How mentoring can improve modern languages uptake in schools

For some time, there have been many stories told of the “crisis” in modern languages in secondary schools and universities. There is hard evidence to support this. Even though there have been upsurges in modern languages provision – following the introduction of the English Baccalaureate for example – pupil numbers continue to fall.

In Wales, where modern languages are still an optional choice at GCSE, research shows that the number of pupils studying a foreign language declined by 44% between 2002 and 2015. The number of pupils taking French in 2015 was less than half those who took it in 2002.

But why are pupils put off taking a language at GCSE level, and how can we improve attitudes to the subjects? As a bilingual country, it seems counter-intuitive that Welsh pupils cannot see the benefits of studying languages. However, research from an engagement project we have recently been running suggests a range of things are influencing pupils’ decisions not to study a language.

Choosing languages (or not)

The mentoring project saw undergraduate modern language students from four Welsh universities trained to work with year eight and nine pupils (aged 13 and 14) in 28 schools. The students helped the pupils to practice their language, build confidence and knowledge, and teach them how modern languages can aid personal and professional development.

Our work was part of a push by the Welsh government, to arrest and reverse the decline in modern languages study by 2020.

In its first year, with 32 students mentoring 254 pupils, the project had a clear impact not only on the schoolchildren who were mentored, but on whole cohorts within the project schools. Over half of the schools reported increased numbers for GCSE language classes, including one school where a modern language GCSE class is now running for the first time in three years.

Schools aren't teaching the most important subject for kids

Not too long ago, Jana Mohr Lone was at an education workshop in her hometown of Seattle when someone gave her a note.

The note was written by a fifth-grade girl. As Mohr Lone read it, the girl's words began to fill her with joy.

"Ever since you left, I've been looking at my surroundings more and being careful about who I'm talking to and what I'm saying," Mohr Lone later recalled, reading the note over the phone. "I'm thankful because you made me think deeper about things and care more about life."

Mohr Lone isn't a guidance counselor or a therapist. She's a philosophy teacher, the founding director of the University of Washington's Center for Philosophy for Children, and the 20-year president of PLATO, a nonprofit focused on bringing philosophy to schools.

She had spent an hour each week for the last year visiting the girl's school to teach the ancient discipline. And now, just a couple months later, she was already seeing her impact firsthand.

Schools' essential function (at least in theory) is to give kids the skills they need to navigate adult life. Amid the heavy focus on math, science, and reading, however, they've skipped over one of the oldest intellectual pursuits.

While programs have been spreading across US high schools over the last several years, when it comes to elementary education one question still lingers: Why don't more schools teach philosophy?

The surprising benefits of kids asking questions

The questions philosophy raises about life merit it a spot in the school schedule, but it's the wide-ranging benefits to other school subjects that make it so valuable for students.

Numerous studies have found that kids who take philosophy go on to excel in reading and math, too.

Healing division in schools: the lessons from Ireland

As racism rears its head after the EU referendum, a chain set up to counter sectarian education is offering solutions for the UK.

In a horseshoe, sitting around teacher Laura Clarke, year 1 pupils from Redfield Educate Together academy in Bristol discuss the EU referendum. “Do you remember what happened?” asks Clarke. “There was a vote and people were unkind to people from other countries,” pipes up Ben Wycherley, aged six.

“How do you feel about that?” Clarke asks her class. “Shocked,” says Tarren Dwyer-Reid, also six. “Sad,” says classmate Angelo Marmolejo, whose parents are Spanish.

“How do you think being unkind might make other people feel?” asks Clarke. “I’d feel lonely,” says Zoe Papp.

“Not very welcoming”, written up on the whiteboard, is the phrase that seems best to sum up the children’s view.

This new school – the first established in England by the Irish Educate Together multi-academy trust – serves a diverse catchment in central Bristol: 60% of children come from black and minority ethnic backgrounds.

The city, like others, is feeling anxious after incidents of racial hatred and immigrants being told to “go home” following the referendum. One local primary school posted a notice on its Twitter feed offering to help families report racism and hate crime.

The headteacher here, Ros Farrell, is keenly aware that her school’s unique “ethical education curriculum” is needed as never before, as its children grow up in a multicultural city where a higher than expected 38% of voters opted to leave the EU.

