Ofsted Part 2: A journey to the heart of matters.

Why do Ofsted grade the quality of education where a strong floor standard is clearly met when other regulators consider this to be bad practice which damages innovation, diversity and prevents them clearly seeing and understanding practice with which they are not familiar?

I took this question to the Westminster Education Forum Consultation:
Accountability in Education – the future of governance, Ofsted and league tables on the 5^th of July 2011.

I put it first to Graham Stuart MP who has recently chaired a review of Ofsted.

He agreed with my observations that Ofsted clearly had a duty to establish and police a high floor standard for educational services and that it had a duty to scrutinise and audit schools detailed self-reports regarding their provision of services.  In response to my question regarding the grading of the quality of services, he said that he felt that there was an opportunity for me to contribute to the Ofsted’s current internal consultation regarding their framework to try and make sure the Ofsted fitted more with what I thought it should do compared to what it does now.

I was satisfied with this response and then addressed the question in a more succinct form to Richard Brooks, the Ofsted Director present at the consultation:

“Where you are inspecting an area of service in an institution and there are no concerns about it, why is better to grade is on a single scale rather than for there to be a qualitative report on it, provided by the school, which is a basis for professional dialogue and on which the inspector comments with any concerns or qualifications?”

His reply was (subject to possible transcript errors):

“I mean of course, there are epistemological attractions from having essentially a single judgment to make about which side of a line do you fall on, satisfactory/unsatisfactory. But you have a real problem about deciding where that line is, and what you taken into account when you think about whether people are

which side of it. So if you think about the overall effectiveness judgment, would we be making essentially a judgment analogous to inadequacy, where all of the other information was lost, where 90% of schools were essentially passing? You would lose a great deal of the richness about the discussion at the boundary between ‘is this practice satisfactory, or is it better than satisfactory? Is it good? If it’s good what can we do to make it excellent? What are the improvements points at a school which actually is not worried about being found inadequate, but really wants to strive to be

outstanding? What are the things that we think institutionally we should focus on?’ All of that would go. It would be a simpler inspection system in some ways, but I think you would lose a lot. Perhaps I have not understood you, but we can talk at the break.”

This was, of course, and answer which attempted to justify the practice of grading the quality of provision without engaging at all with the reasons why this practice is unsatisfactory or to criticise possible alternative practices which serve the same purpose.

We did speak at the break and I was concerned that Mr Brooks did not appear to have any awareness of the arguments make against the status quo by other regulators.  So I suggested that I come and talk to Ofsted as Graham Stuart MP had advised.  That suggestion received a very definite refusal and that categorical statement that the grading of the quality of provision would not change, however Mr Brooks agreed that if I put my question in writing by email he would respond.

Rebecca Hanson to Richard Brooks July 5^th

Dear Richard,

Thank you for your time today.

You promised to ponder the question I asked and attempt to answer it more fully.

Just to remind you the question was:

Other regulators interpret the Hampton principle on page 11 of the attached report (regulators are only mandated to intervene when there is a clear case for protection) to mean that they have no duty to attempt to rate the quality of provision where there is not a clear case for protection.  There are considered to be important reasons why rating the quality of provision where there is not a clear case for protection militates against innovation and high quality provision.

http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file45019.pdf

Please can you explain to me why Ofsted does rate the quality of provision where there is no clear case for protection?

Best regards,

Rebecca Hanson

Richard Brooks to Rebecca Hanson 6^th July

Rebecca

The two short answers are:

-          whilst we act as a regulator in respect of some services, we act as an inspectorate in relation to the education provision within our remit.

 -          we are a creature of statute, and the relevant legislation, including the Education Bill before Parliament now, is explicit that we will report on quality in school inspections. There is of course a valid debate to be had about the merits of taking this approach, and whilst I’m not seeking to dismiss the alternative, I would personally come down on the side of quality ratings. Indeed I think the protection principle can very well be used to justify inspection of quality in relation to many services for children. In the end, however, it is not a decision for us. Kind regards Richard

In November 2009 Ofsted was specifically included under 2006 Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act to which most other regulators had been accountable since 2007.  Therefore it is bound by precisely the same law and principles as other regulators.  Yet although this Act was constructed to militate against poor practices like the grading of the quality of provision of services, Richard Brooks was claiming that Ofsted is forced to grade the quality of the provision of services “it is not a decision for us”.

