The next international Pisa tables will for the first time assess one of Michael Gove's pet hates. How will schools fare?
Facts are rushing out of Sam Goodwin almost as if he's unable to stop them. "It was one of the archers who shot Harold in his eye. William was a Norman, and the English were much better equipped, so William didn't want to get into all that because he didn't have much on him, only a sword and a chest-plate …" He pauses, just momentarily, then explains: "I feel exploded, with lots of information about it in my head!"
Sam, who's 11 and a pupil at Stanley Park high school in Carshalton, Surrey, is talking about the project that has taken up about half his lesson time over the past six weeks. With the rest of his class he's been working on a book – now published in hardback by the pupils' own publishing company – entitled The Miserable Middle Ages. Sam's part was to produce a double-page spread on the battle of Hastings.
"With normal lessons," he says, "you don't feel like you've done the work because your teacher basically does it. This way you learn a lot more, and you feel proud of what you've achieved."
Sam had already visited Hastings and knew about the battle, he says, but now he feels he understands. What he probably doesn't know is that his recent experience may also have placed him at the centre of a different – political – battlefield.
In one camp sits the education secretary, Michael Gove, champion of a traditional, knowledge-based style of learning. In the other are a growing band who want a more child-centred, skills-based approach which, they say, can equip pupils for life.
The argument matters because the issue will be the focus of increased international scrutiny in the next couple of years. The influential OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) study, which maps the attainments of pupils in more than 60 countries, is on the case.
In the past, the announcement of new results from Pisa has focused on how pupils fare in numeracy and literacy. The news that the UK has fallen behind countries such as China, South Korea and Japan, where pupils are encouraged to work long and hard at their desks, has made headlines.
But from 2015, PISA will examine a fourth strand alongside science, reading and maths – "collaborative problem-solving". Some commentators believe the international "league table" will look very different in the future.
Will the UK's pupils excel at this newly elevated skill? Should schools react by moving away from the very focused, knowledge-based, results-driven style of learning they have been encouraged to adopt in recent years?
Gove would surely argue against. Responding to the release of the latest Pisa results in a Commons statement last December, he said the government's newly revamped national curriculum was the way forward. With a focus on knowledge and on traditional academic subjects, he said, it would nudge England closer to the regimes of the higher-performing Asian countries.
"Every child should be able to enjoy the type of knowledge-rich, subject-specific curriculum that gives them the best possible preparation for university, apprenticeships, employment, and adult life," he told a conference in November last year. "That means physics, chemistry and biology not play-based learning, project-work and an anti-knowledge ideology."
When it comes to collaborative problem-solving and project-based learning, Gove has a lot to say, none of it positive.
"I have myself seen far too many lessons where teachers have felt they need to conform to an outdated model of how children learn," he told one audience last year. "Teachers have felt they need to organise group work in which students talk to each other rather than learn from their teacher or texts. This approach is not just constricting the initiative and talent of great teachers by diminishing the power of teaching, it also runs counter to the very best recent research on how children learn."
Gove quoted the work of a cognitive scientist, Daniel T Willingham, who – he said – stressed the importance of accumulating factual knowledge in order to create the right conditions for creative and critical thinking.
In the opposite camp, supporters of project-based learning point to research conducted by the Buck Institute for Education in the US, and hope to gather hard evidence here to support their case. Stanley Park high, where Sam is a pupil, is taking part in a pilot study for a controlled trial, which will take place during the next academic year.
Jacquie Thomas, head of one of the "mini-schools" that make up Stanley Park, says her own experience has convinced her it worked. When she first visited the school as a local authority adviser a decade ago, only about 15% of its pupils were gaining five good GCSEs and it was on the verge of being put into special measures.
"Students here at that time were incredibly passive in their learning," she says. "We wanted to do something about that. We wanted to make learning more real. So we decided to bring in skills, and to look at an approach that brought subjects alive."
Maths, science, English, French and PE are still taught separately throughout the school, but for the first two year-groups history, geography, RE, ICT, business studies and art are subsumed into the new project-based curriculum.
Ofsted visited last summer, and though it expressed concern that the results of its 2012 GCSE entrants – the last to be taught entirely under a more traditional curriculum – were low, the inspectors described the new approach, with its focus on skills such as creativity, problem-solving and showing initiative, as "broad, ^balanced and innovative".
The research project in which Stanley Park is participating is being conducted by the Innovation Unit, which began life as part of the Department for Education but which is now an independent social enterprise. Later this year, the unit will begin a randomised controlled trial into project-based learning with 12 schools, and its results will be evaluated by Durham University.
