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If your GCSE English results are good, congratulations!
But if they could be improved or raised further, you may want to review some
aspects of teaching and learning in the light of recent research. There is
widespread relief that this year’s GCSE English grades have generally been
maintained compared with last year’s despite the greater demands of the new
specifications and this is a tribute to the hard work of teachers and their
students. But it hasn’t been widely publicised that, when the new GCSEs have
settled in uncontroversially through Ofqual’s policy of ‘comparable outcomes’,
their demand will gradually be raised further, monitored by the new National
Reference Tests in English and Maths. This follows from Governments’ long-
term policy of raising GCSEs’ demand to match the standards of higher-
achieving educational systems and raising attainment by students who
currently leave school with poor qualifications or none, see The Importance of
Teaching White Paper (2010)
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/f
ile/175429/CM-7980.pdf
Ofqual’s ‘comparable outcomes’ policy prevents students from being
disadvantaged by the introduction of more demanding examinations by
awarding similar proportions of grades as previously. But this policy reflects
previous standards – it doesn’t raise them. The Coalition Government’s
commitment to raising standards in England to those of the highest-attaining
educational systems and raising attainment by the less able remains current
Government policy and is tacitly supported by Labour. It is a response to
England’s low productivity and had led to such developments as the pupil
premium, Ofsted’s focus on ‘closing the gap’, the introduction of Progress 8 as
schools’ main accountability indicator and the investment of £110 million in
research into more effective teaching and learning through the Education
Endowment Foundation.
This rise in standards obviously can’t be achieved by continuing current
standards. This is shown by a recent paper by the Education Policy Institute –
English Education: World Class? https://epi.org.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2017/08/English-education-world-class.pdf – which shows
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that half of pupils in England should be scoring 50 points or higher across their
Attainment 8 subjects to match the most successful countries, but only 40 per
cent are doing so at present. And there are huge variations: in London 45 per
cent of pupils achieve the world class benchmark while fewer than a third
achieve it in other parts of the country.
There is also a risk that attainment will appear to rise owing to teachers’ and
students’ greater familiarity with the new exams – the well-established
‘sawtooth effect’
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/f
ile/549686/an-investigation-into-the-sawtooth-effect-in-gcse-as-and-a-level-
assessments.pdf Again, the new National Reference Tests will ensure the
necessary allowance is made for this.
Forward-looking schools will need to be aware that Governments of whatever
political party will continue to require GCSE standards to be raised and require
schools to do better with their moderately and less able students. UK workers’
relatively low productivity will continue to make this necessary. We hope the
following will help schools to prepare for future developments.
Where to start
If you don’t know it, a good place to start is Professor Robert Coe’s clear and
helpful paper Improving Education: A triumph of hope over experience
http://www.cem.org/attachments/publications/ImprovingEducation2013.pdf
He shows how standards in England’s schools haven’t risen for 25 years and
how this has been hidden by GCSE grade inflation which has led to Ofqual
taking control of the Exam Boards’ marking and awarding. But more important
he shows why standards haven’t risen. Basically it’s because SLTs have often
required teachers to focus on aspects of teaching that don’t raise attainment
and assessed teaching on surface features, not quality of learning. This isn’t
their fault, of course – everyone wants their students to do better. But why
has this happened? Coe is too polite to say, but it’s the result of poor political
decisions over many years.
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Robert Coe is a leading member of a group of researchers promoting evidence-
based education. In what follows, the illustrations are from his paper.
Failed policies on teaching and learning
The Labour Government elected in 1997 was committed to raising educational
standards (”Education, education, education”) and set about this by creating
the National Strategies, initially in English and Maths. Advised by consultants
employed by the DoE, a formulaic teacher-led model of lesson delivery was
developed with learning objectives, a starter activity, episodes often evidenced
immediately with some writing, and a plenary. In English, simplistic techniques
like Point-Evidence-Explanation were encouraged. This model was rolled out
nationally by a private company, Capita, which employed consultants in every
local authority. The aim was to bypass local authorities and HMI to create a
national model of lesson delivery.
At the same time Ofsted pressured schools to assess students more and more
frequently to track their progress against predicted National Curriculum levels
and, in secondary schools, predicted GCSE grades. This was to fulfil the
expectation that every student should make progress in every lesson. In some
schools this led to every piece of students’ work being assessed against
National Curriculum sublevels or, from 2002, the assessment focusses
underpinning the National Curriculum tests or, from 2008, Assessing Pupil
Progress (APP) criteria, with inevitable pressure on teachers to teach-to-the-
criteria or, at worst, inflate outcomes to show ‘progress’.
