This is the third instalment of my blog series “Being proud of our history?”. The question I have been trying to address is whether “the history teacher community” has a good sense of what it has and had not done in relation to challenges raised in recent years, especially in terms of dealing with racism. In this blog I want to look more closely at the discourse of “the community”. Once again I hope this is taken in the spirit of honest reflection and apologise as this is quite a long piece.

The power of discourse
In myprevious blog I explored the ways in which curriculum constructions do not always live up to the self-narrative “the community” has created. However, in making such a statement, I am also aware that not every curriculum construction has engaged deeply with "community" discourse. When Priggs (2020), for example, wrote her excellent article about not just “doing diversity”, it was clear that she was drawing on a rich “community” discourse encountered via conferences and journal articles. It is this discourse I want to explore today.

Academic educational discourse
I want to begin briefly with academic educational discourse. That is to say the books and articles which are part of university level research. At this level, there certainly is a huge amount written. There are numerous studies of how children are impacted by concepts of race, class, gender etc. in the classroom. One book which really shaped my own thinking in this regard was Archer and Francis’ (2007) “Understanding Minority Ethnic Achievement” for example. There are also a range of studies which look at curricular diversity, or explore the ways students encounter specific historical examples of complex concepts. So far, so good.

In my last blog I began looking at whether we should be proud of “the history teacher community”. I argued that one of the most crucial factors in determining this would be to establish, with honesty, what we had and had not done in relation to challenges raised by society at large, and made the case that we need to be careful of complacency through over-congratulatory self-narrative. In today’s blog I want to explore the ways in which we have been thinking about curriculum in “the community” and to ask if our curricular planning has lived up to the narrative we have told ourselves.

Facing ourselves
Writing in Nazi occupied France, Jewish historian, Marc Bloch argued that “the scholar who has no inclination to observe the men (sic), the things, or the events around him will perhaps deserve the title…of a useful antiquarian. He would be wise to renounce all claims to that of a historian” (Bloch, 1992, p. 36). Nowhere is this more obvious at the moment than in terms of our understanding of race and racism. The last few months have seen a widespread outcry at our collective failures in Britain (and England especially) to face our colonial past and deal with the cancer of racism. And the challenge now is more than simply " being non-racist", but in being actively "anti-racist."

This blog is related to my analysis of the draft 2019 Ofsted inspection framework. You can find the index page HERE and a main blog introduction HERE.

Leadership and Management
Unlike the previous framework, leadership and management are moved down to the final, rather than the first spot for judgement. This is an interesting shift of emphasis away from the “heroic leadership” paradigm we have seen for the last 30 or so years. That said, leadership still receives considerable focus. Here are my key takeaways:
 
Issue 1: Much of the discussion of leadership focuses on the vision for curriculum. Leaders are held accountable for setting the values and policies which lead to a high quality education. As such this is directly connected to the “quality of education” element.
 
The implication here is that the leadership of a school needs to be setting the framework in which curricular excellence can thrive. Christine Counsell has written some excellent blogs on this. It is notable that this focus mean SLT are no longer prescribing pedagogy but creating the policies to enable high quality education. This might be a very big shift for schools where centrally directed pedagogy decisions have dominated. On this theme, I think James Woodcock’s blog on subject sensitive senior leadership is excellent, as is Nick Dennis’ post on engaging subject leads in curriculum planning.
 
Issue 2: There is a large focus on senior leaders developing the subject and pedagogical knowledge as well.
 
In terms of subject and pedagogical development I think it will be important for senior leaders to engage with subject associations and explore the possibilities of joint working to develop subject expertise in regions. In history for example, both the Schools History Project and Yorkshire History Forum offer excellent subject development for schools in and around Leeds (and nationally for the SHP), but few schools engage. There are also implications for the provision of appropriate support and training for new staff and trainees. For too long the ITE provision in schools has been quite patchy. Senior leaders will now have direct responsibility for ensuring high quality, subject specific training is being supported in school. Again, links with local HEI education departments may be helpful here.
 