Louise Thomas, the unit's programme lead for education, agrees that in some respects there is a gulf between the work it is doing and the direction in which the Department for Education is travelling.
Through the Global Education Leaders' Programme, also based at the Innovation Unit, it is working on these approaches with organisations around the globe, she says: "We are talking to the ministry of education in British Columbia, and to the New York Innovation Zone. South Korea is talking to New York about how we measure what we value. Australia is talking to Colorado. But no, we are not doing work with the Department for Education here."
Despite this, she argues that the ideological gap between Gove and schools like Stanley Park is not as wide as some might believe. "The projects in our 'real projects' programme are designed with subject content at their heart," she says, "and with an eye to the level of competence students are expected to achieve.
"There is a high level of accountability there and we know students step up when they are asked to do so. There are structures there. It's not about just chucking them in a lion's den and allowing them to fail. It's about every student being able to do something extraordinary if you give them the opportunity."
And on the other side of the political spectrum there is a certain wariness of Gove's rhetoric, too. The right-leaning thinktank Civitas has been a driving force towards the adoption of a more knowledge-rich, subject-specific curriculum. In 2010 it established an organisation called Core Knowledge UK to promote the idea that every child should learn certain prescribed facts in order to achieve "cultural literacy".
Its director of family and education, Anastasia de Waal, argues that there should be a balance between skills and knowledge in what children learn. But she expresses frustration at the way the debate over how children should learn is often characterised.
"There's a false dichotomy that says you have to pick one camp, which is knowledge, or the other camp, which is doing," she says. "Knowledge needs to be applied in order to be understood. We know that one without the other doesn't work."
Stanley Park's executive head, David Taylor, agrees with her. The school's project-based curriculum must prove its worth through hard results, he says. And – along with other measures – it has. Last summer the first year-group to have gone through the project-based curriculum took their GCSEs. The proportion achieving five good grades including English and maths was 55% – not far short of the national average of 58% and a major achievement considering the low base from which they, and the school, had started.
Taylor takes issue with Gove's stance."The idea is that because we're doing this, we don't value knowledge, that we have low expectations, that we're doing our children a disservice. Knowledge is important, don't get me wrong," he says. "But what's really important is how you apply it." Reported by guardian.co.uk 7 hours ago.
Facts are rushing out of Sam Goodwin almost as if he's unable to stop them. "It was one of the archers who shot Harold in his eye. William was a Norman, and the English were much better equipped, so William didn't want to get into all that because he didn't have much on him, only a sword and a chest-plate …" He pauses, just momentarily, then explains: "I feel exploded, with lots of information about it in my head!"
Sam, who's 11 and a pupil at Stanley Park high school in Carshalton, Surrey, is talking about the project that has taken up about half his lesson time over the past six weeks. With the rest of his class he's been working on a book – now published in hardback by the pupils' own publishing company – entitled The Miserable Middle Ages. Sam's part was to produce a double-page spread on the battle of Hastings.
"With normal lessons," he says, "you don't feel like you've done the work because your teacher basically does it. This way you learn a lot more, and you feel proud of what you've achieved."
Sam had already visited Hastings and knew about the battle, he says, but now he feels he understands. What he probably doesn't know is that his recent experience may also have placed him at the centre of a different – political – battlefield.
In one camp sits the education secretary, Michael Gove, champion of a traditional, knowledge-based style of learning. In the other are a growing band who want a more child-centred, skills-based approach which, they say, can equip pupils for life.
The argument matters because the issue will be the focus of increased international scrutiny in the next couple of years. The influential OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) study, which maps the attainments of pupils in more than 60 countries, is on the case.
In the past, the announcement of new results from Pisa has focused on how pupils fare in numeracy and literacy. The news that the UK has fallen behind countries such as China, South Korea and Japan, where pupils are encouraged to work long and hard at their desks, has made headlines.
But from 2015, PISA will examine a fourth strand alongside science, reading and maths – "collaborative problem-solving". Some commentators believe the international "league table" will look very different in the future.
Will the UK's pupils excel at this newly elevated skill? Should schools react by moving away from the very focused, knowledge-based, results-driven style of learning they have been encouraged to adopt in recent years?
Gove would surely argue against. Responding to the release of the latest Pisa results in a Commons statement last December, he said the government's newly revamped national curriculum was the way forward. With a focus on knowledge and on traditional academic subjects, he said, it would nudge England closer to the regimes of the higher-performing Asian countries.
