground. How, in other words, they manage not to

be pulled into the education-by-numbers game being played out on the

left hand side of the table.

Chapter four (‘Pursuing the mission: challenges for practitioners’)

sets out why these mission-oriented schools teach the way they do, and

assesses the risks they face which, if not mitigated, could see them fall

from the upper right quadrant to the lower right quadrant where the less

successful mission-oriented schools are to be found. It explains how those

risks vary according to the nature of the mission, with those mission-

oriented schools that use student-led, project-based approaches facing

a quite dierent set of challenges from those that use more traditional

teacher-led, didactic methods of instruction. The fact that in most

schools teachers tend to ‘do a bit of both’ doesn’t change the fact that

these two approaches are rooted in two very dierent sets of values and

beliefs (about such fundamentals as the relationship between adult and

child, knowledge and skills, tradition and progress), an understanding of

which helps explain the motivations and intentions of the mission-driven

headteachers I met.

Part 3

Chapter ﬁve (‘Calling time on the game’) returns to the key challenge

raised in Part one – that of reforming the system at every level, from the

secretary of state to the classroom teacher, to ensure that schools are

focused on education’s primary purposes rather than the proxy goals of

tests and targets. The sign of success being a reduction in the number of

schools on the left hand side of the table and an increase in the number on

the right hand side. Fewer gamers, more missionaries in other words.

Only by meeting this challenge will we be able to move our national

conversation on to the more important (and interesting) question of how

best to prepare our children for the challenges that await them in the adult

world. Chapter six (‘Education in an age of unreason’) addresses the

nature and scale of this task.

Language

In dividing school leaders into two groups, gamers and missionaries, I

am acutely aware that I am describing two tiny minorities – those whose

decisions are heavily inﬂuenced by the demands of the accountability

system, and those who pay little or no heed to those demands, no matter

the professional consequences. I do so to make an important point: that

although most school leaders are in neither camp, all of them are subject

to the magnetic pull of these two poles – the need to meet the perfor-

mance targets on which their own careers, and those of their colleagues,

depend, and the instinct always to put the educational and developmental

interests of their students ﬁrst. In an ideal world, these two objectives

would be perfectly aligned. As we shall see, in reality they often are not.

The Ideal School Exhibition4

Audience

This essay addresses two audiences:

First, politicians and policymakers, to persuade them that the costs of

our high-stakes school accountability system now outweigh the beneﬁts,

and that, 25 years after the creation of Ofsted and the publication of

the ﬁrst league tables, our school system has reached a stage where it

would beneﬁt from a more supportive, less punitive approach to school

improvement.

And second, all those frustrated idealists working in our schools who

understand the way the system works but feel powerless to change it. I

hope they feel inspired, even in advance of the policy changes I’m propos-

ing, to make change happen in their own schools – to come together with

colleagues to sharpen the deﬁnition of their shared mission and to put

that mission at the centre of everything they do.

Purpose

The RSA’s mission is to help bring about a 21st Century Enlightenment.

We believe the provision, to every child and young person, of a rich and

broad education that instils a life-long love of learning, is a precondition

for the realisation of that aim.

But before we can move towards that more enlightened future, we ﬁrst

need to get our school system focused on education’s primary, rather than

proxy, goals. Only then can we move our school system to the next stage

in its evolution.

We believe a consensus is there to be assembled behind this aim – one

that recognises the need for transparency and accountability to ensure

money is well spent and children are well taught, but which also recog-

nises the price we are paying for the distortions of professional priorities

and practices that our accountability system has produced.

Whether, having moved the public and professional conversation on

to the substance of education, we can, or even should, reach a consensus

view about what an ideal school might look like, is less clear. After all,

education is goal driven. And the speciﬁcation of those goals is deter-

mined by our values. For as long as we value dierent things, we will

inevitably have dierent views about what makes for an ideal school. But

even here we should be able to agree on some important things: on the

beneﬁts of being able to choose from, and compare, dierent models; of

understanding the relative eectiveness of dierent approaches against

a range of outcomes; of thinking through the trade-os involved in

pursuing one educational mission rather than another; and, crucially, of

ensuring that, whatever their mission, educators work with, rather than

against, the growing body of scientiﬁc evidence about how we learn and

what that means for the way we teach.

There are thousands of idealistic school leaders and teachers who are

desperate to break free of the logic and language of our school account-

ability system, and to engage in these conversations instead. They should

know that these are precisely the conversations the RSA intends both to

host and contribute to in the coming years. We hope that everyone with an

interest or a stake in our schools will accept this invitation to join us.

The Ideal School Exhibition 5

Executive Summary

It is less than thirty years since the academic, Francis Fukayama, wrote

his now famous essay ‘The End of History’ in which he announced that

western liberal democracy had triumphed over its adversaries, and that a

new post-ideological era of peace and progress had begun.

It is fair to say his thesis hasn’t aged well. This year’s school leavers

will head out into an increasingly turbulent and dangerous world – a

world of economic insecurity and domestic and geo-political upheaval.

And they will have to ﬁnd their place and their way in societies that are

being transformed by the liberating but profoundly destabilising forces of

globalisation. Societies that, in the wake of the deepest economic slump

since the Great Depression, are now turning in on themselves over issues

of culture, identity, belonging and belief.

The root causes of the West’s culture wars are many and complex.

But chief among them is the fact we live on a dangerously overheating

and ever more densely populated planet where conﬂict and persecution,

ﬂooding and drought and vast inequalities of opportunity and wealth

have displaced 65 million people and created a migrant population greater

than that of Brazil. Amid the backlash to this unprecedented movement

of people from poorer to richer nations, liberalism is in full retreat, while

nationalism, nativism and protectionism are all on the rise. And with an

angry populist politics on the Right feeding o, and feeding, an intoler-

ant and censorious strain of identity politics on the Left, our ability to

transcend our hardwired instinct to tribalism – to put our shared human-

ity before our group loyalties – is once again being severely tested.

How best to prepare our young people for that world is the conversa-

tion we should, as a society, be having when we talk about education.

Yet so focused have our schools become on achieving the proxy goals of

passing tests, hitting targets and climbing league tables, that they risk

losing sight of education’s higher purposes, like individual fulﬁlment and

societal progress.

This is regrettable but understandable. With governors and trustees

fearing for their schools, and headteachers fearing for their jobs, our puni-

tive accountability system has come to dominate almost everything some

schools do, distorting professional priorities and practice and narrowing

and hollowing out the education our children receive.

We know that in high-stakes, low-trust systems, what gets measured

tends to get done. But what about those things that don’t get measured,

and therefore don’t get done? And what about the way in which things get

done – the tactics some schools employ and the games they feel compelled

to play to ensure performance targets are met and thresholds cleared?

Well, outright cheating and the most egregious forms of gaming remain

mercifully rare, though rising. But low level gaming is rife and teaching to

the test endemic.

The Ideal School Exhibition6

But there are some school leaders who simply refuse to play this bureau-

cratic education-by-numbers game; leaders whose decisions are shaped,

not by the government’s agenda, but by their own sense of mission – by

the higher purpose to which they have dedicated themselves and their

schools.

This report is about them – about a group of ‘missionary’ headteach-

ers and the mission-oriented schools they lead. Despite their many and

important dierences, they have one thing in common: they are all driven

by a sense of purpose that goes well beyond meeting the demands of the

government’s accountability system. What that purpose is varies from

school to school.

Michaela Community School in Brent, where visitors are greeted by a

large sign declaring “Knowledge is Power”, is all about the life-changing

potential of a knowledge-rich education; about giving children from

deprived backgrounds the cultural literacy to compete with their more

privileged peers.

XP School in Doncaster, inspired by High Tech High and the

Expeditionary School movement in the US, is all about developing the

skills and capabilities that are deemed most important to success in the

workplace and the world, and about doing so through enquiry-based,

real-world ‘expeditions’ or projects.

Shireland Collegiate Academy in Smethwick in the West Midlands is

blazing a trail for those who believe not only that the traditional school

model needs to be completely reinvented for the new century, but that

technology now allows us to do that in ways that make learning more

personalised, assessment more useful, the curriculum more dynamic and

parent and community engagement more meaningful.

Reach Academy in Feltham is all about building a culture of high

expectations and even higher aspirations in the belief that any child, no

matter how disadvantaged, can achieve remarkable things with the right

support in place. That support, however, goes well beyond teaching.

Inspired by the Harlem Children’s Zone, Reach’s founders are committed

not just to running a great school, but to building a strong and resilient

community, with plans in place for an on-site hub, out of which a range of

social programmes will be delivered.

School 21 in Stratford is designed not only to prepare children for the

future but to teach them that “today matters”; that they don’t need to

wait for adulthood to produce beautiful work of real value to authentic

audiences. The same spirit – that education shouldn’t all be about sacri-

ﬁce and suering now in the hope of some future return – also underpins

the school’s emphasis on child wellbeing and the development of pupils’

speaking skills, the means by which they help them ﬁnd their voice, liter-

ally and metaphorically.

West Rise Junior School in Eastbourne is focused on character de-

velopment; on providing pupils with unforgettable outdoor experiences

(from ﬁring a shotgun to herding water bualo) designed to teach them

discipline, responsibility and self-control, the pre-conditions for a life of

freedom and discovery.

The Plymouth School of Creative Arts is committed to developing

its students’ creative capacities and providing them with an aesthetic

The Ideal School Exhibition 7

education that showcases the beauty, utility and satisfaction to be found

in great art, clever design and true craftsmanship. It is a place for making

and creating.

Broadlands and Ashgrove are two apparently ordinary primary schools

in deprived neighbourhoods on opposite sides of the country that are

showing the extraordinary things teachers can achieve when they devote

themselves completely to the children in their care, and are prepared to do

whatever it takes to dismantle the many barriers to learning those children

face.

Bealings Primary School in rural Suolk is committed to building a

child-centred, child-sized, experiential learning environment and to a

pedagogical model known as Mantle of the Expert in which children are

taught, or more accurately, helped to learn, through role-play, drama and

discovery.

Bedales, a fee paying school in Hampshire, deﬁnes itself by its human-

ity (the school was established to provide a humane alternative to the

regimented austerity of Victorian schooling) and through its holistic

educational philosophy, summed up by its motto “to educate the Head,

Hand and Heart”. It strives to introduce its students to what is true

(academics), what is beautiful (creativity and making) and what is right

(morals and ethics).

The West London Free School is committed to delivering – for free and

to all – the type of classical liberal education normally reserved for those

who attend grammar or private schools. Its stated purpose is:

“not primarily to prepare pupils for a job or career [but to] transform

their minds so that they are able to make reasonable and informed judg-

ments and engage fruitfully in conversation and debate – not just about

contemporary issues but also about the universal questions that have been

troubling mankind throughout history.”

All these schools share a key deﬁning characteristic: an unshakeable sense

of their own identity and values, and a clear vision, rooted in those values.

To turn that high-level vision into a practical reality on the ground, each

of them has thought deeply about what it is they do – about the design

principles that underpin their model, and about how, through the use

of carefully selected rituals and routines, those principles can imbue the

day-to-day life of the school.

But clarity about one’s values and aims, and attentiveness to the ques-

tion of how they might be made manifest in everyday school life, are not

the only pre-conditions for success. Mission-oriented schools must also

think hard about their practice – about what they teach (curriculum), how

they teach it (pedagogy) and how they know if they’re succeeding (assess-

ment) – and about how to mitigate the risks associated with their chosen

approach.

A key dividing line running through this group of mission-oriented

schools separates those that seek to develop skills, competencies and

capabilities through student-led, project-based learning, from those that

seek to teach knowledge, explicitly and didactically, with the teacher very

much in the lead.

The Ideal School Exhibition8

As the schools in this report are demonstrating, both approaches can

be made to work and to work brilliantly. But understanding how they can

go wrong is vital to ensuring they don’t.

The leaders of School 21, XP School and Shireland Collegiate

Academy argue passionately and persuasively that student-led project-

based learning provides for richer and more meaningful learning

experiences that support deeper understanding; that by transferring a sig-

niﬁcant amount of control over the project to students, it provides them

with the sense of ownership and responsibility that are the hallmarks of

self-motivated, independent learners. They point out that by requiring

students to work in groups, as well as individually, projects teach them

the social and emotional skills needed to collaborate and to lead; that

by culminating in some kind of product or production, they teach them

the value of drafting and redrafting, of learning from their mistakes, of

persevering in the face of diculty and of taking real pride in the quality

of their work; and that by creating a systematic process for documenting

and reﬂecting on learning, they help students ‘learn how to learn’, with

teacher feedback and self- and peer-assessment a central feature.

But those hoping to achieve the success these schools are achieving

need to beware the risks associated with this model. In particular, they

need to heed three key warnings from cognitive science:

First, they need to ensure they don’t fall for the ‘active learning fal-

lacy’ – mistaking physical activity for cognitive activity, and allowing the

former to displace the latter. They need to be alert to the danger that an

activity-packed project might not lead to the expected learning if lots of

those activities are disconnected from, or only tangentially linked to, the

content at the heart of the project. In other words, they need to keep their

primary focus on the learning, not the project.

Second, they need to beware the risk of ‘cognitive overload’, recognis-

ing that novices are highly reliant on their limited working memories and

therefore likely to become overwhelmed when taught complex things in

complex ways with minimal guidance. And they need to be mindful of

the fact that the most deprived students are particularly vulnerable to this

risk, as many of them do not possess the cultural capital – a store of prior

knowledge – without which all learning, but discovery-based learning

in particular, becomes more challenging. Since activity-ﬁlled projects

provide the confused student with easy hiding places, the risk is they end

up, to quote American educationalist Gilbert Sewall, “lost in action”,

their disorientation obscured by a “whirlwind of doing and doing.”

Finally, any school that puts the acquisition of skills at the centre of

its mission, and that seeks to teach or assess those skills directly, needs

to satisfy itself that they are indeed as generic and transferrable as that

approach assumes; that they can be cultivated and applied with equal

eect across dierent knowledge domains. A simple thought experiment

– asking yourself whether you can communicate with equal authority, or

think equally critically, about a subject of which you know little, as you

can on a subject you know well – reveals how domain-speciﬁc these skills

are, and how limited are their transferrable elements. Few argue that skills

are not critically important. The issue at stake is how to develop them;

within traditional subjects and disciplines, within cross-curricular or

interdisciplinary projects, or as ‘subjects’ in their own right.

The Ideal School Exhibition 9

Schools like Michaela Community School, Reach Academy and the West

London Free School would no doubt recognise Sewall’s description of a

brilliant knowledge-rich education:

“At the core, always, is serious content approached seriously. Knowledge

builds on knowledge. Thirteen years of carefully sequenced content and

jealously guarded classroom time allow students to build an enormous

storehouse of knowledge and skills and the ability to use them. And since

knowledge and success are the best breeding ground for interest to take

root and expand, the more students know, the more they will want to

know. Under the leadership of their teacher, students work to unearth

meaning; to evaluate, interpret, compare, extend, and apply; to analyse

their errors, present their ﬁndings, defend their solutions; to attend

carefully to what others say; to get their thoughts down clearly on paper;

to understand. This is not boring and it is not passive. This is real action

learning. This is the mind at work.”

But anyone looking to emulate the success of these schools needs to

understand the risks associated with their model, a model ﬁrst developed

by some of the highest performing American Charter schools like KIPP

(Knowledge is Power Programme), which combine fast-paced didactic

instruction with strict discipline.

The ﬁrst risk is that the teacher fails to get beyond the ‘grammar’ of

a subject; the knowledge, facts, structures and rules that are the essential

foundation – but no more than a foundation – of a great education. The

danger is that, in their rush to introduce their students to “the best that

has been thought and said”, they resort to one-way ‘monologic’ teaching

rather than the genuine exchange of ‘dialogic’ teaching. And, in so doing,

leave too little time for ‘dialectics’ – for questioning, analysing, challeng-

ing and debating – with the result that they teach children what to think,

but not how to think.

The second related risk is that, in their determination to teach as much

knowledge as can be packed into the timetable, they lose sight of the

importance of ‘rhetoric’ – the arts of communication, self-expression and

creativity that allow us to explore the subjective as well as the objective;

what we feel as well as what we know. Speaking, singing, making, draw-

ing, dancing, acting, designing, reciting, playing, presenting; all are part

of a rich and rounded education – an education of the heart and hand as

well as the head – but can easily be pushed to the margins of a knowledge-

based education that privileges the core academic subjects.

Finally, they need to ensure their combination of high-intensity didac-

tic instruction and an elaborate programme of attitude and behaviour

modiﬁcation isn’t so supportive and restrictive that it prevents students

not only from falling down but learning how to get back up. The high

college drop-out rate among KIPP’s ﬁrst students showed how dicult

the transition from school to university can be if students haven’t ﬁrst

acquired the self-discipline, perseverance and resilience needed to study,

work and live independently. Critics of these ‘high expectations, no

excuses’ schools claim they are likely to produce young adults who are too

reliant and compliant – simultaneously dependant on, and acquiescent

towards, authority.

The Ideal School Exhibition10

All the schools described in this report are able to explain, cogently

and persuasively, either why they believe these concerns are misplaced,

or what they are doing to address them. In doing the latter, they tend to

reinforce a key lesson from scientiﬁc and educational research which adds

some important nuance to what can be a rather binary discussion: that

the way in which students are best helped to learn (and indeed, behave)

should change as they get older and as they progress from novices to

experts. At the start of that journey, when students have little relevant

knowledge committed to long-term memory, clear, explicit, didactic

instruction and some structure and constraint have an important role

to play. But getting a student ready for post-compulsory study or work

requires a school progressively to transfer responsibility and control over

the learning process, and over behaviour, to the student. The ultimate goal

being independent learners, capable of independent thought.

It would be a mistake to think that strict sequencing – knowledge

then skills, didactic instruction then independent learning – is the way to

resolve this dilemna or to organise a school, however. As teacher turned

author Martin Robinson explains, the historic Trivium – the collective

title for the three arts of ‘grammar’ (knowledge and rules), ‘dialectics’

(analysis and questioning) and ‘rhetoric’ (presentation and performance)

– provides a useful framework for ensuring that all three are present and

appropriately balanced throughout a child’s educational journey. Only

by achieving an evolving equilibrium between these three arts, Robinson

argues, will we resolve the conﬂict between knowledge and skills, freedom

and constraint, and tradition and progress that sits at the centre of the

education debate. And only then will we be able to provide what the

poet and polemicist John Milton described as “a complete and generous

education.”

But the Trivium stems from an age when education was for the elite.

And its ideas have traditionally provided a foundation for the type of

liberal arts education that is often still only available to an elite.

The task the state-funded, non-selective, mission-oriented schools in

this report have taken on is to provide a complete and generous education

to every child – a quite dierent challenge.

Here, they also provide some valuable lessons: about how to create a

culture that promotes good behaviour and supports learning; about how

to get every child to succeed no matter their starting point; about how to

overcome the barriers to learning thrown up by deprivation and by the

growing problem of child and adolescent mental ill health; about how to

prepare young people for the opportunities and challenges of adulthood

by making your school porous to the outside world; and about how to

turn your school into a ‘deliberately developmental organisation’ where

professional development is constant, rather than continuing, and where

teachers help each other to be the best they can be.

Although research and evidence are, rightly, playing an ever bigger role

in education, ultimately, the debate about the ideal school isn’t technical

or scientiﬁc. It is a values-based debate about what kind of adults we are

trying to produce, and what kind of society we are trying to build.

For anyone who values living in an open and democratic society, it is a

debate, ﬁrst and foremost, about how to educate for freedom; about the

The Ideal School Exhibition 11

sort of schooling that will enable a young adult to fully grasp freedom’s

value, understand its vulnerabilities, recognise its enemies and commit to

its defence.

It is a debate about how to give our young people the shared language

of reason – the means by which, in our multi-cultural, multi-faith socie-

ties, we can transcend the divisive politics of identity and make common

cause with other rational people from beyond our own group.

It is a debate about how to give our young people not only the knowl-

edge, but the wisdom and courage to make judgements, intellectual,

moral, and aesthetic, and the wherewithal to join what the philosopher

Michael Oakeshott referred to as “the great conversation of mankind.”

In short, it is a debate about what kind of education will prepare them,

not just to write a good exam, but to live a good life.

That is the debate these mission-oriented school leaders are engaged

in. And that is the debate the RSA intends to host, and contribute to, in

the years ahead as we work to create the ‘21st Century Enlightenment’

that is the RSA’s stated mission.

But to do this, we must ﬁrst ensure that all those who work in our schools

are able to focus on education’s primary goals, rather than the proxy goals

of tests, targets and league tables. This cannot be achieved by turning

back the clock and dismantling the entire accountability system, however.

Children only get one go at schooling, and the idea of leaving any of them

in schools we know are seriously and chronically underperforming is

unconscionable.

Instead, we need considered reform cautiously applied. Reform

involving changes to policy, practice and culture at every level, involving

ministers, ocials, inspectors, examiners, trustees and governors, school

leaders and teachers.

The aim of those changes is to free headteachers from having to choose

between their own interests and those of their pupils; to get classroom

teachers teaching to the curriculum, not the test; to get examiners to

reward genuine quality rather than coached responses; to get Ofsted to

look at how, as well as whether, a school has met its performance targets;

to get government and the inspectorate out of the business of deﬁning

excellence and focused solely on identifying failure; and, in everything

they do, to ensure the actions of policymakers and regulators are more

supportive and less punitive.

And behind all these aims is one over-riding objective: to help those

who lead and teach in our schools reclaim ownership of their institutions,

their profession and their practice.

As the vice-like grip of the accountability system is loosened – as

schools are given more space and more freedom – so the profession

must take greater responsibility for driving standards, with research and

evidence playing an ever more prominent role.

To achieve these aims we need to:

1. Create a new culture in educational assessment by:

•

Making tests harder to teach to. This involves attending to the

arcane details of test design to increase unpredictability without

The Ideal School Exhibition12

reducing reliability and validity; using more closed-question

and multiple choice tests where appropriate; and supporting the

eort to reﬁne and promote the use of comparative judgement,

which better captures genuine quality, for the marking of essay

based exams;

•

Teaching teachers about the dangers of teaching to the test

such that they develop a proper understanding of the dierence

between the sample and the domain and a true appreciation of

the centrality of the curriculum to a great education. This could

usefully begin by making Ofsted’s assessment training (devel-

oped for its own inspectors) available to all senior leaders;

•

Helping teachers embrace genuine formative assessment by

embedding regular, highly speciﬁc, low-stakes testing in their

practice for purely diagnostic purposes, with the emphasis on

providing useful feedback and identifying helpful next steps.

2. Reform the accountability system by:

•

Making explicit Ofsted’s emerging role as the guardian of a

broad and balanced curriculum; a counterbalance to the pres-

sures of the Department of Education’s (DfE) numbers-based

accountability system; the body mandated and expected to

‘referee the game’, looking not only at what schools achieve, but

how they achieve it;

•

Making the DfE’s representation of school performance more

nuanced and balanced by providing more data about the school,

its students and its alumni (so-called ‘destinations data’);

•

Reweighting league tables to stop the practice of ‘o-rolling’ low

performing pupils. In future, league tables should include the

GCSE results of pupils who, for whatever reason, leave between

the start of the secondary school and the time they sit their

GCSEs 15 terms later. The DfE should allocate these pupils’

results to the institutions where they have spent time on-roll in

proportion to the amount of time they spent there.

•

Withdrawing the ‘right’ for schools to act as their own admis-

sions authority, and establishing a Commission on School

Admissions, convened by the RSA, to look at how best to

permanently close the ‘low road to school improvement’

(manipulating the admissions system rather than improving

teaching);

•

Ensuring all schools receive the eective and timely external

challenge and support they need by creating a comprehensive

but contestable ‘middle tier’ of MATs, local authorities and

others, all of whom will be held accountable for their perfor-

mance. Middle tier bodies will eectively operate on licence,

with those that cannot demonstrate an ability to raise standards

replaced by new ones. Thus, the weight of accountability will

be shared between schools and those charged with supporting

them, with an inbuilt incentive to ensure that support is of the

highest quality.

The Ideal School Exhibition 13

3. Encourage a teacher-led professional renaissance by:

•

Returning the deﬁnition of educational excellence to the

profession by abolishing the Ofsted ‘Outstanding’ category

and getting the inspectorate focused solely on identifying those

schools that are either struggling to meet their students’ needs

or putting those needs second to their own institutional interests

by gaming the system. Schools that are doing neither should be

allowed to set their own priorities in line with their own values

and vision;

•

Supporting and celebrating all grass-roots initiatives designed to

improve the quality of teaching and to support the wider con-

tribution schools make to their local communities and society.

Initiatives like the National Baccalaureate are of particular

importance in the eort to incentivise the provision of a richer,

more rounded education.

England’s school accountability system has performed a vital function

over the last 25 years, exposing underperformance and driving improve-

ment, particularly in the basics of numeracy and literacy. And in some

important ways – not least the increased emphasis on progress rather than

attainment – the system has become less crude over time.

But the bigger trend has been a ratchet-like strengthening of the

system’s grip on our schools, which have now completely internalised

its logic and language. Gaming has become more common and teaching

to the test so standard it is confused for good practice. Innovation and

collaboration meanwhile are powerfully disincentivised. By any objective

measure, the costs of the system now outweigh the beneﬁts.

The headteachers in this report have shown, through their heroic

eorts, what can be achieved, even within this environment. Our task is to

build a system where far more schools are able to do what these mission-

oriented schools are doing, but crucially, where success doesn’t depend on

heroism.

At the RSA, we believe we have now reached that critical point where

change becomes possible: where the risks of inaction are greater than

the risks of reform. And we believe there is a broad coalition for change

waiting to be assembled. That coalition, like the group of schools in this

report, spans the ideological spectrum from progressive to traditionalist

and all points in between. It is a coalition of missionaries, visionaries and

idealists, whether fulﬁlled or frustrated, whether ﬁghting the good ﬁght or

itching to join it.

They should know they have an ally, and a meeting place, in the RSA.

The Ideal School Exhibition14

Part One

The Ideal School Exhibition 15

Chapter 1: The world

beyond the school

gates

We live in a world where only bad news is considered newsworthy. As a

result, it is easy to lose sight of just how much better the fundamentals of

life will be for most young people today than it was for their forebears.

Two hundred years ago, before the routine vaccination of babies, 43

percent of all the world’s children died before the age of ﬁve, compared to

only four percent today. Where then a child would be lucky to live to 35,

today they can expect to live at least twice that long. Where just 14 percent

of young people would have received at least a basic level of education, 85

percent now do so, sending the global illiteracy rate plummeting, from 88

to 15 percent. Meanwhile, the number of people living in extreme poverty

is down from 94 to 10 percent, with much of that still-accelerating pro-

gress taking place over the last 25 years, during which time a staggering

137,000 people were lifted out of poverty every day.

Whether the medical and technological advances that have delivered

these gains in life expectancy, literacy and prosperity are making us hap-

pier and safer is moot, however. With the three ‘Ds’ of dementia, diabetes

and depression claiming ever more victims, the consequences of our

increasingly long lives, and our sugary, sedentary yet stressful lifestyles,

are becoming impossible to ignore.

And with the terrorist threat level never falling below ‘severe’, tensions

between Russia and the West threatening a new cold war, and nuclear-

armed North Korea developing the capability to strike mainland America,

public safety and national security are once again key public concerns.

Even if our worst security fears prove overblown, the fact remains we

live on a dangerously overheating and ever more densely populated planet

where conﬂict and persecution, ﬂooding and drought and vast inequalities

of opportunity and wealth have displaced 65 million people and created

a migrant population greater than that of Brazil. Amid the backlash to

this unprecedented movement of people from poorer to richer nations,

liberalism is in full retreat, while nationalism, nativism and protectionism

are all on the rise. As a species, our ability to overcome our fear of the

‘other’ – to transcend our hardwired instinct to tribalism – is once again

being severely tested.

1. Roser M (2017) ‘The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we

know it’.Published online at OurWorldInData.org

2. Rosenblat, J.D., Mansur, R.B., Cha, D.S., Baskaran, A., and McIntyre, R.S. (2015)

Depression, Diabetes and Dementia. In Comorbidity of Mental and Physical Disorders,

Sartorius, N., Holt, R.I.G. and Maj, M. (eds), Key Issues in Mental Health, Vol. 179, Karger

The Ideal School Exhibition16

Yet it is less than 30 years since history was supposed to have ended

or, more precisely, since the Berlin Wall fell and political scientist Francis

Fukuyama wrote his famous essay The End of History? In it he an-

nounced that the 20th century’s ideological battles between east and

west were over, that western liberal democracy had won, and that a new

post-ideological era of progress and peace had begun.

That was 1989, the year I left school.

This year’s school leavers will head out into a more turbulent and

dangerous world – a world of economic insecurity and domestic and

geo-political upheaval. They will have to ﬁnd their place and their way

in societies that are being transformed by the liberating but profoundly

destabilising forces of globalisation, and which, in the wake of the deep-

est economic slump since the Great Depression, are now turning in on

themselves over issues of culture, identity, belonging and belief.

As citizens, the class of 2017 will have to weigh the costs of joining

or turning away from an increasingly shrill and polarised public debate,

dominated by the deliberately oensive and the easily oended, the

former emboldened by the anonymity of the online echo chamber, the

latter protected by ‘trigger warnings’ and ‘safe spaces’, the struggle

between them throwing up new challenges to the most precious but fragile

democratic freedom of all – free speech.

In a post-truth age when ‘alternative facts’, ‘fake news’ and invented

conspiracies are used to pollute the information space and undermine

the very notion of knowable truth, those who enter that debate will need

to stay a safe distance from both cynicism and credulity by learning to

interrogate competing truth-claims. They will need to make reasonable

judgments not just about plausibility, but about motivation, correlation

and causation, knowing what to attribute to malign intent and what to

incompetence or chance.

At a time of angry populism, when leaders invoke their democratic

mandates to question the integrity of democratic institutions and to

challenge the legitimacy of their decisions, they will need to know the

dierence between an ‘enemy of the people’ and a judge or legislator

discharging their constitutional duty.

In an era of identity politics, when people are all-too-often judged not,

as a wise man once urged, by ‘the content of their character’ but by the

colour of their skin, their sex or by any number of other innate or inher-

ited characteristics, the class of 2017 will need to decide for themselves

what good, if any, is likely to come from placing the group, rather than

the individual, at the centre of our public discourse.

At a time when elites and experts are widely derided – when the

cultural critic and the public intellectual have been shunted o stage by a

never-ending line of reality TV stars and talent show hopefuls – the class

of 2017 will need to identify their own thought leaders and their own

champions of quality and truth to help sift the sublime from the ordinary,

the profound from the trivial and the authentic from the derivative.

