Ofsted have just published the results of their Big Listen research. The stated aim was to reset the damaged relationship between Ofsted, the education sector, and parents.

I have to say that I was reasonably sceptical about the process, not least because the main survey questions were quite vague. What interested me more however was how Ofsted would deal with the results of the main survey and additional research they conducted. Oftsed under Amanda Spielman engaged in a range of consultation exercised, but these were often inward looking, defensive actions to stave off criticism. So, are Ofsted under Martyn Oliver actually listening?
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I have now spent some time analying the survey data and comparing this to the proposed actions. My first impression is that, yes, in terms of the questions which were asked, Ofsted do seem to be acknowledging the scale of the problem and where their priorities for change lie now. Whether this translates into action is another question, but awkward results do not seem to have been swept under the carpet.
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I won’t go through all the headlines here, but I do want to focus on two responses from the main survey which I think are crucial in guiding what Ofsted do next and are critical in analysing whether the proposed responses are sufficient. I also want to offer some suggestions for further actions Ofsted might want to take to move forwards from this point.

[NB. this blog was updated with Q6&7 on 25 August]

Ah, who doesn't love that famously dull election slogan from Warren G Harding? Still it won him the Presidency, so it'll do for me,

It has been a long time since I posted a blog here! This is my endeavour to get my brain back into work mode after the summer break. I will hopefully be giving some more updates on the SHP Curriculum PATHS project here soon. More on that here: Curriculum PATHS - Schools History Project

If you have followed my blog in the past you may be aware that I did a similar analysis back when the current GCSEs were first examined back in 2018, and again in 2019. The aim was to look at how the new exams compared to the old ones and the potential impact of any changes. You an find it HERE. We then had a long break due to Covid and the ongoing impacts on the awarding of exams.

Today I want to revisit some of the questions from 2018 and look to explore what this year's GCSE History results might reveal about some of the main history specifications on offer for GCSE in England.

I will be addressing the following questions. Please do scroll down to what interests you. I have included my short takeaway answer as well as a longer analysis.

1. Are there any noticeable trends in entry numbers?
2. How do this year’s results stack up against the pre-Covid years?
3. Which boards got the best results?
4. Which exams were the most and least accessible?
5. Which units were the most and least accessible?
6. Are there any historic trends with accessibility?
7. What made papers harder or easier?

As ever, I am grateful for any comments or questions you might have, and am happy to chat further about any of this. These days you can find me over at Bluesky @apf102.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Full disclosure: as an SHP Fellow, I am of course connected with the OCR History B (SHP) specification. That said, I and the SHP Fellows do not set the papers, this is done by OCR. The aim here (as you will hopefully see) is to offer an honest analysis of the results for HoDs and others interested in exploring the bigger picture of the history exams over the past few years.

Finally, I want to say a huge thank you to AQA who put all their data in XLS format, making this job infinitely easier!!

Read on for more...
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As one former Secretary of State for Education quits the cabinet over claims of unethical and immoral behaviour, it seems like a good time to offer up some thoughts to his successor’s, successor’s, successor’s, successor’s, successor…Gillian Keegan (* may not be accurate by the time I post this later in the week) on the direction educational reform may need to go.

Keegan has not done much to outline her position on education reform yet, however she has stated that she intends raise ‘quality’ across the system by focusing the needs of those in comprehensive schools. At the very least, this hints at a social justice agenda involving all schools – a distinctive break from the grammar school focus of many of her predecessors. Indeed, she seems to be taking a similar tack to former (and now current) Schools Minister Nick Gibb, who described comprehensive schools as ‘engines of social mobility’.

But how does Keegan intend to improve school standards to enable this social mobility agenda? The return of Nick Gibb I think gives the strongest indication of Keegan’s likely approach, not least because she described Gibb as having done a ‘brilliant job’ since 2010. If this is true, then it is likely to mean a continuation of centrally imposed, curriculum-focused reforms. In this blog I hope to highlight the limits of continuing in this manner and, with reference to the history curriculum, and using the work of the Schools History Project as an example, suggest some alternative means to enact meaningful change in the education system.

(If you’d like to know more about the work of the Schools History Project, please do sign up here to receive updates on upcoming projects.)

Improving ‘quality’ AND doing justice?

A new year means hundreds of PGCE history trainees and history Early Career Teachers setting out on professional learning journeys. It is always an exciting time.

However, our current (& future) ITE system, rooted in the ECF and CCF means many get very limited subject specific input. See my thoughts on this issue HERE.

This year I’m using a Schools History Project (SHP) lens to explore the core things I wish every new history teacher knew at the beginning of their teaching career to enable them to thrive in the long term. In my view there has never been a more important time to keep principles at the heart of history teaching. You can find out more about the SHP Principles HERE or see the summary below. 

This has primarily been written from my experiences as a secondary teacher and teacher trainer, however much will also apply in primary too. Indeed, the new National Curriculum puts many of the same demands on teachers of history from Key Stages 1 to 5.

I will be adding new blogs each week initially. This page will be a landing page to see all of them in one place. I hope they are useful to anyone setting out on this journey, or indeed anyone responsible for training or mentoring a new history teacher. 

As ever please do leave comments or questions below, or get in touch with me on Twitter @apf102.

Things I wish every history teacher knew...

• 12 September: Why do we need to think about how we learn as teaching professionals?
• 19 September:  Why do we teach history at all?
• 26 September: How do we help young people understand how history works?
• 3 October: What does 'developing knowledge' look like in history?

The rise of Twitter threads has meant I actually spend a lot less time wrestling with the Weebly Blog system that I used to. For that reason I am using this as a page to put Twitter threads which are actually more like blogs. I hope this is helpful (and an acceptable compromise Vic!).


Diversifying and Decolonizing the Curriculum

The DfE recently announced it is working on a model curriculum for history. In response to this announcement, I conducted a survey of teachers to explore their reactions. Thanks to the 260+ of you who responded. Below I have presented some of my initial findings. I aim aiming to follow this up at some point soon with a blog on what lessons the DfE might take from these responses. But first a little background (do feel free to skip if you know this – the results are below)…

 Yesterday we said our final goodbyes to Fred. His death was not unexpected. He was well into his eighties and had been in ill health for some time. Yet despite this, it was still a shock. He always had a wonderful spark about him and was so full of life. He thrived in company and had a wonderfully mischievous twinkle in his eye right to the end. When she was able to visit (before covid) my daughter loved to explore the garden with him, or play with his foot massager, or travel up and down the narrow staircase on his recently installed Stannah. Fred loved her company in turn. He would take her to pick ripe tomatoes or find secret passages between the rows of sweetcorn. When he was less mobile, he would stand at the foot of the stairs with the stair lift controls and my daughter would giggle and laugh as he made the lift take her slowly but surely to the top. He was like another granddad. Yesterday my daughter sent him a final video message and I couldn’t help but feel the loss.

I have written about Fred previously, but in this blog I wanted to revisit the story of our first meeting and a conversation we ended up having about teachers and teaching. I want and tell it again now in light of the man, and the teacher, I came to know. I suppose it’s my way of saying goodbye, but also, I hope a way to share the wisdom of someone who I wish everybody could have met.
 
Lunch with Fred
 
I first met Fred in the summer of 2016. My wife has been visiting him for some time as he was a member of the local church and had recently lost his own wife, Sue. Just like Fred, Sue had been a teacher. She had worked with women in immigrant families in Bradford to help them learn English. Some of these women still came to visit Fred right until the end. In the summer Fred was often to be found sat on a lawn with a cup of tea and company whilst small children ducked in and out of runner beans or picked apples or pears in the garden.
 
One Sunday, Fred invited my wife and I along to lunch at a local pub. Before she became a vicar, my wife had been a primary school teacher, and I was in my first year of running a PGCE course. It was almost inevitable that the conversation would turn eventually to teaching.
 