The ethos of this chain of schools was developed in the Republic of Ireland – the first was founded in 1978 to offer an alternative to faith-based education, still the only option for 97% of pupils there. Educate Together’s “ethical education” approach, Farrell says, is intended to help children understand and value belief systems other than their own, and explore concepts of equality and justice.

No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

Pupils choose their own subjects and motivate themselves, an approach some say should be rolled out across Germany.

Anton Oberländer is a persuasive speaker. Last year, when he and a group of friends were short of cash for a camping trip to Cornwall, he managed to talk Germany’s national rail operator into handing them some free tickets. So impressed was the management with his chutzpah that they invited him back to give a motivational speech to 200 of their employees.

Anton, it should be pointed out, is 14 years old.

The Berlin teenager’s self-confidence is largely the product of a unique educational institution that has turned the conventions of traditional teaching radically upside down. At Oberländer’s school, there are no grades until students turn 15, no timetables and no lecture-style instructions. The pupils decide which subjects they want to study for each lesson and when they want to take an exam.

The school’s syllabus reads like any helicopter parent’s nightmare. Set subjects are limited to maths, German, English and social studies, supplemented by more abstract courses such as “responsibility” and “challenge”. For challenge, students aged 12 to 14 are given €150 (£115) and sent on an adventure that they have to plan entirely by themselves. Some go kayaking; others work on a farm. Anton went trekking along England’s south coast.

The philosophy behind these innovations is simple: as the requirements of the labour market are changing, and smartphones and the internet are transforming the ways in which young people process information, the school’s headteacher, Margret Rasfeld, argues, the most important skill a school can pass down to its students is the ability to motivate themselves.

“Look at three or four year olds – they are all full of self-confidence,” Rasfeld says. “Often, children can’t wait to start school. But frustratingly, most schools then somehow manage to untrain that confidence.”

The Evangelical School Berlin Centre (ESBC) is trying to do nothing less than “reinvent what a school is”, she says. “The mission of a progressive school should be to prepare young people to cope with change, or better still, to make them look forward to change. In the 21st century, schools should see it as their job to develop strong personalities.”

Could Steiner schools have a point on children, tablets and tech?

Studies have yet to show much benefit from technology in schools, leading some to wonder whether the offline life is better for children.

It’s late morning and the children in Maria Woolley’s class at the Iona school in Nottingham are busy kneading dough. The dough is made from flour they saw ground at the local windmill using grains harvested from a nearby farm they had visited. During the morning lesson the children have sung songs, recited poetry and done rhythmic clapping and stomping.

There is no uniform here, and no headteacher – the school is run by staff and friends – and, unlike the vast majority of primary schools these days, here the students don’t work on tablets or computers. At the front of the class is an old-fashioned blackboard.

The methods at the school, which are based on the controversial teachings of Austrian 19th century philosopher Rudolf Steiner, may be different from those employed in mainstream state schools, but the Iona was recently declared outstanding by the School Inspection Service – the independent equivalent of Ofsted. The report noted that “pupils do not use computers or the internet when in school but staff have ensured that they have learned about internet safety”. It went on: “Teaching is inspirational and highly effective … teachers are very well trained and highly skilled.”

Any school would be grateful to be described in such glowing terms but the staff here are particularly proud that they achieved their outstanding status without technology. In addition to the ban on computers in school, parents are discouraged from letting their children watch television, play computer games or use smartphones at home.

The Iona school was set up in 1985 by Richard Moore, who had worked for 10 years as a state primary teacher. “Mainstream education was becoming prescriptive even then,” he says, “so what appealed to me about Steiner was that it stressed that the work of children was play.” Today the school – one of 33 schools that follow the Steiner curriculum – has 87 children aged between three and 12 and costs £5,402 a year.

Two children in every class start school with an unexplained language disorder

Language is a fundamental human accomplishment. It is the foundation for literacy, underpins academic and social success, and is important for developing and maintaining relationships with others.

So it is no surprise that children who struggle to acquire their native language are at a distinct disadvantage when they start school. Our research, recently published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, found that two five-year-old children in every Year 1 classroom of 30 had a currently unexplained language disorder. An additional 2.34% had a language disorder that occurred as part of another developmental condition, such as autism or Down syndrome.

