Pearson's think-tank provides insight into schools policy

The Pearson Centre for Policy and Learning recently held one of its famed hot breakfast briefings focusing on the Coalition Government's education reforms and in particular the recent Schools White Paper and current Education Bill.


The seminar was led by the Centre's Head Steve Besley (pictured left) with
support from Policy Manager Julie McCulloch.

It is well worth reading/ watching and the presentation slides are available here and a series of video clips of the event can be watched here.

It will be interesting to see how the Pearson Centre for Policy and Learning, which replaced the old Pearson Research Institute, develops in terms of its policy focus over the next year.

Pearson are not the only major education services provider to set up their own dedicated in-house think-tank or research institute.

A number of these organisations aimed at a) providing insight to the frontline sector but b) promoting research and best practice that shapes the direction of public policy at the centre have been established in recent years.

Examples include the LSN Centre for Innovation and Learning, the City and Guilds Centre for Skills Development and the Cambridge Assessment Network.

Bacc to the future for sector-led curriculum planning?

Dr. John Dunford, a leading educationist, has just posted his debut blog entry on his brand new website.

In it he discusses the efforts of Whole Education in partnership with an array of other education organisations to pioneer a 'Better Bacclaureate' or 'Better Bacc' for short.

Others involved in this consortium include the Curriculum Foundation (led by Mick Waters formerly of QCA), ASCL and the Independent Academies Association as well as Dr. Andrew Chubb on behalf of the Archbishop Sentamu Academy in Hull who helped kickstart the movement.

In particular Dr. Dunford is concerned that despite Michael Gove having made the promise of greater curriculum freedom for all schools and academies repeatedly before and after the General Election this message "has been swamped by the fears of the E-Bacc and how it might be used in future. Some year 11 students are even being put through history GCSE after school in order to give them a chance of an E-Bacc certificate. Some freedom!"

Brian Lightman, who succeeded Dr. Dunford as General Secretary of ASCL last year, has also been pro-active in calling for a broader, more rounded baccalaureate, and has expressed concern about the potential for a narrowing of focus that fails to encompass practical learning, technology and basic employability skills.

It will be interesting to see how responsive the Government are to this new movement to develop an alternative, broader Baccalauerate.

It's also very interesting to note that Lord Baker, the Chair of Edge and former Education Secretary during the Thatcher era, is working with Lord Adonis, Sir Mike Tomlinson and a number of leading University Technical College sponsors (employers, universities and FE Colleges) to develop a Technical Baccalaureate or 'Tech Bacc' proposal that DfE could potentially operate alongside the E-Bacc in future.

As I reported in Leader Magazine in December 2010, the proposed University Technical Colleges will of course be offering a very focused diet of curriculum provision in their specialist areas that focus on helping their students develop advanced practical competences and technical understanding, and their results would not register on any future English Baccalaureate driven performance league table.

Although Lord Baker points out that students between 14-16 will study languages such as German and MChinese and that some UTCs will build history into their curriculum (the history of science, invention and economic development), some parents may be concerned that their children may be disadvantaged through not having the option to achieve an E-Bacc style award.

The proposed Tech Bacc would thus serve as an overarching 'wrapper' for a blended route of academic and practical learning between 14-16 and 16-19.

Into the Fray for Frayne and Cummings at DfE

Michael Gove has just made two significant and shrewd appointments at the Department for Education both of whom will play an important role in improving the strategy, messaging and relationship base as DfE drives through radical changes across multiple fronts in 2011.

In a bold move the Department for Education have plucked Westbourne Communication's Director James Frayne to be it's new Director of Communications according to reports in the Guardian and PR Week.

This is a shrewd decision, as James Frayne is very well known within the field of campaigning strategy, public affairs and public relations as an innovator with a proven track record of success. He publishes a very high profile blog The Campaign War Room which the author of the UK Eduscape blog has followed for a while now and would readily recommend to anyone interested in UK and US political strategy.

One of his key tasks will be to improve the forward planning capacity of DfE communications so Ministers and Officials are better equipped to deal with negative stories and anticipate and deflect criticism of key policy initiatives. But he will also be expected to enhance the ability of the Department to communicate and involve stakeholders at the national and frontline level more effectively in the development of policy and strategy.

In a related move that has been welcomed by figures across the centre-right policy community, Michael Gove opted in late January to appoint his long-time Opposition Chief of Staff Dominic Cummings as a Special Adviser in Government.

It was a suprise to many education policy observers that Mr. Cummings, a highly experienced political strategist and ex-journalist was not appointed to DfE when the coalition was first formed.

As was widely reported both at the time and again recently, his omission from Gove's team was allegedly the result of a veto by the former Downing Street Comms chief Andrew Coulson, who was forced to resign in January 2011.

Mr. Cummings played a key supporting role in the development of Conservative education policy in Opposition, and also led on media strategy coordination for Michael Gove. Since the General Election he had been helping out in an informal capacity at the New Schools Network, the leading umbrella body supporting the development of free schools on behalf of DfE.