Issue 3: There is a significant thread related to workload throughout the two main elements of the framework. Senior leaders are held responsible for taking account of staff pressures and managing workload in a realistic and constructive way. This is hugely important as the adage in schools when I trained to teach was that good was never good enough. Increasing accountability demands overburdened teachers with little discernible effect.
 
The key takeaway here is that policy decisions can no longer be a case of keeping adding new things on. Senior leadership teams will need to consider the efficacy of what they are doing and whether it sits coherently with their whole school approach. The days of fortnightly triple lock marking were already numbered, but this makes it clear. If your school has not reviewed the workload impact of its policies and their effectiveness since 2014, then now is the time to do so. The Key provide a useful flowchart for deciding whether a new policy is necessary, and I really like James Woodcock’s version too.
 
Issue 4: There is a much publicised paragraph about not “off-rolling” or “gaming”.
 
I don’t think this needs much exploration here, but may be a challenge in some contexts.
 
Issue 5: There are also sections on engagement with parents and governors, and to ensure appropriate safeguards are in place to protect staff and students.
 
Much of this is not new.
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This blog is related to my analysis of the draft 2019 Ofsted inspection framework. You can find the index page HERE and a main blog introduction HERE.

Behaviour and Attitudes
The behaviour an attitudes of students are separated out from personal development and welfare in the new framework. Although the three clearly overlap, this should allow greater focus on the specifics of behaviour and attitude within the school. I have certainly worked in schools in the past where behaviour was lacklustre, but where it would have been unfair to say that student welfare was compromised overall. This usually resulted in the school being graded better for the old behaviour and welfare element than perhaps behaviour alone would have allowed. In some senses then I can see the logic of divorcing this element. I suspect there are also concerns with relation to teacher retention and recruitment, hence the increased focus. I have tried to draw out some of the key points below:
 
Issue 1: Much of the focus in this very brief (compared to “quality of education) section is on high expectations and positive attitudes. The language is actually not too dissimilar to that used within the Teachers’ Standards. The school needs to show “high expectations”, to apply these “consistently and fairly”, to enable students to have a positive attitude towards learning, and to encourage resilience and pride in their work.
 
From a school point of view, I suspect that much of this will be uncontroversial. There is no fixed idea about how these things might be achieved, nor of the level of behavioural intervention as long as things are fair, consistent, and have a positive impact on conduct. Where schools may want to take more note is if they have systems which work in theory, but in practice are subverted because they don’t work in practice, or because staff are not supported when they do use the behaviour systems. There is an implicit focus on the idea that good behaviour needs to be supported at all levels in school. This is something Tom Bennett touched upon in his 2017 Behaviour Report: “Creating a culture: how school leaders can optimise behaviour”
 
Issue 2: One challenging element in the new framework draft is the re-wording around attendance. Previously this was termed “prompt and regular”, but now the demand is “high attendance” and “punctual.”
 
This will clearly present much greater challenges to some school than others. We won’t really know until the framework has been in operation or a while where the inspectorate will se the line for this. Or indeed, whether this will be related more to local circumstances. The new challenge however is balancing attendance with the curricular demands outlined in the rest of the framework. One approach to improving attendance for some student was to reduce curriculum. There is no knowing at this point which of these aspects might take priority.
 
Issue 3: A nice addition to this framework is the focus on staff and students reflecting a positive and respectful culture.
 
Whilst this presents some challenges, I suspect that most schools hold this principle as fairly central. It does however mean some considerable thought before adopting extreme zero tolerance approaches to behaviour management, or by contrast, extreme laissez faire approaches. Sensible policies which are widely supported by the school and staff seem to be key.
 

Personal Development
As already noted, personal development is separated out from the welfare heading in this framework. Interestingly, personal development also overlaps with the “quality of education” element, reinforcing the strong focus on curriculum in the draft. Again, here are my key takeaways:
 
Issue 1: There is a balancing of the language of academic challenge from the “quality of education” section with a focus on curricular breadth in non-academic areas. This chimes to some extent with the Activity Passport idea mooted by Damien Hinds before Christmas. However there is a focus on helping students to develop interests and talents beyond academic, technical, or vocational subjects.
 
