What really improves children's learning?
What are the best bets for improving the learning of children? Last week's annual league tables for schools, revamped to reveal a richer range of data on pupil's results, once more raise this fundamental question for teachers, parents and politicians alike.
If you measured educational importance by columns of news print, calls from ministers, or even the convictions of many teachers, then the following reforms would emerge as the most likely to improve results: smaller class sizes; new types of schools; new head teachers; more homework; more teaching assistants; more money for schools for all of the above.
Yet, they are not. These things pale into insignificance when compared with what really matters. We obsess over an enduring list of education myths that hold false promises to boost attainment. And then we wonder why standards have in truth remained unchanged for generations - despite the extra billions poured into schools.
We speak little about the issues that can dramatically improve learning. By far the best hope for better results is to improve the quality of teaching in the classroom. What matters most is the interaction between teacher and pupil. All else is, well, academic.
I can tell you this with such confidence as we now have the numbers behind this pedagogical wisdom. This is thanks to one of the modern wonders of the education system. That wonder is the Pupil Premium toolkit. Published by the Sutton Trust, and developed by Professor Steve Higgins and colleagues at Durham University, this is a Which style guide showing schools which broad approaches work best at improving attainment of pupils. It is aimed at poorer pupils who will attract the Premium funding, but most of the findings apply universally to all children.
Based on reviews of robust educational research from across the world, the toolkit compares the cost-effectiveness of different approaches available to schools. What makes the toolkit so accessible to teachers is that these research findings are translated into practical, concise language: comparisons are made in the extra months of development seen in children if approaches are adopted and delivered effectively. The point is not to tell teachers what to do, but to get them to think about the research evidence, and make informed judgments about what to pilot in their own school.
The toolkit has proved incredibly popular among schools. But I always take a nervous gulp before presenting the findings to groups of head-teachers. They can be both shocking and challenging for even the most successful school leaders.
Reducing class sizes has in fact little impact on learning, unless pupil to teacher ratios are dramatically reduced. Overall, teaching assistants add zero to the attainment of children: billions of pounds of public money is currently spent on a workforce that has no discernible effect on school results.
Ability grouping in class meanwhile has little impact on overall results: the gains of children in high ability groups are outweighed by the losses of those in low ability groups. Parents also have some humbling news: homework during primary school has little or no impact on attainment (although it does during secondary school). One-to-one tuition works but is relatively expensive.
On the other hand, if delivered well, "effective feedback" can boost learning by an extra nine months in an academic year. By effective feedback I mean shifting fundamentally how teachers approach their work in the classroom - understanding where their pupils are in relation to learning goals, adapting their teaching in response, and planning how to plug the learning gaps.
Teachers spend surprisingly little time discussing what happens behind their own classroom door. Too often teachers perceive feedback as a one way street, when the most valuable information is to be found from the pupils themselves. And too often feedback from teachers is unfocused - simply urging pupils to do more of the same.
The example of feedback highlights one of the central messages of the toolkit - what Prof Higgins coins the "Bananarama principle": it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it that counts. This simple point is often lost in education, as it is often the hardest challenge of all. If it was easy to introduce effective feedback, then of course it would have been done already. The same applies to other star performers in the toolkit such as peer-to-peer tutoring and "learning to learn" (metacognitive) strategies which are also associated with large gains in attainment.
The challenge is how to take these tips and turn them into sustainable change in the lessons and classrooms of every school. And this is the dream driving the new £125 million Education Endowment Foundation. The aim is to build on the toolkit's evidence by trialling innovative schemes for poorer pupils in English schools and evaluating them to see whether they work and how they should be best implemented. The hope is that teachers in future will have their eyes on the evidence. Only then will we have a chance to deliver the rising results we all yearn for.
Dr Lee Elliot Major is Director for Research and Policy at the Sutton Trust, and chair of the evaluation advisory panel for the Education Endowment Foundation.
See Dr Elliot Major's presentation about the power of feedback.
Other useful links
The Sutton Trust's Pupil Premium toolkit on the EEF website.
For reviews on the use of feedback, see:
John Hattie's review of the evidence on what constitutes effective feedback
See Dylan Wiliam's paper 'Scaling up formative assessment'
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