Chalk & Change 5: Tim Oates – making things line up

“You can learn a great deal from Finland, but you have to get into a time machine.”

In this episode, we speak to Tim Oates, CBE. Tim was an education researcher and evaluator of youth training schemes, then worked at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, before joining Cambridge Assessment in 2006, where he was the Group Director of Assessment, Research and Development for almost 20 years. He’s currently a fellow of Churchill College, working with governments around the world on curriculum assessment. Most recently that’s included the curriculum review for Northern Ireland and work in Flanders.

His areas of expertise include:

• Assessment and international comparison,
• The role of textbooks,
• The successes of the Finnish education system and otherwise; and,
• What makes an effective curriculum.

Between 2010 and 2013, he chaired the expert panel reviewing the national curriculum in England.

We discussed:

• How confident we can be that students in England are learning more
• Why geography responded well to the National Curriculum Review, and how primary English became overloaded
• How he came to chair the expert panel for the National Curriculum Review
• Why reform of the geography curriculum worked so well
• The difference between borrowing policies and learning from other countries
• What’s working – and not – in Estonia, Finland, Singapore and Sweden
• The “very un-British idea” that we might be doing something right in England

The depth of Tim’s expertise and wisdom shone through his considered responses to every question.

You can listen to the episode on Spotify, or Apple Podcasts, or read the full transcript below, lightly edited for clarity.

Transcript

You spent almost 20 years at Cambridge Assessment. What did you do there?

It was a great 20 years. I joined in 2006. A couple of weeks before I joined, the then chief executive, Simon Lebus, said, “Come and have coffee in London.” I thought, “This is a very relaxed invitation.” It’d be nice to talk about aspects of education, what’s going on in Cambridge, and the work of Cambridge Assessment. I emerged with fear in my bones about the tasks that I’d been given.

I had a long list of things to do. Central to this was improving the nation’s understanding of assessment and qualifications. Also on the list was the idea of both enhancing assessment significantly, and influencing thinking about assessment – in schools, society, and government. This was a very, very challenging remit. I set about working with a group of researchers established in the organisation – experts in their field. They’d been head-down in improving the quality of assessment and qualifications. Suddenly we were working jointly on both improving quality and influencing policy and thinking. It was really challenging and very exciting.

I said assessment and qualifications, and that was the case at that time. We were focused on enhancing assessment and qualifications. Ultimately, that led to some big policy debates about where standards were going in England, which then fed into the reform of GCSEs and A levels more widely.

But after a very short period of time, I discussed with Simon the extent to which we should be thinking about curriculum as well as assessment. For many, many years in this country, groups of educators, people in subject associations and so on, had been the people focusing on curriculum. Then they had gone along to exam boards and said, “This is the curriculum, can you help us assess it?” That was all changing, and increasingly exam bodies were beginning to be involved in curriculum decisions and curriculum thinking.

By the time I left, we had an expansive portfolio of research work looking inwardly – at improving assessment, qualifications and curriculum – and outward at interacting with the international community on quality issues in assessment and curriculum.

What would you say were the big misconceptions you were trying to help policy-makers, exam boards, or whoever, overcome? Where were the knowledge gaps around assessment and qualification?

One of the key things that we worked very hard to shift was the fact that assessment was construed as being a very, very hard science, that few people were privy to. Whilst there was very, very good discourse across exam boards at that time — specialists wanting to sit in the same room and drill down into thorny issues of how you write good questions and how you manage standards over time. Other educators outside – teachers and policy-makers – felt that it was a black box; that it was highly technical and very difficult to talk and think about. What we wanted to do was open up assessment so there could, be a much wider discourse about it and much broader understanding.

There was a unit within my unit in Cambridge University Press and Assessment called the Network, that was devoted to improving wider understanding of assessment — getting underneath the cover in a way which was accessible. They enjoyed a great deal of success in that. We had different nations queuing at the door wanting the courses and provision they had developed. But it was very deliberate. We knew that it was a gap – we actually wanted assessment and qualifications to be more publicly accountable and for people to understand them more.

One of the reasons behind that was that there was some fear in the assessment community itself that issues like standards in qualifications – there was an idea that it should just run as a machine in the background, and that it would be difficult if too many questions were asked about it. I, a number of the people in my unit, and Simon Lebus didn’t think that way.

