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Test Scores Are Plummeting Across Europe. England Held the Line. · Strictly Education

0:00
SPEAKER_19: As for the parents, it's the same thing.
0:02
SPEAKER_19: The same terrible values that are ruining schools, values that we need to reject, are the same values normal families are up against.
0:10
SPEAKER_19: And it takes courage to decide that you're going to think for yourself.
0:20
SPEAKER_19: Hello and welcome to Strictly Education with me, Catherine Berbal Singh, Britain's strictest headmistress.
0:26
SPEAKER_19: So today I want to talk about test scores and our kids.
0:29
SPEAKER_19: The international PISA results came out a few weeks ago, and for those of you who don't know, PISA is an international test that happens about every three years for 15-year-olds.
0:37
SPEAKER_19: And it's sat by countries all over the world in maths, science, and reading.
0:41
SPEAKER_19: The idea is that it lets us compare which countries are doing well and which countries are doing badly.
0:46
SPEAKER_19: And the reason this is big news here in England is that we're seeing headlines like this.
0:50
SPEAKER_19: England's teenagers outperform peers in most countries.
0:54
SPEAKER_19: We're in the top 10 countries for every subject.
0:56
SPEAKER_19: In fact, in reading, the most disadvantaged 25% of children in England outperformed the average pupils in places like Germany, France, and Norway.
1:06
SPEAKER_19: So it's huge.
1:07
SPEAKER_19: So there's a sense that education reforms in England over the last decade and a half seem to have worked.
1:12
SPEAKER_19: So hooray! Now, what's interesting is to look at what was said about those same education reforms back when they were introduced by a man called Michael Gove.
1:21
SPEAKER_19: So Michael Gove was the education secretary for the conservative party that were in power at the time.
1:28
SPEAKER_19: Here's an example.
1:29
SPEAKER_19: Let's look.
1:39
SPEAKER_19: You don't know what you're doing, and the signs glove out.
1:44
SPEAKER_19: This sort of thing was everywhere.
1:46
SPEAKER_19: Let me tell you, Michael Glove was hated.
1:49
SPEAKER_19: Here's another example of a union leader reading a poem about Glove.
2:27
SPEAKER_19: My apologies to Nancy Sinatra, whose song she's mangling.
2:31
SPEAKER_19: You can hear her there.
2:32
SPEAKER_19: You need to listen.
2:34
SPEAKER_19: We're going to walk all over you.
2:36
SPEAKER_19: I mean, what the hell?
2:38
SPEAKER_19: Anyway, the point is, far too many teachers for my liking were very, very angry.
2:43
SPEAKER_19: That was over 10 years ago.
2:45
SPEAKER_19: What they were saying back then is that everything Michael Gove was doing was wrong.
2:49
SPEAKER_19: And that's because the education reforms in England back in 2010 were quite different from what was being implemented in other countries in Europe and around the world.
2:58
SPEAKER_19: Those teachers were angry, and they were saying we should be doing what other countries are doing instead of what Michael Gove is telling us to do.
3:07
SPEAKER_19: And that's what's interesting.
3:08
SPEAKER_19: Now we're 10 years later from all those protests.
3:11
SPEAKER_19: What happened to those same countries these teachers wanted us to copy?
3:15
SPEAKER_19: Well, they're tanking in their literacy, numeracy, and science scores.
3:20
SPEAKER_19: Elsewhere, we've had headlines like these.
3:22
SPEAKER_19: In France, unprecedented drop in performance echoes worldwide decline.
3:27
SPEAKER_19: Here's Australia.
3:28
SPEAKER_19: Let's take a look.
3:29
SPEAKER_18: The results are in, and Aussie student scores for maths, reading, and science have continued a 20-year decline.
3:36
SPEAKER_18: The results are from PESA, which is kind of like NAPLAN, but for over 90 countries across the world.
3:41
SPEAKER_19: A 20-year decline in Australia.
3:44
SPEAKER_19: How about elsewhere in Europe?
3:45
SPEAKER_19: Now, for a very long time, the argument has been that England should follow whatever is happening in Finland or Norway.
3:53
SPEAKER_19: In fact, that's exactly what those angry teachers were saying.
3:57
SPEAKER_19: Here's Finland now.
3:58
SPEAKER_19: Let's look.
3:59
SPEAKER_10: The Finnish education system has always been one of the best in the world, but that is not the case anymore.
4:04
SPEAKER_10: With the new PISA results published, Finland's downward trend keeps going on.
4:11
SPEAKER_19: Okay, so you're getting the picture.
4:13
SPEAKER_19: In fact, Norway has also plummeted.
4:15
SPEAKER_19: Something big is going on.
4:18
SPEAKER_19: As for my American listeners, the picture is obviously more complicated.
4:22
SPEAKER_19: The different American states have really different approaches, and so often it's more interesting with America to compare attainment between the different states.
4:32
SPEAKER_19: But the general picture in the US is, I'm afraid, more or less the same.
4:36
SPEAKER_13: Let's listen.
4:37
SPEAKER_13: In the US specifically, it said, quote, in reading and mathematics, however, the most recent results are below those observed in 2018 and among the lowest ever observed.
4:48
SPEAKER_19: Among the lowest ever observed.
4:50
SPEAKER_19: In fact, globally, these are the lowest scores since we first started testing in 2000.
4:59
SPEAKER_19: That's true even with East Asian places that are top, like Singapore, Korea, Japan, China.
5:07
SPEAKER_19: So this graph is the average across all of the OECD countries.
5:12
SPEAKER_19: It's saying a 15-year-old today is nearly a year behind one in 2018 when it comes to maths and reading.
5:20
SPEAKER_19: A whole year.
5:23
SPEAKER_19: Now interestingly, there are a handful of exceptions to this dramatic decline, including England.
5:30
SPEAKER_19: So there's an obvious question we're going to get to.
5:33
SPEAKER_19: What would make most education systems across the world get worse over the last 20 years?
5:41
SPEAKER_19: And also, why are countries like England bucking that trend?
5:45
SPEAKER_19: So let's start with why everything is getting worse.