The problem was that neither of these policies was based on any research, as
the outcomes of international education surveys eventually showed. The
consultants employed by the DoE and HMI assumed these policies would
raise attainment because they looked sensible. But they didn’t. The three
international surveys of educational attainment – PISA, PIRLS and TIMSS –
showed England’s attainment as flatlining year after year.
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However, this lack of improvement was disguised by GCSE results which
showed a year by year increase of A – C grades (subsequently A* – C) from
29.9 per cent in 1988 when GCSE began to 81.1 per cent in 2012, a rise not
remotely paralleled anywhere else in the world.
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By 2008 the Government accepted that the mismatch between the
international surveys and the GCSE results was unsustainable. In April 2008 it
created Ofqual to commission research on the reliability of the Key Stage 2
tests, GCSE and A Level. This was eventually published in 2012 as a 903-page
book, Ofqual’s Reliability Compendium. The evidence of grade inflation by the
Exam Boards to maintain their market share was clear and Ofqual was given
statutory powers to monitor and control the awarding of GCSE and A Level
grades, beginning in April 2010.
In 2008 the Government also announced the immediate end of the Key
Stage 3 National Curriculum tests and the end of the National Strategies when
Capita’s contract expired in March 2011. Ofsted quietly withdrew its
expectation that every student should be seen to make progress in every
lesson, but little else happened until the Coalition initiated a review of the
National Curriculum in November 2010. This found over-assessment of pupils’
work against National Curriculum sub-levels so widespread, frequent and
pointless that it recommended a new National Curriculum without levels - The
Framework for the National Curriculum
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/f
ile/175439/NCR-Expert_Panel_Report.pdf This was implemented, but many
schools have found ways of continuing frequent assessment of students’ work
against the new National Curriculum though there is no evidence it raises
attainment.
Government silence and its consequences
The problem for schools is that Government has never informed them that
the two failed policies – the National Strategies and frequent assessment of
progress towards target grades – are discredited because they failed to raise
attainment and should be discontinued. For Labour, the reason was evidently
embarrassment at admitting that the millions spent on the National Strategies
were wasted. For the Coalition and Conservative Governments, giving schools
guidance on teaching, learning and assessment conflicts with the policy of
devolving these wholly to schools – schools are to manage these matters
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themselves with final assessments as national tests in Year 6 or GCSE and A
Level monitored by Ofqual to ensure reliability and consistency.
Unfortunately for secondary schools, this silence about teaching and learning
has accompanied the most radical set of reforms in the history of school
examinations in Britain. As mentioned, these support the cross-party policy of
raising attainment in England’s schools to that of more successful countries
and, in particular, raising the attainment of moderately and less able students
who currently leave school with poor qualifications or none – see The
Importance of Teaching White Paper (2010).
All aspects of GCSE have been reformed so that they are now:
• more demanding in examination (end-of-course only), content and
assessment (more challenging questions)
• graded differently with 9 grades (9 – 1) instead of 8 (A* - G)
• consistent in standard between Exam Boards (Ofqual)
• referenced to national standards over time by national reference tests
in English and Mathematics
• equitable so that all grades count towards Attainment 8 and Progress 8
• the lead measure of school accountability through Progress 8
• focussed on effective teaching e.g. by requiring Ofsted to report on how
schools are closing the gap for disadvantaged pupils and by funding
research into effective teaching methods, chiefly through the Education
Endowment Foundation.
The changes are well-intentioned, but schools have been left to work out the
best way of responding to these unprecedented demands by themselves – it’s
hard to imagine any other country treating its schools in this way. The last
advice on teaching and learning from Government was in the 2000s - through
the National Strategies and a more assertive Ofsted inspection model
expecting every student to show progress in every lesson and frequent
assessment against target grades, both now discontinued as ineffective. But,
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as mentioned, Government has never informed schools that these policies are
discredited and withdrawn, so many SLTs understandably require their staff
to continue with them, assuming they are still valid. This has two
consequences which reduce effective teaching and learning in many schools.