That’s why we opened up the standards debate, saying we were worried there was genuine evidence that standards in public qualifications were declining. The way we put it was that each year you can have a very small decline, 1-2%. That can derive from some very well-meaning policy decisions to make things more accessible, or to give the benefit of the doubt. [In my interview with Rob Coe, he described the process within the exam system by which this came about.] But 1-2% each year over twenty years is a great deal. By the time you’ve got there, it’s quite difficult to talk about. It has all the characteristics of a potential crisis.

In terms of international comparisons, Sweden got into that position over a 30-year period. Magnus Henrekson and Jävervall’s work — both economists — showed that Sweden had been suffering, for over three decades, an elevation in the grades given to students by teachers, but a decline in underlying standards. They had this very unfortunate conjunction of grade inflation, combined with a genuine decline in standards underneath. That did result in a national crisis. [I wrote a series of posts about declining standards in Swedish schools in 2016.] That was one of the big things: opening the lid on the black box.

I’ve been trying to get a grip on how far students are learning more than they did 15-20 years ago, which is deeply contested. Within the interviews I’ve done:

• John Jerrim said, “Yes,” if you put a gun to his head, maths had got better.
• Rob Coe said he thought not.
• Naturally, Michael Gove [forthcoming] and Nick Gibb both said things had.

What is your take? To what extent can we say with confidence that students in English schools are learning more than they were 15-20 years ago?

It’s a vital question. We spend a great deal of money on education. We want to know whether the policies that we have, and the policy changes we’ve made, have the effect that we intend. We want to see whether equity can be improved as well as attainment. So we have to know, and that in many ways has been a very personal project. It is challenging and demanding. You have to know that the instruments you use for measurement over time are comparable, or that you can ensure that even if the instruments change – as national qualifications do year on year – that you can equate the standards year on year.

We have some of the best people in the world doing that in England. There’s a great deal of work done domestically and, over the last 20 years, there have been some considerable improvements in that:

• We’ve seen good equating processes.
• We’ve had some revisions within the regulator in terms of the techniques they use for maintaining standards.
• We’ve had instruments added, like the National Reference Test, which is a very responsible addition to the things that we’ve got, within England, to tell whether standards are declining or improving over time.

We’ve then got the big transnational surveys, PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS. For all their limitations, they are very carefully put together, carefully managed, and some very responsible people do the analysis and the reporting. What do I conclude from looking through all of that evidence? I enjoy going through it in a great deal of detail.

Education never stands still. There are enormous pressures on young people, families, and schools. If we take a look across all of those sources, we can see that COVID had an enormous impact across different nations. It had a great impact on attainment in England. We are recovering to some extent from that. The fact that we saw things change, when there was this enormous change in our society and economy, and it was reflected in the things that we look at about attainment – that’s good. It suggests that the things we look at are sensitive to these changes.

One of the things I’ve mentioned is equity and attainment. Like Eric Hanushek, I think both can be improved. Very often policy trades one off against the other. You can make things more equal by lowering standards and you can improve overall attainment just by focusing on particular groups. The challenge is really effective policy which improves both.

The reliable sources of data that we have, through the transnational surveys and domestic sources, say that equality was improving prior to COVID up to 2018 – although it was beginning to show a slight downtick in 2018. In primary in particular – where we’d had interventions, including specification of standards, learning materials, and professional development, in literacy, reading, and mathematics – we had seen an improvement. So equity and attainment were rising. We hadn’t had any intervention in science, and that was pretty static. Again, that all seems to tie up. So I think we were improving. The dates coincided with interventions.

If you draw a timeline, put in the big interventions, and then look at the time when you think you might see an effect, there are a number of countries where we can read off the impact of particular policies. Portugal is a good example. The then minister, Nuno Crato, introduced new national tests. They saw a significant increase in grade retention in the following years – so more and more kids were being held back, because it’s a country in which retention is still in place. Then suddenly retention went back to the same level as it was prior to the tests being introduced. We can infer from that that standards had improved. Interestingly, when those particular tests were withdrawn, other measures showed a decline in standards.

So the two parts of your question:

• Have we got things that enable us to tell whether standards have improved? Yes, we have. We’ve got a range of sensitive instruments.
• And in England, had things improved prior to COVID? The answer is yes, where we had made interventions, particularly in primary.

I was struck by an argument you made in 2021: that part of this is other countries declining; even staying static represents progress. Do you want to say a bit more about that?

That applied particularly to literacy. What we’re seeing around the world is a genuine decline. In all key areas, the PISA data is showing a decline. There are lots of pressures on education, but literacy is particularly being affected by changing patterns in behaviours amongst young people in terms of breadth and type of reading. We also think, looking at the latest data on school readiness, there’s a shift in what’s happening in families prior to school, which is impacting literacy.