Michael Gove will no doubt value having one of his most trusted advisers fully plugged into the development of policy and strategy, and it will be interesting to see how DfE's strategy for engaging with schools, colleges and their key representation bodies changes in the next few months.

It would be reasonable to expect that the first priority of both Frayne and Cummings will be to restore a sense of energy and momentum to the education reform programme has been rocked by a highly pro-active anti-free schools campaign in the media, the judicial ruling on a number of canceled BSF schemes and growing opposition to the Government's new English Baccalaureate.

Getting a grip on both messaging and strategy will be crucial in the context of Budget 2011, the Pupil Premium strategy and the unfolding National Curriculum Review.

LSN argues that the sector and not the state should primarily drive quality improvement in FE

There's an excellent, recently published report by LSN (better known to many as the Learning and Skills Network, an ex-Government quango turned not-for-profit service provider).

In it they explore the broad-ranging but critical issues of quality improvement within the further education sector. This report can be downloaded for free from here.


But does quality improvement in FE matter that much in the scale of reform priorities for the new Government? Yes it should be a crucial aspect of the Government's public service reform and future growth strategy because as the report points out:

"With around 4.8 million learners publicly funded every year through FE and skills provision in England alone, the sector educates and trains more people than universities and has far more 16–18 year-old learners than school sixth forms".

Also the media often pidgeon-holes FE Colleges as the providers of exclusively vocational qualifications such as BTECs, City and Guilds and generic NVQs, and forget that more A Levels are taken in Further Education Colleges than in schools.

The LSN report traces the recent history of quality improvement in FE, looking in particular at a diverse array of initiatives, programmes and agencies created by the previous Government to drive change. It is implictly critical of the chop and change approach that saw a number of machinery of government changes affecting FE funding, inspection, regulation and performance management in the 2000s:

"A history of institutional instability, a plethora of agencies and the reliance on partnership working that this necessitates, all make it likely that the frontline struggles to really comprehend the basic roles and responsibilities of key national organisations".

Some key highlights from the report's recommendations include:

1. Quality improvement should be owned by institutions within the sector through self-regulation and challenged by inspection and meaningful data, which is understandable and
accessible to a wide range of stakeholders – not led by these (central) mechanisms.

2. A call on Government to revist and change the central-local balance within the FE sector so as to empower providers. The report specifically says there must be a review of the balance between nationally policy-driven quality improvement programmes and those led by the sector, taking account of the readiness of diff erent providers to make eff ective use of available resources, with the presumption being that the ‘default’ responsibility for improvement will lie with providers within the sector where appropriate.

3. There is also a call for Government to recognise, prioritse and provide dedicated resources to support effective partnership working and best practice dissemination through sector networks that will pay dividends in the longer term. Specifically the report argues calls for the establishment of a ‘network of networks’ driven by web-portal that enables providers in the sector to build connections, promote their improvement activities to each other and ensure high-quality network activities.

Reform think-tank pulls no punches on the Coalition's scorecard for education reform to date

The Spectator are carrying an interesting and provocative piece by Dale Bassett, Reform's research director and resident education policy guru. In it he assesses how radical and effective the Coalition Government has been in taking forward education policy reform.

One of his key criticisms is that the Coalition Government's reform strategy suffers from an intrinsic contractiction of trying to promote greater autonomy and diversity in provision at the frontline level, while maintaining key features of central and local bueraucratic control:

"Despite a reduction in bureaucracy and an increase in teachers’ autonomy, the fundamental assumption that government can and should drive improvement in the quality of teaching continues to underpin the system".

This he argues militates against the Coalition Government's vision of a much more flexible, demand-led education system where new providers are encouraged to replace failing schools and colleges.

He is also concerned that the flagship free schools agenda will fail to achieve sufficient scale to have any systemic or transformative impact on standards if the Government continue to restrict sponsors to not-for-profit groups of parents, teachers and charities, and argues that:

"Profit-making companies should be allowed to inject their expertise and capital into the system to significantly increase the number of new schools. The profit motive is also a useful incentive to encourage good schools to expand".

Dale Bassett's article follows hot on the heels of the Reform think-tank's recent publication of a scorecard report analysing the Coalition's record to date across a range of different public service areas.

In it the authors argued that:

"viewed as a whole, the Government’s public service reform policies are all over the place. The Government’s failure to adhere consistently to its principles gives an air of unreality to the whole programme".

In specific relation to the reform of the education system, the report pulled no punches giving the Education Department straight D grades (on an A-E index) for overall effectiveness, accountability, flexibility and value for money.

Technical Breakthrough?

In December 2010 I published an article on University Technical Colleges which made the front cover of ASCL's Leader Magazine.

It contains interviews with several of the leading pioneers of UTCs including Lord Baker, Professor Alison Halstead of Aston University and Jim Wade of the JCB Academy. It can be accessed here for free.