5:48
SPEAKER_19: There are a few myths which, for me, don't stack up at all.
5:52
SPEAKER_19: First, some people will say COVID.
5:55
SPEAKER_19: Our children are all suffering because of COVID.
5:58
SPEAKER_19: You can see where they're coming from, I suppose.
6:00
SPEAKER_19: You know, school being closed for a year or more is obviously a problem.
6:04
SPEAKER_19: But I don't think it can explain what's going on, actually.
6:07
SPEAKER_19: England closed its schools during COVID, while Sweden kept them open.
6:12
SPEAKER_19: England's results have improved since 2018, which was before the pandemic.
6:18
SPEAKER_19: Sweden's results have gone down since then.
6:22
SPEAKER_19: If students in England can get back to the same level as before the pandemic or even improve, that would suggest it's possible to do this elsewhere.
6:30
SPEAKER_19: And on top of that, the decline in a lot of places started before the pandemic had even happened.
6:37
SPEAKER_19: So while the pandemic might have made things worse, it doesn't account for the global fall.
6:43
SPEAKER_19: In searching for an explanation, some people have suggested that it might be money.
6:46
SPEAKER_19: Is it just the case that the best systems simply spend more?
6:50
SPEAKER_19: Well, that doesn't really stack up either.
6:52
SPEAKER_19: Here's some reporting on performance within the European Union.
6:56
SPEAKER_01: The report also states the world is no longer divided into rich countries with great schools and poor countries with weak ones.
7:04
SPEAKER_01: For instance, Luxembourg is by far the biggest spender on education, but it posted lower average science scores than Ireland, France, and Italy, all of which invested less than half that amount per student.
7:18
SPEAKER_19: Right, so the world is no longer divided into rich countries with good schools and poor countries with weak ones.
7:25
SPEAKER_19: Within the United Kingdom itself, we have a similar situation.
7:28
SPEAKER_19: There's no difference in funding between Scotland, England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
7:34
SPEAKER_19: But they have totally different education systems.
7:37
SPEAKER_19: Take Scotland.
7:39
SPEAKER_19: It was historically the highest performer in the UK by far 20 years ago.
7:44
SPEAKER_19: I remember it.
7:46
SPEAKER_19: In the early 2000s, a Scottish pupil would be around half a year ahead of an English one.
7:52
SPEAKER_19: But now, 20 years later, Scottish pupils are around a year behind.
7:58
SPEAKER_19: But they've had the same money.
8:00
SPEAKER_19: That tells you it isn't just about resources.
8:04
SPEAKER_19: So how do we explain the changes?
8:06
SPEAKER_19: How could a handful of countries like England hold or improve their scores since COVID while the majority have plummeted?
8:15
SPEAKER_19: Let's start with England and go back to the ancient history of 2010.
8:19
SPEAKER_19: We've already seen how angry teachers were at Michael Gove, the education secretary in England.
8:24
SPEAKER_19: Michael Gove said we needed to raise standards.
8:28
SPEAKER_19: We needed a more traditional education.
8:30
SPEAKER_19: We should study traditional and hard texts.
8:32
SPEAKER_19: We shouldn't dumb down content.
8:34
SPEAKER_19: Teachers should lead the learning and tell kids off.
8:37
SPEAKER_19: We should have tough exams that everyone has to sit.
8:40
SPEAKER_19: Kids should work on pen and paper, not walk around the room and that sort of thing.
8:45
SPEAKER_19: Okay, so it's music to my ears, really.
8:48
SPEAKER_19: Gov's opponents said we needed the opposite of that.
8:51
SPEAKER_19: Children moving freely around the classroom so that they could be creative.
8:56
SPEAKER_19: Teachers said we needed the children doing projects together and discussing or learning by play, not sitting and listening to the teacher.
9:04
SPEAKER_19: God forbid.
9:06
SPEAKER_19: To take you back to before 2010, the curriculum in England was seen as quite flimsy and a bit insubstantial.
9:12
SPEAKER_19: So Gove made the decision to make the curriculum more traditional.
9:16
SPEAKER_19: In English, harder classical texts were added.
9:19
SPEAKER_19: In maths, the questions were made more difficult.
9:22
SPEAKER_19: Gove pushed subjects like Latin, including in poorer areas.
9:26
SPEAKER_19: History now included more content, and children were expected to know a lot more stuff.
9:33
SPEAKER_19: Ask any teacher.
9:34
SPEAKER_19: School got harder.
9:36
SPEAKER_19: Gove got rid of coursework modules where teachers and children could basically cheat, and instead focused on more rigorous exams where children had to know things and be tested on that.
9:49
SPEAKER_19: This is what gets called a knowledge-rich curriculum.
9:52
SPEAKER_19: It's the idea that we need the curriculum to be full of knowledge, and then expect children to memorize that knowledge and then we test them on it.
10:02
SPEAKER_19: And then once they know things, they can use that knowledge to think critically.
10:07
SPEAKER_19: That knowledge, which then lives in a child's long-term memory, then becomes the building blocks to answer harder questions as they get older.
10:16
SPEAKER_19: So, in terms of the changes that Gove made, he encouraged children to memorize great poems or sections of great literature, the best that's been thought and said.
10:26
SPEAKER_19: So, of course, Michael Gove was slammed for this because it was seen to be outdated.
10:32
SPEAKER_19: Here's one news program from the time.
10:35
SPEAKER_19: Just look at the contempt.
10:37
SPEAKER_03: Can the panel please recite a poem that they learnt by wrote at school and explain how this has been useful in their subsequent careers?
10:49
SPEAKER_19: Everyone is laughing at the idea that we should drill our kids in the great poems and that they should memorize them.
10:55
SPEAKER_19: Not just for literacy, but also for their sense of knowledge of the country.
10:59
SPEAKER_19: Here's one politician.
11:00
SPEAKER_14: I think quite clearly, you know, Gove in the whenever it was, 60s or 70s, you know, had a had a childhood that he clearly enjoyed, and he clearly enjoyed being at school.