It’s essential that we continue to emphasise early reading. After all, the words you have available in your long-term memory determine, not only what you say, but what you think. Literacy is wonderful because you can read about a million worlds, but it’s fundamental to cognition – a major achievement in human society that we read and that we can effectively teach young children to read. What we’ve seen is this decline in reading literacy – a big hit again in terms of COVID.

England declined less than the other home nations of the United Kingdom, which is important. [I have looked at this comparison in detail.] In terms of our international rank, we improved very significantly, even though our scores didn’t improve significantly. So we’ve got these two things: our scores are not declining as rapidly as other nations, and the fact that we can sustain our performance, has meant that we’ve elevated our position within European nations in terms of reading.

The intervention you were particularly involved with was the National Curriculum Review, which began in 2010. What had gone wrong with the national curriculum up to that point?

Something did go wrong in 2008. Prior to that, there’d been a whole series of really good reviews. When we first had a national curriculum, after the Education Reform Act in 1988, everybody piled in because the national curriculum was where the action was. So we had these incredibly full subject specifications, and then the additional requirements of cross-curricular skills, economic understanding, core skills, and so on. It was our first attempt at a national curriculum, and my goodness me, was it full.

Ron Dearing did a great job, in 1994 and 1996, in refining the content of the national curriculum. He held rapid, focused, effective reviews which made the content more manageable and resolved some problems – for example, the relationship between national testing and GCSE.

The thing which brought me to the position of being asked to chair the expert group in 2010 was a piece I’d written on the 2008 drafting, which was odd. Things had gone wrong. If we were on a nice trajectory of improvement from 1988 onwards, through these reviews – in 2008 we had a new version produced which had really broken with that tradition. The number of statements shrank to an extraordinary extent. In science, for example, there was no mention of concepts like photosynthesis, or conservation of mass. That’s quite odd for a national curriculum. It meant that it would not be clear to schools what the legal requirement was in terms of what should be taught.

Before I wrote this article, I did speak with the officers at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA). They said, “It’s OK, the detail is in these things called schemes of work, these non-statutory documents.” I said, “Well, that means it’s not really law then – that’s the trouble.” [Nick Gibb described the problems he perceived at the QCA, and why it “had to go.”] One of the most critical things about the national curriculum is that it is the legal framework of what people should have access to. If it is not sufficiently detailed, then equity is at risk. Obviously, if it’s over-detailed, then it fills up too much time and space and becomes unmanageable.

Say the national curriculum doesn’t mention the need to understand and use metaphor in writing. Some kids will understand what metaphor is, and will use it in writing, because of what they’re doing at home. Others, who don’t have that opportunity – if it’s not in the national curriculum, despite it being absolutely essential – if it’s discretionary in schools, then there is a very strong risk that it won’t be available to them. That’s a big problem in terms of equity. I felt that such an outline, highly-generalised, generic set of statements in that version of the national curriculum ran terrible risks in terms of equity and attainment.

That led to me being asked to chair the expert panel. We all agreed – although there were some issues within the expert panel as we were doing the work about the level of specificity – that this idea of entitlement, and a clear expression of the content of the school curriculum was vital.

Some might take the view that reducing specification frees up teachers, or allows them to make choices tailored to their students. I assume there are other risks of these generic statements in terms of the burden they place on teachers?

You have to decide what you’re going to teach on a Monday. You have to design, for the term and for the year, a prospective school curriculum. If a national curriculum is too generic, and lacks an adequate level of specificity, then the workload for teachers escalates enormously.

That is a big debate in Estonia at this very time. They had a very nicely specified national curriculum built up over a long period of time. In the last five or six years, they’ve introduced a much more generic national curriculum, and asked schools to do a great deal more work. Even some of the elite schools, like the elite science school in Tallinn, have said, “This is a lot of work for us. This could be considered great professional discretion. We see it as a real problem.”

That’s at the heart of the revisions of the national curriculum in Northern Ireland at the moment. Getting the right level of specificity, delivering this concept of entitlement, and at the same time allowing professional discretion for teachers to design exciting learning programmes – but not overloading them, particularly in key content decisions.

You talked about tailoring to students. There’s a huge controversy which still rages in education about the extent to which education is about bringing out what is already in children, and the extent to which it is giving them stuff which we have accumulated as humans in the form of knowledge and skills. It’s a pretty fraught and fractious discussion. At its heart is contestation about what we think of childhood.