So I submitted a freedom of information request to Ofsted to find out if there was any justification for Richard Brooks claim.  The response is 3 pages long.  The only possible partial justification for the claim is a reference to a statue which designates that Ofsted must report on the quality of provision.  I cannot find any legal imperative that this must be done by the auditing of quality standards or though qualitative reports with disciplined language.  There is substantial justification for the assertion that the quality of the work done by Ofsted would be much higher if alternative practices were used.

So I ask again:

Why are those involved in education in England subject to inspections which are considered to be bad practice by other British regulators because they militate against diversity, against innovation and against the regulator actually perceiving what is happening?

Richard Brooks claims that Ofsted is forced to do from outside.

By what or by whom is he forced to do that?

His response to me question showed a very serious lack of understanding or either inspection and regulation and a total lack of insight into the realities of the consequences of current inspection practices on education.

Where is Ofsted’s ‘proper conclusion’ that this practice is in the interest of the education of our students?

Where is anyone’s ‘proper conclusion’ that this is in anyone’s interest?

Where is the cost benefit analysis I can look at which properly understands and justifies the costs of this quasi-objective system?

To be continued...

Ofsted part 1: A journey into questioning the status quo.

Time for an interruption for something anglocentric I’m afraid.  I will come back to the yin and yang theme after that and in the meantime please do continue to comment on any old posts.

Like the vast majority of those in English Education, my assumption that there had to be a coherent explanation as to why reason why Ofsted is as it is was deeply ingrained.

I’ve seen such horrors, but I assumed that it was only me – that my experiences were not representative.  I’ve seen the gifted teachers destroyed by ‘unsatisfactory’ ratings.  I watched strong pedagogies disappear because they weren’t ‘Ofsted-proof’.  I've seen great school put into special measures by teams who’ve turned up with scores of ‘fail points’ those schools had to disprove in order to avoid the status and have been deemed to be ‘failing’ despite disproving very nearly all of them.  I’d read the statistics about the correlation between Ofsted gradings and exam outcomes.

Yet still, when I accepted a position as Head of Maths at a school in special measures, I expected the frequent dialogue with inspectors to be a constructive experience.  The reason for this was that our HMI was the top inspector for maths in England.  My personal experiences of such characters had been so positive that I was convinced the interaction would be appropriately challenging and constructive.  With excellent academic and teaching credentials, a credible history of achievements in mathematics education at national and international levels, a clear plan as to how we would harness the substantial technological resources we had to transform results and a strong network of friends and contacts across mathematics education I thought it would be a constructive experience.  I am well known for relishing every challenge and seeing it as being an opportunity to achieve deeper insight.

The reality was…. indescribably awful.  

Yet still I was convinced I must just have been unlucky. I started to listen to others as I attended conferences.   From a distance Ofsted had done a wonderful job at their schools.  Close up the picture was very different.  But I could only get ‘close up’ because teachers trusted me.  They could see I’d been there.  They didn’t feel at all at ease expressing their experiences and had no fluency in doing so.  Most were embarrassed by their experiences.  Few felt that there was any point in talking about it as nothing would change and they would be labelled trouble makers.  

In essence it seemed that the quality of the reports and gradings were often very low.  The constant numerical grading of everything created a pseudo-objectivity to the reports, but it often seemed that those numbers (or at least the average/corollary grading of them) was determined prior to the arrival of inspectors and the reports were cut and paste standard comments which linked those grades with few modifications.  This seemed to be much more the case in schools with challenging cohorts which did not choose to follow strategies where by all staff were ‘singing from the same hymnsheet’ all the time in order to allow teachers to have a degree of professional responsibility and freedom in allowing them to teach to best of their abilities and to adapt rapidly to evolving circumstances.

