The Literacy Game

The Story of The National Literacy Strategy

John Stannard,Laura Huxford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134115815
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Containing invaluable insights from the original director of the National Literary Strategy (NLS) and its director of training, this book provides the only systematic exploration of the reform programme.

A vital introduction and critical appraisal for pracititioners and students, The Literacy Game examines the origins, evolution and impact of the NLS, and provides a fully comprehensive contribution to the teaching of literacy and the management of educational change.

This illuminating text:

• sets out the political background and context to literacy education in England over a decade from 1996 to 2006
• explains and appraises the rationale and design underpinning the NLS, thereby rebutting some of the folk-lore that has built up around it
• provides an example of the principles and practices of large-scale system change
• links the NLS to wider global research on system change and educational reform
• evaluates the contribution of the NLS in advancing knowledge of the literacy curriculum in English and the development of pedagogy as a whole
• considers the impact and consequences of the NLS on standards of literacy.

The Literacy Game is an enlightening book which will appeal to all policy makers and academics who are keen to know what did and did not work in the NLS and why.

Chapter 1
The context and origins of the National Literacy Strategy

A brief history

We called this book The Literacy Game because it has an intimate connection with the ambitions for education reform set out in an earlier book, The Learning Game, by Michael Barber (1996). The Learning Game was written over a period immediately preceding the general election in May 1997 when New Labour came to power. It was a formative text. Barber’s ambitions to eliminate failure through guaranteeing standards in the basic skills, the idea of the school as a learning institution, a learning promise for every child, the wider aims of creating a learning society and opportunities for lifelong learning, have all been echoed in ensuing education policies. The National Literacy Strategy, its partner the National Numeracy Strategy, the later, and symmetrical, Key Stage 3 secondary school strategy, the restructuring of the 14–19 sector, and the major redevelopment of early years’ education, though not conceived in any detail, all find a place in this original vision. The book sets out an overwhelming moral, social and economic case for placing education at the centre of government policy. Barber’s optimistic proposals met with much criticism but, with characteristic persistence and calmness, he listened to and investigated objections, worked out practical solutions and costed the proposals to create an agenda for educational reform that was politically viable and became highly influential in the formation of education policy over the coming years.

The Learning Game provides a detailed critique of education policy over the postwar years, focusing particularly on the preceding terms of Conservative government, at a point when that government was in its final years of power. Ironically, as we write this book, New Labour may be approaching a similar stage in its electoral life. The Thatcher years saw great changes; the two most indelible being the introduction of the National Curriculum in 1989 and the creation of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) in 1993 out of the long-established and rather more benign HM Inspectorate of Schools. The National Curriculum established a framework of statutory, and publicly agreed, standards and expectations for schools. Ofsted, like Ofwat for water utilities and Oftel for telecoms, became the new standards watchdog and regulating body for the delivery of the standards. In the context of the past 50 years both developments are relatively recent but they were and remain fundamentally important as the twin pillars of standards and accountability which define the key structures, responsibilities and working relationships of today’s education system.

The conservative project in education, in line with reforms across other areas of public utilities and public services, was to create a market in which parents, as customers, would choose schools on the basis of preference and publicly provided information in the form of national test results and school inspection reports. By the same token, school autonomy was increased with devolved funding for schools, to take to themselves most of the key management functions, including the hiring and firing of staff. Funding was differentiated in various ways with some financial incentives for success, and extra resources for improvement to the weakest. Increasing devolution to schools also, and intentionally, diminished the powers of the local authorities. Many local authorities, especially those in the inner urban areas where school performance was typically weaker, were labour strongholds run by the opposition and frequently a thorn in the government’s side. The most celebrated and adversarial conflict with the monolithic Inner London Education Authority was resolved with its break-up in April 1990, and signalled a changed, and much more assertive, relationship between government and local authorities.