"Every child should be able to enjoy the type of knowledge-rich, subject-specific curriculum that gives them the best possible preparation for university, apprenticeships, employment, and adult life," he told a conference in November last year. "That means physics, chemistry and biology not play-based learning, project-work and an anti-knowledge ideology."
When it comes to collaborative problem-solving and project-based learning, Gove has a lot to say, none of it positive.
"I have myself seen far too many lessons where teachers have felt they need to conform to an outdated model of how children learn," he told one audience last year. "Teachers have felt they need to organise group work in which students talk to each other rather than learn from their teacher or texts. This approach is not just constricting the initiative and talent of great teachers by diminishing the power of teaching, it also runs counter to the very best recent research on how children learn."
Gove quoted the work of a cognitive scientist, Daniel T Willingham, who – he said – stressed the importance of accumulating factual knowledge in order to create the right conditions for creative and critical thinking.
In the opposite camp, supporters of project-based learning point to research conducted by the Buck Institute for Education in the US, and hope to gather hard evidence here to support their case. Stanley Park high, where Sam is a pupil, is taking part in a pilot study for a controlled trial, which will take place during the next academic year.
Jacquie Thomas, head of one of the "mini-schools" that make up Stanley Park, says her own experience has convinced her it worked. When she first visited the school as a local authority adviser a decade ago, only about 15% of its pupils were gaining five good GCSEs and it was on the verge of being put into special measures.
"Students here at that time were incredibly passive in their learning," she says. "We wanted to do something about that. We wanted to make learning more real. So we decided to bring in skills, and to look at an approach that brought subjects alive."
Maths, science, English, French and PE are still taught separately throughout the school, but for the first two year-groups history, geography, RE, ICT, business studies and art are subsumed into the new project-based curriculum.
Ofsted visited last summer, and though it expressed concern that the results of its 2012 GCSE entrants – the last to be taught entirely under a more traditional curriculum – were low, the inspectors described the new approach, with its focus on skills such as creativity, problem-solving and showing initiative, as "broad, ^balanced and innovative".
The research project in which Stanley Park is participating is being conducted by the Innovation Unit, which began life as part of the Department for Education but which is now an independent social enterprise. Later this year, the unit will begin a randomised controlled trial into project-based learning with 12 schools, and its results will be evaluated by Durham University.
Louise Thomas, the unit's programme lead for education, agrees that in some respects there is a gulf between the work it is doing and the direction in which the Department for Education is travelling.
Through the Global Education Leaders' Programme, also based at the Innovation Unit, it is working on these approaches with organisations around the globe, she says: "We are talking to the ministry of education in British Columbia, and to the New York Innovation Zone. South Korea is talking to New York about how we measure what we value. Australia is talking to Colorado. But no, we are not doing work with the Department for Education here."
Despite this, she argues that the ideological gap between Gove and schools like Stanley Park is not as wide as some might believe. "The projects in our 'real projects' programme are designed with subject content at their heart," she says, "and with an eye to the level of competence students are expected to achieve.
"There is a high level of accountability there and we know students step up when they are asked to do so. There are structures there. It's not about just chucking them in a lion's den and allowing them to fail. It's about every student being able to do something extraordinary if you give them the opportunity."
And on the other side of the political spectrum there is a certain wariness of Gove's rhetoric, too. The right-leaning thinktank Civitas has been a driving force towards the adoption of a more knowledge-rich, subject-specific curriculum. In 2010 it established an organisation called Core Knowledge UK to promote the idea that every child should learn certain prescribed facts in order to achieve "cultural literacy".
Its director of family and education, Anastasia de Waal, argues that there should be a balance between skills and knowledge in what children learn. But she expresses frustration at the way the debate over how children should learn is often characterised.
"There's a false dichotomy that says you have to pick one camp, which is knowledge, or the other camp, which is doing," she says. "Knowledge needs to be applied in order to be understood. We know that one without the other doesn't work."
Stanley Park's executive head, David Taylor, agrees with her. The school's project-based curriculum must prove its worth through hard results, he says. And – along with other measures – it has. Last summer the first year-group to have gone through the project-based curriculum took their GCSEs. The proportion achieving five good grades including English and maths was 55% – not far short of the national average of 58% and a major achievement considering the low base from which they, and the school, had started.
Taylor takes issue with Gove's stance."The idea is that because we're doing this, we don't value knowledge, that we have low expectations, that we're doing our children a disservice. Knowledge is important, don't get me wrong," he says. "But what's really important is how you apply it." Reported by guardian.co.uk 7 hours ago.