A couple of things that drive me. One is, “OK, let’s let kids follow their interests and follow what motivates them.” If we do that at the age of six or seven, then we’ll be guaranteed to have fewer girls studying science. There are all sorts of social pressures and rhetoric which reinforce gender stereotypes. Why would I be interested in physics if I’m a 7-year-old female, when many of the signs and signals in society are saying, “That’s not for you.”

You can see the extent to which that’s a real danger. It’s a risk for us as a society, and a risk for individuals – that things they are entirely capable of doing, or are interested in, but are afraid to say, because of other pressures, leads to them having a very restricted educational diet. That’s true of stereotypes which affect males as much as of stereotypes which affect females, and stereotypes and pressures which affect kids in particular circumstances.

This idea that children at a young age will enjoy education more if they follow their own interests is an extremely naive position, and a rather odd conception of childhood. Of course education needs to be enjoyable. It’s great if a child wants to go to school on a Monday morning. But that’s more about this role that teachers have, which is taking counterintuitive ideas – Michael Young and I believe that when you look through the school curriculum, the majority of what we want to learn is counterintuitive. As I often say, look out the window: it looks to me like this sun goes around the earth. The majority of what we want kids to learn at school is contrary to their everyday lived experience. But to do that, it has to be exciting and engaging.

If you have a national curriculum which lists clearly this stuff in and across subject disciplines, and leave it to teachers to design programmes which contextualise that in the right way for their kids, then you’ve got an effective education system.

In the run-up to the curriculum review, you published the paper ‘Could Do Better’. You’re very interested in comparisons with other effective countries. Who did you think we should be learning from, and why?

The word “learning: is very important, because there are people who say, “You can’t possibly take something from one country and then implement it in another. It just won’t work because of the culture and history and so on.” Naive policy borrowing is a problem.

If a minister does naive policy borrowing, what are they doing, as opposed to learning?

Let’s get in a plane to America, see the only private industry council which is working in America, be very impressed by what we’ve seen – and then fly back and give us the Training and Enterprise Councils. For any listeners who have no idea what they are – they didn’t last long. I’ve got a long list of these things. You can see that currently, in a couple of things around Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND). Education and Healthcare Plans (EHCPs), came from elsewhere. The latest “three levels of SEND support” is very much a model which you can see in Finland. All of those things have been implemented in ways which are insensitive to the context in which they were originally developed, and so have become problematic. Policy learning is seeing why things work in particular circumstances, and then thinking whether you can devise something, which can be very, very similar, versioned for your particular circumstances.

One of the things that was essential to the national curriculum review in 2010 fell absolutely into that category. That’s “fewer things in greater depth” in primary education. That’s characteristic of quite a few nations in Asia: it’s true of Japan and China. You spend a longer time on particular ideas in mathematics, science, or literacy, to make sure that every child has understood the idea, or has acquired the skill to a level appropriate to the next stage.

In Singapore, for example, much, much more time is spent on number bonds and number relationships. The national curriculum says, “You are going to spend this amount of time on the numbers 1-10.” Kids do – they spend much more time working with those numbers, with objects, and verbally-stated problems, and they’re very secure in number. They then worked on to 1-100, and then 1-1,000. It seems like a very stilted way of going through mathematics. “Surely if you understand place value, that’s the key thing? You don’t need to separate number out in this way.” No, the evidence is to the contrary. You should spend these long blocks of time on these ideas.

In Singapore, they spend a lot of time on the equals sign. Kids have a proper understanding of equals: if you’ve got something on one side of the equal sign, it is literally the same as the stuff on the other side. Whereas many kids, in systems where they don’t spend enough time on it, think that it’s a “getting” sign. “You do this and you get that.” The stuff on the other side is a complete mystery. No – the answer is in the stuff you can see on the other side of the equal side.

The fact they spend so much time on these ideas is important again for equity and attainment. Kids are not left behind. They don’t feel they can’t do it. They all feel part of a learning community. This is quite fundamental in Japan. That was something which we thought was fundamental to the structuring of curriculum, and to determining how much material should be in the primary curriculum.

We did use it to drive that drafting, even though perhaps we didn’t fully realise it in all subjects and some overload did arise. Fewer things in greater depth was there in Reynolds and Farrell’s report ‘Worlds Apart’, of 1996. It was there staring you in the face on the table from international comparisons, and we confirmed that again, and thought it was a very important principle that ran across nations.