Also, over the decade from 1985 to 1995, research into school improvement burgeoned, demonstrating irrefutably that (a) some schools had a big impact on children’s success despite differences in socio-economic circumstances, (b) performance varied widely among schools serving statistically similar populations and (c) that weak schools could significantly improve through carefully directed intervention and support. The publication of school league tables along with the hostile practice of naming and shaming weak schools simultaneously raised public awareness and depleted professional morale. It also marked a growing and justified intolerance of school failure which became the hallmark of Ofsted’s public success and influence. The fear that schools might be placed into ‘special measures’ massively strengthened government’s leverage across the system and had a major impact on raising public awareness of school performance, especially in the key areas of school leadership and teaching quality. Thus, prior to the 1997 election, government policy on school improvement was framed around four core principles:

• the statutory National Curriculum to define standards and expectations for all children;

• accountability and public reporting through Ofsted to assure quality;

• devolved and differentiated funding to enhance school autonomy and enable each school to direct resources towards continuous improvement;

• parental choice to create a market as an incentive for schools to meet the needs of their ‘customers’.

By the mid-1990s, under Gillian Sheppard, the last Conservative secretary of state, this policy framework had settled into a generally accepted modus operandum. The National Curriculum and its assessment was established, most primary heads devoted the greater part of their effort to dealing with management problems generated by the new devolved financial regime and Ofsted’s impact was mixed. It had achieved notable success in exposing problems of the weakest schools and local authorities but was having little real impact on school improvement. Inspection reports repeated the same message year after year about good schools being good, weak ones needing to get better, listing the characteristics of each and enjoining everyone to improve but without the wherewithal to contribute more than the most general advice on how to do it.

When Ofsted was created, a clear distinction was drawn between functions of inspection and advice—or pressure and support in the emerging jargon—based on the precept that inspectors should not evaluate their own advice to schools. Over the years, this distinction became increasingly institutionalized and persists today. Distinct and disjoined roles evolved for each function. Inspectors withdrew from any serious participation in support and training and, while auditing and listing schools’ strengths and weaknesses, avoided putting their toes in the water of advising schools or prescribing practice, which was strictly a matter for each school to decide in its own way.

The new Ofsted ‘hit and run’ approach to inspection came to be reflected in the organization of local authority services, where school monitoring began to replace support as their principal school improvement strategy. Local authorities, the main providers of professional support to schools, had their support budgets top-sliced to fund the creation of Ofsted and further reduced through the devolution of funding to schools, seriously depleting their capacity to support schools. Loss of funding, combined with a new emphasis on local inspection and the monitoring of school performance, led most authorities to deploy their remaining resources into school improvement teams. The work of these teams increasingly focused on identifying and monitoring the weakest schools and coaching them through their Ofsted inspections, under pressure from their own elected members, to avoid incurring criticism of the authority, and the threat of penalties for poor performance.

Two other consequences contributed to the malaise. First, local authorities, encouraged by government, attempted to privatize their support services in an effort to claw resources back from the schools. They had to make money or go to the wall. Many failed, while those that survived generally did so on the basis of offering schools what they could sell rather than that which might help or challenge them. Second, the inspection/support division of labour also accorded differences of status to the two roles. Ofsted led the pack, but at the local level, school monitoring teams were the place to be if you wanted a career, while professional support and training progressively diminished. Thus the whole effort to improve was increasingly driven by pressure and the threat of public criticism. This, naturally, exerted itself most palpably on schools, who did their best to comply and stay out of trouble. It was a hard road for school leaders and teachers who felt increasingly exposed and criticized. The constant challenge to improve tended only to depress schools and deepen a growing culture of mistrust and blame.

There was no way that Barber’s vision of school improvement, in a learning society with high achievement on a world-class scale, was likely to emerge from this unhappy combination of pressure and low morale. The system had, as Barber argues, important merits. No one in their right mind would seek to disband Ofsted or ditch the National Curriculum. Later, in his role as chairman of the Literacy Task Force, he drew attention to the need for a judicious balance of pressure and support:

Without too much exaggeration, it would be possible to describe the history of the last thirty years as 20 years of support without pressure and 10 years of pressure without support. If we are to transform literacy standards in the decade ahead, we shall certainly need both.

(Literacy Task Force 1997:14)

On the positive side, much more was known about the processes of school improvement. There was also a growing understanding that school improvement was largely a function of improvements in the leadership and quality of teaching. The challenge lay in how to exploit this knowledge effectively. In 1996, Chris Woodhead put his finger on it in Ofsted’s Annual Report:

There is no doubt that if standards of pupil attainment are to be raised, then the quality of teaching must be the focus of everyone’s efforts. Every government initiative ought to be tested against this key imperative. Will it help teachers to teach better or will it distract them from their key task? This must always be the question. So too, at the level of the LEA and the individual school. Children will learn more when teachers teach better.

(Ofsted 1996a)

Barber agreed but believed the point had much wider implications. The key was system-wide professional development for all teachers and a reciprocal commitment to self-improvement from the profession. Standards and pressure would remain but a massive injection of support was needed to balance out the pressure. Instead of using pressure to berate schools, it would be used as leverage to engage them. In exchange for big commitments in resources, high quality training, professional trust and improved working conditions, teachers would raise their expectations, learn new professional skills and focus seriously on improving their teaching; it would be a deal but not an option. A similar balance of pressure and support would be focused on improving school leadership with priority given to leading the curriculum, teaching and learning. The ambition: nothing less than the elimination of school failure. This brave outlook could only be realized through some serious ‘re-engineering’ of the system where decision makers have to be deliberately ambitious and break with the traditional rules. ‘Any government that embarks on re-engineering in education will not succeed if it lacks courage, determination and ambition’ (Barber 1996:251).

In practice, this process of reform would need to begin in primary schools with the basic skills of literacy and numeracy. In a second term of Government, it would move into the secondary sector, creating an upward pressure for change and a developmental pathway to improvement. Michael Barber was invited to advise Labour in opposition on the development of its education policy. Around the start of 1996 he was asked by David Blunkett, the education spokesman, to set up a Literacy Task Force, which was announced at the Whitsun conference of the National Association of Head Teachers. The task force comprised literacy and school improvement expertise, those with experience of system change and large-scale improvement in other sectors plus a number of experienced and successful heads and teachers. Its job was to collect evidence on how best to improve literacy standards, and to make evidence-based policy proposals.

In parallel, at the start of 1996, government frustration with its inability to improve standards boiled over, triggered by Ofsted’s report The Teaching of Reading in 45 Inner London Primary Schools (Ofsted 1996b). The survey found pervasive weaknesses in the teaching of reading in three inner London education authorities. Inspectors estimated that only about a quarter of the teaching they observed reached a satisfactory level and catalogued weaknesses centred on the quality of teaching and school leadership. Soon after, a similar report was published on numeracy. These were to become landmark documents not just because of their content, but because they were also designed for political impact, calling into question the competence of three under-performing Labour-led authorities.

To their eternal credit, the Secretary of State agreed to a proposal from the Chief Inspector to break with tradition and intervene in these and a number of other poorly performing local authorities with two parallel support projects to improve the teaching of literacy and numeracy through the National Literacy and Numeracy Projects. The projects, although initiated by Ofsted, were run by the DfEE, while Ofsted, along with the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) evaluated them. John Stannard, at the time Ofsted’s specialist English Adviser, was seconded to create and direct the National Literacy Project (NLP). Fifteen local authorities were invited to participate—none refused. Most but not all served urban disadvantaged areas; three large ‘shire’ authorities also participated. Demand exceeded supply and a further three were included at their own request while others had to be refused. The National Numeracy Project was developed in concert but with a different group of local authorities, allowing each project to grow and be tested independently. While Michael Barber was developing his proposals in The Learning Game, John Stannard and Anita Straker went to work developing pilot...