England's good PISA results: how much credit does Gove's GCSE reform truly deserve?

[ParentOfOne]

England did reasonably well in the latest PISA results, much better than Scotland and Wales
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgy6n0l4rdo

I'd be interested in comparing opinions on how much credit Gove's GCSE reform of 2013 deserves for this.

I don't like Gove (a Brexiter who famously said that all schools should be above average...) but I am open to admitting that I can disagree with someone on a topic but still agree on another.

It's not clear to me what the main difference between Gove's GCSE and the previous system was: did coursework use to count in the previous system, whereas he made the GCSE reliant only on the final examination? Has this made the results fairer and more reliable, to the extent that the test and the marking are the same across the country?

It's also not clear to me how the Welsh system differs. I remember many comments from Welsh politicians against teaching to the test and in favour of a more comprehensive approach, but I do not understand what it means in practice.

What was most striking for me was that the results were not driven by socio-economic factors, and that English students in deprived areas still did better than Welsh students in less deprived areas (based on the press - I haven't analysed the reports myself), so it's not a matter of London being richer and skewing the results.

Thoughts?

His changes to GCSEs made the work harder and in my experience at the time teachers rose to the challenge.

So one theory is that he made the GCSE in England harder, but those in Scotland and Wales stayed the same, and that helps explain the difference?

Is it just about more/harder content, or also about removing coursework / doing other changes?

Was his reform contested mostly because he was a Tory and teacher unions tend to support Labour, or were there more "pedagogical" objections?

did coursework use to count in the previous system, whereas he made the GCSE reliant only on the final examination?

Yes, he binned a lot of coursework (except in maths which had already been binned by the prior Labour government). It's not the only reform he made, previous teaching favoured 'progressive' methods (group work, discovery learning and other stuff that wasn't the teacher telling the kids what they needed to know).

I think it's important to note that at the same time there was somewhat of a grassroots teaching revolution - there were a lot of teacher bloggers (like OldAndrew) who were blogging about how crap some of these progressive methods were and a focus on methods that actually work. Tom Bennett (who was an ex-teacher blogger who gave behaviour management advice for the TES) and others set up ResearchEd which was an organisation with regular conferences where teachers spoke about evidence-based teaching methods. In maths, teachers like Craig Barton became very influential on teaching practice. People started talking about Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction. Gove was influenced by these people as much as they were given room to influence by him (Bennett was later appointed his behaviour tsar). The EEF was set up to inform teachers about the evidence-based for various educational interventions.

It wasn't just a top-down imposition of these things by Gove, teachers actually wanted teaching methods that work.

It's important to note that England isn't only performing better than Wales and Scotland who decided to overhaul their curriculum in a more progressive direction but we are doing well internationally. It's also important to note that our PISA scores haven't massively improved, but other countries' have dropped so we have moved up the ranks.

Wales’ slump is mainly down to the abolition of league tables and standardised testing. It was supposed to mean that schools focused on true education without having to spend time coaching to tests. Then some years later the pigeons came home to roost that if you don’t spend time coaching to tests, you’ll do badly in tests and everyone will assume that you are thick and you can enjoy the enrichment of your education as you mop out the toilets in McDonald’s

It's not just GCSE level. He had the entire primary current rewritten so objectives moved down one or two year groups (ie what was covered in Y5 sometimes became Y3 work). Many new objectives were added too. It was awful at the start but I do think standards are higher now.

What's the point of doing well in the PISA tests if the results don't translate to a more successful and productive economy and society? I'm a teacher and parent of children who started school at the time of the curriculum reform and IMO the curriculum is a contributory factor to the poor mental health and behaviour of students. It would be better if we did less well in the PISA tests but students learned skills thay would help them succeed in the workplace and education would be properly accessible to all.

I would also say that much of the longer-term change came from the literacy and numeracy strategies of the Blair Government from the late nineties. We had a load of money into LAs and lots of peripatetic advisory teachers appointed. This built on the introduction of the National Curriculum in the 80s, after the rather laid-back attitudes of the seventies, when I started teaching. There was a lot of emphasis on improving teaching and learning and money for training. The Tory governments failed to maintain that investment, but standards continued to rise because of the frameworks in place and the inspection system.

The combination of Gove's curriculum and Ofsted's obsession with data are fueling the SEND crisis, the behaviour crisis and the teacher retention crisis. There need to be curriculum pathways that everyone can access, including less academically able children and those who prefer more practical work, and Ofsted need to accept that.

I dunno, I think Nick Gibb's focus on phonics has had a huge impact on early years reading.

@noblegiraffe Thank you, very interesting. I'll look up those references.

This may be a bit of a silly question, but how does an Education secretary change the national curriculum, and how does that link to the supposed autonomy of schools and exam boards? exam boards can change the curriculum only within certain parameters set by the Dep of Education?

@HilaryThorpe2 Money into LA? You mean local authorities? But, since then, there's been a huge shift, whereby the vast majority of secondary schools are now independent of local authorities. I forget the exact number, but I think ca 3/4 of English secondaries are academies. It seems a bit of a stretch to me to link today's success to something which happened 25-30 years ago, when so much has changed in the meanwhile

It made exams more challenging which the academic children could manage.

