The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys

Robin Alexander, Christine Doddington, John Gray, Linda Hargreaves, Ruth Kershner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136328701
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys is the outcome of the Cambridge Primary Review – England's biggest enquiry into primary education for over forty years. Fully independent of government, it was launched in 2006 to investigate the condition and future of primary education at a time of change and uncertainty and after two decades of almost uninterrupted reform. Ranging over ten broad themes and drawing on a vast array of evidence, the Review published thiry-one interim reports, including twenty-eight surveys of published research, provoking media headlines and public debate, before presenting its final report and recommendations.

This book brings together the twenty-eight research surveys, specially commissioned from sixty-five leading academics in the areas under scrutiny and now revised and updated, to create what is probably the most comprehensive overview and evaluation of research in primary education yet published. A particular feature is the prominence given to international and comparative perspectives. With an introduction from Robin Alexander, the Review's director, the book is divided into eight sections, covering:

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• children's lives and voices: school, home and community

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• children's development, learning, diversity and needs

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• aims, values and contexts for primary education

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• the structure and content of primary education

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• outcomes, standards and assessment in primary education

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• teaching in primary schools: structures and processes

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• teaching in primary schools: training, development and workforce reform

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• policy frameworks: governance, funding, reform and quality assurance.

The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys is an essential reference tool for professionals, researchers, students and policy-makers working in the fields of early years, primary and secondary education.

1 Introduction

Research, the Cambridge Primary Review and the Quality of Education

Robin Alexander

This is the companion volume to the final report from the Cambridge Primary Review, a comprehensive and independent enquiry into the condition and future of primary education in England. Based at the University of Cambridge, the Review was supported from 2006–10 by Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. Details of its remit, processes and personnel appear in Appendices 1–3.

Children, their World, their Education – the final report – contains an account of why and how the Review was undertaken, what it investigated and what its findings indicate for future policy and practice. Structured loosely round the Review’s ten nominated themes, the report discusses the evidence from four complementary strands of enquiry: written submissions received from individuals and organisations in response to an open invitation issued in October 2006; face-to-face regional and national ‘soundings’ with a wide range of groups and organisations both inside and outside education which were undertaken during 2007 and 2008; statistical and other official information held by government departments and national agencies; and commissioned surveys of published research prepared by the Review’s 66 research consultants in 21 university departments in England, Scotland, the Republic of Ireland and Norway. The report culminates in a set of formallyframed conclusions and recommendations for future educational policy and practice.

This volume is rather different, and it serves three quite distinct purposes. The commissioned surveys of published research – the fourth of the Review’s evidential strands referred to above – were such a substantial and distinctive component of the Review that we have always believed that they should be available separately and in full rather than serve merely as points of reference in a larger enterprise. Earlier versions were disseminated, mainly via the Review’s website, between October 2007 and May 2008. The aim then was to encourage discussion which would feed back into the evidencegathering process, and this was readily ensured by the added combination of unprecedented media coverage and an uncertain political climate. The final report refers to the research surveys alongside the other evidence mentioned above, and indeed draws on them heavily, but it does not and cannot convey a sense of the breadth and depth of each of the surveys as undertaken, nor of their combined scope and narrative power, nor of the sheer quantity of research surveyed: in all, across the 29 chapters nearly 3000 published sources are cited.

Our first purpose in presenting the research surveys here, therefore, is to ensure that justice is done to them as an important part of the Cambridge Primary Review as a whole and as a necessary adjunct to Children, their World, their Education.

The second purpose reflects a belief in the value of these research surveys in their own right, as a free-standing resource for teachers, students, researchers and policy-makers which is able powerfully to illuminate many of the most important problems in primary education and to help us to address some of its most urgent and difficult questions. With this in mind, The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys provides a reader or handbook of research relating to primary education, possibly the most extensive yet published. Of course, no such reader can claim to be comprehensive, and this is no exception; so we hope and expect that the book will be revised and added to from time to time in order to keep abreast of new research and of change in the educational, social and political conditions which provide its focus and context.

Our third purpose is less obvious and perhaps more controversial. Since the mid-1990s the prefixes ‘evidence based’ and ‘research based’ have been attached to the words ‘policy’ and ‘practice’ with increasing frequency in official circles (with academics and professionals dutifully following the trend), and the websites of British and American government departments confirm how inescapably the trend has become embedded in political and administrative discourse. For example, the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind Act (2001) mentions ‘research-based practice’ no fewer than 111 times (Gamoran 2007). Sometimes ‘evidence-based’ or ‘research-based’ are uttered with discriminating and critical intent; sometimes they are used casually as to meaning though calculatedly as to intended impact. For although ‘evidence-based’ ought immediately to provoke methodological scrutiny, it may also seek to deflect it by brandishing ‘evidence’ or ‘research’ as a policy kitemark which forecloses further discussion. Sometimes, on closer inspection of the policies or practices in question, the ‘evidence-based’ claim can be sustained, but sometimes it cannot. Yet, along with the no less talismanic ‘what works’ and ‘best practice’, the phrase has become habitual among policy makers and their advisers in both Britain and the United States.

