Making a Difference in Education

What the evidence says

Robert Cassen, Sandra McNally, Anna Vignoles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780415529211
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317494683
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What is working in education in the UK - and what isn't? This book offers a highly readable guide to what the latest research says about improving young people's outcomes in pre-school, primary and secondary education. Never has this issue been more topical as the UK attempts to compete in the global economy against countries with increasingly educated and skilled work-forces. The book discusses whether education policy has really been guided by the evidence, and explores why the failings of Britain's educational system have been so resistant to change, as well as the success stories that have emerged.

Making a Difference in Education looks at schooling from early years to age 16 and entry into Further Education, with a special focus on literacy, numeracy and IT. Reviewing a large body of research, and paying particular attention to findings which are strong enough to guide policy, the authors examine teacher performance, school quality and accountability, and the problematically large social gap that still exists in state school education today. Each chapter concludes with a summary of key findings and key policy requirements.

As a comprehensive research review, Making a Difference in Education should be essential reading for faculty and students in education and social policy, and of great interest to teachers and indeed to anyone who wants to know about the effectiveness of UK education policy and practice, and where they should be going.

1 Introduction

Robert Cassen, Sandra McNally and Anna Vignoles

DOI: 10.4324/9781315712352-1

There is a lot of talk about ‘evidence-based policy’ in education. But what exactly does the evidence say?

This book reviews the key research in the fields we cover, namely education from early years to age 16 and entry into Further Education. We concentrate on England and the state sector, but refer to the rest of the UK where we can, and also draw on the experience of other countries when it is relevant. The research field of education is of course extremely broad and we have had to be necessarily selective in our choices of topic. We have therefore not addressed several important subjects, such as arts education, sport in schools, coaching, moral and social issues in various educational practices and we do not discuss Higher Education at all.

We have tried to reach conclusions about what is and is not effective in education in our topics. By ‘effective’ we mean what can reasonably be expected to achieve a given result: in particular what can improve outcomes for learners, and what can narrow the ‘social gap’, the association of disadvantage with diminished outcomes. It is a book about what ‘works’, in this sense.

The language of ‘what works’ has itself become contested in some quarters, for assuming a crude type of causality, or being asserted in relation to particular kinds of policies, or suggesting a set of simple-minded ‘rules’ for the education profession. We hope that we will be understood as adopting a nuanced approach to causality. It is well known that in quantum physics one can speak only of probabilistic relationships, not causation. Equally in some fields, causality can be and has been established with certainty. We know that the variola virus caused smallpox, and that vaccination prevented it; without that knowledge, smallpox would not have been eradicated. Much more than that, we could not live in a world without cause and effect, without knowing that given actions lead to given effects, at least most of the time. Yet social science lies somewhere short of this kind of certainty.

In social science and certainly in education, we can say at most that a measured relationship is highly unlikely to be the result of chance – sometimes we can even say how unlikely. But we can never be 100 per cent certain that all confounding factors have been fully accounted for. The randomised controlled trial or ‘RCT’ is often held up as the ultimate gold standard as a way of establishing causal relationships. In practice, if one were to adopt the results from a RCT into a policy measure, one would still have to be confident that the entire context would be the same as in the trial in every relevant respect. The physical world is relatively constant over time, so that we may rely on cause and effect at long intervals. But the social context changes, sometimes quite fast: we cannot be sure, for example, that a measure that ‘worked’ in education 20 years ago will have the same effects for the internet generation today or that something that ‘worked’ in Doncaster would work in Delhi. And societal factors may differ a great deal. Quite a few educational RCTs have been carried out in India, but because of the importance of context we do not refer to them in this book, as the conditions are so far from our own.

A 2012 paper from the Cabinet Office made a strong plea for more RCTs in public policy, including education.¹ They are standard practice in medicine for any new therapeutic methods and the arguments for their use in policy are clear. Simply evaluating whether an intervention or policy is associated with a change in a particular outcome is insufficient: one might wrongly conclude that it had (or had not) worked because of a change in the environment. RCTs give us confidence that there has been cause and effect. RCTs will also rule out ‘selection bias’, the possibility that individuals or institutions adopting an intervention may have some characteristic that makes the intervention more likely to succeed. An RCT can also give guidance about cost-effectiveness: depending on the magnitude of its effect and the cost, it will help to show whether an intervention is worth rolling out to scale. RCTs need not be expensive, yet we do not have all that many of them.

RCTs have their limitations. We need to know not only what works, but what works for whom and under what conditions. RCTs cannot always help us answer all these questions. We need many other kinds of research too, not least to find out what to trial in RCTs and crucially why particular policies work or don't work. But sensitively used, they are among the best kinds of evidence we can have when it comes to policy.