For the less academic children though it meant the curriculum moved too fast, became inaccessible and because the grading of GCSEs mean that around 30% will always fail, it resulted in disengagement with education for a significant proportion of pupils. People wonder why there is now a school absentee crisis. Well, it's because schooling is only aimed at the academically able.

The old system of CSEs and O'levels understood that abilities and skills differ as ensured there were educational options for all.

The exam boards basically do what the DfE says because if they don't, the DfE just says that those qualification don't meet the govt's 'rigorous' standards and won't be counted in the league tables.
If they're not counted in the league tables, schools won't do them because schools care about league tables and the exam boards lose money.

Schools basically do what the DfE says because Ofsted inspect based on what the DfE tell them to prioritise. So academies don't have to follow the national curriculum but if they don't, they can be penalised come Ofsted if it doesn't basically match what the DfE want.

You wouldn’t get a job in Mac Donald’s if you don’t pass enough GCSEs

@Lindy2 But there are differences even in the new system. There is a foundation tier for maths.
Is your point that the the threshold is too high even for foundation?

I don't have the expertise to have a fully informed opinion.
I understand that some say that foundation maths is about life skills, fractions and percentages, and that failing to reach even that level basically means a kind of functional illiteracy which makes it hard to function in today's society.

On the other hand others say that there is something wrong in a system where so many (25ish% maybe? I forget) fail to get a 4 in Maths and English.

I am not sure what to think, because I am not convinced it is a solution to say that 1/4 of our teenagers don't really need to learn fractions and percentages.

@Tickingcrocodile , @MoggetsCollar Do you mean that you would keep standardised testing but that the current system places too much emphasis on them? Or that you would replace them with something else entirely? if so, what?

FWIW I see them as a necessary evil. Too much focus on testing leads to teaching to the test, and to some schools playing dirty to improve their scores, including "incentivising" certain students to go elsewhere so their precious stats aren't negatively affected. But what's the alternative? I think that, in countries with less standardises testing, universities end up doing their own standardised admission exams, so the same issue is still there

I also agree that there is a direct correlation with the change in curriculum and children’s mental health suffering. I’m a primary school teacher and think we now teach to the test and are overly formal from too young an age at the cost of developing children’s ability to gain the skills they need to be independent learners eg collaboration, perseverance, independence, creativity, hands on practical learning.

the results also fail to show the vastly narrowing secondary school curriculum as a result of the teacher retention crisis and lack of funding, eg the numbers of children doing a level music or languages are at an all time low. Some would argue this narrowing is necessary to ensure the basics are taught well but I think it’s an absolute disgrace compared to countries where children have to take nine subjects to a level standard- these may score lower but in my view create more well rounded people with a higher overall skill set.

@wafflesmgee I think it’s an absolute disgrace compared to countries where children have to take nine subjects to a level standard- these may score lower but in my view create more well rounded people with a higher overall skill set.

No system is perfect. The early specialisation of the English system means that

• university courses are shorter. Can you imagine telling teenagers they need to incur one more year of debt for their uni?
• You don't end up penalised if you excel in one area but not another. If you want to study literature but maths makes you lose the will to live, or viceversa, I'm not sure that you should be penalised and that unis should favour those who also excel at other, unrelated subjects

The downside is that it's very hard for kids to know what they want to do so early. E.g. an English 16-year old can be undecided between medicine and biology, but there aren't many combinations of A level subjects that would allow them to study, I don't know, medicine, or chemistry, or engineering, or economics.

Whereas their cousins in other countries make that choice at 18-19, not at 16

We still came 7th in the world, despite this.
I don’t think you give enough credit to English teachers, who work tirelessly for their pupils.

You mean like France? Where they have tanked in the ratings, but their pupils are very expressive…
Why do you think so many countries employ English graduates? I rest my case.
We can’t keep blaming Covid for mental health and flaky pupils. But we can blame parenting skills and social media.

One of Gove's big mistakes (and he made a lot) was to decouple AS levels from A-levels. Students used to take 4 subjects in Y12 and drop to 3 in Y13 so got a broader sixth form education, now they only take 3 subjects both years.

That's an excellent point - I didn't remember this difference

You can take more than 3 if you want…

No, you often can't.

My school wouldn't let you, unless the 4th was Further Maths, and I think that's fairly standard.

Correlation doesn’t equal causation - it’s a massive stretch to say that the curriculum is responsible for poor teen mental health when we also have the rise of smart phones, Covid and who knows what else.

And that is a HUGE downside.

The narrowness of the curriculum is another, even within subjects.

Letters and sounds was introduced in 2007 by Labour following the rose review- introducing systematic synthetic phonics. That became embedded and tightened up over the next few years, then nick gibb made it statutory in 2010 and held course for over a decade. Not only was it the best method, it was just the fact primary schools didn't have to keep adjusting to constant changes of direction on it that really helped.

However I do think we need to take Pisa as one piece of evidence- and not entirely surprising that the more you test kids the more used to taking tests they are. Wider discussions about what education is for matter too.