In principle I cannot see many schools disagreeing with this. However I think it raises significant challenges for some institutions. First, those schools who prioritise examination results above all else, cutting back broader educational provisions and limiting freedoms of choice for students at risk of not hitting targets. Second, those schools for who fail to offer provision beyond the curriculum at all. This is actually much more challenging as financial constraints have meant schools being unable to fund extensive extra-curricular activities and having to rely heavily on the goodwill of staff. I do fear that this focus will lead to increasing pressure for staff to offer extra-curricular provision. This was an issue discussed at length on Paul Dwyer and Will Bailey-Watson’s podcast recently.  There may also be implications for the school day. Many Yorkshire schools now have a 30 minute lunch break, leaving little time for extra-curricular provision. For schools with large numbers of children who are “bussed-in” this is really the only time for a fully accessible provision. 
 
Issue 2: There is quite a heavy focus on “character development”. This seems to include things like resilience, confidence and independence, as well as physical and mental wellbeing. So far this feels like the least coherently thought through point. A huge range of things are covered here and there is a lot of debate now about where the remit of schools ends. That said there is a reduction of “listed” topics e.g. healthy eating, internet safety etc. This might encourage a more coherent and locally applicable approach to what an appropriate pastoral curriculum might look like.
 
I do worry here that there will be a flurry of consultants offering resilience lessons and the such like. For my money, this needs couching much more in terms of how the school supports student development. The obvious answer to a lot of this is a functioning pastoral system, but that doesn’t seem immediately obvious from the text. My plea here: don’t try to tick the boxes without proper consideration for the whole school pastoral approach. 
 
Issue 3: British values finds its way in here again.
 
Until genuine consideration is given for how we teach civics and politics to students under the age of 16, there will be little real progress in this area. As a history teacher I know that I have often had to pick up elements of civics with students because our provision in the UK in this area is so dire. Even when we have had citizenship lessons in the past, the content had been far too vague. Any school which develops a proper civics programme in response to this would get a huge thumbs up in my book!

This blog is related to my analysis of the draft 2019 Ofsted inspection framework. You can find the index page HERE and a main blog introduction HERE.

Quality of Education
In the Ofsted framework draft, quality of education goes into the top spot. It is split into three key areas: intent, implementation, and impact. These three encompass a large amount of what was once covered in the old framework under quality of teaching, and pupil outcomes. However there is now much more focus on coherence. I have drawn out some key points below:

Issue 1: References to teachers and teaching are grounded in the knowledge of teachers and their ability to ensure content is remembered. The phrase “cultural capital” is central. This could be interesting in shifting the focus onto what is learnt by pupils rather than how.

All of this has great implications for the way schools organise and run CPD. Teachers will clearly need supporting in their subject knowledge and pedagogy development, as well as updating their knowledge of the processes of learning and how students remember. This also implies trusting departments much more to be able to identify and meet their developmental needs. An interesting starting point would be to ensure curriculum leads have read current research finding such as those from the How People Learn project HERE and HERE, and Willingham HERE. It would also be worth exploring what local university education departments are offering (for example at Leeds Trinity HERE). For subject leads, engagement with their subject associations will also be key (The Historical Association, or Schools History Project for historians for example).

Issue 2: Ambition and curricular breadth get heavy emphasis. The implication here is that students should not be prevented from sitting challenging qualifications, nor have their curriculum reduced to promote higher outcomes on a narrower range of subjects (especially relevant in exam years e.g. Y6 and Y9).  

This has big implications for schools who have narrowed their KS2 or KS3 curricula to allow more time for exam preparation. There are also implications for the ways in which pathways are used at KS4. Some schools for example still prevent students from sitting “academic” subjects if they are considered to have little chance of achieving a grade 4 pass. There is some reference to national exams where appropriate as a measure, but the parameters of what will constitute “achieving well” are not defined (yet!).
 
Issue 3: There are interesting references to assessment systems being used systematically to check pupil understanding and facilitate feedback without creating workload burdens for staff.

This may be a challenge for schools with very regular data drops, or schools using GCSE type questions regularly as a proxy for assessment through KS3. This form of assessment does not have much basis in identification of barriers or misconceptions, and often fails to enable effective feedback for students. I have written on this subject before HERE.

