The annual publication of A-level results brings with it the agonising over declining standards. Without a good evidence base, it’s hard to ascertain whether there is any truth to the perception that exams get easier with each passing year.
When we go to the doctors or a hospital, we're pretty sure that treatment is based on some kind of evidence. Unfortunately, and despite the massive investment, the same is not true in schools and education in general.
Instead, the nature of how learning is delivered and schools are managed is dealt with on the basis of highly-politicised, highly-charged and emotive process of policy-making. And as a result, the guidance given to teachers is ever changing, and good ideas don't get shared. Why bother? A scheme that has worked locally is likely to be superseded by another policy initiative very soon, and so the practical and proven is lost.
Surprisingly, it is only recently that medical practice has become 'evidence based'. Even where evidence has been accumulated and tested over many years it can take much longer for the principles to be adopted as everyday practice. As was once pointed out by Professor Charles Desforges at a teaching conference, it's taken 300 years for the medical profession to learn to wash its hands.
To take one concrete example: truancy. It costs around £800m per year, £1bn has been spent since 1997, and no progress has been made beyond small, minor projects - no-one has had the will to find out what works, what doesn't, and use that evidence to make change happen. In an initiative on improving leadership for literacy in New Zealand, the Ministry for Education awarded a contract to appoint 20 national facilitators to assist school leaders, based on a 'flow down' model, with messages flowing from one level down to the next, and a university team was contracted to evaluate it. The evaluation showed that while the teachers said they were satisfied with the programme, there was no evidence that student achievement had actually improved. The evaluators put this down to an absence of a shared theory of action between the ministry that funded the initiative and those who implemented it. The ministry, unusually, agreed to start again using a formative approach this time, as recommended by the evaluators - processes and tools were developed jointly by teachers, facilitators and researchers. This resulted in large improvements for students.
By looking at small-scale innovations in education and examples from other sectors, it is possible to imagine what an evidence-using culture might look like. For example, a far richer variety of information would be available in more accessible forms for both teachers and parents; professional researchers and teachers would interact as a matter of course to create and transform knowledge for practical use. There needs to be a shift away from the norm of short-term academic research towards longer-term programmes that involve and engage directly with practice in classrooms, and some kind of 'brokerage' function that connects practice and research, creating new incentives in job roles to ground work in evidence. One example of how this might work is the Research in Practice organisation for children's services. It works in collaboration with the Association of Directors of Children's Services and a network of 100 agencies to promote positive outcomes for children and families based on research evidence. It identifies effective methods of understanding and using research by working intensively with a small number of ambitious agencies, testing and evaluating new methods of promoting evidence-informed practice.
The way in which knowledge about educational practice is produced and put to use is a matter of the utmost public importance. It is also something for which no structure or agency exercises overall responsibility. Improvements in the system as a whole come from the actions of myriad organisations and individuals acting independently of one another. So this isn't a plea for funds. We don't necessarily need more research, or more money for research, but people who are interested in the evidence, and think and act purposefully on what it says.
Elaine McCann is a development manager at the CfBT Education Trust