First, teachers are required to spend time on teaching approaches and
assessments which don’t increase good quality learning and distract them from
approaches that do. This contributes to excessive workload, tiredness and
high staff turnover. The DfE recognised this in February 2015 with its
Workload Challenge and by March 2016 commissioned three reports on
reducing the demands of marking, planning and data management -
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/reducing-teachers-
workload/reducing-teachers-workload Surprisingly the DfE hasn’t taken the
opportunity to state clearly and repeatedly that the National Strategies
teaching model and frequent assessment against target grades should be
discontinued as ineffective. Unsurprisingly most schools have ignored the
workload recommendations - https://www.tes.com/news/school-
news/breaking-news/dfe-plans-reduce-teacher-workload-ignored-80-cent-
schools
Second, unless they are in a local authority or MAT with a good adviser on
teaching and learning, schools may turn to bodies like PiXL and Thinking
Schools International which promote a ‘tips and tricks’ approach to raising
attainment, recommending approaches which look attractive but for which
there is no research evidence that they significantly improve learning. Others
obtain advice informally (and more cheaply) through TeachMeets, online
forums and the latter pages of the TES. None of this works except at the
margins.
So how do we raise attainment?
The vital importance of research is shown by the Education Endowment
Foundation which is funded by Government to commission research on raising
attainment in schools. The research is rigorous, with random controlled trials
and results evaluated independently of the researchers. Most projects show
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little or no impact, with a few showing sufficient promise to warrant further
research. But the EEF has also commissioned researchers at the University of
Durham, including Robert Coe, to summarise the international research on 34
possible ways of raising attainment in schools, relating their effectiveness to
their cost. This is published as a Teaching and Learning Toolkit to encourage an
evidence-based approach to raising attainment
https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/resources/teaching-learning-
toolkit
Here is Robert Coe’s visual summary of the Toolkit.
It will be seen that the most effective approaches all relate to practical aspects
of teaching: feedback, metacognition, peer-tutoring, collaboration (i.e.
groupwork) and, in secondary schools, well-designed homework. These
approaches also feature high in John Hattie’s work on Visible Learning for
Teachers (2012). There is strong overlap with Dialogic Teaching developed by
Robin Alexander and Neil Mercer which the EEF has recently confirmed as a
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potentially powerful way of improving learning at Key Stage 2 -
https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/our-work/projects/dialogic-
teaching/ - and with the promotion of Carol Dweck’s growth mindset. There
have also been effective adaptations of the CA model. One of the most
remarkable related to teaching a large-enrolment freshman Physics course at
the University of British Columbia which achieved an effect size of 2.5, one of
the largest increases ever recorded in a standardised trial – see The University
of British Columbia experiment [pdf]. Taken together, the research evidence is
robust, repeated and incontrovertible.
What makes great GCSE English teaching?
It is worth recalling that the new GCSE specifications explicitly require the
teaching of reasoning skills applied to texts. In English Language, most marks
for Reading are awarded for analysis, evaluation and comparison of unseen
texts. In English Literature marks are awarded for analysis of studied texts and
development of informed personal responses to aspects of them as required
by the examination questions and for comparison of unseen poems. These
reasoning skills operate on the basis of texts, studied and unseen, so that
students require a rich cultural awareness of how English has been used for
various purposes, chiefly in the 19th to 21st centuries but also by Shakespeare.
These changes have been introduced because such demands are common in
other, more educationally successful countries.
The new demands are considerable. For success, students must be able to
respond swiftly, confidently and in depth, in timed examinations, to a range of
unseen texts and searching questions about studied texts. And, for Progress 8,
these skills must be taught across the whole ability range. Clearly they can’t be
taught quickly – they need to be built up over time with regular practice.
How can these skills be taught most successfully? As Coe points out, the first
stage is to focus teaching on requiring students to think: “Learning happens
when people have to think hard.” But this may not be students’ top priority.
There is research evidence that some prefer to finish quickly or get an answer
with the least effort or avoid the teacher making demands on them. Every
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teacher is aware of students who engage with learning as little as possible or
don’t work to their full ability much of the time. How can a teacher ensure
that all the students in the class are thinking hard at several points, perhaps
many points, in the lesson so that they will definitely be learning?
Second, how can the teacher be sure to incorporate the features that the EEF
Toolkit show raise attainment most: effective feedback, metacognition, peer-
tutoring and collaboration leading to well-designed homework? (Incidentally
this is why most textbooks are of limited value except for providing useful
texts. They are designed to be used by students working alone as well as in
schools and so provide little opportunity for feedback, metacognition, etc.
These have to be led by a teacher in conversation with the class.)
Third, lessons that encourage thinking and provide a structure for effective
feedback, metacognition, etc, also need to use a range of rich authentic texts
using fiction, non-fiction and poetry from appropriate periods. This builds up
students’ cultural capital.