Issue 4: The teaching focus is shifted to clarity of presentation and sequencing. Much less emphasis is put on the style of teaching, promoting an emphasis on what is being learned by pupil and the impact of teaching on this.

Whilst this suggests a shift in focus onto what students are actually learning there are some risks here of performative response. There seems to be a danger that schools may insist on regimes of knowledge checking or regular, detailed feedback to meet the demands of the new framework without considering the efficacy of such an approach or the workload implications. It does however suggest that some subject specialists observers will be needed in all schools to identify and comment on the impact of curricular intentions. This could be very powerful if devolved to a departmental level, and might in turn encourage the kinds of curricular development desired in point 

Issue 5: Finally, there is a large focus on ensuring that learners are prepared for the next stage in their education or employment, rather than just exam results. Helpfully the problematic phrase that students should meet or exceed age expectations is gone as this became a proxy for counting numbers at Level 4 or Grade C in the past. There is also an interesting shift away from pupils being prepared for future qualifications or jobs which meet a national or local need to jobs and qualifications which match their aspirations and intentions. In my view, this is much more positive framing.
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I have written at length about the fact that too many schools focus on the performative aspects of passing exams, whilst ignoring the longitudinal aspects of student development. This is often seen in the learning of “exam technique”: tricks which create an illusion of understanding without laying the necessary groundwork for future progress. Here schools will need to engage again with their subject specialists and draw on the expertise in subject associations in order to really consider what it means to prepare for the next stage. Schools will most likely need to revisit their thinking around progression and consider whether their models of progression and assessment are actually fit for this purpose. A helpful starting point from a whole-school point of view would be to read the Report of the NAHT Commission on Assessment which was published shortly after the abolition of National Curriculum Levels in 2014.

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5. What impact did non-specialist teaching have on grade stability?
This is one of the most interesting, and runs somewhat counter to what I was expecting. If we look at the correlation between departments with no non-specialists and result stability in 2018, we find that there is a slight disadvantage. There are of course many reasons which could account for this: the department might be very tightly run; the non-specialists may actually have taught for a long time; the specialists might have over-taught recycled content areas from old specs etc.  It is also worth saying that only a handful of departments in the sample had non-specialists teaching at GCSE, and then in small numbers. A single positive result might therefore skew this data a lot.

What is most interesting is where this is compared to 2017 vs 2016 grade stability. Here the impact of non-specialists seems to make results much more erratic. This may suggest that the new GCSE has levelled the playing field between specialists and non-specialists somewhat whilst expertise is rebuilt.

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4. Was the A*-A / 9-7 rate affected?
In this section I am comparing the percentage of departments where their A*-A / 9-7 pass rate remained stable in 2018 and 2017. This largely follows the pattern set for the 9-4 range. 2018 seems to have been much less variable than 2017.

​I also cut this down to look at differences between types of school where results were stable across 2016-17.  There was not much of a story to tell here, with average ability departments seeing the most variation at the 9-7 level and lower ability centres the least. 

​In all cases there was much less variability than seen in 2017.

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3. What impact did exam question practise have on results?
​Another common question. Did centres who practised exam questions frequently do better in terms of grade stability? Short answer: not really, no. (I have taken the options here which had by far and away the most responses – 90% between them)

When this was broken down to look at school type, the strongest correlation with improvement for lower attaining schools was to have exam question practise on a half-termly basis. Only practising during the final revision period in these schools however was by far and away the worst option. There was certainly no obvious benefit to weekly or fortnightly practise. Average and higher attaining schools showed almost no pattern when it came to frequency of practise.

Takeaway: Think carefully before bombarding your kids with loads and loads of exam practice questions – they may not really be helping. Sometimes grasping the content well, or doing something which builds confidence can be just as effective. Also, if you are musing over a 3 year KS4, spending the extra time on loads of exam practise does not seem to be a great driver.