It seemed to me that the process of grading the quality of provision was counterproductive because it created a false sense of objectivity, it created abstract definitions of what a high quality education was which meant that much great teaching went unrecognised and, most importantly, it seemed to militate against dialogue between schools and weaker inspectors who could hide behind their own negative judgements of the staff who disagreed with their opinions.  The feedback loops were virtually non existent for most staff and the assumption that weak results indicated that ‘weak teachers should be punished’ could only be countered by very strong, eloquent and established heads.    

It seemed to me then that what was needed instead was that Ofsted should be responsible for clearly defining ‘unacceptable’ practice in collaboration with all stakeholders and that it should demand (as part of the process of avoidance of ‘unacceptable practice’) that schools provide detailed qualitative descriptions regarding their current practices and their processes and plans for improvement and that these should be scrutinised, audited and mentored by inspectors.  

Yet still I assumed that Ofsted must have a justification for continuing to use these numerical grades for the quality of provision.  So I started to suggest in both face-to-face and in discussion forums that they shouldn’t in order to try and reveal what this justification was. Coherent answers or justifications for what Ofsted was doing did not arrive*.  Instead I found that international education regulators and other UK regulators considered the grading of the quality of provision above a high floor standard to be poor practice and effectively to be illegal under the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act (2006) which enshrined the Hampton Principles for regulation for the reasons I suggested.  To define what is high quality provision militates against innovation, diversity and regulators properly tuning in to and seeking to understand what is actually going on.  Improvement is more effectively achieved through detailed scrutiny and mentoring of provision and improvement processes.

(more to follow).

The yin and yang of maths education - Part 7. The difference in the nature of the red route and the blue route.

There are two arrows from zone C to zone B.  How are they similar?  How are they different?

When the purple arrows are in operation, the brain is constructing a need and place for the knowledge which it acquires before it receives it.

But what of the red arrow?  Is the opposite true?  Is knowlege being presented before the brain is ready to receive it?

I would say sometimes and sometimes not.  I would also say that where this is happening it is not necessarily disastrous.

Sometimes and sometimes not: A wise and experienced teacher will not tell students what they are to learn, they will guide them through experiences and help them develop their own insights which will naturally lead their brains to demand the knowledge which is to be taught.  This is appropriate in many areas of mathematics where knowledge is constructed in an axiomatic way.  In these cases there will be little difference between the red and the purple routes.  However not all mathematical skills lend themselves to axiomatic construction.  This is particularly true of human skills such as resililance and application to contexts, but is also true of other ontological aspects of mathatics such as the definitions of root concepts.

Where this (knowledge being presented) is happening it is not necessarily disastrous. This is particularly true if the student has developed a mind which is used to acting in a constructivist way.  Such a student will look at the knowledge being presented and will work actively to see if they can construct a place and a context for it given what is already authentic to them.  It is useful that students develop the ability to do this.

The yin and yang of maths education - Part 6. What are these paradigms?

Here's a diagram which I offer as a tool for thinking.  All diagrams are partial.  They are only in 2-dimensions after all.


In the traditional paradigm, the maths to be learned in a lesson is selected from the mathematics which has been proved and written down.

In the constructivist paradigm, however, the focus is instead on nurturing the way that students mathematise the world around them. Because the focus is on the thinking processes to be developed, the maths to be learned is not clearly specified.  Hence it becomes irrelevant as to whether it is mathematics which has been previously proven or not.  In my opinion and experience substantial amounts of mathemics is learned during these lessons, but that mathematics is most powerfully learned when it is backed up with some traditional teaching at another time.  There is also a job to be done to fill in the gaps of core mathematical techniques which have not been learned.

But - oh - the magic of invention.  When students have aha moments.  Which a child expresses something incredible that you've never imagined before.  The intellectual journeys you take as a teacher.  Please excuse me while I get a little misty eyed.  I can understand why some teachers who discover the constructivist paradigms for themselves can become rather messianic about it.  I wouldn't want to teach without it being part of my teaching.  It inspires me.  My students inspire me.