All three phrases are never less than problematic. There are questions about what kinds of evidence are appropriate, who decides, and whether their decisions are made on genuinely methodological grounds or relate more to ideology or expediency. In a value-laden field like education, the pragmatic criteria to which ‘what works’ so overtly appeals are not necessarily the only criteria that matter, and the claims to scientific rigour by which ‘best practice’ is ostensibly justified may not be in every case appropriate, let alone sustainable. We might also ask whether ‘what works’ necessarily and inevitably defines also what is educationally worthwhile; and whether the ‘best’ in ‘best practice’ accommodates the complex ethical and cultural questions which are intrinsic to educational debate properly conducted, and indeed which are semantically embedded in the word ‘best’ itself (for what is pedagogically efficient may not be best educationally); or whether all such questions are made subservient to pragmatic considerations. Meanwhile, cynics and even some serious commentators claim that for ‘evidence-based policy’ we should read ‘policy-based evidence’, on the grounds that policies are impelled more by the politics of power and electoral advantage than by a spirit of enquiry, and that the task is to find such evidence as will justify the policies, excluding meanwhile anything which is politically unpalatable. Such pessimism should itself be tested, though examples of policy-makers’ resistance to or misuse of evidence come fairly readily to mind, and the problem surfaces at several points in the Cambridge Review’s final report.

Similar claims are made in the arenas of professional training and practice, where intending and serving teachers are inducted into ways of thinking and acting which are purportedly underwritten by ‘research’. Here the stakes are no less high than in the arena of policy, for the decisions taken by teachers affect, directly, profoundly and sometimes permanently, the lives and prospects of children. Again, therefore, the questions must be asked, and perhaps with added urgency, not just about the nature and reliability of the evidence but also whether its practical application is attended by proper understanding of its strengths and limitations. We should ask whether the full range of evidence pertaining to a given area of professional understanding and decisionmaking is drawn upon. We need to know whether trainees and serving teachers are initiated into the skills of critically evaluating the evidence in which their school and classroom decisions are purportedly grounded, or are merely expected to take it on trust. All such questions prompt a larger one about the trainers themselves, and the basis of their own claims to expertise in these matters.

This is not the place to pursue such questions. We mention them here to underline the third purpose of this collection, which is to invite discussion and debate not just about the purposes, content and outcomes of primary education but also about the evidential basis on which policies in relation to such matters are constructed and everyday decisions in primary schools and classrooms are made.

Perspectives, Themes, Questions and their Rationale

Implicit in the questions above is a query about the authority and expertise of those who provide evidence in the expectation or hope that it will inform policy or practice; for nobody is immune to the intrusion of personal values in their professional activity. That being so, we should say something about the genesis and production of the studies in this volume.

The Cambridge Primary Review was formally launched in October 2006, but planning started nearly three years earlier, in January 2004. An essential task at that stage, once we had ascertained from consultations that an independent enquiry into the condition and future of English primary education was needed and supported, was to establish what it should investigate and how. From these deliberations came what were later refined and consolidated as the Review’s ten themes and three overarching perspectives.

The themes and perspectives, and their attendant questions, were far from random. The paragraphs that follow quote, with minor amendments, from the summary of their rationale which we published at the outset.

A national system of primary education offers to an enquiry such as the Cambridge Primary Review, if that enquiry is properly conceived, a dauntingly vast canvas. It is national, so it raises questions about national values, national identity, the condition of English and indeed British society and the lives and futures of the groups and individuals of which that society is constituted. It is a system, so there are questions about policy, structure, organisation, finance and governance to consider. And being an education system, it raises a distinctively educational array of questions about the children whose needs, along with those of society, the system claims to address, and about schools, what goes on in them, and the contexts within which they operate.

Some earlier enquiries have claimed to be comprehensive but have in fact been restricted to the point where the discussion of even what they treat in detail loses some of its validity. This is because ostensibly bounded matters such as curriculum, teaching, assessment, leadership and workforce reform – to take some typical recent instances – raise larger questions of purpose, value and context. Thus, a curriculum is much more than a syllabus: it is a response to culture, the past and the future – and English culture today is complex, the pace of change renders our sense of history ever more fragile (yet essential), while even optimists concede that the future is highly problematic. Teaching is not merely a matter of technique, but reflects ideas about thinking, knowing, learning and relating. Assessment, for better or worse, has become as much a political as a professional activity. In turn, all of these are framed, enabled and/or constrained by policy, structure and finance. And so on.