Children with language disorders have problems with speaking and listening. They tend to have limited vocabularies, leave endings off words and use very simple grammar in their sentences. They have difficulties telling coherent stories and don’t understand complex instructions. This causes many problems in the classroom.

So for example, children with language disorders will struggle to understand questions such as “which of these items will float? Why do you think so?” Even if they understand and know the answer, they may not be able to use words to explain “the ball will float because it is filled with air and is lighter than the penny.” A child with language disorder may just point and guess, or articulate a couple of key words such as “the penny sinked”.

Our study involved more than 7,000 children and 190 schools in Surrey, south of London, in order to find out how many children in England start school with a language disorder – what is known as a prevalence estimate. This may sound straightforward to work out, but it isn’t. As language is multi-faceted, we measured vocabulary, grammar and narrative skills both when the children were speaking and listening. This is the combination of tests that has informed current diagnostic criteria for language disorder.

Asian Countries Take the U.S. to School

A closer look reveals key differences in how they educate their students and offers valuable practical lessons in getting all children to achieve.

Closing the achievement gap between the United States’ disadvantaged students and the rest of our students has been the major focus of federal education policy since 1965, when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed. Compared to the countries with more successful education systems in the world, how is the U.S. doing? The answer is not very well.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development just released a very revealing report on low-performing students in the countries that participate in the Programme for International Student Assessment survey. In places like Hong Kong, Shanghai, South Korea, and Vietnam, fewer than 5 percent of 15-year-old students performed below the basic-proficiency level in reading, mathematics and science. But, in the United States, 12 percent—half a million students—fell below the same level in all three subjects. The performance of the average student in the U.S. falls below the OECD average for all 64 countries in its survey, and far below the average for the major industrial countries. The proportion of our students who score below the OECD basic score is also well above the average for the major industrial countries. Equally troubling, the proportion of our students who score in the upper ranges of the OECD spectrum is also well below the average.

Some argue that the U.S.’s lagging behind has nothing to do with our schools: The U.S. has a much higher proportion of disadvantaged poor and minority students than higher-performing countries. But the data show that 37 countries outperform the U.S. in the degree to which socioeconomic status predicts low achievement. Both Vietnam and Latvia have far smaller percentages of low-performing students than the U.S. If it is poverty that accounts for the U.S.’s high proportion of low-performing students, it is hard to explain how these two countries are doing better than the United States. Vietnam’s average income,adjusted for purchasing power, stands at just one-tenth of the U.S. average, Latvia’s at less than one half.

The OECD also tracks the proportion of low-income and minority students who score at high levels on their assessment. This metric shows that the U.S. has a smaller proportion of low-income high achievers than all but a few of the countries studied.

It turns out that a number of East Asian countries, which account for the majority of nations with high-average performance, also have the lowest percentage of low-performing students. Indeed, Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea all rank in the global top ten in terms of achievement as measured by OECD’s PISA, and each of these jurisdictions has less than 10 percent of its students scoring at the lowest levels. That makes it clear that improving the performance of the low performers does not require a country to sacrifice the performance of the average or top performers.

The schools where they never say ‘sit still’

An education initiative in South Carolina relies on exercise and movement to make students better learners.

David Spurlock is 63, a former baseball and football coach with a bum shoulder and bad back and right now he’s busy planning a jailbreak. He has spent a lifetime walking the hallways, classrooms and athletic fields all across Charleston, South Carolina, his home town. Those classic images of school-aged children sitting still in desks organised into neat rows? Spurlock calls it “educational incarceration”.

“We put kids in a two by two cell and dare them to move: ‘Keep your feet on the floor and hands up where I can see them,’” says Spurlock, the coordinator of health, wellness and physical education for the Charleston County school district. “That sounds like being incarcerated to me.”

The educational model is broken, Spurlock says, and the key to fixing it is applying some of the most basic principles of sport and exercise. Students in some Charleston area schools sit on desks that double as exercise equipment, they enrol in “advanced PE”, receive regular yoga instruction and visit specially equipped learning labs each week where the line between education and physical education disappears entirely.

“If you went to anybody who’s in education, you say PE versus instruction, they say instruction every time,” he says. “But what we’re trying to show is that more movement equals better grades, better behaviour, better bodies.”