11:09
SPEAKER_14: And he, but you know, the I think that he looks at our modern schools and wants to kind of somehow or rather import in education that frankly is largely out of date.
11:18
SPEAKER_14: I don't think that learning the names of the kings and queens of England is the most important thing to learn in history.
11:24
SPEAKER_14: I think you need to have an understanding of why we are where we are.
11:28
SPEAKER_14: If you don't understand your history, you are doomed to continue to make the same mistakes.
11:32
SPEAKER_19: So that line there, out of date.
11:34
SPEAKER_19: She's saying he's trying to be traditional.
11:36
SPEAKER_19: And we all know that traditional is bad.
11:40
SPEAKER_19: They find it laughable that someone would want children memorizing key presidents or kings and queens or lines of poetry from their country.
11:49
SPEAKER_19: Nearly every person in that audience is mocking the idea of a traditional education, and they're saying we should leave it all behind.
11:58
SPEAKER_19: Here's what one teacher says.
12:07
SPEAKER_05: Making them sit down and recite poems would just be a waste of my time and a waste of their time.
12:13
SPEAKER_05: And I would love Michael Gove to actually come into school and try and teach five-year-olds poetry.
12:20
SPEAKER_19: Okay, so you hear that?
12:21
SPEAKER_19: A waste of my time, a waste of their time.
12:24
SPEAKER_19: Notice what she prefers.
12:26
SPEAKER_19: The five-year-olds write their own poems.
12:29
SPEAKER_19: They don't need to learn great poems from the past.
12:33
SPEAKER_19: The whole panel is in agreement that this idea of traditional rigor for all kids is just the total joke.
12:40
SPEAKER_19: Now, Peter Hitchens is the only person who disagrees because he was taught in a traditional way.
12:48
SPEAKER_19: Here he is.
12:49
SPEAKER_03: Well, all right, you can spell accommodate.
12:52
SPEAKER_17: Spell accommodate.
12:58
SPEAKER_17: But I'll do your poem as well, because I've been asked to.
13:01
SPEAKER_17: Into my heart's uh an air that kills from yon far country rose.
13:06
SPEAKER_17: What are those blue remembered hills?
13:08
SPEAKER_17: What spires, what farms are those?
13:11
SPEAKER_17: It is the land of lost content.
13:13
SPEAKER_17: I see it shining plain.
13:15
SPEAKER_17: Those happy highways where I went and cannot come again.
13:19
SPEAKER_17: And I'm very pleased.
13:23
SPEAKER_17: I'm very pleased that my head is full of things like that, and also lots of hymns which I remember, and I feel very sorry for anybody who hasn't had the chance to learn them.
13:32
SPEAKER_17: And I think it is a great condemnation of our school system that so few people, and particularly only those whose parents are rich, can actually afford to have their children taught things like that and have their minds furnished with beauty for the remainder of their lives.
13:48
SPEAKER_17: And to pour scorn on it and to say that it is it is unimportant is to declare yourself a spiritual desert.
13:56
SPEAKER_17: Of course, people need these things, and what's more, they're a profound part of being British.
14:01
SPEAKER_17: If you don't know the literature and the poetry and the music of your own country, then you aren't really fully conversant with its history or its character.
14:10
SPEAKER_17: You've lost touch with what your ancestors knew, and you won't be able to pass it on to your own children and grandchildren.
14:16
SPEAKER_17: Of course, these things should be taught.
14:17
SPEAKER_17: I wish Michael Gove actually had the power and the policies to make it happen.
14:22
SPEAKER_17: I really do think it would be a good thing.
14:25
SPEAKER_17: I also think that people should not, should, particularly teachers, should not say that these things don't matter.
14:31
SPEAKER_17: They matter immensely.
14:35
SPEAKER_19: Go, Peter! If you don't know the literature and the music and the poetry of your own country, and you aren't really conversant with its history and its character, then you have lost touch with what your ancestors knew.
14:48
SPEAKER_19: Peter Hitchens gets it.
14:50
SPEAKER_19: And notice the crowd.
14:52
SPEAKER_19: They all clap for him.
14:53
SPEAKER_19: Even they can see he has something.
14:56
SPEAKER_19: And he's saying that we should give this to all of our children.
15:00
SPEAKER_19: In the moment they're inspired by Peter and his poetry.
15:05
SPEAKER_19: Now, most kids can't do what Peter Hitchens does, nor can most of us adults.
15:10
SPEAKER_19: But thanks to Michael Gove, our kids nowadays have at least studied a larger number of harder classical texts.
15:18
SPEAKER_19: Michael Gove was saying we should give building blocks of knowledge to all of our children, not just the rich ones at private schools.
15:27
SPEAKER_19: All of our children, whatever their background, expose them to great ideas and make them do hard things.
15:35
SPEAKER_19: A lot of teachers, like that lady in the audience, told him that he was an idiot for this.
15:40
SPEAKER_19: And they hated it, and they hated him.
15:43
SPEAKER_19: Now, in Scotland and Wales, they very much did the opposite to all of this.
15:48
SPEAKER_19: They rejected traditionalism entirely, much like those striking teachers would have liked.
15:54
SPEAKER_19: Here's Wales.
15:55
SPEAKER_09: This needs to be part and parcel of the most significant curriculum reform that Wales has ever seen.
16:02
SPEAKER_04: School league tables abolished.
16:04
SPEAKER_04: SATS exams at 11 scrapped rigid curriculum gone.
16:10
SPEAKER_19: So you had this sort of weird experiment all on one island, the United Kingdom.
16:14
SPEAKER_19: England goes traditional and knowledge-rich with its curriculum.
16:18
SPEAKER_19: Scotland and Wales, modern, progressive, no to testing, no to a knowledge-rich curriculum, no to silly dates and facts and all that outdated stuff.
16:28
SPEAKER_19: There were other ways this manifested itself in the curriculum.
16:31
SPEAKER_19: In England, the school's minister Nick Gibb pushed for teaching literacy through something called phonics.
16:37
SPEAKER_19: Here's how phonics works.
16:38
SPEAKER_19: Instead of teaching children a whole word at a time, you break it up into chunks of sounds made by the combination of letters.