3. Fukuyama, F. (1989) The End of History?. The National Interest, No. 16, pp. 3-18

4. King Jr, M. L. (1963) Speech, Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC 28 Aug. 1963

The Ideal School Exhibition 17

At a time when our multi-cultural, multi-faith societies are struggling

to settle on the core, non-negotiable values that bind them, the class of

2017 will need to learn to ‘live and let live’ without ever lapsing into moral

relativism; to understand both the value, and the limits, of tolerance.

They will need to weigh competing rights, balance mutually exclusive

freedoms, and reconcile apparently incompatible world-views and, when

compromise cannot be reached, to settle their disputes peaceably within a

framework of democratically determined, impartially applied laws.

And when Islamists and far right extremists are willing a violent ‘clash

of civilisations’, the class of 2017 will need to know how to resist their

provocations without shrinking from the battle of ideas that will have to

be fought between enlightenment and bigotry.

They will need to keep

sight of the fact that the front lines of this unavoidable battle run through,

not between, nations and religions.

Most importantly of all, they will need to learn that all of this will be

more easily achieved if they – we – can rediscover our civility, generosity,

empathy and humour, the diminution of which has always accompanied

the rise of man’s worst ideas and most dangerous ideologies.

This poses a challenge for all of society, but particularly for our schools –

the communities within which children are not only taught but socialised;

the institutions charged with passing on society’s norms, customs, culture

and values.

As the American psychologist and educational reformer John Dewey

put it: “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education

is its midwife.”

Anyone who doubts the connection between liberalism, democracy

and education need look no further than contemporary Hungary, a

country that has elected as its prime minister a man who promised to

build an ‘illiberal democracy’ knowing full well that, as The Times’ Philip

Collins puts it: “Liberal democracy comes as a pairing and anyone who

disparages the ﬁrst, threatens the second.”

But what Viktor Orbán also

knows, and his actions over the seven years since his election reveal, is that

an enlightened liberal democracy depends for its survival on education.

Which is why, in contrast to the global trend, he has sought to restrict,

rather than expand, the educational opportunities available to Hungary’s

youth. Since 2010 he has cut education budgets at every level, lowered the

school leaving age from 18 to 16, reduced the number of young people

going to university, appointed powerful chancellors to exert political

control over the country’s higher education institutions, introduced a new,

highly nationalist curriculum in schools and, most recently, passed into a

law an apparently technical regulatory requirement, the actual purpose

of which is to close the Central European University, hitherto a beacon of

openness, independence and academic freedom.

5. Huntington, S., (1997) The Clash of Civilisations? The Debate. Simon & Schuster

6. Dewey, J., (1916) The Need of an Industrial Education in an Industrial Democracy,

Manual training and Vocational Education, Vol.17

7. Collins, P. (2017) EU must wake up and defend democracy. The Times Online [online]

13 April. Available at: www.thetimes.co.uk/article/eu-must-wake-up-and-defend-democracy-

djtp97g80

8. Müller, J-W. (2017) Hungary: The War on Education, The New York Review of Books

[online]. Available at: www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/05/20/hungary-the-war-on-education-ceu/

The Ideal School Exhibition18

The lesson could not be clearer. When authoritarianism is the goal,

education is the problem. When freedom is the goal, education is the

solution.

But how do we educate for freedom? What sort of schooling enables a

young adult to fully grasp freedom’s value, understand its vulnerabilities,

recognise its enemies and commit to its defence?

What kind of schooling will give our children the shared language of

reason; the means by which, in our multi-cultural, multi-faith societies,

we can transcend the politics of identity and make common cause with

other rational people from beyond our own groups?

What kind of schooling will give our young people the wisdom and

courage to make judgements, moral, intellectual and aesthetic, and the

wherewithal to join what the philosopher Michael Oakeshott referred to

as “the great conversation of mankind”?

In short, what kind of education will prepare them, not just to write a

good exam, but to live a good life?

There are many plausible answers to this, but ‘the status quo plus an

hour of civics’ is surely not one of them.

For this is a question which, once asked, leads inexorably to a fuller,

richer, more expansive account of education’s purposes and character

than that which underpins our current, technocratic, narrowly instrumen-

talist debate.

It is a question that challenges us to think afresh about how, as a

society, we can provide our children with what John Milton once called “a

complete and generous education.”

10.

9. Oakeshott, M. (1959) The voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind: an essay

Bowes & Bowes

10. Milton, J. (1909-14) Of Education Tractate on Education The Harvard Classics.

Available at: www.bartleby.com/3/4/1.html

The Ideal School Exhibition 19

Chapter 2: Gamers and

Missionaries

Anyone who has dipped into the education debate in England could be

forgiven for thinking the most important fault line running across that

system is that which separates progressives from traditionalists. On one

side, the future-facing ‘Progs’ with their emphasis on 21st century skills

and on what Tom Bennett, founder of researchED, calls “groovy teaching”

– hands-on, experiential, student-led and project-based. On the other, the

canon-revering, fad-shunning, chalk-and-talk ‘Trads’ with their relentless

focus on what Peter Hyman, the founder of School 21, dubs “behaviour

and basics.”

But the trench that separates progressives from traditionalists is not the

most important dividing line in contemporary English schooling. For that,

we need to focus on the line, drawn in green below, which separates the

‘missionaries’ and the ‘gamers’.

Missionaries, as the name suggests, are those school leaders whose

decisions are shaped by their own sense of mission; the higher purpose

to which they have dedicated themselves and their schools; the cause that

gets them out of bed every morning.

Gamers, by contrast, are the minority of leaders whose decisions are

overwhelmingly shaped by the government’s demands – by the constantly

changing tests and targets against which their performance and the

school’s quality will be judged.

In between them are the vast majority of heads who are neither gamers

nor missionaries but pragmatists, doing the best they can for their pupils

in the circumstances.

The Ideal School Exhibition20

2.1 The Gamers

No one enters the teaching profession to play the education-by-numbers

game. But some end up having to play the game anyway, driven to do so

by the irresistible logic and remorseless pressure of the system.

11.

Anyone who has seen the highly acclaimed American television series

The Wire will recognise the phenomenon – the daily dilemmas faced by

honest public servants forced to choose between doing the right thing and

the expedient thing.

Although billed as a crime drama, The Wire is actually a sociological

examination of the modern American city and of the impact its institu-

tions have on those who work in them. It tells the story of a parade

of battered idealists and would-be heroes in the police force, the city

government, the courts and the school system, and how they are required

to battle not only the forces of poverty, crime and addiction on the streets

of west Baltimore, but against the warped logic, skewed priorities and

perverse incentives of the public bureaucracies in which they work. Their

jobs may dier, but they are all daily confronted by the same realisation:

that ﬁdelity to the higher purpose or calling that ﬁrst drew them to their

profession is emphatically not what will secure their survival or advance-

ment now that they’re in. They understand only too well how the system

works, but can do nothing to alter it. Insiders who challenge the rules

of the game tend to pay a heavy price. Those who don’t tend to drink,

heavily.

Our school system, with its tests, targets, league tables and inspec-

tions, has become just such a game; a bureaucratic numbers game that

all too often pits narrow institutional interests against the wider public

interest, forcing teachers and school leaders to choose between helping

their students and helping themselves. That is the unavoidable conse-

quence of the fact that the same tests used to assess pupils’ learning are

used to measure school and teacher eectiveness. The result is that good

decisions that would deliver long-term beneﬁts to pupils but are unlikely

in the short-term to show up in test scores tend not to be taken, while bad

decisions that are not in the long-term interests of pupils but are likely

have a positive immediate impact on test scores do get taken. Proof that

in high-stakes, low-trust systems, what gets measured gets done, and what

doesn’t, doesn’t.

The distortions to professional priorities and practice that result

take many forms, most of which represent nothing more than a rational

response to the incentives the accountability system creates and the

instructions, whether implicit or explicit, the government sends. And, in

those cases, most people would agree that the lion’s share of the blame

rests with the policymakers who write the rules of the game, not the

practitioners who are forced to play by them.

11. Weale, S. (2017) Ofsted to investigate schools ‘gaming system’ to move up league

tables The Guardian. Available at: www.theguardian.com/education/2017/mar/10/ofsted-to-

investigate-schools-gaming-system-to-move-up-league-tables

The Ideal School Exhibition 21

But there are some practices that cannot be blamed on others.

The number of teachers caught engaging in acts of outright cheating is

small, but rising. There were 388 penalties issued to teachers for assisting

pupils in A-level and GCSE exams in 2016, up from 262 in 2015 and 119

in 2014, although considering how hard some forms of cheating are to

detect, this is likely to understate the true scale of the problem.

12.

A dierent, arguably less deliberate form of cheating, is the tendency

for teachers to over-mark the coursework component of modular

qualiﬁcations, leading to the attainment of higher-than-deserved grades.

The most eye-catching recent example being the results posted by the

large number of borderline GCSE students who, in 2011, sat AQA’s tier 2

English language exam – 71 percent of them achieving a C grade or higher

in the teacher-marked “speaking and listening” component, 65 percent

in the teacher-marked coursework component but only 4 percent in the

externally-marked written exam.

13.

In the report that followed the publica-

tion of these and other suspiciously volatile results, the regulator Ofqual

concluded:

“While no school that we interviewed considered that it was doing

anything untoward…many expressed concerns that other nearby schools

were overstepping the boundaries of acceptable practice. It is clearly hard

for teachers to maintain their own integrity when they believe that there is

a widespread loss of integrity elsewhere. No teacher should be forced to

choose between their principles on the one hand and their students, school

and career on the other.”

14.

A particularly oensive practice which is beginning to attract greater

media attention is that of schools boosting their scores by taking deliber-

ate steps to attract pupils who are likely to push those scores up and get

rid of pupils who are likely to drag those scores down. This is done by

manipulating the admissions system to select high attaining pupils, and

by permanently excluding or, more commonly, ‘managing out’ harder-

to-teach students whose continued presence in the school threaten its

league table standing. Recent ﬁndings from the Institute for Public Policy

Research (IPPR), revealed the full scale of this practice.

15.

