I was recently challenged to explain why I believe in a knowledge curriculum. ‘Do you want to just go back to the 1950s?’ said my interlocutor. ‘Aren’t you aware of anything that has happened in education in the past fifty years? Where is your evidence that any of this knowledge stuff works? It sounds like… Read more »
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In my previous post I spoke about the different types of evidence used in education. Here is a concrete example of what I mean. The Educational Endowment Fund have been set up to review the effectiveness of certain educational reforms. They have an overview of a range of different reforms on their website, together with… Read more »
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Stephen Twigg’s announcement of his plans for an Office of Educational Improvement has got a lot of people talking, including me, here. On Lib Dem Voice, Stephen Tall welcomed the proposal, arguing that it would reduce the influence of unevidenced dogma and politicians’ pet whims. But I think that, on the contrary, the body as… Read more »
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Stephen Twigg has made an important speech stating that the problem in the English education system is that there is too much dogma and not enough evidence. Certainly there is some truth in that. I personally am extremely dismayed by the way that the scientific evidence about how humans learn is barely known amongst educators… Read more »
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In my last post, I argued that we should publish as much information about schools as possible so parents can use it to create their own league tables of what they find valuable. I also argued that measuring schools by one metric only was problematic because it’s too easy to game one metric. Instead, the… Read more »
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In my last post, I blogged about how league tables are neither the problem nor the solution. They do have some value, however. Teachers will tell you they are flawed, and we are right to do so. But they do give some information. I was speaking to a friend recently who is a teacher and… Read more »
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There is an interesting article in this week’s Economist about Welsh schools. In 2001 the devolved Welsh government abolished school league tables. A decade on, the results are not encouraging. The Economist’s main piece of evidence for this is that only 66.5% of GCSE results get a good grade (I presume they mean a C… Read more »
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