You may not believe this, but I am actually not a huge fan of discussing education outside of my professional life. All too often I find myself in conversations with people who either think the youth of today are going to Hell in a handcart, or that teachers are too soft. Or conversely, I end up listening to people telling me that knowledge doesn’t matter and that we just need to teach children to be creative. Either way I am very bad at the polite but firm disagreement which these encounters require.
 
Fred had been a teacher in the 1960s and 1970s. I reasoned he had almost certainly been trained in the progressive pedagogies of this period (he once met Piaget it transpired) and was already anticipating where the conversation might go. Meanwhile in 2016, I was drunk on Michael Young, ‘powerful knowledge’; the liberations of ‘rigour’; and busy decrying the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ found in many schools obsessed with GCSE grades or ‘21st century skills’. I suspected that our dinner conversation would be one to endure rather than enjoy. As with so many other times in my life when I have been certain of my own rectitude, I was wrong.
 
Reading none of the books

A three part series looking at the power of subject communities to enact change in education. This builds on the important notion of principled communities of practice as embodied by groups such as the Schools History Project www.schoolshistoryproject.co.uk

The first part looks at the power of history-specific subject communities in empowering teachers to build better curricula for their students.

The second part of the series explores the problems of communities.

The final part focuses more practically on how we might engage meaningfully with subject communities.

Every so often a crisis appears in education which causes us to stop think. The A-Level crisis of August 2020 needs to be one of those moments. Although it has been portrayed as the catastrophic result of changes brought in haste due to Covid-19, the systems which have underpinned the current crisis have been in place for decades. The examinations system is the sick-man of education. What we have been witnessing over the last week is the tragic outcome of a diseased system, the underlying issues of which have festered away unchecked and untreated for far too long. It’s time to look for a cure. Let me explain...

The crisis
First a very brief overview of the specific crisis this summer. During the coronavirus lock down, formal examinations of pupils were cancelled by the DfE. A decision was taken to ensure students were still graded despite not sitting exams (we could discuss the problems in this too, but there is no space here). The statement from Gavin Williamson (below) really should have raised more questions and scrutiny at the time. The notion that grades for 2020 would be indistinguishable from other years despite students not sitting exams, or that “grading” in the usual way was the best outcome for students, were assumptions which should have been more robustly challenged. However, too many were unwilling to think through the potential consequences or were blinded by their faith in what they believed to be a robust and functioning examinations system which achieved fairness in normal years.

This blog is trying to capture something I have been wrestling with for a while now. Should we be proud of our history. And no, I don’t mean our national story! Growing up with a Welsh father punctured any notion I might have developed that the history taught in schools was in any way a “national” or representative story of Britain. I can remember him quizzing me weekly on what Welsh history we had studied. The answer, always, was “none!”. What I want to talk about today is a different kind of history: the history of our profession.

Blog series:

1. Being proud of our history? (below)
2. Are we being honest about curriculum?
3. Are we being honest about our discourse?​

I have turned the remainder of my blog here into a short video lecture series which you can access here: PLAYLIST


Being proud of “the community”
Over the years I have been teaching history (and latterly history teachers), I have developed something of a sense of pride in the way in which history, as a school subject, has engaged with complex issues in curriculum and pedagogy. I have even taken to referring to “the history community” in an almost reverential way. I am sure I am not alone. If you look at the discussions which happen, especially on Twitter, you will often see people expressing pride in “the history community” and its various achievements. Often the narrative we tell about “the community” is framed as a story of social justice in which pupils are liberated through carefully curated content and powerful pedagogical knowledge. 

So, the first tranche of Ofsted reports from the new framework have now been released. I thought this would be a good time to reflect on their content and consider what they reveal about the new, and much touted, curriculum focus. It should be noted of course that there are still only a handful of reports to look at, so this is very much initial reactions.

A quick review
Before I get into what we can glean from these reports, I think it is worth revisiting some of the hopes and fears I had about the new Education Inspection Framework when it was first announced. I have summarised these briefly below.