Although the

ocial statistics show that 6,685 pupils (or 35 a day) were permanently

excluded from school in 2015-16 (the majority of them in the run up to

GCSEs), the researchers claim that even this 40 percent increase over three

years massively understates the rate at which overall exclusions are grow-

ing. They point out that 48,000 children are being educated in alternative

provision for excluded pupils, and that many more are leaving school for

12. Turner, C. and Scott, P. (2016) Cheating teachers on the rise: Number of sta illicitly

helping students pass exams trebles. The Telegraph Online [online] 16 December. Available

at: www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2016/12/13/cheating-teachers-rise-number-sta-illicitly-

helping-children/

13. Ofqual (2012) GCSE English 2012. [pdf] Oce of Qualiﬁcations and Examinations

Regulation. Available at: webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20141031163546/http://www.

ofqual.gov.uk/ﬁles/2012-11-02-gcse-english-ﬁnal-report-and-appendices.pdf

14. Ibid.

15. Gill, K. et al (2017) Making the dierence: breaking the link between school exclusion

and social exclusion IPPR. Available at: https://www.ippr.org/ﬁles/2017-10/making-the-

dierence-report-october-2017.pdf

The Ideal School Exhibition22

‘elective’ home education, the rate of which has doubled over the past four

years. Overall, the researchers estimate that the number of children being

illegally excluded is in the “tens of thousands”.

Research from Education Datalab, another thinktank, while stopping

short of making speciﬁc allegations against named schools, demonstrated

how the worst oenders would have seen their GCSE pass rates fall by a

full 17 percent had all the pupils who were moved ‘o-roll’ between year 7

and year 11 remained in the school.

16.

To understand the full consequences

of this practice, one needs only to consider the fates of those pupils who

get shunted out. Where the proportion of pupils nationally who achieve

ﬁve or more good GCSEs including English and maths stands at almost

six in 10, the proportion of ‘movers’ clearing that hurdle varies from 40

percent if they move to a mainstream school, 30 percent if they move to a

university technical college or studio school and just one percent if they

move to a special school or into alternative provision.

17.

More common and less egregious examples of gaming, some of which

the government has since moved to close down, include the decision to

focus the school’s attention and resources on pupils who are close to

the pass-fail threshold and on subjects that are counted (or that count

double) for the purposes of accountability, to the detriment of pupils

and subjects that will make less of a dierence to the school’s chances

of hitting government performance targets. These decisions are rational

from the school’s perspective but have a very real negative impact on the

large numbers of children who are well above or below the crucial C/D

borderline, or have a passion or aptitude for a subject that doesn’t show

up in league tables.

Another is the tendency for schools to seek out the easiest qualiﬁca-

tions to achieve and to steer large numbers of pupils towards them,

regardless of whether they are of interest or value to the learner. Entering

students for whom English is an additional language (EAL) into a GCSE

examination in the modern ‘foreign’ language (MFA) they speak at home

is one example. A second, which has attracted a good deal of media

coverage over the last year or so, is the large number of pupils entered

for the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL) IT qualiﬁcation

that is deemed equivalent to a GCSE for the purposes of accountability.

Entries to this fast track qualiﬁcation, which can be taught in as little as

three days, rose 350 percent in a single year, up from 26,250 in June 2015

to 117,200 in June 2016.

18.

Further research from Education Datalab has

shown how pupils taking the qualiﬁcation average the equivalent of an A

grade despite achieving below a C on average across their other GCSEs.

19.

16. Nye, P. (2017) Who’s left? How much do leaver rates vary from school-to-

school? Education Datalab School accountability Blog [blog] 17 February. Available at:

educationdatalab.org.uk/2017/02/whos-left-how-much-do-leaver-rates-vary-from-school-to-

school/

17. Nye, P. (2017) Who’s left: The main ﬁndings. Education Datalab School accountability

blog [blog] 31 January. Available at: educationdatalab.org.uk/2017/01/whos-left-the-main-

ﬁndings/

18. Staufenberg, J. & Dickens, J. (2016) Fast-track ECDL IT qualiﬁcation pass rate soars

by 350%. Schools Week [blog]. Available at: schoolsweek.co.uk/fast-track-ecdl-it-qualiﬁcation-

pass-rate-soars-by-350/

19. Thomson, D. (2016) Does Ofqual also need to look at the grades awarded in non-GCSE

qualiﬁcations? Education Datalab [blog]. Available at: educationdatalab.org.uk/2016/05/does-

ofqual-also-need-to-look-at-the-grades-awarded-in-non-gcse-qualiﬁcations/

The Ideal School Exhibition 23

Yet another, until recently, was the tendency to enter pupils for GCSEs

a year or two early – even though the data shows they were likely to

achieve a lower grade as a consequence – so the school could bank the

C or B grade pass and enter the pupil for more exams, often in the same

domain, the next year, or, in the event that they failed, give them another

go at clearing the threshold.

20.

Behind all these tricks is a clear trend towards narrowing, with primary

schools reducing their key stage 2 curriculum to little more than reading,

writing and maths in year 6 and secondary schools curtailing the deliber-

ately broad key stage 3 phase at the end of year 8 to give themselves and

their students an extra year to prepare for GCSEs.

21.

Ofsted reports that

a quarter of secondary schools are now extending their key stage 4 from

two to three years, with the result that 12 year olds are being asked to

make path determining choices, with key subjects like history, geography

and languages being dropped a year early. Considering that key stage 3 is

designed speciﬁcally to expose children, for the ﬁrst and last time in their

lives, to the widest possible range of academic subjects, this is a genuine

shame.

So important are all these tactics, short-cuts and quick-wins to

schools, that thousands of them have joined organisations like the PiXL

club (Partners in Excellence) which, in return for a fee, provide advice

about how to meet the demands of the government’s accountability

system or, in the words of former education secretary Michael Gove,

about how “to game the system…and use the student as a means of

gathering points so that the school can look better.”

22.

It is worth repeating the point: apportioning blame for such practices

in a system where the incentives to engage in them are so strong is far

from straightforward. As PiXL’s Chairman Sir John Rowling put it when

challenged over his organisation’s energetic promotion of the ECDL

qualiﬁcation: “There is a real crisis in schools. The interests of kids and

schools are set at odds against each other by the system. I don’t sit in

judgment of schools that live in fear of their jobs.”

23.

The most insidious way in which the assessment and accountability

systems have distorted professional practice and hollowed out the educa-

tion children receive cannot really be described as gaming at all, if by that

we mean the deliberate manipulation of the system. Rather, it results from

the tendency to teach to the test, a practice that subverts the purposes of

education in ways so subtle that most teachers don’t even realise they are

doing it and wouldn’t, in all probability, think they were doing anything

wrong if they did.

20. Paton, G. (2013) Crackdown on schools that ‘cheat’ the GCSE system. The Telegraph

[online]. Available at: www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10342444/Crackdown-

on-schools-that-cheat-the-GCSE-system.html

21. Spalding, C. (2017) ‘Why we must resist the lure of starting GCSE courses in KS3’, TES

[online] www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-views/why-we-must-resist-lure-starting-

gcse-courses-ks3

22. Paton, G. (2013) Crackdown on schools that ‘cheat’ the GCSE system. The Telegraph

[online] Available at: www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10342444/Crackdown-on-

schools-that-cheat-the-GCSE-system.html

23. Dickens, J. (2015)EXCLUSIVE: Schools urged to enter pupils for fast-track ‹GCSE›

taught in just 3 days. Schools Week [online]. Available at: schoolsweek.co.uk/schools-urged-to-

enter-pupils-for-a-fast-track-gcse/ [Accessed 12 Oct. 2017]

The Ideal School Exhibition24

This is unsurprising. Compared to the more outrageous and deliberate

ways of playing the system listed above, teaching to the test is a more

morally ambiguous and complex problem. As Sam Freedman, the execu-

tive director of programmes at Teach First and former policy advisor to

Michael Gove, put it to me: “You could argue that if your students have to

sit a test, and you know how important passing that test is to their future

prospects, it would be immoral not to teach to the test.”

24.

A reﬁnement of

the same argument was made by Gove himself when he argued that there’s

nothing wrong with teaching to the test if you have a good test.

As Freedman and Gove both know, they are only right up to a point.

Certainly, exam success opens doors to life-changing opportunities that

will likely remain shut to the unqualiﬁed, and for that reason, sending a

student into the exam hall not knowing what to expect, having never been

schooled in the basics of exam technique, would indeed be immoral. And

if the test is a good one, it is hard to see what harm can come from doing

everything possible to prepare them for that test. But pull at the threads of

these arguments and they quickly unravel.

Yes, good exam results open doors, but those doors are to op-

portunities, not to certain success. Whether students can seize those

opportunities depends on whether they actually possess the knowledge

and skills suggested by their exam grades. But as assessment expert Daisy

Christodoulou explains in her book Making Good Progress, there are

a number of reasons why the inferences we want to draw from pupils’

performance in exams may not be valid. Most of these relate to the way

exams and tests are structured and marked. However, as Christodoulou

explains:

“There are other, subtler, threats to validity, which may not immediately

seem as though they are that damaging. Indeed, in some cases they may

even seem to represent good practice. Take the common practice of coach-

ing in the details of the exam question. Most UK exam textbooks devote

large amounts of space to preparing pupils to answer various types of

question: 8-mark questions such as ‘The use of propaganda was the main

reason the Nazis were able to control the German people. How far do you

agree with this view?’ or 16-mark questions such as ‘The Wall Street Crash

was the main reason Hitler got into power. Do you agree?’ This is one

of the features of such textbooks that led Tim Oates [group director at

Cambridge Assessment] to criticise them for having ‘highly instrumental

approaches to learning, oriented towards obtaining speciﬁc examination

grades’. These 8-mark and 16-mark questions are features of the sample,

not the domain. They do not correspond to the types of problems pupils

will face in real life so, if pupils have focussed excessively on these types of

questions, it will compromise the validity of those results.”

25.

This is the essential problem with teaching to the test: not only is it

dispiritingly instrumental, but it doesn’t actually lead to learning of any

lasting value or utility. The school posts the numbers it needs to keep the

24. In conversation with the author (November 2016)

25. Christodoulou, D. (2017) Making Good Progress: the future of assessment for learning.

Oxford University Press

The Ideal School Exhibition 25

government at bay but which don’t tell an accurate story about the quality

of the education it has provided. And the students bank the scores they

need for further study or a skilled job, both of which will likely present

challenges for which they are not properly prepared. This is a direct con-

sequence of having been coached in ways that, in the words of Harvard

Professor of Education Daniel Koretz, “generate gains that are limited

to a speciﬁc test and that do not generalise well to other tests of the same

domain or to performance in real life.”

26.

To reveal the gap he predicted would exist between the inferred and

the actual knowledge possessed by students who had been taught to the

test, Koretz compared the results achieved by the same American pupils

on two dierent standardised multiple-choice maths tests that were both

samples of the same domain, diering only in the details.

27.

On the ocial

high-stakes test used to judge school performance – a test for which the

pupils were speciﬁcally and extensively coached – they performed signiﬁ-

cantly better than on the other, despite the fact both tests were seeking to

measure their understanding of the same broad content. In the context

of the English school system, Durham University’s Professor Robert

Coe’s ﬁnding that, over the last three decades, signiﬁcant improvements

in GCSE and other high-stakes exam results have not been accompanied

by equivalent improvements in other assessments of the same domain, is

suggestive of the same phenomenon.

28.

Indeed Christodoulou posits the

theory that this may explain why year-on-year increases in maths and

English GCSE results haven’t translated into a higher ranking for English

students in the international literacy and numeracy league tables compiled

by the OECD.

29.

Christodoulou, in a recent paper for The Centre for Market Reform

of Education (now the Centre for Education Economics), oers yet more

evidence of widespread teaching to the test, noting that:

“Researchers in both countries [the US and the UK] have identiﬁed the

existence of a ‘sawtooth pattern’ in the results of national, high-stakes

assessments such as GCSEs in the UK. The sawtooth pattern sees test

results rise gradually as schools, teachers and pupils become familiar with

a particular test speciﬁcation, only for results to fall when a new speciﬁca-

tion is introduced. This suggests that the initial increase in test results

is not being driven by secure and genuine improvements in teaching and

learning, but instead by familiarity with the structures and typical pat-

terns of a particular speciﬁcation…. Similarly, when looking at the types

of revision materials and advice given to schools and students, one can

see that lots of it is designed with very speciﬁc exam structures in mind.

For example, in history, many revision guides give over almost a third of

their pages to exam-board speciﬁc instruction in dealing with the 4-mark,

8-mark and 16-mark question. In maths, one school improvement organi-

sation has produced an approach to revision called ‘Beyond the Staples’,

26. Koretz, D. (2008) Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us. Cambridge:

Harvard University Press.

27. Ibid.

28. Coe, R. (2013) Improving Education: a triumph of hope over experience. Durham:

Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring

29. Op cit

The Ideal School Exhibition26

which identiﬁes the types of questions in the second half of the exam

paper (ie, those beyond the staples of the exam booklet) which are not as

dicult as some of the others, and which should therefore be targeted by

low-attaining pupils.”

30.

Teaching to the test may not be gaming as normally understood, but the

result is no less damaging. By teaching what will be tested, rather than

testing what has been taught, we end up losing sight of education’s core

purpose. By mistaking the sample for the domain, the proxy for the goal,

we have created a system that is perfectly designed to deliver exam success

rather than education’s ultimate aims like professional accomplishment,

personal fulﬁlment or societal progress. What is more, by doing so – by

narrowing and hollowing out young people’s experience of education

until its power to instil wonder and fascination has completely disap-

peared – we risk extinguishing their natural inquisitiveness and putting

them o learning for the rest of their lives; a high price to pay for hitting

the latest administrative targets.

As countless surveys demonstrate, the legions of honest and commit-

ted teachers who work in our schools pay a heavy price in terms of morale

and professional self-esteem for their forced collusion in this elaborate,

resource-sucking, time-consuming game. But, as a recent study published

in the Harvard Business Review makes clear, the most skilled gamers –

those who best understand the rules of the game – can do very well out

of it indeed.

31.

By analysing the changes made by headteachers in 160

secondary schools in England, the report’s authors were able to segment

them into ﬁve groups, each deﬁned by their approach to school improve-

ment. They found that the most highly paid (average salary £150,000

p.a. versus less than £100,000 for across the other four groups) and most

decorated group of headteachers (two thirds had received a knighthood

or other national honour), were those who focused on short-term success

at the expense of the long-term – a group they named the ‘surgeons’. The

authors found that the dramatic and quick improvements they delivered

were achieved by removing the worst performing quarter of pupils, ﬁring

10 percent of sta, cutting out non-essential activities, allocating the best

teachers to the year groups sitting exams and focusing relentlessly on test

preparation and revision. But as the authors explained:

“These examination results don’t last. After the Surgeon leaves, exam

scores fall back to where they started, mainly because younger students

have been ignored and under-resourced for the previous two years. It’s

impossible to close this gap, no matter how hard everyone tries. Some

parents claim it’s because the new leader isn’t strong or decisive like the

old one, but the teachers know it’s the result of two years of cuts without

any investment. In the meantime, buoyed up by an undeserved reputation,

the Surgeon has moved on to their next patient.”

32.

30. Centre for Education Economics (2017)Annual research digest 2016-17: Evidence on

uses of technology in education [online]. Available at: www.cfee.org.uk/sites/default/ﬁles/

CfEE%20Annual%20Research%20Digest%202016-17%20-%20web%20version.pdf

31. Hill, A., Mellon, L., Laker, B. and Goddard, J. (2016) The One Type of Leader Who

Can Turn Around a Failing School Harvard Business Review, updated 3 March 2017 [online]

Available at: hbr.org/2016/10/the-one-type-of-leader-who-can-turn-around-a-failing-school

32. Ibid.

The Ideal School Exhibition 27

Despite the many undeserved honours it has handed out, the government

is wising up to the problem of gaming, and to the artiﬁcially inﬂated

scores and reputations it produces. When examples of teacher cheating

are uncovered, monitoring is increased. When the over-marking of modu-

lar qualiﬁcations is detected, teacher-assessed coursework is replaced by

externally marked exams. To prevent schools excluding a low attaining

pupil without good reason, the government rules that the costs of educat-

ing that child will continue to be met by the school that excluded them.

To overcome the problem of schools focusing only on borderline pupils,

the government introduces Progress 8, an accountability measure that

gives equal weight to the progress made by all pupils, regardless of their

attainment. To tackle the problem of entering pupils early and, if need

be, repeatedly, for the same exam, the government rules that only grades

achieved the ﬁrst time round will count towards league tables. To tackle

the problem of schools entering pupils for relatively easy but low value

qualiﬁcations, the government changes the rules about what is or is not

deemed ‘equivalent’ to a GCSE or what does or does not count towards

a school’s overall performance score. But this is the bureaucratic version

of the ‘whack-a-mole’ fairground game. No sooner has an abuse been

identiﬁed and closed down than a new one pops up somewhere else.

Those who doubt this should have witnessed the explanatory sessions

for headteachers that the DfE organised to explain the workings of the

Progress 8 measure in the run up to its introduction. As someone involved

recalls:

“We would start by explaining how pupils’ English and maths scores

would be counted double in Progress 8, and that, although every pupil

would be required to take both English language and English literature,

only the higher of the two English results would be doubled. I’d then start

silently to count the seconds in my head knowing that, as had happened at

every other such meeting, no more than ﬁve seconds would elapse before

someone would ask “Does it matter if the student fails the other one?”

33.

The lesson? The rules may change, but the game goes on.

33. In conversation with the author (July 2017)

The Ideal School Exhibition28

2.2 The Missionaries

The missionaries are a dierent breed. Yes, they recognise the need

for transparency and accountability to ensure money is well spent and

children well taught. And yes, they understand the importance of exam

success for their students, recognising that without it, life-changing

opportunities and life-enriching occupations will likely remain beyond

reach. But they also recognise there are lots of things a good exam grade

doesn’t tell us about the student who achieved it, like whether the knowl-

edge they’ve acquired is likely to prove superﬁcial and temporary, as is

likely if they’ve been intensively taught to the test.

What is more, the missionary knows that exam success tells us little

about a student’s ability to put their education to use – to work with

others, in real life situations, under time pressures, learning from, and

not being disheartened by, mistakes, showing initiative, spark and leader-

ship. They know an A* or a grade 8 or 9 doesn’t tell us whether the pupil

enjoyed learning the examined facts, or learning in general, or whether,

having aced the exam, they are determined to keep on learning, fuelled by

a sense of curiosity and wonder. And they know it doesn’t tell us whether

they are happy, kind, selﬂess or brave – whether they will go out into

society determined to help others, to stand up to injustice and make a

positive dierence.

Yet all of these things matter more – far more – to the missionary than

whether their pupils have been successfully coached in the techniques of

answering an 8-mark or 16-mark question.

The school leaders I visited in preparation for this report are all

missionaries. Despite their many and important dierences, they have one

thing in common: they are all driven by a sense of purpose that goes well

beyond meeting the demands of the government’s accountability system.

What that purpose is varies from school to school.

Michaela Community School in Brent, where visitors are greeted by a

large sign declaring “Knowledge is Power”, is all about the life changing

potential of a knowledge-rich education; about giving children from

deprived backgrounds the cultural literacy needed to compete with their

more privileged peers.

XP School in Doncaster, inspired by High Tech High and the

Expeditionary School movement in the US, is all about developing the

skills and capabilities that are deemed most important to success in the

workplace and the world, and about doing so through enquiry-based,

real-world “expeditions” or projects.

Shireland Collegiate Academy in Smethwick in the West Midlands is

blazing a trail for those who believe not only that the traditional school

model needs to be completely reinvented for the new century, but that

technology now allows us to do that in ways that make learning more

personalised, assessment more useful, the curriculum more dynamic and

parent and community engagement more meaningful.

Reach Academy in Feltham is all about building a culture of high

expectations and even higher aspirations in the belief that any child, no

The Ideal School Exhibition 29

matter how disadvantaged, can achieve remarkable things with the right

support in place. That support, however, goes well beyond teaching.

Inspired by the Harlem Children’s Zone,

34.

Reach’s founders are com-

mitted not just to running a great school, but to building a strong and

resilient community, with plans in place for an on-site hub, out of which a

range of social programmes will be delivered.

School 21 in Stratford is designed not only to prepare children for the

future but to teach them that “today matters”; that they don’t need to

wait for adulthood to produce beautiful work of real value to authentic

audiences. The same spirit – that education shouldn’t all be about sacri-

ﬁce and suering now in the hope of some future return – also underpins

the school’s emphasis on child wellbeing and the development of pupils’

speaking skills, the means by which they help them ﬁnd their voice, liter-

ally and metaphorically.

West Rise Junior School in Eastbourne is focused on character de-

velopment; on providing pupils with unforgettable outdoor experiences

(from ﬁring a shotgun to herding water bualo) designed to teach them

discipline, responsibility and self-control, the pre-conditions for a life of

freedom and discovery.

The Plymouth School of Creative Arts is committed to developing its

students’ creative capacities and providing them with an aesthetic educa-

tion that showcases the beauty, utility and satisfaction to be found in great

art, clever design and true craftsmanship. It is a place for making and

creating.

Broadlands and Ashgrove are two apparently quite ordinary primary

schools in deprived neighbourhoods on opposite sides of the country that

are showing the extraordinary things that teachers can achieve when they

devote themselves completely to the children in their care and are pre-

pared to do whatever it takes to dismantle the many barriers to learning

those children face.

Bealings School in rural Suolk is committed to building a child-cen-

tred, child-sized, experiential learning environment and to a pedagogical

model known as Mantle of the Expert in which children are taught, or

more accurately, helped to learn, through role-play, drama and discovery.

35.

Bedales, a fee paying school in Hampshire, deﬁnes itself by its human-

ity (the school was established to provide a humane alternative to the

regimented austerity of Victorian schooling) and through its holistic

educational philosophy, summed up by its motto “to educate the Head,

Hand and Heart”. It strives to introduce its students to what is true

(academics), what is beautiful (creativity and making) and what is right

(morals and ethics).

And the West London Free School is committed to delivering – for free

and to all – the type of classical liberal education normally reserved for

those who attend grammar or private schools. Its stated purpose is:

“not primarily to prepare pupils for a job or career [but to] transform their

minds so that they are able to make reasonable and informed judgments

34. Harlem Children’s Zone. (n.d.)Home - Harlem Children’s Zone. [online] Available at:

hcz.org/ [Accessed 12 Oct. 2017]

35. Taylor, T. (2016) A Beginner’s Guide to Mantle of the Expert: A Transformative

Approach to Education

The Ideal School Exhibition30

and engage fruitfully in conversation and debate – not just about con-

temporary issues but also about the universal questions that have been

troubling mankind throughout history.”

36.

All of them are highly distinctive, mission-oriented schools with

a clear sense of their own identity and purpose. You don’t have to be

persuaded by everything they do, or be able to imagine choosing them for

your own children, to recognise the value of the diversity they bring to the

system. This diversity matters.

It matters because dierence is a precondition for meaningful choice;

it increases the chances of parents ﬁnding a school that matches their

educational philosophy and their child’s interests and aptitudes.

It matters because dierence allows for informed comparison; for a

more sophisticated understanding of the relative strengths and weak-

nesses of dierent models of schooling, of the dierent outcomes they are

likely to deliver, and of the compromises and trade-os bound up in each.

And it matters because dierence is a sign of a healthy system – evi-

dence of the innovation and experimentation that drive progress.

But it matters most of all because mission-oriented schools, by their

very existence, expand and enrich the conversation about education’s

purposes, and force us to re-examine our assumptions about what a good

school looks like.

With our obsession with tests and targets leading to widespread

gaming and teaching to the test, which in turn has led to a narrowing and

hollowing-out of the education our children receive, this is something

everyone – progressives and traditionalists alike – should celebrate.

36. West London Free School (n.d.) Our Vision. Available at: www.wlfs.org/Our-vision/

The Ideal School Exhibition 31

Part two

Part Two

The Ideal School Exhibition32

Chapter 3: Deﬁning

and embedding the

mission

This chapter looks at how the schools I visited – each of them a highly

successful mission-oriented school – stay true to their mission. It looks, in

other words, at how they resist the magnetic pull of the accountability

system that could, if they weren’t suciently clear about, or committed

to, their own values and aims, drag them across the green line that sepa-

rates them from the education-by-numbers game.

Values, aims, design principles

Almost every school in the country has a motto, with three-word state-

ments of ambition and compassion (‘Learners, Achievers, Friends’ or such

like) particularly popular. But these are normally suciently vague not

to hint at costs or consequences. They don’t force decisions and choices.

They don’t commit to, or even say, anything with which anyone could

disagree.

Mission-oriented schools are dierent. Their mission statements

amount to a vision. And that vision reﬂects their values – their at-

titude to things like authority, obedience and tradition, or freedom,

independent-mindedness and non-conformity. Whereas in most schools,

the headteacher and perhaps one or two senior colleagues can talk ﬂu-

ently about the school’s ethos and purpose, in a mission-oriented school

everyone can, the pupils included. Stop anyone in the corridor of one

of these schools and the chances are they’ll be able to explain why their

school is dierent, why that dierence is a strength, and why they feel

lucky or proud to study or work there.

Of the schools I visited, it was the oldest and the newest that felt most

distinctive and most certain of their own identity, the former having used

The Ideal School Exhibition 33

the passing of time deliberately to weave their philosophy and ethos into

the fabric of the school’s life; the latter, using their lack of history and the

one time only opportunity of a completely blank slate to set out a clear

vision, uncluttered by past events and outside inﬂuences.

Although I could reference most of the schools I visited to make the

point, the example of two in particular demonstrates how to turn a clear

set of values into a purposeful mission statement, which in turn can be

made manifest in the practices and protocols of every day school life.

They are Bedales, a 125 year-old independent school in rural Hampshire,

and School 21, a ﬁve-year-old state school in Stratford, East London

– both of them what social commentator Charlie Leadbeater would

describe as a “creative community with a cause.”

37.

Everything Bedales does is designed to achieve one or more of the

following ﬁve aims:

37. Leadbeater, C. (n.d.)Learning to Make a Dierence: School as a Creative Community.

[ebook] WISE Matters. Available at: www.wise-qatar.org/sites/default/ﬁles/wise_matters_

learning_to_make_a_dierence.pdf [Accessed 12 Oct. 2017]

The Ideal School Exhibition34

For the visitor, the “Bedales dierence” as it is described on the school’s

website, is everywhere to see. It is there in the student-constructed build-

ings, artefacts and landscapes of the school estate. It is there in the quirks

of the school’s systems and routines, and in the names by which they are

known (BACs, Blocks, Brekkie, Jaw, etc). But it is there, most of all, in the

school’s culture; in the human relationships that give the community its

character – relationships that are characterised by the ﬁrst-name terms on

which adults and children interact and codiﬁed by rituals like the twice-

weekly handshaking between all sta and students. As the school’s head

of philosophy and religious studies, Clare Jarmy, explains, although some

of these practices may appear odd to the outsider:

“There are a lot of things we can’t understand by observation alone. A

Muslim friend…once pointed out that if you walk into the back of a

mosque, and don’t understand what ideals lie at the heart of Islam, all

you see is lots of bottoms in the air! To understand why we shake hands at

Bedales, you have to understand our ideals: teachers and students in part-

nership, working together on teaching and learning…working together to

create the community and ethos of the school… [recognising that] respect

is not something to be expected because of status, but something that

everyone deserves by virtue of being part of the school community.”

38.

The School 21 jigsaw is another example of a set of carefully selected,

thoughtfully assembled, mutually reinforcing design principles that help

turn a high-level vision into a practical project.

As at Bedales, deliberate steps have been taken to ensure that these

aims and supporting practices are underpinned by protocols and rituals

that constantly reinforce the school’s values. For example, by putting

substantive hour-long assemblies, held ‘in the round’, at the centre of

school life, and by using the so-called Harkness method – a practice in

which children sit at a large oval table to discuss ideas with only minimal

teacher input – the school lives out the belief of its founder and Executive

Headteacher, Peter Hyman, that, where the 20th century was all about

38. From the Bedales website. Available at: www.bedales.org.uk/home/history-bedales/

bedales-handshaking-assembly

The Ideal School Exhibition 35

rows, the 21st century is about circles: “They’re about unity, equality and

democracy. Whereas in a row you can end up isolated on the end, or stuck

at the back.”

39.

The School 21 jigsaw, like the above articulation of ‘the Bedales

dierence’, is as interesting for what it doesn’t include as what it does.

For example, if, like both these schools, you want to educate the head,

heart and hand (ie focus not only on academics but on character develop-

ment and wellbeing, creativity and making) that might mean less time to

concentrate on the Ebacc (a measure of attainment in the core academic

subjects). If you want to develop your students’ ability to communicate in

spoken English that might mean less time spent teaching students to speak

other languages. If you want to use project-based learning, that means

committing sucient time to designing and delivering projects know-

ing that this might have consequences for curriculum coverage, raising

interesting questions about the conscious trade-os the school’s leaders

are making between depth and breadth.

These are the hard-edged choices that mission-oriented schools make

– choices with consequences; choices that come with opportunity costs;

and choices that carry very real risks for the school’s leaders when they

run counter to the implicit instructions the government sends through its

accountability measures.

39. Warrell, H. (2015)School 21: ‘free school’ where circle time beats exam coaching.

[online] Financial Times Available at: www.ft.com/content/61f62fde-6c0f-11e5-8171-

ba1968cf791a [Accessed 13 Oct. 2017].

The Ideal School Exhibition36

Chapter 4: Pursuing

the Mission:

challenges relating to

practice

It would be absurd to suggest that every diculty or challenge mission-

oriented schools face relates to the accountability system or the external

policy environment. Or even that clarity about one’s values and aims,

and attentiveness to the question of how those values and aims might be

embedded in the rituals and routines of everyday school life, are sucient

pre-conditions for success.

What you teach (curriculum), how you teach it (pedagogy), and how

you know whether you are succeeding (assessment), all matter. Get these

wrong and your school risks falling through the green line in the table

below – the line that separates the best from the rest of England’s mission-

oriented schools.

This section looks at the risks and challenges relating to practice that

these mission-driven schools face, and at how some of those risks and

challenges vary according to the nature of the school’s mission.

The Ideal School Exhibition 37

4.1 Areas of agreement…and

disagreement

All the schools I visited were agreed on one thing: that an excellent school

must, alongside its other objectives, deliver an excellent academic educa-

tion. The fact the government measures only some of the things that

schools should be doing, and that the very process of trying to measure

them leads, inevitably, to damaging distortions of professional priorities

and practice, doesn’t mean the things it does measure don’t matter. Quite

the opposite. Literacy and numeracy are fundamental. They provide the

foundations on which all other academic enquiry stands. Without them,

a child cannot access the broader secondary curriculum – the natural

sciences, humanities and the arts – that is their right. For it is within these

disciplines that they will develop a fuller understanding of themselves

and the world in which they live, and by doing so, enter into the “great

conversation of mankind.”