Did you get pushback to say: “If I’m going to spend twice as long on the equal sign, what has to go?” Are we removing hinterland that’s less important ? Are we deferring other topics? Or are we saying that time on the equal sign allows other things to come into place more quickly and so we don’t need to devote as much time to them? What’s the trade-off being made there?

In terms of the work that we did during the national curriculum review in 2010–2014, it was interesting the way that different subject groups worked. The first national curriculum had too much in it, because everybody thought that if they didn’t have their stuff in it, it wouldn’t be taught. That tendency continues. Whenever you write a national curriculum, one of the first things you have to grapple with is overload. Even though we’ve used “fewer things in greater depth” as a guiding principle for subsequent curricular development, such as the work we’ve recently done in Flanders, the first drafts are always overloaded and you have to work hard. Some of the discussions are very tough.

Did certain things lose out? If you have an overloaded curriculum, then immediately things lose out, because teachers make local decisions about what they’re going to themselves leave, or treat on a cursory basis. If the overloading is too great, and all teachers know that they can’t teach the whole lot, so they make their own local decisions, a national curriculum is not working as a national curriculum at all. You’ve lost a grip on policy, and on the contract between state and schools at that point. So these tough decisions always happen.

The two bits which operate very strongly in a school curriculum are the idea of some fundamentals – core stuff which everybody has to have – and then some discretionary elaboration, which allows you to run a school in a particular context; which allows all of the activities of the school to be engaging, rewarding and exciting for kids. You have to have a discretionary element. Robin Alexander, in the Cambridge Primary Review, said about 60% of the content should be determined centrally, and 40% should be discretionary. It doesn’t pan out in a simple, formulaic way in our national curriculum or anywhere else. But that idea is important.

It’s there in Hannah Arendt’s very important 1954 paper, ‘The Crisis of Education’. She says that you should have a curriculum which focuses on fundamental elements of subject disciplines, and should enable every child to be equipped with these fundamentals, so that they can become critical participants in a future society. You shouldn’t go beyond these fundamentals, because if you do, you are in areas where – she would refer to it almost as “indoctrination” – that if you try and determine too much about a lived experience in schools, you are telling children what to think about absolutely everything.

Different subjects operated in different ways in the review. Geography – David Lambert’s work and the Geographical Association were great. They said, “It’s going to be tricky in terms of covering some bits of human geography. We are going to leave it until Key Stage 3. We’re not going to have it in Key Stage 2 and 1. We’ll probably do it in the context of Asia. That’s an arbitrary decision, but that will work.” It was great. It resulted in a very well-managed specification, at the right level of specificity.

In English, there was tremendous pressure to put more and more stuff in. We were left in 2014, when the new curriculum was implemented, with a primary curriculum in English that was overloaded. Over the first years of implementation, that became very clear. That came from some very last-minute pressures to put more stuff in. I wish we’d been able to resist that.

Pressures from whom?

It related very much to this issue: if you use the principle of fewer things in greater depth, then it looks like you’re spending an awfully long time on things. You want to see quite dramatic progression, year-on-year. The annexes put in huge amounts of progression, for example, in the use of language about language. It’s important that children know the difference between verbs and nouns. But then to elaborate that – rather than say “You’ve understood what a verb is, let’s look at different ways in which it can be used,” and encourage a wide range of application in writing. That was a mistake. There were justifiable claims from the profession that there was overload.

You wrote this piece for The Guardian – and you were asked to run the curriculum review. What happened in between? What’s the process whereby one is sounded out and appointed to lead an expert group like that?

That was interesting. The new curriculum arrived in my office in the hands of a colleague and he said, “Have you seen what they’ve done? We can write any qualification we want on the basis of this.” I said to this guy, Mark, “That’s probably not a good thing, is it?” He said, “No.” I went to see Simon Lebus, the chief exec, and I said, “Simon, this give examples huge amounts of carte blanche in terms of the content of qualifications.” He said, “That’s probably not right.” That gave rise to the Guardian article.

Then I gave a series of lectures around the country on curriculum theory, and where we were in the national curriculum. I kept on seeing the same names, which I didn’t recognise, on the end of the attendance sheets. It turned out they were indeed sounding out our position. I got an invitation a couple of days after the election had been won by the Coalition government to present international comparisons and curriculum principles. After that – I had been scrutinised. I was asked to lead the expert group.

