I think today, more than many, shows the bizarre morass into which our educational system has got stuck.

The day dawned with unexpected optimism.

Pearson published its report, The Learning Curve, which appears to suggest that the United Kingdom’s education performance isn’t quite as rubbish as our Government likes to keep telling us we are.

The BBC was reporting that we are 6th best in the developed world. The Telegraph appeared to confirm this.

That was gratifying as at school today we hosted a delegation of Chinese headteachers who were interested in our extra-curricular provision, our emphasis on creativity and independent thinking, our ability to combine high quality enrichment with very good results.

Yes, that’s right - people from overseas felt that we in the UK had things they could learn from.

Then there was Sir Michael Wilshaw’s first report as Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector. This was presented chiefly as an attack on complacent local authorities - which seems a little unfair since their room for dealing with underperforming schools is now decidedly limited if those schools have become academies, as so frequently (and tediously) exhorted to do.

Our friends at the Telegraph, clearly exhausted by their one positive education news story of the day, presented the report in various bilious chunks:

Ofsted: 82,000 students taught in 'inadequate' colleges

Ofsted: third of five-year-olds 'not ready for school'

Ofsted warns over 'postcode lottery' in school standards

Ofsted chief: school inequality 'not good enough'

As ASCL’s Brian Lightman noted on Twitter:

Listening to news this eve I really think I must have read a different HMCI report....'70% of schools good or better..standards improving'

Thus a Pearson report tells us we’re pretty good (okay, not top five) while other reports tell us that we’re lousy.

It’s just another day.

But here’s the bit that interests me.

Sir Michael writes an introduction which is largely about himself. But once we get beyond that to the small matter of the nation’s schools he reports:

As things stand, the overall picture across Ofsted’s inspection remits is that broadly 70% of providers are good or better. In most assessments, a 7/10 mark might equate to ‘fair but could do better’. For an aspiring leading nation in a 21st century global economy, it has to be ‘not good enough; must do better.’

and

‘The quality of teaching is gradually improving, but nothing less than consistently good or better teaching is acceptable’.

Fair enough: we know we have much to do. Good enough is not good enough. But forgive a few caveats.

First - really, really forgive me - I’m not convinced that Ofsted necessarily knows what good teaching looks like. There are, you’ll recall many schools deemed ‘outstanding’ where the teaching is judged merely ‘good’. How can that be?

Might it in fact be a reminder that the clunky causal link between teaching and learning isn’t quite as inevitable as Ofsted would have us believe?

Does good learning always arise from good teaching, or is it sometimes in spite of mediocre teaching?

I suspect we’ve all known teachers who are boring, possibly dysfunctional and even repellant, and yet who get great results.

Sometimes, I would tentatively suggest, the learning happens despite the teacher - as a result of other stuff: parental expectations, school culture, compliant students, access to Google, even a youthful desire to escape the misery of the classroom.

Let’s  therefore be a bit careful of reducing something complex like teaching to causal inevitabilities. We want lots more great teaching - but a twenty-minute judgement by an inspector who last taught ten or more years ago may merely lead to robotic, pre-packaged demonstrations of superficial progress, whatever Sir Michael may protest about not wanting us to produce a ‘house style’.

More topically, there’s the hot issue lobbed into the standards debate by Ofqual, our country’s proud non-regulator.

You’ll recall that no one enjoys causal links more than Ofqual. The summer’s GCSE results are, in their working methods, inextricably linked to the dubious outcomes of the same cohort’s Year 6 test results. The mantra seems to be: we judge Year 11 outcomes by how they did in Year 6. The one predicts the other.

Then there is Ofqual’s fatuous notion of ‘comparable outcomes’ which would surely make it impossible anyhow to demonstrate that teaching has improved. Because if results from one year to the next have to mirror the previous year’s, how are we supposed to show that teaching is better? One school can only get better at the expense of another.

Or is Ofqual now setting itself up as the arbiter of the nation’s teaching quality and deciding when results can rise because teaching has improved? (Please let the answer to this be no).

If so, what are they basing their judgement on? And, in any case, could we please ask them to put their mind to their real job of starting to regulate exam standards? We’d like the summer’s fiasco to be sorted out.

So, in conclusion, forgive me if I neither get overjoyed at the Pearson report - because all of these comparisons fail to convince me, even when we’re seemingly drawing closer to our long-established rivals in the table of international big boys - nor give too much attention to the annual report of the Chief Inspector.

It isn’t because I’m cynical or complacent or uninterested. Honest.

It’s just that so much of what I read in these reports seems so remote from what I see day in and day out in school - teachers working hard to become better teachers, young people exuding optimism and ambition and skills that my generation rarely displayed, and schools that once, not so long ago, were united by a very strong moral purpose and an instinct to work together.

And the constant sniping does tend to undermine all of that and I’d rather not read it.

Geoff Barton

Tuesday 27 November, 2012

20:25 pm