Breadth of coverage in a national educational review is therefore essential. At the same time, no review can cover everything, choices must be confronted and made, and they must be argued rather than random. The Cambridge Primary Review responds to these imperatives of breadth and meaningful selectivity in its hierarchy of ‘perspectives’, ‘themes’ and ‘questions’.

We start with three broad perspectives: children, the world in which they are growing up, and the education which mediates that world and prepares them for it. This is a variant on the more familiar opposition of the individual and society, but being triarchic it avoids the polarisation into which individual/society too readily slides, allows a more subtle interplay of connections and relationships, and accords education a mediating role between the development and learning of the young child and the culture and world in which he or she is growing up. These three perspectives – children, society and the wider world, primary education – have been the Review’s core concerns and together they have provided the framework for its more specific themes and questions. They also provide the title for the Review’s final report.

Next, ten themes unpack with greater precision aspects of the education perspective:

1. Purposes and values

2. Learning and teaching

3. Curriculum and assessment

4. Quality and standards

5. Diversity and inclusion

6. Settings and professionals

7. Parenting, caring and educating

8. Children’s lives beyond the school

9. Structures and phases

10. Funding and governance.

Finally, for every theme there is a set of questions (listed in full in Appendix 2). These explicate the themes and indicate in more direct terms what the Review hoped to investigate in order that it might pronounce authoritatively and constructively on the condition and future of English primary education. Again, the questions were not random: under each thematic heading they fell into two groups: questions – to deploy the admittedly over-simple distinction – of ‘fact’ and ‘value’, of what is and what ought to be, of evidence and vision, of how (and how well) primary education is currently ordered and how it might be ordered better.

The relationship between the perspectives and themes is – as has been noted – hierarchical, but it is also permeative, for although the ten themes appear to elaborate the ‘education’ perspective in greater depth than the other two, the childhood and societal/global perspectives infuse that elaboration throughout.

With obvious justification and to widespread approval at the time, the Plowden Report of 1967 placed the child ‘at the heart of the educational process’. However, it also drew the boundaries of that process somewhat narrowly, perhaps as a conscious echo of Froebel’s garden: child, school, home and immediate community. One can see the rationale for this too, for if the child is at the heart of the educational process, this in a physical sense is the child’s world. But even in 1967 this intimate nexus could never be enough. If the 1960s generation of children did not have the internet-driven global awareness which was so evident from the Cambridge Primary Review’s community soundings forty years later, they were not necessarily any less aware of a world stretching far beyond the streets in which they lived; and if they and their parents were not as worried about global warming as those we talked to in 2007, they had their own nightmare of nuclear annihilation.

The failure meaningfully to locate children’s lives and primary schooling in their wider social and global contexts led Plowden, when it came to define the aims of primary education, to capitulate to confusion, uncertainty and even a degree of banality about what it called ‘society’:

All schools reflect the views of society, or of some section of society … Our society is in a state of transition … One obvious purpose [of primary education] is to fit children for the society into which they will grow up … About such a society we can be both hopeful and fearful … For such a society, children … will need above all to be adaptable.

(CACE 1967: 185)

The other characteristic of the Plowden view of the child’s relationship to the wider world, at least in the chapter on aims, is its strong streak of fatalism or determinism. The child adapts to society and social change but appears powerless to influence them. For all its progressivism, there is more than a hint in Plowden of the old elementary school mission of ‘fitting’ the working class child for its pre-ordained ‘station’ in a society ordered by those who knew (and lived) considerably better. Readers of our final report will know that the Cambridge Primary Review rejects this 19th century legacy, and that the principles of childhood agency and empowerment are among its running themes, surfacing in the discussion of children’s voice, aims, curriculum, learning, teaching, school culture and the relationship between children’s lives inside and outside school.

Redressing historical tendencies to cultural determinism and educational parochialism required, when we came to translate the Review’s themes and questions into topics for the surveys of published research, that they should have a strong orientation towards the world – and children’s lives – outside the school, towards the condit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: Research, the Cambridge Primary Review and the Quality of Education
• PART I. Children’s Lives and Voices: School, Home and Community
• PART II. Children’s Development, Learning, Diversity and Needs
• PART III. Aims, Values and Contexts for Primary Education
• PART IV. The structure and Content of Primary Education
• PART V. Outcomes, Standards and Assessment in Primary Education
• PART VI. Teaching in Primary Schools: Structures and Processes
• PART VII. Teaching in Primary Schools: Training, Development and Workforce Reform
• PART VIII. Policy Frameworks: Governance, Funding, Reform and Quality Assurance
• Appendix 1. The Cambridge Primary Review: remit and process
• Author index
• Subject index