The consensus pretty much ends there, however. Across the mission-

oriented schools I visited, I encountered fundamentally dierent views

about the purpose and character of academic study, which in some cases

produced some surprising and unlikely alliances. On the whole though,

the schools divided into two broad camps: those that are seeking, ﬁrst and

foremost, to develop students’ skills, capabilities and characters through

student-led, project-based learning, and those that are seeking to expand

students’ knowledge – their cultural literacy – through teacher-led,

didactic instruction.

The dichotomies over which they divide include:

•

Whether the primary value of academic study is to be found in

the knowledge that is studied, or in the skills, capabilities and

habits-of-mind developed in the process of studying it.

•

Whether knowledge is an intrinsic good – an end in itself – or an

instrumental good – the means to an end; further study say, or a

rewarding job.

•

Whether a rigorous academic education is appropriate for all

students or only some, and what that means for the balance

between academic and vocational provision at dierent ages.

•

Whether the higher-order cognitive skills that are most valued in

work and life – problem solving or critical thinking for example

– are generic and transferrable, or whether they only exist in

a meaningful sense, and therefore can only be developed and

applied in the context of the knowledge domain within which

the ‘problem’ is situated, or about which the student is being

asked to ‘think critically’.

•

Whether the same is true of so-called non-cognitive skills and

character traits like resilience or perseverance, and what that

means for the curriculum and the way it is taught and assessed.

•

Whether teaching and learning should take place within tradi-

tional subjects or through cross-curricular or interdisciplinary

enquiries and projects.

The Ideal School Exhibition38

•

Whether, to use a couple of well-worn phrases, the teacher

should be a ‘guide on the side’ enabling and supporting inde-

pendent, self-regulated learning, or a ‘sage on the stage’ provid-

ing direct and explicit instruction.

•

Whether, to aid learning (and the ongoing diagnostic or forma-

tive assessment needed to support learning), topics should be

broken down into more easily digested but de-contextualised

pieces, or whether they are best oered up whole.

•

Whether teachers should sugar the pill of academic content by

thinking up imaginative ways of making it more relevant and

engaging, or whether such sweetening simply denies students the

opportunity to develop their palates and acquire new tastes.

•

Whether engagement is a pre-condition for, or a consequence of,

successful learning.

•

When, and how often, students should be encouraged to express

opinions, and on the relative importance of memorisation and

recall on the one hand, and questioning and challenging on the

other.

Regardless of precisely where on the spectrum between these two poles

each school sits, there is one other immovable fact on which they are all

agreed: if you want the freedom to pursue your own mission – to provide

your own answers to these and other choices about what schools do and

why – you need to satisfy the government that you can deliver on the core

academic curriculum against its chosen measures. Sponsors, trustees,

governors and school leaders run schools on licence; fall short and that

licence can quickly be revoked. As Mike Fairclough, the principal of West

Rise, the junior (and forest) school on the edge of a marsh in Eastbourne

which places as much emphasis on character development as on academ-

ics, explained:

“If we didn’t deliver good results at Key Stage 2, we simply wouldn’t be

allowed to do all the other things we want to do. I don’t complain about

it. I’m running a primary school here. To argue that we shouldn’t focus on

English and maths would be like a milkman saying he wasn’t interested in

delivering milk.”

40.

What sets West Rise apart from the other schools I visited that put non-

academic objectives at the centre of their mission is the degree to which it

separates out its character-building activities from its teaching of the core

curriculum. The school is housed in a nice but perfectly ordinary build-

ing, where children wear a typical uniform, sit in traditional classrooms

and are taught the national curriculum in a fairly conventional way. But

out on the marsh, things are anything but ordinary, typical, traditional or

conventional. There, Fairclough does his own thing, for his own reasons,

according to his own rules. Indoors, his pupils sit in English and maths

classes learning reading, writing and arithmetic. Outdoors, they ﬁre guns

and build ﬁres, learning to how to manage risk, work in a team and take

responsibility.

40. In conversation with the author (December 2016)

The Ideal School Exhibition 39

XP School in Doncaster, School 21 in Stratford and Shireland

Collegiate Academy in Smethwick, have all, in dierent ways, sought

to build a far more complex, layered model that allows them to pursue

multiple outcomes – academic and non-academic – at the same time.

Where, at most schools, the curriculum is taught within traditional

subjects, in these schools it is taught through projects, expeditions or

enquiries. Such approaches vary in certain respects, but all tend to have

an essential question at their core which, to be answered fully, requires the

student to range widely across subjects. A project about the role of the

East India Company in the British Empire, for example, might be used

to explore all aspects of 18th and 19th century British and Indian life,

touching on any combination of history, anthropology, religious studies,

politics, economics, geography, history of art, music, architecture, textiles

or food technology in the process. By following the question where it

leads, the teacher is able not only to teach the facts of each subject, but

to show how those facts and subjects relate to each other, emphasising

the essential unity of real-world knowledge. And by ensuring the central

question is a big and timeless one – perhaps, in this case, about the

positive and negative impacts of empire – they can explore the recurring

themes and dilemmas of the human story, showing how, while the actors

and the scenery change, the underlying issues often remain much the

same.

The layering doesn’t end there however. By getting students to take

decisions about how the project or enquiry will be conducted, and how

they will work together to deliver a presentation, performance or product

at its end, projects and enquiries of this sort are also designed to promote

independence, collaboration, discipline, perseverance, leadership and

other performance-enhancing skills, attitudes, character traits and habits.

What is more, the project’s designers often seek to do all of this in ways

that replicate real-life scenarios and environments, introducing students

to experts and specialists from the world of adult work, and requiring

them to perform or present to authentic audiences to make the project

more rewarding and meaningful. Finally, these projects are designed to

provide regular opportunities for feedback, reﬂection and evaluation so as

to develop students’ metacognitive skills, or, in plain English, to help them

‘learn how to learn’ – widely seen by educationalists as one of the most

valuable skills of all.

Katharine Birbalsingh at Michaela Community School, Hywel Jones

at the West London Free School and Ed Vainker at Reach Academy would

likely all raise a sceptical eyebrow at the prospect of these time-consuming

activities. They would argue that a rigorous academic curriculum – the

best that has been thought or said – is a lily that needs no gilding, and that

it is demanding enough without over-elaborate teaching methods aimed at

multiple, interwoven learning objectives making it more bewildering still.

To them, the key to good teaching is simplicity. Teach within traditional

subjects, break subjects down into their smallest constituent parts, se-

quence them logically, explain them clearly and explicitly, and get students

to practice them until they have been mastered. Then, when the last fact

or concept is securely lodged in long-term memory, move on to the next.

And because, in the words of American educator E D Hirsch, “learning

builds on learning”, with existing knowledge acting like “mental Velcro”

The Ideal School Exhibition40

making it easier for new information to stick, the student will gradu-

ally become more capable, not only of memorising new facts, but of

understanding their signiﬁcance and meaning.

41.

Thus, step by tiny step,

the pupil makes the long journey from novice to expert, led by a teacher

whose job it is to map and pace that journey, all the while checking what

has and has not been learned, adjusting their instruction accordingly.

The school leaders I met who use project-based learning argue pas-

sionately and persuasively that it provides for richer and more meaningful

learning experiences that support deeper understanding; that by trans-

ferring a signiﬁcant amount of control over the project to students, it

provides them with the sense of ownership and responsibility that are the

hallmarks of self-motivated, independent learners; that by forcing them

to work in groups, as well as individually, it teaches them the social and

emotional skills needed to collaborate and to lead; that by culminating in

some kind of product or production, it teaches them the value of drafting

and redrafting, of learning from their mistakes, of persevering in the face

of diculty and of taking real pride in the quality of their work; and

that by creating a systematic process for documenting and reﬂecting on

learning, it helps students learn how to learn, with teacher feedback and

self- and peer-assessment a central feature.

41. Hirsch, E.D. (1996) The schools we need and why we don’t have them. Anchor Books

The Ideal School Exhibition 41

4.2 Challenges for schools that seek

to develop skills through student-

led, project-based learning

In setting out the challenges faced by dierent mission-oriented schools

with dierent philosophies and approaches, it is important to understand

that these are not insuperable obstacles, they are exactly what I am calling

them – challenges. What follows, therefore, should not be taken as a list of

reasons not to teach in a particular way, but as a list of risks and potential

pitfalls that need to be borne in mind before employing a particular

approach.

4.2.1 The scientiﬁc challenge to student-led, project-based

learning

The school leaders I met who employ more traditional, didactic methods

of instruction, oppose student-led and project-based learning for two

main reasons: ﬁrst, they see it as a highly inecient way of teaching,

which therefore carries a signiﬁcant opportunity cost. And second, that

they claim it ignores some key warnings from cognitive science about

the nature of knowledge and skills and the way they are acquired or

developed.

The active learning fallacy

The ﬁrst problem – that of the opportunity costs associated with

project-based learning – is illustrated by an anecdote that Professor

Dan Willingham, a cognitive scientist, recounts in his book Why Don’t

Students like School?

“A teacher once told me that for a fourth grade unit on the Underground

Railroad he had his students bake biscuits, because this was a staple food

for runaway slaves….[but] his students probably thought for about forty

seconds about the relationship of biscuits to the Underground Railroad,

and for forty minutes about measuring ﬂour, mixing shortening and so

on.”

42.

And since, as Willingham puts it, “memory is the residue of thought”,

what students spend their time thinking about – in this case baking rather

than history – really matters.

43.

It is this tendency to spend time on superﬁcial or irrelevant activities

(weighing, mixing, tidying up etc) that leads author and educator Gilbert

Sewall to argue that supporters of active, project-based learning “have

made a dangerous error. They have substituted ersatz activity and shallow

content for the hard and serious work of the mind.”

44.

42. Willingham, D. (2009) Why Don’t Students Like School. Jossey Bass; 1st edition

43. Ibid

44. Sewall, G.T. (2000) Lost in Action: Are time-consuming, trivializing activities displacing

the cultivation of active minds? American Educator Summer Issue. [online] Available at: www.

aft.org/periodical/american-educator/summer-2000/lost-action

The Ideal School Exhibition42

As to what that serious work of the mind looks like, Sewall describes it

thus: