Back to basics
England’s schools have fared well by shunning more fashionable approaches
ON PAPER, Mercia School in the north of England is a forbidding and unfashionable place. Teachers focus unrelentingly on “the acquisition of knowledge”, if its intimidating website is any guide. Lessons are “didactic”, delivered to pupils sitting in orderly rows. Youngsters form lines in the playground before processing silently into class. Failure to bring a pen can earn a demerit. Chatting in the corridors is banned.
Yet on a cloudy morning in May the secondary school in Sheffield is a far cheerier place than its pen portrait suggests. In its airy dinner hall 12-year-olds in PE kit prepare to tackle an orienteering course set across school grounds. During a noisy breaktime, two youngsters explain how they won the badges that hang in thick bunches from their lapels (for good attendance, speaking up in class and the like). The school is oversubscribed, absence rates are low and expulsions rare, says Dean Webster, its headteacher. Last year it ranked third in England for how much progress children make between the ages of 11 and 16. For boosting disadvantaged youngsters, it came top.
Founded in 2018 on the site of a school closed for its poor grades, Mercia is emblematic of a shift on education that politicians in England have pursued for a decade and a half. Conservative ministers who entered government in 2010 were convinced that faddish ideologies had diverted schools from teaching in ways that evidence suggests work best. Many people believe that the reforms they wrought amount to a big step backwards. Yet lately England’s schools have been climbing up international league tables. Meanwhile countries that have pressed on with more fashionable approaches have been watching their own scores fall.
Reforms in England have targeted both what is
taught to children and the way lessons are delivered. Start with curriculums. Policymakers who grabbed the whip hand in 2010 maintained that, in a rush to endow children with useful “skills”, teachers were neglecting to instil them with enough nitty-gritty facts. Schools had come to think of “problem-solving” and “critical thinking” as talents children could pick up without gaining expertise in particular subjects, says Nick Gibb, who was schools minister, on and off, from 2010 to 2023. “But you can’t teach those things in isolation. You acquire them by having knowledge.”
To people who think schools are too Gradgrindian, the idea that they might be failing to transmit sufficient content sounds absurd. Yet in practice it is common for experts to downplay the importance of learning crunchy stuff. Since people can find facts on the internet, book-learning is less valuable, goes one theory. Some insist that the world is transforming so swiftly that much of what schools teach will quickly grow stale. More important, they say, to imbue children with a love of learning so that in future they can retrain themselves whenever a robot takes their job.
Just the facts, ma’am
In selling their fixes, England’s reformers invoke the work of E.D. Hirsch, an American academic. His research in the 1970s found that comprehension skills rely a lot on general knowledge. People who know little of Vikings or volcanoes struggle to make sense of writing that mentions them—even if they can read every word on the page. If that seems obvious, much literacy instruction has commonly ignored it.
Reforms in England also have sought to alter the ways teachers teach. The fashionable thinking is that children will learn better, and more joyfully, if teachers see themselves as “a guide on the side, not a sage on a stage”. That often means setting pupils on more selfguided projects that lead them towards key lessons, rather than explaining them explicitly upfront. All this borrows somewhat from ideas popularised by the early Romantics, who argued in the 18th century that formal schooling stamped out curiosity. People who are spoon-fed lessons as children, goes the thinking, will struggle to learn by themselves in adulthood.
The problem is that studies commonly find these hip pedagogies to be less reliable than the more straightforward kind. In the late 2000s John Hattie, a professor in New Zealand, crunched findings from thousands of educational studies to evaluate different kinds of interventions. This exercise found that conventional, teacher-led styles of instruction were much more effective than their critics tend to make out. PISA test results, likewise, suggest that rich-world children in classes that are “teacher-directed” score better than those in which lessons are “enquiry-based”. This is especially pertinent because the PISA tests are supposed to do a better job than most other assessments of measuring how far pupils can apply their learning in situations they might come across in real life.
England’s reformers yanked several levers to bring more rigour to the classroom. They made the national curriculum thicker and more specific. In maths, courses for young children now look more like the ones high-achieving Singapore sets. In reading, the curriculum rewrite cast aside “child-centred” approaches to literacy that sought to escape the drudgery of mastering phonics (broadly, how letters of the alphabet combine to make sounds). The more tedious methods, which depend greatly on such frowned-upon techniques as rote memorisation, get better results.
Since 2011 the Education Endowment Foundation, a government-funded NGO, has sought to supply more data-based findings about what teachings work best. The government also shook up the national school inspectorate, which it had come to see as an enforcer of poorly evidenced orthodoxies it wanted to disrupt. And it has funded an arm’s-length agency, called Oak National Academy, which is meant to supply teachers with optional, high-quality lesson plans for every class the national curriculum might require them to teach.
Many of these reforms have been deeply unpopular, and some of them only partially a success. Teachers guffaw at the idea that they have been liberated from woolly thinking; plenty feel that ramped-up tests and inspections limit their freedom. “Nobody is against knowledge,” says Guy Claxton, a visiting professor of education at King’s College London. The risk of thinking that kids will learn more efficiently if you “just tell them” stuff, he says, is that they end up not understanding what they are told. Even big fans think that positive changes in England have been under
Many of these reforms have been deeply unpopular, but they are starting to bear fruit
cut by failures to invest in the teaching workforce and in repairing crumbling school buildings.
Yet the data give good reason to think that England’s reforms are starting to bear fruit. Before 2020 about 80% of children were passing a “phonics check” they take when they are six-year-olds, up from only 58% in 2012. England has been doing better than many comparable nations in international tests—including during the pandemic-afflicted years, when its grades appear to have fallen back by a little less than was the case in much of Europe. In the PISA tests for maths, England’s 15-year-olds have risen from 29th in the world in 2009 to 11th in 2022.
Gonnae no’ dae that
Most compelling are the sharply contrasting trajectories of education systems that have taken the opposite approach. The best comparator is Scotland (each of the four parts of the United Kingdom controls its own school system). Scotland’s children share much in common with their peers south of the border. The difference, argues Lindsay Paterson at the University of Edinburgh, is that Scotland’s political class has long viewed conventional approaches as “old-fashioned, out-of-date, alienating and unmotivating”.
This approach reached an apogee in 2010, with the launch of a Scottish curriculum that waxed modishly about skills but offered only vague steers about what content children should be taught (and which cemented practices that had come into vogue years earlier). Scotland’s scores in international tests, already then in decline, have continued slumping hard since. By the time the pandemic receded, Scottish 15-year-olds were scoring at levels that, a generation earlier, might have been expected of pupils a full two years younger (see chart). That is the case even though spending per pupil is 18% higher than the average across Britain.
The diverging fortunes of British children hold useful lessons for policymakers elsewhere. No other government in Europe has reformed its curriculum “as radically” as Scotland’s has, says Professor Paterson. But it is not the only place to offer a cautionary tale. In the early 2000s Finland had one of the most admired school systems on the planet. Over the years since, its scores in a range of international tests dropped sharply. In 2015 a report by Gabriel Heller Sahlgren, a Swedish economist, speculated that Finland’s rise to the top ranks of global league tables owed much to the traditional brand of schooling it was doling out in the 1970s and 1980s. Its decline, he argued, relates in part to a “progressive turn” that began gaining momentum in the mid-1990s. (Another theory is that after Finnish families achieved comfortable living standards, they lost some zeal for academic achievement.)
Many think similar shifts lie behind declines in bits of Canada, France and New Zealand. For some years Australian curriculums have offered teachers only limited detail on what content should be taught, and in what order, says Ben Jensen of Learning First, a consultancy; to him that helps explain why PISA test scores in that country have fallen. And despite mounting evidence of Scotland’s decline, politicians in Wales have just waived through a waffly curriculum as woolly as that deployed by its northern counterpart. It does not help that voters care little about schooling; in a poll conducted in May only 7% of Britons rated education as a top-three issue for this month’s election.
In America a decentralised school system allows the world’s best- and worst-evidenced educational practices to rub along cheek by jowl. The challenge for reformers there is not just that policy choices are devolved to states and to local officials in 14,000 school districts. It is also that teachers closely guard their own freedom to run their classrooms however they see fit. Too few American educators have access to quality lesson plans, argues David Steiner of Johns Hopkins University; many concoct their own curriculums from resources found online. Research suggests they often make schoolwork less challenging than pupils need.
American exceptionalism
America has entertained a noisy debate about reading, which parents have come to realise is often taught in ways which sound appealing but which are not backed by solid studies. This awakening bears a resemblance to the movement that is changing schooling in England (itself inspired in part by methods used at America’s “No Excuses” charter schools). But many American schools retain a “visceral prejudice against teachers standing up in front of a classroom and explaining stuff”, says Natalie Wexler, an author. She thinks educators have not yet recognised how much pupils rely on general knowledge to gain comprehension skills.
The roiling culture wars in America have made the debates about what to do in the classrooms even trickier. Critics from the left accuse schools of fetishising the theories and deeds of dead white men. Those on the right seek to ban or sanitise teachings that they think paint the country in a bad light (as, for example, with the history of slavery). None of this gives educators much incentive to deliver an ambitious curriculum. Safer to steer away from knowledge-packed lessons, in favour of efforts to develop ambiguous “skills”.
Politicians who prioritise children’s progress would rise above these distractions. The best interests of their countries require it. Populations are ageing; workforces are shrinking. Young adults will have to become much more productive if they are to shoulder the rising costs of caring for the old. It is hard to see how that can happen unless youngsters receive more effective schooling. They must get the teachers, the technology, the curriculum and the pedagogies that they need to make the very best start. ■
Roiling culture wars in America have made these debates trickier