Indeed concern with effective policy-making motivates this book; there is much talk of ‘evidence-based policy’, so here we have tried to make clear where the evidence we discuss is based on RCTs or other, methodologically rigorous, statistical analysis that provides ‘robust’ findings. Equally, we have signalled where the evidence we present only amounts to observation or statistical correlation. How and to what extent evidence has been used in past policy is discussed and the book gives examples of research findings that have influenced policy and quite probably should not have done. Indeed sometimes research results are quoted in support of a policy long after they have been shown to be misleading.

We are however realistic. There is much ‘policy-based evidence’ rather than ‘evidence-based policy’. Despite this, we hope that our book will provide some insight into the more robust evidence that is available on a range of important education issues. We start by highlighting some key issues that we think are critical for the education system in England.

The legacy of the past and the key issues

The large social gap – the tendency of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds to do disproportionately badly in school outcomes at 11 and 16 – is a key problem in state school education today, and the subject of much media comment and policy discussion. Put briefly, the UK is an unequal society, and the educational system does not do enough to make up for a poor start in life. It also does not serve the post-16 age group well enough, either in stretching the better performers, or in providing clear and flexible routes in practical education. (This book does not in the main cover research on private, independent schools; they have a major role in the country's inequalities, but they account for only 7 per cent of pupils, and are largely unexamined here.)

A further big issue is how to improve the handling of vocational education and the Further Education (FE) sector. The FE sector absorbs significant resources, but is somehow the Cinderella of educational policy and indeed of research. While post-16 education is not a main subject of this book, we address vocational education in Chapter 11.

Gaps

A frequent observation about our education system is the large ‘tail’ of inadequately educated young people emerging into the world of work. The Confederation of British Industries (CBI) regularly complains that we are not turning out the people industry needs – according to them there is not just a lack of engineering or technological skills, but also of even basic literacy and numeracy and ‘soft’ skills that companies need. The CBI's 2013 education and skill survey pointed out that 36 per cent of pupils did not get an A*–C grade in GCSE English in 2012, and 42 per cent did not get one in maths. The survey said that even college and university graduates lack basic skills and that high proportions of firms report difficulties in recruiting the people they need. We are not, they lament, the ‘global leader in the race for knowledge, skill and innovation’ that we could and should be.² While one might dispute the details as expressed by the CBI, certainly there is a sentiment among policy-makers, business and the public that some parts of the education system are not fit for purpose.

The social gap relates to this concern. A common way to show the gap is to look at the achievement of pupils on free school meals (FSM). FSM is imperfect as a measure of disadvantage; but it is widely used because so often the data include it rather than other measures. FSM pupils are in fact half as likely as non-FSM pupils to score 5A*–C results in their GCSEs. More positively the socio-economic gap in the proportion achieving 5A*–Cs including English and maths was reduced a little in the 5 years to 2012.³ However, this may somewhat mask the true situation – if you use postcode poverty rather than FSM, there is a continuous association between deprivation and school outcomes – the gap will not be closed just by improving results for FSM pupils.⁴

The problem begins before school: data from the Millennium Cohort show cognitive gaps between disadvantaged and better-off children as early as age 3 and gaps in vocabulary at age 5. In a much quoted study, Leon Feinstein showed that bright children from disadvantaged backgrounds fared worse at primary age than less bright children from better-off homes.⁵ Socio-economic gaps in achievement then widen by age 11, as can be seen from English and maths results in primary schools, and then widen a little further by age 16. Again there are some positive elements to this story. While the socio-economic gap as measured by GCSE results relative to postcode-poverty has declined since the early 2000s, it may well widen again as a result of the recession that began in 2008. It is undoubtedly true that there is still a strong link between family income and educational results.⁶ Related to the socio-economic gap in pupil achievement, there is a variety of learning difficulties going under the heading of special educational needs (SEN), which are only slowly being met – but these needs too are more common among pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. The issues of SEN are addressed in Chapter 9.

As for teaching, we may quote Ofsted in 2012:

Pupils in most need of the best teaching, such as lower attaining pupils and those with special educational needs, may not get it. They are often taught by the weakest teachers in the school. In secondary schools, they are more likely to be taught by non-specialists, whose subject knowledge is weak; in primary schools, by teaching assistants deployed too extensively with children who find learning difficult.⁷

Improving teaching – and not just for the disadvantaged – is a key need in UK education, addressed in Chapter 6. It has the most mileage for improving educational outcomes of almost any intervention in schools, yet policy has targeted school reform more usually than teaching.

It is also often said that our schools do not sufficiently stretch the better-performing pupils. An Ofsted report in 2013 noted that nearly two-thirds of those who achieve well in English in primary school (obtaining a level 5) do not get an A* or A at GCSE; for maths the proportion was more than a half, and a qua...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 How Did we Get Here? A selective history
• 3 The Early Years
• 4 Parents and Parenting
• 5 Schools Organisation, resources and effectiveness
• 6 What Makes a Good Teacher?
• 7 Reading And Writing
• 8 Numeracy And Mathematics
• 9 Special Educational Needs
• 10 ICT in the Classroom
• 11 Vocational Education
• Index