One recent morning at Charles Pinckney elementary, 28 children, all aged nine and 10, rolled through the door in a single file, bouncing and giggling as they plopped on to the tiled floor.

In 19 states, it’s okay to hit kids with a wooden board

Terry sat in his middle school principal’s office knowing that in a few short minutes, he would be feeling the pain and humiliation of being paddled.

No parent, administrator or teacher should find this scenario acceptable. Yet, every school day, an estimated 838 students like Terry receive corporal punishment in American schools. Nineteen states still allow corporal punishment, despite research that clearly indicates such public humiliation is ineffective for changing student behavior and can, in fact, have long-term negative effects.

For a decade I have studied approaches that are effective for promoting appropriate student behavior. And as a teacher for a dozen years, I experienced personal reward as well as pride in my students, as they learned and used appropriate behaviors. I have not come across a single valid study that showed any positive effect of corporal punishment.

A form of child abuse

Corporal punishment is a method of responding to student misbehavior wherein an adult uses a wooden board to strike a child on the buttocks in order to inflict pain.

The harm done by corporal punishment is well-recognized by many school administrations across the US. Professional organizations across disciplines including the American Psychological Association, National Education Association, American Bar Association and National Association of School Nurses have called for ending corporal punishment.

In fact, the American Bar Association condemns the practice in the following words:

Institutional corporal punishment of children should be considered a form of child abuse that is contrary to current knowledge of human behavior and sound educational practices.

Do teachers in Finland have more autonomy?

Imagine this: you spend a day in a typical American public school going from one classroom to another, observing what teachers do. Then you do the same in Finland. What would you expect to see?

Many things would probably look similar. But, without a doubt, you would notice one big difference: teachers in Finland would be much less concerned about whether all students have reached the grade level, met the homework standard or feel prepared for the forthcoming standardized tests.

In my previous job as director general at the Finnish Ministry of Education in Helsinki, I had an opportunity to host scores of education delegations from the United States. They often did what I asked you to imagine above.

After spending a day or sometimes two in Finnish schools, they were puzzled. Among other things they said was the following: the atmosphere in schools is informal and relaxed. Teachers have time in school to do other things than teach. And people trust each other. A common takeaway was that Finnish teachers seem to have much more professional autonomy than teachers in the United States to help students to learn and feel well.

So what’s the evidence for teachers in Finland having more autonomy?

What we know about the teaching profession

We have more anecdotal evidence than solid research to answer this important question. And we have surprisingly little internationally comparable evidence about what teachers do in their schools.

The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland

Forget the Common Core, Finland’s youngsters are in charge of determining what happens in the classroom.

“The changes to kindergarten make me sick,” a veteran teacher in Arkansas recently admitted to me. “Think about what you did in first grade—that’s what my 5-year-old babies are expected to do.”

The difference between first grade and kindergarten may not seem like much, but what I remember about my first-grade experience in the mid-90s doesn’t match the kindergarten she described in her email: three and a half hours of daily literacy instruction, an hour and a half of daily math instruction, 20 minutes of daily “physical activity time” (officially banned from being called “recess”) and two 56-question standardized tests in literacy and math—on the fourth week of school.

That American friend—who teaches 20 students without an aide—has fought to integrate 30 minutes of “station time” into the literacy block, which includes “blocks, science, magnetic letters, play dough with letter stamps to practice words, books, and storytelling.” But the most controversial area of her classroom isn’t the blocks nor the stamps: Rather, it’s the “house station with dolls and toy food”—items her district tried to remove last year. The implication was clear: There’s no time for play in kindergarten anymore.

A working paper, “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?,” confirms what many experts have suspected for years: The American kindergarten experience has become much more academic—and at the expense of play. The late psychologist, Bruno Bettelheim, even raised the concern in an article for The Atlantic in 1987.

Researchers at the University of Virginia, led by the education-policy researcher Daphna Bassok, analyzed survey responses from American kindergarten teachers between 1998 and 2010. “Almost every dimension that we examined,” noted Bassok, “had major shifts over this period towards a heightened focus on academics, and particularly a heightened focus on literacy, and within literacy, a focus on more advanced skills than what had been taught before.”

Scotland's child poverty levels so severe teachers are sent advice on spotting malnourished students

Country’s largest teaching union draws up guidelines to help 'poverty-proof' classrooms.