16:46
SPEAKER_19: Here's an example.
16:47
SPEAKER_11: Here's what happens when you teach your kid to memorize sight words.
16:50
SPEAKER_11: What does that word say, baby?
16:51
SPEAKER_11: Right?
16:52
SPEAKER_11: How about this word?
16:53
SPEAKER_11: I don't know.
16:54
SPEAKER_11: Instead, let's start teaching our children to sound words out by explaining why they're hard.
17:00
SPEAKER_11: Do you see those three letters, baby?
17:02
SPEAKER_11: Ig H make the sound I.
17:05
SPEAKER_11: So try reading each word with I in the middle.
17:08
SPEAKER_10: Right.
17:08
SPEAKER_11: Good.
17:09
SPEAKER_11: Next word?
17:10
SPEAKER_10: Fight.
17:11
SPEAKER_11: Good.
17:11
SPEAKER_11: Last word there.
17:13
SPEAKER_11: Awesome work, baby.
17:14
SPEAKER_11: Good job.
17:15
SPEAKER_19: Yeah, that guy's great.
17:16
SPEAKER_19: So what he's doing is showing the kid what the combination of letters I G H sounds like.
17:23
SPEAKER_19: The child can then identify that sound whenever they see those letters.
17:27
SPEAKER_19: That helps children become more confident readers.
17:30
SPEAKER_19: England made phonics compulsory in every primary school and then introduced a national test to check that every child could identify the sounds.
17:40
SPEAKER_19: Again, this was hated.
17:42
SPEAKER_19: Famous authors were getting together to write open letters, telling the government how awful it was.
17:48
SPEAKER_19: It's cruel to test children.
17:50
SPEAKER_19: Children can discover the words their own way.
17:52
SPEAKER_19: Waste of money.
17:53
SPEAKER_19: This will harm reading, that sort of thing, you know.
17:56
SPEAKER_19: Now again, we had this contrast.
17:58
SPEAKER_19: In Scotland and Wales to this day, they still don't have those tests everywhere.
18:03
SPEAKER_19: National testing was seen as too old school.
18:06
SPEAKER_19: That's precisely what they were deliberately getting rid of.
18:10
SPEAKER_19: So no universal phonics, no screening.
18:13
SPEAKER_19: So how's that looking over a decade later?
18:16
SPEAKER_19: Let's jump to 2026.
18:19
SPEAKER_19: Nowadays, when it comes to literacy, England is rated as one of the best in the world.
18:23
SPEAKER_19: While in Scotland, we're getting stories like this: primary teachers hired to teach Glasgow secondary pupils to read.
18:32
SPEAKER_19: So Scotland has children who at 12 can't read properly when 30 years ago they used to outperform England.
18:40
SPEAKER_19: That's because phonics works.
18:42
SPEAKER_19: How strange.
18:43
SPEAKER_19: Celebrities and teaching unions campaigned for things that don't help poor ordinary families.
18:49
SPEAKER_19: Who would have thought it?
18:51
SPEAKER_19: There were loads of other things that Michael Gove changed.
18:54
SPEAKER_19: I'll give you an example.
18:56
SPEAKER_19: Before the Gove reforms, teachers in England had to give 24 hours notice before giving a child a detention.
19:03
SPEAKER_19: I remember I'd say, that's a detention to a kid, and they'd respond with, 24 hours, 24 hours, and there wasn't anything you could do.
19:13
SPEAKER_19: You'd try to write a note in their diary, and then they'd say that they couldn't do that day.
19:18
SPEAKER_19: Then you'd choose another day, and then their parents would complain and say they couldn't do it.
19:22
SPEAKER_19: So what ended up happening was teachers just tried to avoid giving detentions because it was such a hassle.
19:27
SPEAKER_19: Michael Gove abolished this.
19:29
SPEAKER_19: He said, if a kid is bad, they could have a consequence on the same day.
19:34
SPEAKER_19: And I can tell you, same-day consequences are everything in teaching.
19:38
SPEAKER_19: I'll give you another example.
19:40
SPEAKER_19: They let teachers search children's bags.
19:43
SPEAKER_19: Before a child could say no to you looking through their bag, even if you thought they were carrying a knife.
19:50
SPEAKER_19: It was insane.
19:51
SPEAKER_19: How was Michael Gove treated?
19:53
SPEAKER_19: Well, people said he was evil and should lose his job for how cruel his ideas were.
19:59
SPEAKER_19: Gove's reforms, in a whole bunch of ways, gave teachers back some sense of authority.
20:06
SPEAKER_19: I say this to my younger staff.
20:08
SPEAKER_19: You don't know what it was like before Michael Gove.
20:10
SPEAKER_19: And they don't.
20:11
SPEAKER_19: They take the sensible systems we now have for granted.
20:14
SPEAKER_19: Now, some of you will be thinking, these changes all feel like common sense.
20:18
SPEAKER_19: Well, you're right.
20:20
SPEAKER_19: But they weren't common sense back then.
20:22
SPEAKER_19: Honestly, people acted like he had committed a war crime.
20:27
SPEAKER_19: What else did Gove do?
20:28
SPEAKER_19: Okay, here's another big one.
20:31
SPEAKER_19: He moved control of schools away from local councils and towards head teachers.
20:36
SPEAKER_19: The main way this was done was through two major changes in terms of types of schools.
20:42
SPEAKER_19: Here's a Canadian journalist explaining how different it is from their system.
20:47
SPEAKER_16: In Canada, parents generally have three options: public schools, private school, or homeschooling.
20:54
SPEAKER_16: England has these two.
20:56
SPEAKER_16: But they also introduced two types of government-funded non-profit schools.
21:01
SPEAKER_16: These are called academies and free schools.
21:05
SPEAKER_16: Academies are schools that were previously government-run, and free schools are new schools started from scratch.
21:12
SPEAKER_16: Both of them are tuition free.
21:15
SPEAKER_19: Okay, so neither an academy nor a free school is run by the local council.
21:20
SPEAKER_19: But they are both fully state funded.
