Redefining More Able Education

Key Issues for Schools

Ian Warwick, Ray Speakman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815353119
• eBook ISBN: 9781351137287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Redefining More Able Education is an essential, up to date and challenging introduction to the many factors involved in teaching more able students. Written by Ian Warwick, founder of London Gifted and Talented, and Ray Speakman, this book challenges our understanding of provision for the more able and explores ways in which we can ensure that students reach their full potential.

Providing a thorough overview of topical research, the book offers a range of practical solutions for engaging students and encouraging them to become more independent in their learning. Warwick and Speakman explore key ideas including differentiation, resilience and motivation, and unpick issues including the history of more able education, the relationship between intelligence and achievement, working with marginalised groups and how students can overcome barriers when applying to top universities. A dedicated chapter summarises 21 easy-to-implement strategies that can make a real difference to teaching practice.

This definitive guide to more able education will be essential reading for teachers, school leaders and any education professionals reflecting on different approaches to motivating and teaching the more able in order to better provide for all their students.

Part one

Chapter 1
Introduction

What to take on board?

Recently, a worldwide survey asked practitioners concerned with provision for the more able to identify what they saw as their main problems (Freeman, Raffan, and Warwick, 2010). Their responses were dominated by the practical ways they felt that their work was being short-changed by a lack of funding, training, capacity, time, teacher skills, interest, space, resources, ideas and technology. Beyond that, and in terms of the way their work was seen and understood, they complained of being regarded as advocates or agents of some outdated and immoral educational apartheid system. Consequently, they and those students they hoped to lead towards high performance felt misperceived and side-lined.

Those were their main worries, but there are more.

There is an increasingly evident phenomenon called, ‘PISA shock’. This is when a country’s education system is plunged into crisis by the publication of that country’s ranking by the Programme of International Student Assessment. The assessment measures mostly mathematics, reading and science, with a small amount of problem-solving and financial literacy. Many argue that since these assessments began, education systems across the world have dramatically increased their reliance on quantitative testing. Education has become about testing and finding ways to move up the PISA rankings. Some would argue that we have become nations of league tables – which are easy to sensationalise and which make unfair comparisons between very different societies. PISA offers, critics say, a single, narrow, biased yardstick, a ‘testing juggernaut’, a global testing regime that has become a sort of educational colonialism led by an organisation which appears to have become the arbiter of the means and ends of education around the world. These tables have become something of a Bible on absolute standards for various governments across the world and not least, for the media – a perfect weapon with which to beat teachers over the head. We do not have to rehearse the figures here, they are readily available – but we do have to say that it’s too easy to dismiss these figures as coming only from crammer/sweat-shop type jurisdictions. Whatever the approaches elsewhere and however much we might disapprove, we have to concede that many other countries seem to take the education of their most able students much more seriously than we do in the UK. That should worry us.

Like Jude Fawley in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, we are encouraged to believe that there is a ‘prescription’ or a ‘secret cipher’ possessed by some other countries, and if we could only find it then we too would hold the key to the top spots on the PISA lists. Jude calls it the law of transmutation, a belief that someone out there holds the key to success and all we have to do is persuade them to hand it over and all will fall into place. Applied to education this leads to what we can only describe as educational tourism, which is about looking at those countries that regularly shine on the PISA lists, such as Finland and Singapore, for answers. Politicians and the media seem not to notice that other countries not only have other education systems but also different cultures. Finland, for instance, is a relatively wealthy society with a population of 5m, and a fair degree of cultural homogeneity. Similarly, Asian and Eastern European countries might seem to be succeeding because they view the most able as an elite who need to be taught as a special needs group, but in some of these countries this former certainty is now being challenged, and concerns have grown about the way hot-housing and an impressive command of basic principles seems to have been achieved at the expense of creativity and originality. In yet other countries, there are no programmes for the more able at all. For about two thirds of the world’s population such programmes would be a luxury and beyond what their education systems could offer as standard. In western cultures, an interest or lack of interest in the more able students has tended to be a political rather than an educational issue. Stephen and Warwick (2015) observe that renewed attention … tends to follow on from a crisis and they cite as examples the perceived need in the USA to compete more successfully in the space race in the 1950s, and later, the shortage of home-grown science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) specialists. Is it beginning to look as though the more able agenda is in danger of becoming a feather for every wind that blows (Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale)?

And for those teaching in the UK, the worries do not stop there.

About every two years the UK’s inspection processes throws up a report which generates headlines such as: ‘Schools not doing enough to support most able students’. In general terms, they say, many state schools do not provide sufficient challenge for all students, but particularly for the more able: ‘thousands of highly performing primary pupils are not realising their early promise when they move to secondary school’ is one of Ofsted’s headline conclusions (2015). If this is true in many schools, they found that it is particularly the case where students are from poorer backgrounds, or if they are boys, or how they perform when they first enter secondary education. A second organisation, The Sutton Trust, dedicated to increasing social mobility through raising student aspirations has also expressed its concern over provision for the more able. It finds schools complacent and Government policy (or lack of policy) moving towards ‘ever less comprehensible measures’ (they don’t seem to make sense). It’s not just that we are not taking the education of the more able seriously enough, as Ofsted and The Sutton Trust are telling us loudly and clearly, many schools simply do not recognise those students who have the potential to become high performers. We seem to have forgotten that the early twenty-first-century attempts in the UK to foreground and develop an education system which recognised and nurtured the more able was initiated with the with clear and precise intention of making state education truly comprehensive.