The next bit, after we’d assembled the panel, was fascinating. I asked for twenty civil servants, and the then director said, “What twenty?” I said, “We’ve got to compare a whole series of jurisdictions — Hong Kong, Alberta, Massachusetts, Finland.” We had some really good, bright young civil servants carefully going through all of the national curricula, extracting the content, putting it into tabular form – big tables with all of the national curricula on them – looking at what was taught, when it was taught, how much time was spent on it. That resulted in some really thorough comparisons, and a very good report by Stefano Pozzi. We had a good handle on this issue of fewer things going out of depth, and then what should be in Key Stage 3 and what should be covered by national qualifications.

The work on textbooks also came out of that, because we couldn’t understand the published national curricula of countries like Singapore. It looked as though they’re really general. It was weird. You go on the website – “People like Oates go on about, if they’re too general, it’s problematic. But the national curriculum for Singapore looks pretty general to me.” But they’ve got state-approved textbooks – and they’re thick and they’re used in classrooms, flexibly and in a very sensitive way, but they’re used. So you’ve got this generic statement and then you’ve got these additional instruments.

We don’t have state-approved textbooks in England, so we need a different level of specificity in our legal framework. Again, that’s interesting because that reflects on this policy borrowing thing – if you just say “We want to be like Singapore, so we’ll have a national curriculum like them,” you won’t have picked up that they have all these intermediate documents, which teachers use to get to programmes on a Monday morning and for a given year, which are scrutinised by the state and are agreed as being the agreed content at the agreed pace.

Maybe that’s a good cue to introduce control factors. This is one of these things that gets missed in international comparisons: “Singapore don’t do X, and they do Y.” But you’ve missed accountability, training, and whatever else. How would you explain this idea of control factors and the need for alignment?

They’re really exemplified in an incident at an international conference in Singapore. We’d done some school visits and an American educator came back and stood up – in front of the hosts – and said, “I don’t believe what’s said about Singapore. I’ve been into this school and I spoke to the head, and there’s no action to integration in terms of different social groups. The head said, ‘We do nothing at all about social integration in our school, in terms of our entry.’ I don’t believe what’s said in Singapore.”

A couple of us said to him, quite quietly, that the reason there’s no entry criteria to the school is the social policy forces integration in the local housing. You go to your local school and then it will be mixed across different ethnic and income groups. This person had missed the full dimensions of policy which are enacted by the government to bring about what they want, which is high levels of social integration in schools.

The control factors came from way back – thirty years ago. I was concerned about this issue of policy borrowing and policy learning. How can you prevent policy borrowing? How can you – if you go to another country and you see something working – understand how and why it works, and all of the things which make it work? I looked at hundreds of bits of research on international comparisons, and at the factors they were looking at to explain the performance of education systems. Eventually we got to a list of fourteen. That example in Singapore would be an example of control factor 14: allied social measures.

The control factors says “These are the things about which you can have policy.” You can decide:

• How big your schools are.
• The configuration of your assessment.
• Whether you have a national inspection service, and you can use it for particular things.
• Accountability arrangements.

The word ‘control’ is that if you’re a politician or a policymaker, you can have a policy on them.

Then there are explanatory factors. An explanatory factor may well be, for example, that you’ve got an economy in crisis, or that you have a historical legacy which is limiting your development. A key factor in Iceland might be that some of it explodes. You have to keep your kids away from school for a number of months. There are explanatory factors about your education system behaving the way it is, which are not so amenable to control.

Together, control and explanatory factors help you go to an education system and say, “What’s in action here?” But the control factors also help you say, “If we’re not going to have a national inspection service, how can we guarantee that the things that would’ve happened if we had it still happen? Where else are we going to have it work? Are we going to have it through national assessment? Are we going to get local government to do it? Are we going to get schools to self-evaluate?”

The control factors are helpful in explaining a particular system, in understanding whether you’ve thought hard about things when you replicate something, and when you’re designing policy.

A clear case of using the control factors was when Maths Mastery was being developed in this country. I encouraged Lee Fei Chen – she very kindly came over to England to talk to the minister about the importance of professional development alongside learning materials. Maths Mastery has been very successful because of the quality of the curriculum content, curriculum materials, and professional development. That’s how the control factors can get you to a much better understanding of somewhere else, but also of your own context.

I find this helpful in understanding what has changed in England. To me it looks like the reforms because they were sustained enough and broad enough – we have changes to inspection, to school structures, things like the early career and initial teacher training framework. To what extent would you think that English school reforms have taken account of the need to work strategically through all the control factors?

Certainly, I’ve been privy to periods of government when that’s been done extremely well. At their best, civil servants are great at helping ministers understand, “If you do this, these other things need to be in place. If you do that, it will be affected by these other things.” You’ve got to think about the linkages – wise civil servants are very good at that.