Next question

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2. Did teaching a 2 or 3 year curriculum have the biggest impact on 2018 results?
This is quite a tough one to answer and again, the results need to be taken with a pinch of salt. Here I have compared the basic stability of 2018 results vs 2017 by the number of years spent teaching the course. The result is that a 2 year curriculum seems to have offered more stable results.

​To see if this was related to school type, I decided to break this down further and look at the impact of 2 or 3 year GCSE based on the STABLE higher, middle and lower brackets identified previously. Interestingly lower ability students seemed to benefit from a 2 year curriculum, with average and higher ability students showing a normal distributions. The 3 year curriculum was much more divisive, showing a negative correlation in average ability schools, a neutral one in higher ability, and a very split picture in lower ability schools. 

​When all schools are factored in (stable, rising and falling), the results suggest that in average and higher attaining schools, the 2-year KS4 curriculum offers a slightly more stable outcome. Whereas, in lower ability schools a 3-year KS4 curriculum shows a significantly negative impact (see below).

​Finally, I thought I would look at which specifications were most likely to be completed. Looking at this data, OCR B seemed to be completed most often and AQA the least, however there were few differences between the boards. 

​The picture was slightly worse when 2 year KS4 was filtered for. Here the gaps between the big three at 100% and 90% completion were larger. 

First of all, apologies for the enormous gap between these posts. I have been up to my eyes in school visits and preparations for the final stage of the PGCE. Today’s blog is part 4 of my series exploring how we might go about choosing the most suitable textbooks for our departments. In previous posts, I encouraged people to question the narratives being developed, and the overtness with which the contested nature of the narrative is presented. In my last post, I asked people to consider the range and depth of knowledge presented by a textbook. In this blog, I want to move onto a connected theme and ask how different textbooks help students to develop and deepen their knowledge of the history they study.

To teach from the textbook or not?
Before we begin, I should probably say that I am generally of the opinion that a good history teacher uses a textbook as a tool. They know what they want students to understand and make use of the textbook as a resource to this end, deviating from it where the intended aims are not met by the author. It was a great tragedy that so many teachers during the 1990s and 2000s were told that to even see a textbook in a lesson was a sign of failure. I certainly understand therefore why there has been an enormous backlash against this anti-book culture which seems to pervade in many schools. Of course, I also know why so many people were wary of using textbooks which promoted a very particular kind of history, or which ignored large chunks of the wider world story. Sadly, I don’t have space for more on this debate here, but there are some interesting examples of how this debate has played out internationally too. [i]
In my view, therefore, I tend to check over a textbook for the types of questions and activities it sets, however it is not usually the prime reason I would buy it or otherwise. To take a good example of this, I generally love the ‘Citizens’ Minds’ book by Longman, but I find some of the activities too detailed and time consuming to be practical in a normal history scheme of work. However, many recent voices on the issue of textbook use in schools, have suggested that the textbook should effectively be the progression model for students. This is coupled with the fact that there are large numbers of non-specialists teaching history. Addressing these perceived issues have been part of the drive for the ‘Knowing History’ series released by Robert Peal. Given that Peal is claiming so many other textbooks are “dreadful” at securing progression, it is crucial to consider the types of questions and activities contained within his books, but also those which are being labelled as failing.

What are students asked to recall?
One does not have to look far at the moment to see the influence of neuroscience on mainstream education. Courses are popping up all over the place explaining how we can “make history stick” or promote long term memory in history lessons. It is great to see the profession responding to more recent developments in theory, and I am sure that the new drive for higher quality CPD has had a big influence on this. Such CPD is often based around the work of a few “celebrity” neuroscientists such as Howard-Jones or Willingham.
One of the major maxims which has come out of Willingham’s work is that recall and testing are a crucial part of the testing process.[ii] As such, it is worth exploring how often students are asked in textbooks to recall information they have seen in the text they have read. I am going to focus on the medieval life sections I used previously for this comparison, and focus on the knowledge students are asked to recall/extract from the text they have read. The double page spread from ‘Knowing History’ on the medieval village has 5 questions (as with every spread), whilst the sample section I used from the SHP book has around 10 mini-activities which get students to recall/extract in some way. If students were to complete the questions and activities in both books, this is the knowledge they might have recalled in the process: