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Rose Report

There should be flexibility in the curriculum. My concern is that the review will replace one set of prescriptions with another and will not increase flexibility. Schools will now feel that they have to do what is in this report rather than what they were doing before. Of course there are cross-curricular activities: for example, when a class is asked to write up something about the middle ages—a story or what they have learned from the textbook that they have been given—doing so improves their literacy skills. That is the right approach to cross-curricular teaching, not attempts to shoehorn literacy, numeracy and other parts of the curriculum into themes, whether chocolate or rocks, in which one loses the structure and can miss out important parts of what needs to be taught, compared with teaching distinct subjects. On page 25 of the report is a list of the ideological debates that have plagued education since this ideology was introduced into the British education system in the 1950s. It originated in the United States in the 1920s at Teachers College, Columbia university, under John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick. The report lists:"““Subjects vs cross-curricular studies;""Knowledge vs skills;""Child initiated learning through play vs teacher directed learning;""Formal vs informal classroom organisation; and""Summative vs formative assessment.””" The report itself clearly comes down on the ideological side of cross-curricular studies and child-initiated learning through play. On the 50-year debate about whether schools should teach knowledge or skills, page 27 of the report states that"““it is worth noting that, when observed in practice by the Review, the approach which attempts to teach skills…disembodied from a coherent core of worthwhile knowledge has not been convincing in securing children's understanding of important key ideas.””" But the next paragraph states:"““There will be times when it is right to marshal worthwhile content into well-planned, cross-curricular studies.””" In effect, that is an endorsement of the cross-curricular skills approach that the preceding paragraph dismissed. However, no evidence is given in the review about how and why that approach might be effective now when it was so ineffective in the past. Paragraph 1.48 says:"““Given the strong tradition of child-centred thinking in primary education, it is perhaps surprising that many respondents to the review found it difficult to answer the question… What is distinctive about children's learning and development in the primary phase… Typical answers included: 'It's a time when they learn how to learn'; 'It's not what they learn but how they learn that's important'””." Yet, despite dismissing these answers as poor, the review, on page 41, recommends:"““In year one, the range and content will highlight the opportunities for child initiated enquiry and exploration.””" Herein lies the confusion in the report, which is at the heart of this review. Evidence that the 1950s and '60s approaches do not work is cited, but the report proceeds to recommend those same approaches. The review appears to endorse and promote an ideological approach that has failed. E. D. Hirsch, in his book, ““The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them””, sets out clearly the problem in American schools, which also applies to British schools: he says why that ideological approach has never worked and goes into the roots of the ideology. I tried to find a quote from the book that best summarises the argument, but the best quote is from the blurb on the reverse of the book, which says:"““For over 50 years, American schools have operated under the assumption that challenging children academically is unnatural for them, that teachers do not need to know the subjects they teach, that the learning 'process' should be emphasised over the facts taught. All of this is wrong…by disdaining content-based curricula, while favouring abstract—and discredited—theories of how a child learns, the ideas uniformly taught by our schools have done terrible harm to America's students. Instead of preparing our children for the highly competitive information-based economy in which we now live, our schools' practises have severely curtailed their ability, and desire, to learn.””" That is the point that the hon. Member for Norwich, North made: love of learning comes from learning well in primary schools. Throughout his book, Hirsch talks of the damage that the ““naturalistic””, ““project-orientated””, ““hands-on””, ““critical thinking”” approach to education has caused. The communist intellectual, Antonio Gramsci, was one of the first to understand the damage that this approach to education was causing. There is nothing new in all this: it all goes back to the 1920s and '30s; the same old stuff is repeated and fails over and over again, but here we are in 2009 recommending the same stuff again. Gramsci wrote in 1932 that this type of education"““is destined not merely to perpetuate social differences but crystallize them””." That can be seen in all the data showing the gap widening between the children from disadvantaged backgrounds and those from middle-class, educated backgrounds. The gap between the state and independent sectors is widening, too. The review is full of recommendations that would move English primary education even further towards the type of education that so worried Gramsci. The review states, on page 49:"““Parents also worry that the shift from the play-based environment to a more structured approach to learning in Year 1 of primary school is too abrupt and inappropriate for a child who may have only recently turned five.””" That is a clear endorsement of extending play-based education from the nursery to reception and even to year 1. I asked the Minister for Schools and Learners a parliamentary question about how many parents had been consulted as part of the review process, echoing the concerns about the consultation process expressed by the hon. Member for Yeovil. The answer was eight. One in five children in London attend an independent school. Many centre-left and left-wing journalists I know send their children to independent schools. When I ask them why, they say that it is not the social cachet or the exclusivity of the intake that makes them spend upwards of £8,000 a year, or even the small class sizes, but the fact that vast majority of pre-prep and prep schools have not adopted the so-called progressive approach to education that is so prevalent in the state sector. Those schools have never abandoned phonics in the teaching of reading: they continued to teach children their times tables by heart and they have 40 minutes a week each of history and geography, with no intention of shunting those subjects to key stage 3 and secondary school, as Rose wants to do in the review, thereby narrowing the curriculum and lightening it by shunting those important subjects up to secondary school. If we are serious about raising standards in our primary schools, we have to eschew the ideological approach that has so dominated this country's education system from the late 1950s, particularly following the Plowden report in 1967. We need to replace this ideological approach with a practical approach using what the evidence says works. The paragraph in the review that most alarmed me was 2.44 on page 42, which says,"““The teacher who once said: 'If children leave my school and can't paint that's a pity but if they leave and can't read that's a disaster' was perhaps exaggerating to make a point.””" That is what the report says—““exaggerating””. If Sir Jim Rose and the QCA do not believe that it is a disaster for a child to leave primary school unable to read, they are the wrong people to carry out a review of primary education.