21:22
SPEAKER_19: No one pays fees.
21:24
SPEAKER_19: But local bureaucrats don't have as much to do with them.
21:28
SPEAKER_19: Academies themselves were actually introduced under the previous Labour government back in 2000, and there were around 200 of them.
21:36
SPEAKER_19: Gove massively expanded this so that most secondary schools and a number of primaries are now academies.
21:43
SPEAKER_19: They're run by different charitable trusts, and the government gives them freedom to decide how the school will be run rather than have it centrally controlled by the state.
21:53
SPEAKER_19: Here's how they're different.
21:55
SPEAKER_15: At the heart of the academy model is a certain number of freedoms.
22:00
SPEAKER_15: Freedom over your curriculum.
22:02
SPEAKER_15: So we have a national curriculum in England.
22:05
SPEAKER_15: And by being an academy or a free school, you don't have to follow it.
22:10
SPEAKER_15: You have freedom over paying conditions.
22:12
SPEAKER_15: So you are the employer.
22:14
SPEAKER_15: So in a local authority run school, the local authority would employ all of the teachers and everybody working in that school.
22:21
SPEAKER_15: Whereas in a free school or an academy, that is down to the academy trust running that school.
22:27
SPEAKER_15: And the other, the third freedom that they have is around the qualifications that teachers have.
22:32
SPEAKER_15: So there is a restriction or a requirement for local authority schools that you have to have a trained teacher, so someone that has gone through accredited teacher training and that they have to work, you know, you have to have that accreditation before you can work in a local authority school.
22:52
SPEAKER_15: You don't have to have that in a free school and academy.
22:55
SPEAKER_15: And all of this, what this means is actually you get a lot of variation within free schools and academies.
23:01
SPEAKER_19: They have got more opportunities.
23:03
SPEAKER_19: So she gives some good examples.
23:04
SPEAKER_19: In an academy school, you choose who you want to hire.
23:08
SPEAKER_19: You, as the head, are the boss.
23:11
SPEAKER_19: You make the decisions and are held accountable for them.
23:14
SPEAKER_19: To give an example, I've had young teachers who've just left the army or they come from working in the private sector.
23:20
SPEAKER_19: I meet them and I think, yeah, you're a good fit.
23:23
SPEAKER_19: We'll train you up to be a world-class teacher.
23:25
SPEAKER_19: Before the Gove reforms, schools didn't have the freedom to do that.
23:30
SPEAKER_19: That was the point.
23:31
SPEAKER_19: Ownership.
23:32
SPEAKER_19: Leaders need to make decisions, build a team, and be held accountable for delivering.
23:37
SPEAKER_19: Academies increased the freedoms and accountability that schools had.
23:42
SPEAKER_19: They made the head the leader of the school.
23:44
SPEAKER_19: They made the head and the governors accountable for the school and not the local government.
23:50
SPEAKER_19: Now, back then, people would talk as if this change was against the Human Rights Act.
23:55
SPEAKER_19: Here's a good example.
23:56
SPEAKER_02: For tonight's special report, our social affairs editor Jackie Long has been hearing from angry parents who've already launched a legal challenge and last night staged a packed public meeting to denounce the plans.
24:42
SPEAKER_00: Because we're not, I don't know, not rich enough, not clever enough, not middle class enough.
24:47
SPEAKER_21: Everyone's, you know, try to rally around, it's it's improved over the last uh number of months.
24:51
SPEAKER_06: But what about the idea that becoming an academy would improve it further, would improve it quicker?
24:56
SPEAKER_21: Well, is there any evidence to state that?
24:59
SPEAKER_21: You know, for primary education, I don't think there is.
25:01
SPEAKER_21: And I don't want Michael Grove gambling with my children's education.
25:04
SPEAKER_19: Yeah, so that was quite standard, actually.
25:07
SPEAKER_19: Uh the media suggested that we should keep everything in local council control, but spend more money on failed methods in failing schools.
25:14
SPEAKER_19: You can hear it in what those parents are saying there, and I don't blame them.
25:17
SPEAKER_19: I get it, they don't really know.
25:20
SPEAKER_19: But the fact is, we were just going to continue with failed methods in failing schools.
25:24
SPEAKER_19: I must say, some politicians jumped on this bandwagon a bit.
25:28
SPEAKER_19: Here's an example.
25:29
SPEAKER_06: And last night, hundreds packed into the school hall as part of an ongoing campaign to fight the academy plan.
25:36
SPEAKER_22: And we say to Michael Gove, don't treat us like a bunch of fools.
25:43
SPEAKER_19: So that was over ten years ago.
25:44
SPEAKER_19: All of those evil reforms, and remember it takes years for education reforms to have any impact, have now been in place for a while.
25:52
SPEAKER_19: So how's it going?
25:54
SPEAKER_19: Let's go back to our contrasting case studies of places in the UK where all schools are run by the local council.
26:00
SPEAKER_19: Let's start with Wales.
26:02
SPEAKER_04: Schools in Wales have been performing well below the average compared to other schools in the UK.
26:07
SPEAKER_04: They're the lowest for maths, science, and reading, and they've just been handed another deeply troubling set of results.
26:14
SPEAKER_20: Literacy and numeracy did not receive the continuous focus that it has needed.
26:19
SPEAKER_04: But what if some of those decisions actually made things worse?
26:23
SPEAKER_04: Did Wales build the system reformers dreamed of while losing sight of the basics?
26:29
SPEAKER_19: Okay, so hear that.
26:30
SPEAKER_19: Wales had the system reformers dreamed of.
26:33
SPEAKER_19: They ran things the way those angry teachers wanted.
26:37
SPEAKER_19: Everything centralized to the local government, removed tests that upset families and kids, don't focus on teacher accountability or making exams harder.
26:45
SPEAKER_19: That's in Wales.
26:46
SPEAKER_19: So how's Scotland doing?
26:48
SPEAKER_12: John Swinney was this morning slammed for overseeing the destruction of Scotland's world-leading education system as international lead tables confirmed an ongoing decline.
26:57
SPEAKER_12: Pupils are lagging more than a year behind their English counterparts on reading, maths, and science.