The yin and yang of maths education - Part 5. What was new and what was the same?

I don't think my mathematics department was so different to some of the most inspirational department I had encountered and heard about in my early days of teaching.

Some of the subtle skills of teaching we wanted had been obliterated by our managerialist, ofsted centred culture but because our need and desire for them became obvious, we could spark them back into life with the help of retired teachers who came in and reminded us what to do.  But, as I've said before, they were only part of the story.  There were many types of teaching going on, the majority of which would not have appeared different to mathematics lessons in other schools.

My students matured in a way I liked.  Instead of having to sit down and shut up until they were permitted to express themselves, they were encouraged to express themselves until they learned how to control themselves.  A student passing test at level 6 might suddenly realise that they did not properly understand place value.  If I didn't have the time to work with them one-to-one I would show them the relevant part of mymaths and let them explore it for themselves.  Having done that they might do the same mymaths work again the next lesson, and again until the penny finally completely and irrevocably dropped.  20 years ago a teacher might have done the same with a text book, so my thinking is not so different.

So teachers were freer and students were freer and yet all the disciplines and demands in place previously were still in place.  We quite simply had better tools at our disposal to facilitate what we wanted to achieve.  I have chosen to teach in a school where I had a big, flexible classroom with plenty of space and ICT. It would be in appropriate to claim or recommend that it was just the ICT which mattered.  I had an interactive whiteboard at one end of the room and ordinary whiteboards at the other.  This helped me teach different groups different things.

I don't want to talk too much about exactly what I did.  Each teacher did it differently and that was a big part of the point and I'm sure if another school used the same structure for thinking they would be different again.  I'm not trying to get people to copy the detail of the way I or any of my teachers taught so I won't say any more about it in this part of the blog.  Hopefully I've said enough to stimulate others to think about their situations which is my main aim.

The yin and yang of maths education - Part 4. Harnessing Technology.

 
By the time I was ready to apply to be a head of department, I had a new tool at my disposal.

Mymaths (mymaths.co.uk) provided online interactive lessons on every secondary mathematics topic to tie into the UK National Curriculum.  Although the accompanying homeworks were not yet in place at that stage there were already booster packs which could be used as homeworks.  These gave me detailed information on the progress of each students and, in doing so, empowered me to require that each students work through the curriculum at their own pace.  The quality of the interactive lessons was much higher than previous online tools due both to the high level of mathematical and pedagogical insight of the designers and also to the interactive visual tools they had incorporated.

I had a very clear vision that I wanted use this technology, combined with individual examples of key topics incorporated into lesson starters, to take a great deal of the strain of teaching the National Curriculum, leaving the teachers at my school with substantially more freedom to decide how best to use significant portions of lesson time.

The 'synthesis of paradigms' strategy was probably most evident in students homework, where I set them an online homework each week which was automatically marked and therefore had more energy to spend on the detailed marking of personal investigations, also set as homeworks.  In this second type of homework students were required to think for themselves, independently interpreting and analysing pure and applied mathematical situations.

Classes probably didn't look so different as you might expect.  We did some applied tasks and some rich investigations.  Some lessons the students worked primarily with high quality texts.  Students were explicitly taught to explain their thinking to each other (see or example the previous section of this blog on how the Chinese do it) and their skills in listening to, explaining to and supporting each other were explicitly cherished.  We were dealing with many challenges at the time, such as mixed ability classes (due to the school being small and working towards closure) and having many students with challenging behaviour and specific learning difficulties and it was my perception that the framework I had allowed us more time to focus on using teaching methodologies which responded the needs of our students rather than on our need to deliver a National Curriculum which contained more material than many classes could cover.

By focusing on teaching rather than on the content to be covered a substantial proportion of the time, in our different ways we covered many elements of that National Curriculum in powerfully connected contexts.  Thus they were relatively easy for students to understand during starter questions and during those online homeworks.  Those individual questions and the computer based teaching wouldn't have worked without the rich earth of experience in which they were taking root.