Sir Peter Lampi, chairman of the Sutton Trust, says in response to data about the performance of more able students in the UK: ‘These are shocking findings that raise profound concerns about how well we support our most academically able pupils, from non-privileged backgrounds … these figures show that few bright non-privileged students reach their academic potential – which is unfair and a tragedy for them and the country as a whole’ (2012). He goes on to say that to condemn the less able to a similar lack of recognition would be seen as morally unacceptable and yet we seem to find it okay to side-line the more able. This perception will touch a nerve for many of us who have taught in the UK’s comprehensive system, where the needs of the most able have for the most part simply not been met, and because those students complain less, and often just get on with their own education as best they can, their needs have never become a whole school priority. It is a peculiar form of egalitarianism which states that equal opportunity is the same as everyone having the same opportunity.

Even more to think about

The global survey we opened this chapter with (Worldwide Provision) told us about more than a dearth of practical provision, and a feeling that the agenda is frowned upon by many inside and outside the profession. Put these things together with the findings of Ofsted and The Sutton Trust in the UK and it becomes obvious that it would be an act of denial to make an ostrich blush if we, and some other countries too, tried to pretend that we are doing well regarding our most able students. We clearly are not. Either some nations take the education of their most able much more seriously than others or apparently they know something we don’t know. For the sake of these students we clearly need to wise up to the resulting waste of our national talent.

As well as practicalities and attitudes, the survey also touched on the theories about how best to respond to high ability, which of those theories are most and least in vogue, and how beliefs are shifting – one way or the other.

The survey’s respondents perceive a steady movement away from more able education designed in terms of high ability as predominantly inherited – and therefore, for the most part, unchangeable. Even though some scientists are finding growing evidence that degrees of intelligence can be identified in DNA, many educationalists are more and more saying that, IQ doesn’t matter (Berliner and Eyre, 2017)^. In practical terms, this means that withdrawal for acceleration or special provision has declined and able children are more likely to be taught alongside all other children. Some would see this as an inclusive approach, others as an invitation to the more able to perform below capacity. The nature of high ability, too, has been questioned. It is now seen to be as much about character as it is about IQ, and as a consequence it can be taught. Place this in a context of a well thought-through programme of enrichment and effective differentiation in the classroom then what had become in some quarters an elitist programme of provision has morphed into ways of teaching the more able that is believed to be less restrictive, less separatist, less elitist. In short, conscientiousness is winning in the race against a reliance on IQ in order to access what Hardy’s Jude saw as the key to success. One final perception about the way things are going: given the variations in the profile of the more able in different countries and in different schools, and in the consequent levels of provision, teachers seem to be looking to fill the void by seeking out local, national and international collaboration as a way of staying in touch with the agenda and doing the best they can for their charges. The more able agenda is not going to go away, nor are teachers going to stop worrying, thinking and talking about it.

So, what do we believe? Where do those beliefs come from? Is there a theory or an all-embracing approach that we can hold on to? The social psychologist, Herbert Crovitz, said that: Theories do two things: they account for the data, (or) and they make people happy (qtd. in Engel 2011). Despite the obvious impact of PISA data, particularly on governments, there has been a general move away from theories built from data and a move towards theories that make people happy. Data from PISA, SATs, and IQ tests draw teachers towards an approach that shapes – even dictates – the way we teach. Tests such as these offer quantifiable measures of potential and achievement – and perhaps most of all, what appears to be hard evidence of how well a school or a country is doing. Niccolo Machiavelli would have approved of the way such tests have come to dominate thinking and practice – a means to rule by fear and distraction, one of the key strategies developed in The Prince. He would have understood the phrase we use several times in this book, ‘anxious literalism’. We are so concerned that our students do well in the tests, that how to take tests is what we teach – often at the expense of a whole tranche of other classroom endeavours. When teachers are criticised for marginalising creativity, problem-solving, wider reading, the arts, for dampening aspirations and side-lining enjoyment – Machiavelli would have joined with all those other critics of schools to say that no one told teachers to drop these other pursuits and focus almost entirely on test preparation – it was their own decision.¹ Those who oversee education try to deny breadth and choice without actually saying that they are denying breadth and choice.

Crovitz sets data-related theories against that broad range of approaches which do their best to make people happy. Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligence would fall into that latter category (1984). As Engel points out, Gardner’s egalitarian theories of intelligence have been used by teachers to make all children feel that they have some form of intelligence about which they can feel good. Parents, teachers and students feel happy when they can believe that it is possible to improve intelligence, when nurture is in the ascendant over nature, when environment has a clear advantage over genetics. Teachers would take this a stage further: they express scepticism not only about the way tests can be used as a once and forever measure of promise, but also in the way they use a practice known as norming, that is, deciding how well or otherwise a child does in a test compared with other children (or children in other countries) so that they do not measure the child as an individual but in relation to the average levels of achievement in that age group.

We argue throughout this book that putting all your eggs in the basket of one theory or another misses the opportunity to see theories not in a binary way, but as a series of complex and dynamic interactions. It seems obvious to us that a child’s home and school environment has a huge influence on how that child progresses and it might also seem that a child’s environment is readily open to change and development. However, that environment can also have the opposite effect, it can be hugely difficult to influence and change – as we see later when we talk about disadvantage and ‘walls in the head’. Similarly, a child’s apparently ‘fixed’ inclinations towards particular skil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preview: Inside out
• Part One
• Part Two
• Index