In an interview with Professor John Hattie, education researcher and author of Visible Learning, SSAT education director Anne-Marie Duguid draws out his trenchant critique of the English education system, and how to avoid the distraction of different types of school…
In his usual no-nonsense way, Hattie began with: “All the work I’ve done across the whole visible learning spectrum shows that creating different kinds of schools has a very short-term effect.” Within six months of starting an academy a trust, a free school, you name it, he says, it’s just another school.
“And unfortunately you then have to brand the school, and publicise it. It’s all premised on this crazy notion that we want parents to have the choice of school. That’s one of the biggest examples of the politics of distraction I know. Because if you take two kids of the same achievement here in the UK, it almost doesn’t matter what school they go to.”
He maintains that what the UK and a number of other education systems have done “is to give parents this belief that they can choose schools. But what really matters is within-school variance, and we’ve not given them the right to choose teachers. Now I know why we don’t do that and I’m not suggesting we should do it, but the hard reality is it’s the teacher within the school that makes the difference, not the school.” Many schools in England, he conceded, recognise this: they focus on teachers’ CPD. But he felt it was important to recognise that the crucial test of CPD’s value is its effect on the children, not on the teachers.
The crucial test of CPD’s value is its effect on the children, not on the teachers
Data interpretation is the schools’ job
Our accountability system also comes in for some stick. UK education has “gone overboard in testing and sending test results to Ofsted and the government. But one of the key things is how you interpret that data. Take New Zealand for example: they don’t ask for a single scrap of data from a school. But every school, every year, has to submit their OTJs – their overall teacher judgements about where the kids are in the curriculum. This leads to dramatically different conversations, because the schools have to defend how they make interpretations – not just from the test scores but from the artefacts the kids make and the way the kids think. And it’s transformed how that country considers the role of teachers.
“There’s nothing wrong with accountability, it has to happen. But the minute you start handing out the data beyond the school you’re handing away the most important thing about it, the interpretation. New Zealand’s Privacy Commission ruled that it’s the students who own the data. Here, the politicians are appeasing the voters and at the same time doing damage to the students, who are the ones we should be responsible for.”
In recent months, England’s school leaders have adopted a similar approach, he noted. Their primary concern now is not Ofsted or DfE, but evaluating results for themselves, to improve the students’ learning.
When you hand out the data beyond the school you’re handing away the most important thing about it, the interpretation
Children should be interpreting their data
Further than this, he believed “kids should be taught how to interpret the data and how to achieve a year’s growth in a year. Research data shows that what predicts your adult health, wealth and happiness is not your test scores, it’s your years of schooling.” So the vital question the system should be addressing, he suggests, is “how do you make the kids want to come back to school?
And, again echoing the concerns of many school leaders about the narrowing of the curriculum in this country, he concluded: “If you focus just on numeracy and literacy, you’re leading to a society of the haves and the have-notes. And that’s not a very healthy society.”
SSAT members can hear more of Hattie’s forthright views on improving education in this country here.