Interestingly, Graham Stewart, at the select committee, accused Michael Gove of being “hyperactive”. [The word was actually the Guardian‘s, in their gloss on Stewart’s reports on Gove’s work.] Certainly, it was a period when Michael Gove had his mind fixed on all those things that you described, and they were all being changed simultaneously, But that was being done quite consciously in light of the control factors: you have to make things line up.

Scotland didn’t line up. It’s now acknowledged – Mark Priestley’s work and indeed the Scottish Executive, the first minister himself recognises – that there was a failure to align curriculum and qualifications in Scotland. Qualifications do dominate the last few years of Scottish schooling. They did not line up well. It’s led to very, very serious problems in Scotland.

Likewise, Sweden, felt during the 1970s onwards, that they could improve quality right the way across the peace by improving competition and parental choice in the system. They relaxed so many instruments: national testing, inspection, state-approved materials and textbooks. [More on this process in another post of mine on policy reforms in Swedish schools.] They thought that the competitive mechanism would deliver on all aspects of quality. It didn’t, and they have understood in the last 5-10 years how much those other things – instruments which allow national standards to be understood and managed, inspection being a key part of the system, a key feedback loop – those have all been reintroduced and ramped up again.

The analogy I have in my own mind is, it’s like an old-fashioned railway control box, with a whole series of levers in front of you. You have to pull them to the right extent to make it all work. Is that happening now? That’s a good question. It’s very easy for things to go out of sync. From 2010, there was meticulous attention paid to how those control factors lined up and having adequate policy in each of them.

I liken it to a Napoleonic-era warship: if you turn the wheel, every sail has to be trimmed accordingly.

We’ve talked about Sweden. You mentioned this is almost a party piece, but it’s one that still perhaps not everyone is familiar with. Finland was held up as an example for many years, and in some ways arguably misunderstood, because people looked at Finland and they saw what they wanted to and perhaps missed other control factors. What can and can’t we learn from Finland?

It’s a big one, isn’t it? Plenty has been written. After Gabriel Heller-Sahlgren and I published blogs, and he did the brilliant pamphlet ‘Real Finnish Lessons’. We did a series of lectures and presentations. Some people are well aware that there were misconceptions about Finland after that very high performance in PISA in 2000 and in the following couple of PISA rounds. But then they started to decline, and our explanations explained that decline.

You can learn a great deal from Finland, but you have to get into a time machine, and go back to the period when they were improving – because they were right at the top of their trajectory in 2000. It’s been downhill since 2006 – and dramatically. The kids in 2000 were 15, because that’s when they get measured in PISA. Already the seeds of that decline – the decline from 2006 – were sown during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The time that Finland is interesting is the 1960s-1980s, because that was their steep period of really impressive improvement. What they were doing then was totally different to what they were doing in the 1990s. Going to Finland in 2000 saying “What are you doing?” is completely the wrong question. If you say, “We should do what Finland is doing,” or did in the 2000s, then you are making a terrible mistake. One of the things that people didn’t realise, or didn’t ask about ,was the level of school closures in Finland. Wait for it, Harry: they closed 2,300 schools. Bearing in mind the population of Finland is a tenth of that of the United Kingdom, that’s like closing 20,000 schools.

Which is almost all of them.

Imagine what would happen if you were to do that? They were closed for good reasons: some of them were very small, it was for economic reasons and so on, but don’t tell me it didn’t have an impact. They changed their curriculum and assessment approaches, their approach to teacher training. State-approved textbooks had stopped by the early ’90s. Those changes are associated with decline. Sure, they were in place in 2000, but they’re associated with the decline.

I’d been asked by Joel Moors, the producer on the The Educators, to talk with Sarah Montague about the next series. She asked me a series of questions. I said, “These questions are just rubbish. You’ve got to understand the bigger picture. This is the bigger picture.” She said, “Really? So everything I’ve been told about Finland is wrong.” I said, “Well, yeah.”

Joel phoned me up about six months later and said, “I forgot to tell you, the programme’s on tonight. Sarah asked the director of education in Helsinki, ‘What do you think about this proposition of Tim Oates and a couple of other people that the lessons from Finland as it is now are wrong?'” I was terrified, because I’ve done all this work on Finland and said, “It’s a misunderstanding that you should do what Finland is doing now, you should be interested in what Finland was doing 20-40 years before.” I thought, “What’s she going to say?” The direct of education in Helsinki said, “Oh yes, that’s right.”