27:02
SPEAKER_12: And the country's education system is also struggling to compete with places like Estonia, Finland, and Poland.
27:08
SPEAKER_12: The program for international student assessment, which ranks education systems via series of tests of 15-year-olds, outlines scores of problems amid a 20-year-long decline across all subjects.
27:19
SPEAKER_19: Notice that the children are in hoodies and all sat on laptops there, very fashionable and modern.
27:25
SPEAKER_19: Destruction of the education system.
27:28
SPEAKER_19: 20-year-long decline.
27:31
SPEAKER_19: So why are things going so badly then?
27:33
SPEAKER_19: Well, the truth is that the advice from local authorities was and is mostly terrible advice.
27:40
SPEAKER_19: I remember being told that if we all had a fancy interactive whiteboard, it would add one grade for every kid.
27:46
SPEAKER_19: You would be given the most stupid advice, and head teachers would think, I need to do what I'm being told.
27:52
SPEAKER_19: And I'm not sure I can blame them really.
27:54
SPEAKER_19: After Gove's reforms, this culture changed in England.
27:58
SPEAKER_19: Head teachers suddenly had more freedom.
28:00
SPEAKER_19: Now, obviously, some of that freedom can be used badly.
28:03
SPEAKER_19: You can have an academy or free school that uses its freedoms to do stupid things that don't work.
28:09
SPEAKER_19: But if you have most schools underperforming and leaders are given the freedom to innovate and try other things, pretty quickly you'll have some examples of good practice.
28:19
SPEAKER_19: And that's exactly what happened in England.
28:21
SPEAKER_19: What Gove did was allow head teachers to start breaking away from the ways that were failing and to try new things.
28:28
SPEAKER_19: I would know.
28:29
SPEAKER_19: I learned loads from watching the work of heads who use their academy freedoms to do something different.
28:35
SPEAKER_19: That's how innovation works.
28:38
SPEAKER_19: That relates to another change that Michael Gove and Nick Gibb introduced.
28:41
SPEAKER_19: They basically changed the way that school league tables worked by introducing something called Progress 8.
28:48
SPEAKER_19: Now, explaining exactly how this league table works is pretty complicated, so I'll simplify it massively.
28:53
SPEAKER_19: What Gove said was: the best schools are the ones where kids make the most progress across eight subjects instead of just judging a school on how well the kids do in English and maths.
29:03
SPEAKER_19: Because the starting point for a child should matter, and not just their attainment at the end.
29:08
SPEAKER_19: A more privileged child is likely to outperform a less privileged child, not because the school is better, but because they have more support at home.
29:18
SPEAKER_19: So imagine a child who starts at school very behind and he's here, and the school helps him make progress to here.
29:27
SPEAKER_19: Gove was saying that's the good school because they've made the most progress.
29:32
SPEAKER_19: Because if you have a school which is really affluent, and maybe the children, you know, they start here and then they end up here, right?
29:40
SPEAKER_19: The results might look similar, but that's not to do with the good teaching because those kids would have got there anyway, right?
29:47
SPEAKER_19: Whereas this school has done something exceptional, bringing those kids up there.
29:51
SPEAKER_19: And so it was what progress was important, right?
29:55
SPEAKER_19: It was what progress the school made that decided where you were placed on the progress eight chart.
30:02
SPEAKER_19: So all of this led to two things.
30:04
SPEAKER_19: First, you had academies and free schools with school leaders trying different approaches who were in control of their own decision making.
30:11
SPEAKER_19: Some schools tried a more traditional approach.
30:13
SPEAKER_19: Second, you had a league table to compare which of these methods are working, which are the schools that we should copy.
30:20
SPEAKER_19: So this is the Progress 8, top 10, from a few years back.
30:24
SPEAKER_19: There's our school, Michaela, at the top.
30:26
SPEAKER_19: That 2.56 means that the average child went up two and a half grades from what was expected by their primary school.
30:34
SPEAKER_19: But then in second is Mercia, and there's Mossborne, Tauhedol, which is now called Star Academies, Art Greenwich Free School.
30:41
SPEAKER_19: All of these schools have traditional teaching, strict rules, they don't allow phones out, that sort of thing.
30:47
SPEAKER_19: Schools have used their freedoms to teach more traditionally, and the GCSC results prove that it works.
30:53
SPEAKER_19: Now the PISA results prove that these same ideas that have spread across the country work.
31:00
SPEAKER_19: So that's the picture of English school reform and a huge part of why England has gone up in those rankings.
31:06
SPEAKER_19: Michael Gove, Nick Gibb, Andrew Adonis, if you're watching, I salute you.
31:13
SPEAKER_19: So, why has everywhere else gone down?
31:17
SPEAKER_19: What about that side of the question?
31:19
SPEAKER_19: Okay, so we've already said that COVID and money don't quite stack up.
31:23
SPEAKER_19: They can't fully explain the downward shift globally.
31:26
SPEAKER_19: And obviously, it won't be the same for every country.
31:29
SPEAKER_19: And I'm simplifying to some extent, but if I had to identify two major factors that will drag down an education system and hurt children, here's what I would say.
31:40
SPEAKER_19: Number one, tech.
31:42
SPEAKER_19: Smartphones at home, sure, but it isn't just that.
31:45
SPEAKER_19: iPads, laptops, screens used in the classroom.
31:49
SPEAKER_19: What do Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden all have in common?
31:53
SPEAKER_19: They all used to be high performers.
31:56
SPEAKER_19: They all then chose to get rid of textbooks and embed iPads into everything.
32:02
SPEAKER_19: They have all plummeted since.
32:05
SPEAKER_19: They are now dropping their obsession with tech and going back to textbooks, pen and paper.
32:11
SPEAKER_19: Generally speaking, ed tech makes an education system go backwards.
32:16
SPEAKER_19: I've already done an episode on this in detail.
32:18
SPEAKER_19: If you want to know more, you can go back and find it.
32:21
SPEAKER_19: So, number two problem in Western education systems are the values.