Child poverty in Scotland is now so severe that teachers are being sent advice on how to spot if a child in their class is going hungry, amid evidence that the problem is having an increasingly serious impact on education.

The new guidance, which will be distributed to schools and colleges across Scotland next week, warns that the issue of hunger among pupils is “moving from the exceptional to the more commonplace” as families struggle to make ends meet.

The advice has been drawn up by the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS), the country’s largest teaching union, after a survey of 300 schools and colleges suggested that teachers are increasingly having to help underfed pupils. It is the first time that a section on hunger has been included in the guidance.

“Pupils may appear pale, fatigued, irritable or lacking in concentration, or complain of headaches or feeling unwell,” it states. “While there can be other reasons underlying such signs, for a growing number of children and young people in our schools and colleges today, the reason will be hunger.”

Teachers who suspect that a child may be going hungry should include them in morning breakfast clubs and post the details of nearby food banks on school notice boards and websites, so their families can seek help, the guidance says.

Too much too soon? What should we be teaching four-year-olds

The first day of school is a momentous event in the life of a child. For many it is a day filled with pride and excitement. For others it is more stressful; they may cling to their parents, unused to being parted for so long.

In England, these extremes of experience are particularly marked because of the very young age at which children start formal schooling. Children begin school in the year in which they turn five, meaning that many children start school shortly after their fourth birthdays. England is unusual in this regard; in 31 out of 37 European countries children do not start formal education until they are at least six.

The age at which children start school may not matter as much as what happens to them once they get to the classroom. Given our backgrounds in developmental psychology and speech-language therapy, we think the current targets set for children in their first year at school are not developmentally appropriate. Our research published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry demonstrates that the youngest children in the class find these targets particularly challenging.

England has a curriculum for Early Years Foundation Stage, which outlines developmental goals from birth to five years old. This includes three prime areas of learning such as personal, social and emotional development; physical development; communication and language; as well as specific areas of learning such as maths and literacy.

In 2012, the New Early Years Foundation Stage Profile was introduced, to document attainment at the end of the early years curriculum. The profile is completed by the teacher at the end of the first year in school, and children are assessed on the extent to which they meet or exceed expected progress on 12 key targets across these areas of learning. Those making expected progress are deemed to have achieved a “good level of development”. Here are a few of the key targets:

California Thursdays Success Story

Gary Petill is convinced that if you’re trying to get kids to eat healthy food, the secret is in the presentation. Petill would know. He’s responsible for serving over 26 million meals a year through the San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD), and has an impressive track record when it comes to pushing produce.

That’s why Petill and his staff serve fruit cups chock-full of bright slices of mango, watermelon, cucumber, and jicama in see-through containers. School salad bars brim with locally sourced lettuce, tomatoes, broccoli, kiwis, and citrus, and sport signs encouraging students to “Try Something New.”

The effort doesn’t end at the salad bar.

Mondays are meatless. School gardens are thriving. A vibrant farm-to-school program taps into San Diego County’s 350+ organic farms (the most in the nation). Those farms also support the popular “Harvest of the Month” program, through which a locally grown item such as creamy avocados or juicy plums is introduced to students and offered repeatedly throughout each month. An innovative "Breakfast in the Classroom" program reaches 90 percent of eligible children, up from only 25 percent when it began. And the "Prime Time Kids" dinner program currently serves a nutritious evening meal to students at more than 120 sites.

Knowing how to launch and maintain a successful nutrition program may help San Diego succeed with its next one.

Starting in late October, two dozen San Diego schools are rolling out California Thursdays™, a collaboration with the nonprofit Center for Ecoliteracy. This new program taps into San Diego’s existing commitment to source local produce, but takes it further by offering students a complete meal featuring ingredients from the Golden State.

The California Thursdays program is designed to connect the food on the plate to nearby farms and local communities that students know first-hand. Tender local asparagus and just-picked strawberries already come with great flavor; layering in the California Thursdays message teaches students to consider the source of their food and helps emerging healthy habits take root.

Children living in Victorian conditions, say teachers

Teaching union’s survey finds children are turning up to school sick because parents cannot afford to take time off and sometimes without socks or a coat.