Hello everyone. This is an updated version of last year's post on GCSE history results. I have left the previous post in tact but added the new results for 2019 in blue text for those interested and commented where things have changed from 2018. The first version of this post was published on 24 August 2018.
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Evening all, I thought I'd take a few minutes to outline five key things we found out about the new History GCSEs. OK, it's really four and a question, but hey ho!

1) Pupils this year did pretty much the same as last year overall
No changes here, and no surprise given the details below. I have updated the chart to show the 2019 results side by side.

This is not really a surprise as Ofqual demanded a statistical tie between 2017 and 2018. Therefore almost the same proportion of kids got a G/1 or greater as last year, and the same for C/4 and A/7. 

There were some minor differences, but at a school cohort level of say 100 pupils, the difference would have been less than a single pupil missing out on a grade C/4.
Of course, this does not mean everyone’s results will have been stable. It is common with new specifications for some schools to do much better than normal and some to do much worse. This is usually because some schools manage to match what examiners were looking for more closely. It is almost impossible to second guess this precisely in the first year of a specification as examiners refine their expectations during first marking and grading discussions.

Takeaway lesson:
​NO CHANGES HERE
Read the examiners’ reports closely and get some papers back if you were not happy with your overall results.

2) Your choice of board made almost no difference to overall grades (on average)
There is very little change here this year. The distribution of awards per board seem to be fairly static and this reflects the fact that awards are still tied to pupil prior attainment. From this we can therefore infer that centres doing OCR A tend to have cohorts with higher prior attainment and that therefore a greater proportion of higher grades can be awarded.

Discounting the statement at the end of the last point: because the boards all had to adhere to this basic rule when awarding grades, the differences between boards are also non-existent. If you look at the detail you will see that some boards did deviate from the 2017 figures, however this is because they have to take prior attainment into account. So, the reason that OCR A seem to have awarded more 4+ and 7+ grades would suggest that more high attaining pupils took these exams. By contrast OCR B probably awarded slightly fewer 4+ and 7+ grades due to a weaker cohort. This might imply that OCR centres chose their specification based on the ability range of their pupils (though this is pure speculation). AQA and Edexcel pretty much fit the Ofqual model, suggesting they had a broadly representative sample of pupils.

Yesterday I read an interesting blog by Rich McFahn, commenting on the problems he sees with Michael Young’s concept of ‘powerful knowledge’ in history. I have to say that I have been having similar musings and this led to a very interesting discussion on Twitter, which you can follow here. The following is a bit of a rambling muse about 'powerful knowledge' in history.
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If you are new to the concept of ‘powerful knowledge’ here is a brief crash course (you might also like to read this). In Young and Lambert’s phrasing: “knowledge is ‘powerful’ if it predicts, if it explains, if it enables you to envisage alternatives” (Young and Lambert, 2014, p. 74). However, this is not the full picture. There are other criteria Young uses to define ‘powerful knowledge’:

• PK is distinct from everyday knowledge;

• PK’s concepts are systematically related to other concepts or ideas within a discipline
• PK allows generalisations and thinking beyond particular cases or contexts;
• PK is developed within specialist disciplines or fields of enquiry, and is therefore peculiar to the discipline
• PK is the product of broad disciplinary agreement;
• PK is always provisional in relation to the truth processes of the discipline.

Powerful knowledge and curriculum
Young and Lambert make the case in “Knowledge and the Future School” that the identification of ‘powerful knowledge’ is an important tool for considering curriculum construction. They argue that the concept of ‘powerful knowledge’ might help schools “reach a shared understanding about the knowledge they want their pupils to acquire” through the collective wisdom of the various disciplines (Young and Lambert, 2014, p. 69).

In my previous two blogs I looked at some of the serious problems which exist in the marking of subjects like History and English at GCSE and A Level, and at potential changes which could be made to improve the reliability of examinations. However, I also noted that such modifications might not resolve all of the problems identified.
 