32:26
SPEAKER_19: We've already seen that Gove was hounded by teachers, celebrities, the political class for being traditional.
32:33
SPEAKER_19: You'd get the same reaction in most Western countries, in particular around the belief that it is good for schools to be strict.
32:40
SPEAKER_19: In most Western countries, you'll find that teachers will generally have children facing each other at their desks instead of their teachers.
32:49
SPEAKER_19: The teacher then facilitates the learning instead of using direct instruction.
32:53
SPEAKER_19: They may often get children to get up and move around.
32:56
SPEAKER_19: You won't find desks in rows with the teacher teaching the children at the front of the class, as used to happen all the time 30 or 40 years ago.
33:04
SPEAKER_19: But it's also way worse than that.
33:06
SPEAKER_19: In a lot of Western schools, there really is zero respect for the teacher.
33:11
SPEAKER_19: There will be few or no consequences for bad behavior.
33:14
SPEAKER_19: And in terms of the values the teacher gives the kids, they are often terrible.
33:19
SPEAKER_19: Everything will be about child mental health, well-being, anti-racism, their identity, how oppressive society is, their victimhood status, and so on.
33:28
SPEAKER_19: People think I'm crazy when I talk about values, small c conservative values, to be clear.
33:33
SPEAKER_19: But remember, people said phonics would destroy literacy.
33:37
SPEAKER_19: The values we're giving our kids is not just a threat to our schools.
33:41
SPEAKER_19: I think it's a civilizational problem in a million ways.
33:46
SPEAKER_19: I actually think this is such a big problem, I've written an entire book about it.
33:51
SPEAKER_19: Oh, let me show you.
33:53
SPEAKER_19: Diversity is not our strength.
33:55
SPEAKER_19: So I keep showing this in my podcast.
33:57
SPEAKER_19: My book is about how I think the values we give modern children are part of why a lot of places feel politically like they're on fire.
34:05
SPEAKER_19: And it comes out on November the 12th.
34:07
SPEAKER_19: You can pre-order it on Amazon or wherever you buy books at the link in the description below.
34:12
SPEAKER_19: Now, a fair question someone can point out is hold on, Catherine, terrible values in tech are in English schools too.
34:21
SPEAKER_19: Exactly.
34:22
SPEAKER_19: The difference in England is that the awful values and the terrible tech stuff is offset by what some schools in England are doing post-Gove.
34:32
SPEAKER_19: I'm always saying English schools are broken.
34:35
SPEAKER_19: And I think PISA shows I'm right.
34:38
SPEAKER_19: It's just that in England things aren't quite as broken as they are everywhere else.
34:44
SPEAKER_19: So these are the PISA scores from 2006 to 2025.
34:49
SPEAKER_19: So 19 years.
34:50
SPEAKER_19: Okay.
34:51
SPEAKER_19: Now you see where they start, and you can see their rankings where they are then, okay?
34:56
SPEAKER_19: And then they fall.
34:58
SPEAKER_19: Isn't it weird about England?
34:59
SPEAKER_19: Look how it just stays still.
35:01
SPEAKER_19: So while England looks as if it has improved, since 2006 it hasn't, actually.
35:08
SPEAKER_19: It's just maintained its raw score.
35:11
SPEAKER_19: It's just that everybody else has plummeted.
35:14
SPEAKER_19: You see that?
35:15
SPEAKER_19: It's fascinating.
35:17
SPEAKER_19: So the truth is that when you forget other countries, English schools are basically in the same place as they were in 2006 in these PISA scores.
35:26
SPEAKER_19: Take maths, for example.
35:28
SPEAKER_19: England is above Wales and Scotland, sure.
35:31
SPEAKER_19: But notice England is the same as it was in 2006.
35:35
SPEAKER_19: Let's take reading.
35:36
SPEAKER_19: The long-term trend since 2006 is that it has basically stayed the same in terms of its raw score while everybody else got worse.
35:46
SPEAKER_19: Now the thing is, anyone who knows about schools knows that in 2006, it wasn't exactly like English schools were in a good place.
35:54
SPEAKER_19: They were pretty terrible.
35:56
SPEAKER_19: That tells you that things now are still pretty bad.
36:02
SPEAKER_19: It's just that things could be worse.
36:05
SPEAKER_19: It isn't that our boat is a perfect boat.
36:08
SPEAKER_19: It's just that it's sinking more slowly than the other boats.
36:12
SPEAKER_19: It's like our picture, you know?
36:14
SPEAKER_19: So the thing is that there's a whole bunch of things that are dragging schools down, right?
36:20
SPEAKER_19: Terrible values, a growing lack of respect for teachers, terrible progressive teaching methods, ed tech in the classroom, and smartphones.
36:28
SPEAKER_19: But then there are a bunch of other forces dragging that boat back up above the water, just about.
36:34
SPEAKER_19: Knowledge-rich curriculum, rigorous exams, phonics, some schools where the teaching is more traditional, some schools where they have rejected ed tech and are strict on smartphones.
36:45
SPEAKER_19: That's what Gove's reforms allowed to happen.
36:49
SPEAKER_19: What's really sad is that most of the people who insisted all along that Gove was wrong still don't really accept it.
36:55
SPEAKER_19: Michael Gove has never been seen as a hero.
36:58
SPEAKER_19: He was attacked relentlessly for four years and lost his job because he was so hated.
37:02
SPEAKER_08: The strains on our marriage were not as a result of Brexit.
37:05
SPEAKER_08: They were as a result of my decision to enter politics in the first place.
37:08
SPEAKER_08: And things flowed from that.
37:10
SPEAKER_08: And if I'd never been a politician, might we still be married?
37:14
SPEAKER_08: I just don't know.
37:15
SPEAKER_08: But I think uh uh if you isolate one individual moment, that helps you realize that at that point in the narrative, that's the the hinge moment.
37:30
SPEAKER_08: But actually, it may be that they, you know, the first step was taken a lot.
37:35
SPEAKER_08: It was politics earlier.
37:36
SPEAKER_19: Yeah.
37:37
SPEAKER_19: So he lost his marriage.