Children are turning up to school sick because their parents cannot afford to take time off to care for them, teachers say.

School staff are also still seeing youngsters arriving for lessons hungry, tired and wearing inappropriate clothes due to a continuing squeeze on family finances, according to the NASUWT teaching union.

It warned that the lives of many children are young people are being “blighted and degraded by poverty and homelessness”.

In some cases, teachers reported being aware of pupils living in “Victorian conditions”, of youngsters coming to school with no socks or coat and of more families depending on food banks.

A survey commissioned by the NASUWT found that almost seven in 10 (69%) of teachers said they had seen pupils coming to school hungry, while eight in 10 (80%) had witnessed youngsters turning up in clothes that were inappropriate for the weather and similar proportions reported children arriving in unwashed or damaged and frayed clothing.

In addition, 78% said they have seen pupils without appropriate footwear and 55% had seen youngsters who were unable to afford uniform.

One of the almost 2,500 teachers surveyed said they had seen: “Pupils who come into school unwell. Often their parents cannot afford to take a day off work, and therefore send their children to school when they ought to be at home.”

And another reported: “Pupils who need medical attention, but parents are not taking them/unable to take them to the GP, optician and/or dentist.”

How space for creativity opens up young people’s minds

Creative experiences can engage the demotivated, irrigate parched minds and illuminate serious socio-economic problems. And yet the current UK coalition government has launched a sustained attack on creativity in education.

Last November, Nicky Morgan, secretary of state for education, said at a launch for a maths and physics education campaign that “the arts and humanities” were for students who “didn’t know” what they “wanted to do”. She said that while these subjects used to be thought of as “useful for all kinds of job”, now “this couldn’t be further from the truth”.

But the powerful impact of giving young people the space to be creative has been endorsed by many others – from Labour leader Ed Miliband to educationalist Ken Robinson, and it has opened some clear blue water between the parties in this election campaign.

Reaching for vocabulary

At Goldsmiths, my colleagues Jim Anderson and Vicky Macleroy have highlighted the power of giving young people creative space through Critical Connections, a multilingual digital storytelling project funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

In this project, young language-learners in mainstream and complementary schools in the UK and beyond worked together to create “digital stories”. One learner created a PowerPoint presentation with a voice-over in Arabic about his uncle’s wedding in Algeria. A Year 8 class in a Catholic school in London created an animation about a fairy house in French. And a group of Palestinian teenagers created a short documentary in English about talented young local jugglers, musicians and poets.

The idea was that in creating their films, learners would work on narratives important to them – and in doing so would reach for the words and grammar they needed. This stretches learners to think beyond the dry vocabulary lists related to “my pet” or “buying a train ticket” which were standard fare in my childhood French class.

Finland’s school reforms won’t scrap subjects altogether

Finland’s plans to replace the teaching of classic school subjects such as history or English with broader, cross-cutting “topics” as part of a major education reform have been getting global attention, thanks to an article in The Independent, one of the UK’s trusted newspapers. Stay calm: despite the reforms, Finnish schools will continue to teach mathematics, history, arts, music and other subjects in the future.

But with the new basic school reform all children will also learn via periods looking at broader topics, such as the European Union, community and climate change, or 100 years of Finland’s independence, which would bring in multi-disciplinary modules on languages, geography, sciences and economics.

It is important to underline two fundamental peculiarities of the Finnish education system in order to see the real picture. First, education governance is highly decentralised, giving Finland’s 320 municipalities significant amount of freedom to arrange schooling according to the local circumstances. Central government issues legislation, tops up local funding of schools, and provides a guiding framework for what schools should teach and how.

Second, Finland’s National Curriculum Framework is a loose common standard that steers curriculum planning at the level of the municipalities and their schools. It leaves educators freedom to find the best ways to offer good teaching and learning to all children. Therefore, practices vary from school to school and are often customised to local needs and situations.

Phenomenon-based learning

The next big reform taking place in Finland is the introduction of a new National Curriculum Framework (NCF), due to come into effect in August 2016.

It is a binding document that sets the overall goals of schooling, describes the principles of teaching and learning, and provides the guidelines for special education, well-being, support services and student assessment in schools. The concept of “phenomenon-based” teaching – a move away from “subjects” and towards inter-disciplinary topics – will have a central place in the new NCF.

Classroom design can boost primary pupils' progress by 16%

 

We all know how important it is that our primary school teachers are highly qualified, but what is less known is what impact the room where children are taught has on their achievement or performance. Results of a three-year research project have shown that the design of a classroom at primary school level can boost learning progress by up to 16% in a single year.

Our team of researchers visited 27 schools in Blackpool, Hampshire and Ealing, carrying out detailed surveys of more than 150 classrooms in varying geographical and socio-economic contexts. Our resulting report analysed the performance of 3,766 pupils between the ages of five and 11 in relation to the design of their classroom, providing clear evidence for the first time that it had a dramatic affect on their attainment levels.

While we were aware that specific elements such as “air quality” have been analysed before, it was the first time researchers had ever gone into real schools and discovered the impact on children’s learning of every aspect of a classroom.

Measuring pupils' progress

For each pupil in the study, we looked at the teacher-assessed grades in reading, writing and mathematics at the start and the end of the year, so that their progress in each subject could be calculated. These subjects are typically taught in the same classroom, which represents a permanent learning space for the children at primary school level, unlike in a secondary school where students often move from room to room for their different subjects.

It was from this data that we could estimate that moving the “average” pupil from the least effective classroom to the most effective classroom accounted for an increase in pupil performance of 1.3 sub-levels of the national curriculum in a single year. The national curriculum is divided into eight levels, each with three sub-levels, used to measure children’s progress. Progress of 1.3 sub-levels based on the classroom environment is a big impact when the Department of Education expects primary school children to progress by two sub-levels in a year.

Send disadvantaged pupils to boarding school and only the brightest thrive

Send a child to a boarding school and they’ll thrive. That’s what many richer families believe when they send their children away to board, and it’s the belief behind a series of programmes set up around the world in the past two decades, aimed at providing places at boarding schools for disadvantaged children.

Two examples are the SEED boarding schools, started in the US in the late 1990s to teach poor black students, and the internats d’excellence (boarding schools of excellence), introduced in 2008 in France to teach students from poor families. There are 45 such internats are now operating in France, serving 4,200 middle and high school students, essentially for free.

These schools were opened because of concerns that the negative influences students are exposed to in their home environment could impair their academic potential. But very little is known about the effects that substituting school for home produce on students. The only study considering this question found that being enrolled in the SEED boarding school in Washington DC increases student test scores.

Boarding by lottery

In research co-authored with Luc Behaghel and Marc Gurgand from the Paris School of Economics, and conducted with the Poverty Action Lab, we analysed the effects of a French internat on student outcomes. Our findings suggest that while these boarding schools can help boost pupils who are already strong academically, they might not be helping weaker students.

Pigs won’t fly in textbooks: OUP tells authors not to mention pork

Guidelines for writers have come to light telling them to avoid mention of anything which might offend overseas markets.

 
Stringent guidelines from educational publishers, that warn textbook authors off touching on topics from pork to horoscopes to avoid offending students in other countries, have come to light amid widespread criticism.
Their emergence follows the news earlier this month that publisher HarperCollins had pulped an atlas designed for use in Middle Eastern schools after outrage over its omission of Israel from the map. HarperCollins said at the time that the decision reflected “local preferences”, with the inclusion of Israel “unacceptable” to its Gulf customers.

The insistence that mentions of pork products in educational material designed for use abroad is also prohibited was revealed by Jim Naughtie on Radio 4’s Today programme, when he read out a letter he had obtained from Oxford University Press to an author, prohibiting the mention of “pigs plus sausages, or anything else which could be perceived as pork” in their book.

“Now, if a respectable publisher, tied to an academic institution, is saying you’ve got to write a book in which you cannot mention pigs because some people might be offended, it’s just ludicrous. It is just a joke,” said Naughtie, prompting a chorus of outrage in the Daily Mail, which quoted Tory MP Philip Davies describing the situation as “nonsensical political correctness”.

But according to authors, the guidelines are well-known and widely used by educational publishers, encompassing a range of “taboo” subjects in addition to pork, with publishers keen to avoid offending potential markets for their books abroad. There is even an acronym, PARSNIP, to remind authors of topics to be avoided: politics, alcohol, religion, sex, narcotics, isms (communism for example) and pork.