In this final blog, I want to explore a more radical solution to the search for the “gold standard” of examinations: it’s abandonment. Indeed, to take a gold rush analogy, it was seldom the gold hunters who profited much from the great gold rushes in America. In fact the gold hunters gave way to huge corporate interests and long term destruction was the result (though the companies certainly did well). Instead it was those who supplied the tools, cooked the food, cleaned the cabins, and provided the clothes who really made the profits (most notably of cause one Levi Strauss). In short, those people who recognised that the opportunities lie in the everyday, not the elusive. So what would this look like?
 
First, I want to suggest that we need to reconsider the purpose of summative assessment in schools. Up to now, examination has been seen only in terms of measuring the standardised “outcomes” (and thereby potential) of students and schools. However, I would suggest that well designed assessment should in fact be supporting the development of rich curricula, improving teachers’ engagement with their subjects, and promoting deep curricular engagement among students. This in turn would impact on students’ knowledge and understanding, and thereby implicitly their outcomes.
 
Second, and in order to achieve the above. I think the creation of assessments need to be devolved to the level of schools, or groups of schools working together. This is not the same as saying all work should be coursework, just that the assessments should be designed and set in smaller, local groupings. In such as system, students learning might not be so easily comparable nationally (though this clearly isn’t working well in some subjects anyway), but the improved quality of teaching might well mean better outcomes in real terms, regardless of the grading systems used.
 
Why are such changes needed?
To understand the power a locally led examination system might have, one must first focus on the problems inherent in assessing a subject, like History or English, where there is no definitive agreement on content at a national level. I have outlined a selection of these below:

Note: my final blog offering suggestions for real examination reform is now live here.

In my previous blog I looked at the ways in which the marking of examinations in England is particularly problematic in subjects like History and English. For a full review of this, you may like to read Ofqual’s blog and report on the subject. Today I want to deal with the question of what action the educational establishment might take.

GCSE and A-Level examinations are still being held up vital to the education system. The impetus has been to seek to cement their place as the “gold standard” both nationally and internationally. If we want this to be true in reality, I wonder if we need a more fundamental rethink of what examinations (especially GCSE examinations) are for and therefore what they might be in an educational landscape which is vastly different from that of the late 1980s when GCSEs were first introduced.

What are GCSE examinations for?
The seemingly simple question of the purpose of GCSE examinations is actually very complex indeed. But of course, as with all assessment, validity is heavily connected to the inferences one wants to draw from an exam (Wiliam, 2014). The range of inferences which are suggested as valid from a set of GCSE examinations are extremely diverse:

Note: there are two blogs which follow this one which offer some solutions to the problems outlined here.

A few days ago, Ofqual published an interesting blog looking at the state of the examinations system. This was based on an earlier report exploring the reliability of marking in reformed qualifications. Tucked away at the end of this blog was the startling claim that in History and English, the probability of markers agreeing with their principal examiner on a final grade was only just over 55%.

The research conducted by Ofqual investigated the accuracy marking by looking at over 16 million "marking instances" at GCSE, AS and A Level. The researchers looked at the extent to which markers’ marks deviated from seeded examples assessed by principal and senior examiners. The mark given by the senior examiner on an item was termed the “definitive mark.” The accuracy of the other markers was established by comparing their marks to this “definitive mark.” For instance, it was found that the probability that markers in maths would agree with the “definitive mark” of the senior examiners was around 94% on average. Pretty good. They also went on to calculate the extent to which markers were likely to agree with the “definitive grade” awarded by the principal examiners (by calculation) based on a full question set. Again, this was discussed in terms of the probability of agreement. This was also high for Maths. However, as noted, in History and English, the levels of agreement on grades fell below 60%.

When Michael Gove set about his reforms of the exam system in 2011, there was a drive to make both GCSE and A Level comparable with the “the world’s most rigorous”. Much was made of the processes for making the system of GCSE and A Level examination more demanding to inspire more confidence from the business and university sectors which seemed to have lost faith in them. Out went coursework and in came longer and more content heavy exams. There was a sense of returning GCSE and A Level examinations to their status as the "gold standard" of assessment. The research conducted by Ofqual seems suggest that examinations are a long way from such a standard. Indeed, it raises the question of whether or not national examinations have never really been the gold standard of assessment they have been purported to be. Have we been living in a gilded age of national examinations? The answer is complex.

Before I launch into this, I should also note that I understand the process of examining is a difficult one and that I have no doubt those involved in the examinations system have the best interests of students at heart. I also don’t want to undermine the efforts of those students who have worked hard for such exams. That said, there were some fairly significant findings in the Ofqual research which need further thought.

In my previous two blogs I looked at the problems with teaching the assassination of JFK as a murder mystery, and with imagination type activities in learning about the Holocaust. Today I want to explore one of the most controversial lessons I have witnessed.

The “slave auction”
Reading the title of this, I hope most people would be baulking already. However, in the last five years, I have heard of this kind of lesson being used in multiple history departments and the image above is not invented but actually came from a grammar school in the South East. Just as with the Holocaust example I gave last time, this type of activity can end up being done in multiple topic areas, but effectively involves role-playing an extreme power imbalance.
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The reasons departments persist with “lessons” like this one are usually vaguely couched in terms of empathy, and the need to clarify complex concepts like chattel slavery. However, more often than not they are promoted for their “interactive”, or “engaging” elements. Indeed, one non-historian described seeing such a lesson to me once as being “a good, fun way to get across a difficult idea.”

My thanks to Sally Thorne @MrsThorne for reading this blog and contributing her expertise to refining the very rough-round-the-edges original. For more of Sally's thoughts on teaching excellent history, do read her book: "Becoming and Outstanding History Teacher"

Today I want to briefly cover the issue of differentiation. In part this is responding to an anonymous blog HERE which suggests that differentiation is a well-intentioned but morally bankrupt educational approach. 

​Now there are many things I actually agree and sympathise with in this blogpost, especially the problems of “personalised learning” which became so prevalent in the early 2000s, and the demands for teachers to make tasks easier for pupils to access etc. However, I think the blog itself is based in a major logical fallacy: “because differentiation has been done badly, all differentiation must be bad.” It is for this reason I simply cannot agree with the conclusions the author reaches. 

Today the DfE have released their much vaunted teacher recruitment and retention strategy. The document covers four main areas for improvement and was compiled in consultation with some key partners including ASCL, the EEF, the CCoT, Ofsted, and the NAHT. I have to say it is welcome to see this kind of discussion happening, though I do think some quite partisan lines remain in the strategy.


Last January I published some key steps I thought the DfE might take to improve teacher recruitment and retention. Today I want to go back to these suggestions and consider them in light of the DfE's new strategy. First a quick reminder:

1. Reduce confusion around training routes
2. Ensure strong subject (or phase) specific training is in place
3. Fund and support ITE and NQT mentors
4. Reduce workload
5. Improve pay and pensions
6. Rethink bursaries
7. Improve professional freedoms
8. Leave supply models alone

 
A marked improvement?
Let’s start with the positives. It is certainly evident that the DfE has gone well beyond the measures we have seen in the last few years when considering their recommendations. There are welcome

Last week I published a number of blogs exploring the proposed Ofsted Framework for 2019, as well as some of the individual elements of that framework. Today I want to explore the proposals from the point of view of an ITE provider, rather than that of a school.
 
As you may have noted, I was reasonably upbeat about the revisions and opportunities for schools in the new framework. Although I am aware that there may be a lot of work for people to do to feel confident in meeting the criteria of the “Quality of Education” element. When it comes to ITE however, I am less encouraged. I have written about some of the struggles in ITE in the past (HERE and HERE). I know that Ofsted was never going to do much to reverse the tide of generic teacher training. However, there was one major area where I hoped a new framework might be of some use: improving the status of mentoring.