This structure for organising teaching and learning also allowed me and other staff to focus on some of the more challenging pedagogical strategies which are often neglected in the pursuit of curriculum content coverage.  In experimenting in this way I found that I experienced substantial personal growth as a teacher and my student clearly benefitted from this.

I felt I was delivering on Barcelona.  The two sides of maths education were empowering each other:

Personal investigation of the world is much more effective if  the personal investigation has mastered the use of many key tools and the universal vocabulary which will help them analyse and interpret what they see.

It is easier to learn and more deeply understand can personally make connections in a curriculum if you have spent time considering the situations where the maths it involves is generated and you have experienced the need for that maths.

Verification of my claim for the success of this strategy is limited.  Our results were very good despite the considerable challenges we faced but there were only four externally examined year groups and they were small.  But I think I can validate my claim in the theory of education and in the intuition of experienced teachers.  Much of the content based curriculum was being discovered in context and then taught in abstract.  Students needed core techniques in order to be able to think mathematically and mathematise situation.  To me it just all made perfect sense.  And I think that, as we move from Web2.0 and 3.0 to Web4.0 it will make easy and fluent sense to many others too. I'll continue to work on this validation in my future posts in this section.

I wrote up my efforts to synthesise the paradigms of teaching when the school where I was working closed in 2008 and these can be found here, under my previous name (Rebecca Teasdale).  Sadly there is a £3 charge to access this article.   http://www.atm.org.uk/journal/archive/mt210.html

The yin and yang of maths education - Part 3. How to make enemies of natural befellows.

I wondered about the tendency of some to attack the paradigm of maths education which is not their favourite.  Why do it?

I think there is a natural human tendency to universalise conclusions.  When you find something which is good it is natural for you to want everyone to share your experience.  It's easy not to notice that others may also have found something else which is equally exciting and fulfilling.  I think this is more true for the young and less true for those who have experienced the limitations of thinking in this way many times before.

But there is another force which has made enemies of these natural bedfellows.  It is that the organisational forces which are required to make maths education function in a school have needed to be configured predominantly one way or the other.  Schools have either had programs of study, testing and teaching which are organised according to the mathematical techniques and vocabulary to be learned (with perhaps specific times allowed for constructivist activities) or the curriculum has been child thinking centred (with perhaps specific times allowed for exam preparation).  Those teachers who have been in departments configured for teaching methodologies which have not suited them have suffered and so they have complained.  If they have not been heard then they have come to resent a status quo which prevents them being the teacher they are capable of being.

Let's imagine some parallels:
Say schools had to choose either to teach French or Spanish.  There would be great debate as to which was better and such debate inevitably includes consideration of which is worse.  Now suppose schools were required to teach both French and Spanish.  After the initial strains of reorganisation do you not think that concerns associated with which language is worse would simply disappear?  Do you not think that teachers would instead look at the synergies between the two languages and at ways of teaching which would enhance students' progress with both?

There is another parallel in society as a whole.  I have long appreciated the benefits of the philosophy of liberal freedom.  I have also understood socialist values.  And in my appreciation of both positions I have come to understand that society has had to configure itself either one way or the other.  Either you have centrally organised socialism or you have liberal freedoms with much less central organisation.  But that has changed, hasn't it?  For me the most obvious joy of the 21st century is that ICT has given us the power to develop much more complex and versatile administrative infrastructures which can more easily and effectively integrate social and liberal ideals.  Isn't socialism much more powerful when it is powered by the financial contributions to society of those who free to generate substantial wealth?  Aren't we actually more free if we know that should we become vulnerable in an aspect of our life there will be support available to us?

Broadband is a magic bullet we can use to eliminate that jar between many pairs of traditionally opposing paradigms.  By 2006, when I was preparing to become a head of department, I knew that I had new and very powerful tool at my disposal in my question to cherish both the teaching and learning of traditional mathematics vocabulary and techniques and the development my students as creators and appliers of mathematics.