Those predictions have been borne out as we’ve seen the later PISA rounds – because you were saying this ten years ago – you couldn’t have seen from the trend in results at that time.

That’s correct.

Is there anything that I’ve not asked you about that you think is particularly important?

One of the things that is pretty clear about the state of discussion around the curriculum at the moment is something that some people find very uncomfortable – but people are quite interested in England because things have improved. Here we are with reading improving in schools – or rather literacy not crashing as much as it is in nations. We’ve seen these improvements in achievement. We’ve got a lot of people interested in what we’ve done. It’s a very un-British idea that we might be doing something right and other people will be interested in it, but they are. We’ve got countries queuing up to understand what’s happened.

From that we can draw some very important principles about the importance of discipline knowledge within curricula, getting the sequencing right, the importance of early reading. There are many technical things that I’m obsessed by in curriculum and assessment, which I could gone about for a very long time. But Ithe thing which I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about is what’s happening with very young children.

There’s quite a tricky thing that [Public Health England] has produced. It says, “Ready to learn by two, ready for school by five.” I know they don’t mean it, but “ready for learning by two” – you’ve got most of the foundational learning. A very young baby learns to look at the eyes of another human being when they’re communicating. Kids have learned to walk, talk, think – engaging with the world. Ready to learn by two – they’ve done most of the important stuff. Then we’ve got to get all the formal stuff going. So that’s a tricky phrase.

Indeed, Michael Gove, in a couple of interviews, said that the thing that he would’ve done differently particularly was stuff about early years. In the Institute for Government report a while ago, I wrote that the decline of funding to Sure Start was a major problem. We are seeing school readiness decline. This recent Savanta report says that teachers are spending over [two hours a day] responding to children who are not school ready. This is a big deal. COVID hit society very hard. Some of the patterns that were set up in the earlier experience of kids and families have continued.

We find it quite tricky to talk about what’s happening in families. But the school system makes all sorts of assumptions that children arrive with certain things already established: a sense of number-object correspondence, the ability to work collaboratively, and to follow instructions. The fact that we are seeing objective decline in these things is a very serious matter, and is leading to terrible stresses amongst educators of young people. And it’s leading to problems for all young people, because if you’ve got three kids in a group who are struggling with what’s being asked off them and disrupting the learning experience for others, it’s a problem for everybody.

Last question. You’ve been working with Flanders and the government of Northern Ireland. What have you taken from what you’ve seen in England to inform the work that you’re doing? Are the things that you’re doing differently this time round?

In terms of the control factors, we talk about the importance of coherence across the different control factors:

• Your assessment has got to be aligned to your curriculum.
• Your inspection has got to be aligned to the curriculum assessment.
• The supply of teachers has to be commensurate with the expectations of curriculum.

Alignment across control factors is all-important. Those are playing out differently in Flanders and in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland has got a brilliant strategy – TransformED – which is an extremely impressive ten-dimension plan of reform. I’m involved in the curriculum strand and I’m just finishing the report on the assessment strand. There’s another report been produced on qualifications. It uses this idea of you need to attend to all of the dimensions of your education system. It’s very ambitious, but it’s really impressive.

In Flanders, the government is now waking up to the fact they’ve got a new curriculum: now what’s needed to make sure it’s embedded properly? They’ve done it the other way round. They’re also understanding that you have to have alignment between curriculum, assessment, professional development, and so on.

The things we are bringing across from one to the other: we are very sensitive to the differences in governance of schools. In Flanders, there’s very strong groupings of schools that are run by the church. In Northern Ireland, the governance and configuration of schools is very different.

The key thing is that if you’ve got a reform, you need to know how it’s going. In Finland, they had grade tests every year for a period of time – and then stopped them when they knew that the new national curriculum had landed properly, during the 1980s. Assessment is fundamental and you have to get stuff from the system as to whether your reforms are having the right impact.

What we’ve done with our recommendations around assessment in Northern Ireland is emphasise the role of assessment in providing information on the progress of every child, so you can support every child’s educational and personal development. We’ve tried to avoid the very strong association that we’ve got in England between assessment and accountability. Whilst we’ve emphasised the importance of the state having information that enables it to understand what’s happening in terms of equity and attainment, and to understand the impact of its reforms, we have tried to avoid anything which will create the same kind of very negative view of state-administered assessment which we’ve seen arise in England. It would be good not to have this very strong antipathy towards assessment that we have in England.

Tim Oates, thank you very much.

Harry, it’s been great. Thank you very much indeed. Thanks for the opportunity.