37:39
SPEAKER_19: He also lost his job as education secretary because the pressure against him meant his party moved him on before election time.
37:47
SPEAKER_19: Just so we're clear, my school, in fact, all of the top schools in England that have established what works in the classroom could not exist without the reforms that Gove had to fight for.
37:58
SPEAKER_19: But our current education secretary, Lucy Powell, has been quite open that the Gove reforms are the problem.
38:05
SPEAKER_19: But we can cover that on another strictly another day.
38:08
SPEAKER_19: I'm often the first to criticize our politicians, but the truth is that there are so many children in this country whose lives will be better because of the bravery of politicians like Michael Gove and Nick Gibb, and a bunch of people whose names we will never know.
38:22
SPEAKER_19: My school would not exist if they had not shown that courage.
38:25
SPEAKER_19: And I take my hat off to all of the head teachers and staff who did do things differently, did improve things.
38:32
SPEAKER_19: Their bravery really changed a lot of lives.
38:35
SPEAKER_19: And as for the parents, it's the same thing.
38:38
SPEAKER_19: The same terrible values that are ruining schools, values that we need to reject, are the same values normal families are up against.
38:46
SPEAKER_19: And it takes courage to decide that you're going to think for yourself.
38:50
SPEAKER_19: Hopefully, Strictly Education helps us all find that courage to do what is right by our kids.
38:56
SPEAKER_19: So have a look below and click and subscribe.
39:03
SPEAKER_19: Right.
39:03
SPEAKER_19: So now I get to answer a few questions from all of you.
39:06
SPEAKER_19: And if you have a question you'd like answered, put it in the comments below.
39:09
SPEAKER_19: You can also find me on ex at miss underscore snuffy.
39:14
SPEAKER_19: Okay, Lucy asks, I'm an early childhood teacher.
39:18
SPEAKER_19: If you were to design the ideal foundation program for three to five year olds, what would that look like?
39:23
SPEAKER_19: Well, that's a great question.
39:25
SPEAKER_19: So, with little ones, the main thing you need them to be able to do is read and count.
39:31
SPEAKER_19: Okay?
39:32
SPEAKER_19: So when you're counting, you count by ones in the first instance, one to a hundred.
39:37
SPEAKER_19: I mean, first you're gonna start with one to ten, then you're gonna go ten to twenty and so on.
39:41
SPEAKER_19: You're gonna build up.
39:42
SPEAKER_19: Um, and then you're gonna count by twos, and then you're gonna count by threes and by fours and so on, because you're thinking about their times tables that will come later.
39:51
SPEAKER_19: And you, parents, you can all do this, right?
39:53
SPEAKER_19: You can do it with the peas on the plate, the cars on the street.
39:56
SPEAKER_19: You're just counting all the time.
39:57
SPEAKER_19: Kids love it, okay?
39:59
SPEAKER_19: Then you also want them reading, and it means you're reading with them.
40:02
SPEAKER_19: Draw your finger underneath the words as you're reading to them.
40:05
SPEAKER_19: Don't just read them one story a night.
40:07
SPEAKER_19: You can read several.
40:08
SPEAKER_19: You know, they should you they should be surrounded by board books when they're little, when they're tiny, like when they're two, and they're playing with the board books and you're reading the words, and then you read certain books with rhymes over and over again, and they'll start repeating it back to you because they'll know it and love it.
40:23
SPEAKER_19: And they will associate the bonding with mom and dad with reading.
40:27
SPEAKER_19: It is the best gift you can give to your children.
40:30
SPEAKER_19: Okay.
40:30
SPEAKER_19: Cana asks, will you do an episode on the specific conservative values in your school and how you implement them?
40:37
SPEAKER_19: Thank you for starting a podcast.
40:38
SPEAKER_19: All teachers amongst everyone else should be watching.
40:41
SPEAKER_19: Well, thank you, Cana.
40:42
SPEAKER_19: And you're absolutely right.
40:43
SPEAKER_19: I do need to do one specifically on conservative values, although I hope that in all the various ones I'm doing, those conservative values are sort of seeping out.
40:51
SPEAKER_19: But you're right, I need to do a specific one, and I I will just for you, Connor, all right?
40:56
SPEAKER_19: Just for you.
40:57
SPEAKER_19: So, Calvin says, What an inspiration watching this with a tear or two.
41:02
SPEAKER_19: Oh, that's nice, Calvin.
41:03
SPEAKER_19: Thank you.
41:04
SPEAKER_19: My question for you is what can I do to help you on your journey?
41:07
SPEAKER_19: I want to make a contribution and I see how children are our future.
41:11
SPEAKER_19: Keep up the great work.
41:11
SPEAKER_19: Well, you know what?
41:12
SPEAKER_19: Brilliant.
41:13
SPEAKER_19: You can see that children are the future.
41:15
SPEAKER_19: This is something I'm desperately trying to persuade everyone of.
41:17
SPEAKER_19: You know what?
41:18
SPEAKER_19: You can send the podcast to your friends, try and encourage people to watch it.
41:22
SPEAKER_19: You can put it on your various social media and actually talk about the ideas.
41:27
SPEAKER_19: You know, the key thing that we all need to be doing is spread the word about how important children are and get people thinking about their own children and their own the schools that their children go to and what they're doing with their own children in their homes.
41:40
SPEAKER_19: And when they're when they're saying about, I don't know, when they're complaining about various political situations, say to them, well, you know what?
41:47
SPEAKER_19: What why is that happening?
41:49
SPEAKER_19: Get them to try and think.
41:50
SPEAKER_19: Well, what why are our young people the way they are?
41:53
SPEAKER_19: Maybe it has something to do with what they learned in school, what they're learning online.
41:57
SPEAKER_19: And, you know, just keep watching and keep spreading the news.
41:59
SPEAKER_19: Thanks, Calvin.
42:01
SPEAKER_19: Well, that's all we have time for today.
42:03
SPEAKER_19: I've got a school to run, you've got things to do.
42:05
SPEAKER_19: Until next time on Strictly Education, hold the line, strength and honor.
42:09
SPEAKER_19: Thanks for stopping by