Finally, designing lessons which engage students in thinking hard about
demanding texts and provide effective feedback, metacognition, etc, is difficult
and takes some expertise. Teachers can’t learn this from a single input. There
needs to be a CPD programme which provides modelling of lessons over
several sessions with observations and support until teachers are confident in
the new approach. This is also recommended by the DFE’s Standard for
teachers’ professional development (June 2016) -
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/f
ile/537031/160712_-_PD_Expert_Group_Guidance.pdf
Cognitive acceleration
The programme which best fulfils all these requirements is Adey and Shayer’s
Cognitive Acceleration (CA), devised at King’s College London for Science in the
70s and 80s and for English since 2009. Based on work by Vygotsky and Piaget,
the programme provides structured challenge by which students develop their
capacity for thinking by working out the best solution to problems through
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group discussion, facilitated by the teacher with effective feedback and a clear
focus on metacognition.
There are similarities with Philosophy for Children and Feuerstein’s
Instrumental Enrichment, but CA is distinctive in providing a suite of lessons
explicitly designed to develop higher-order thinking in relation to school
subjects. The lessons are designed to be used fortnightly, 15 per year, over
two years in KS3 and in Year 10. (There are also separate suites of lessons for
primary schools.)
Formal trials of CA in Science Education (CASE) were conducted throughout the
1980s and 1990s. In every case the average gain compared with matched non-
CASE students was between 1 and 2 National Curriculum levels and between 1
and 2 GCSE grades. There were significant long-term effects, up to three years
after a two-year intervention, and transfer effects into Mathematics and
English from an intervention in Science, suggesting that CASE increased general
reasoning powers, not only those relating to Science – see Adey and Shayer
The Effects of Cognitive Acceleration – and speculation about causes of these
effects https://www.letsthinkinenglish.org/wp-
content/uploads/2012/06/TheEffectsofCognitiveAcceleration.pdf
A central feature of this success was that Adey, Shayer and their co-workers
ensured that the teachers understood the CA pedagogy and supported them
until they delivered it effectively. This influenced the teachers’ approach to
teaching so that they adapted their teaching in CA-related ways, further raising
students’ attainment. (With Let’s Think in English we find teachers soon start
developing their own LTE-style lessons.)
A particularly important feature of CA is its ability to raise the attainment of
lower ability and EAL students – see e.g. Really raising standards in GCSE
English, Appendix 5
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/education/research/Research-
Centres/crestem/Research/Current-Projects/CogAcc/files/Really-raising-
standards-in-GCSE-English-full-version.pdf This is why many schools are using
pupil premium money to fund CA/Let’s Think in English, though it helps all
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students. (A crucial feature of Progress 8 is that raising students’ attainment
from grade 2 to 3 is as valuable as raising it from 7 to 8 or 8 to 9.)
During the 1990s and early 2000s, CASE was highly successful in English schools
and CA programmes were developed in Mathematics (CAME), Technology and
the Arts (Drama, Music and Visual Art) and in Science and Mathematics for
primary schools, all with similar effect sizes. However, from 2000 CA was
gradually squeezed out of schools’ teaching programmes by pressures of the
National Strategies and Ofsted’s requirement of frequent assessment for
tracking purposes. Interest in CASE has gradually revived in recent years and a
CA programme for English has been developed on exactly the same principles
since 2009. This is now used by some 350 schools in England and in Jersey,
Switzerland, Hong Kong and Vietnam.
Interest in CASE has also developed abroad, with formal trials in ten countries
see McCormack 2013 https://www.letsthinkinenglish.org/wp-
content/uploads/2012/06/LTIS_efficacy.pdf It has become particularly well-
established in Australia where there is continuing and growing interest – see
Oliver and Grenville (2016) Bringing CASE in from the cold: the teaching and
learning of thinking https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11165-015-
9489-3
Against this background, the Let’s Think in English programme provides:
• 30 fully trialled, high interest KS3 lessons and 20 KS4 lessons, using high-
quality authentic texts, with more being added termly
• a year’s in-school training and support
• particularly effective support for lower ability and EAL students
• a structured basis for teaching the reasoning skills and confidence
required for success in the new GCSE English specifications
• a basis, where necessary, for persuading SLTs to allow English
Departments to move on from National Strategies-based pedagogy and
unnecessary repeated assessments to a structured programme of
proven effectiveness in raising attainment
• a total package costing less than three pupil premiums.
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For further information, see www.letsthinkinenglish.org For other CA and CA-
related programmes, see www.letsthink.org.uk (Science and Maths) and
http://iccams-maths.org/ (Maths).
4th September 2017
Any comments or enquiries to [email protected]