Thoughts from the Study...

It is a very difficult time to be a parent in a world that is changing so quickly. The tools of technology are now held by your children, who can manage things with your mobile, your laptop, your remote control at which you can only marvel. Peer pressure, the recession and competition can become an inordinate pressure for parents and children when they should be enjoying their formative years at school. Thank goodness that The Prep, with all its foibles and idiosyncracies remains an island of calm and good sense in an uncertain world.

Since 2004 Peter Tait has been capturing his thoughts on the joys and frustrations of running a school and of educating and raising children in the 21st century. If you would like to read his musings please download here 'And What's More ...'.

Measuring Intelligence

"My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors."

Maya Angelou

"We are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist, using technologies that haven't been invented, in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet."

Karl Fisch - "Did You Know"

"SIR - Our goal as educators is surely to equip children with the necessary skills and capacities that will enable them to thrive in the future and be happy, confident citizens of the world. How does one examine that?"

Letter to The Daily Telegraph, 6th January, 2012 John Brett, Headmaster, Old Buckenham Hall School Brettenham, Suffolk.

With the examination system under public scrutiny, it is timely to ask why we persist in measuring our children in such narrow and limited ways. While acknowledging that the examination remains a very important method of assessing learning, our traditional reliance upon exams as the sole measure of assessment is outdated. When Paul Nurse, director of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and winner of the Nobel prize for medicine in 2001, reflected that he was 'never very good at exams, having a poor memory and finding the examination process rather artificial' and that 'there never seemed to be enough time to follow up things that really interested me," he was giving voice to the frustrations in a system that was not only static and retrograde, but which has often stifled the creative gene and denied those students whose work ethic, intelligence and curiosity were never properly assessed.

Simply teaching students a requisite body of knowledge and dressing this up as education, is no longer enough. We all know people who know a great deal, but cannot use this mountain of knowledge other than to opine. In a novel based on the life of Katherine Mansfield, C. K. Stead wrote in the person of Bertrand Russell, 'people of my sort . . . have a lot to unlearn. Too much is laid on us too early. We grow up fettered." There is much to be said for not cluttering the mind, freeing it from both trivia and dogma, and encouraging it to think and question, rather than to learn and accept.

In a world awash with data we need, therefore, to place more emphasis on thinking creatively and on recognising the other forms of intelligences. We need to change our understanding of how we define and measure our children, and appreciate that there are other intelligences, equally as important. We need to recognise that a skill in passing exams often hides any number of other deficiencies, including social, spatial or kinaesthetic intelligence.

So how do we measure what our students need: the ability to discriminate from a sea of information, available at the touch of a screen; the ability to deduce and develop their critical faculties; the ability to synthesise and analyse; to prioritise and to précis information and to express oneself coherently and accurately with knowledge and argument, in written and spoken form? Sometimes we see the intellect most clearly in debate or discussion, in communication with others and through collaborative learning. How do we measure such things?

Until we arrive at some better way of doing so, our children will continue to be assessed by a flawed and discredited examination system that lacks transparency, but which measures them against a skills-set so narrow as to be of minimal use outside of academia. That needs to change.

Peter Tait, Headmaster MA, FRSA

February 2012

Public Examinations on Trial

"Exams are ruining children's time at school"

Professor Mick Waters, former schools adviser, 4th January, 2012

"Students learn to pass, not to know

They do pass, and they don't know"

Thomas Huxley (attrib)

"If we have to have an exam at eleven, let us make it one for humour, sincerity, imagination, character - and where is the examiner who could test such qualities?

A S Neill

As the problems with public exams rumble on, with allegations of collusion between examiners and teachers, it is not surprising that there has been a public loss of confidence in the ways we assess our pupils. The revelations of the seminars held for those who can afford and choose to attend in search of a few meagre pearls of information that examiners cast before paid-up audiences is yet further evidence of the impact league tables have had upon schools, and the inordinate pressures placed upon teachers to deliver results measured solely by examination marks. No system is ever totally fair, of course, being dependent as they are on postcodes, the ability of families to buy advantage indirectly by shifting to areas where there are high-performing schools or directly, by moving to independent schools, employing tutors or accessing whatever help or advice is for sale. Parents, naturally, will go out on a limb to seek advantage for their children, a quest made more singular, more stressful, by the pressure for university places and jobs. But it is in our interests to ensure that any system of assessment is as fair as possible and that any examination tries to do rather more than assess prior learning.

The problem is compounded by the fact that our system of public examinations is run by independent providers, each competing for a share of the market place. Recent errors in the setting and marking of examination papers have not helped public confidence. Inevitably, mark schemes have become increasingly prescriptive, seldom allowing for the type of originality or divergent thinking that universities are crying out for, a trend that would be further exacerbated if the recent suggestion of Barnaby Lenon, former headmaster of Harrow for exam boards to make greater use of multiple choice questions in exams was taken seriously. Too often, one hears of teachers dissuading their students from taking intellectual risk - a throw back to university courses where lecturers often wrote the textbooks and from which you deviated at your peril - only now, it is the examiners who write the course books. The idea of formulaic preparation for exams, and the oft-quoted argument that if it is not likely to be examined, then don't bother learning it, runs through much of our teaching and is a canker in our schools.

There are several steps we could take to improve the status quo. We could, for instance, look at reducing the importance of exams by improving the reliability and integrity of summative assessment; we could consider setting up a National Examinations Board to help improve standards and remove the overt commercial interests that have tainted some of their operations. We could develop mark schemes that encourage initiative and encourage more transparent feedback by returning examination scripts to students, as happens elsewhere in the world. But more important, we could - and should - question the purpose of the exams themselves and whether they are fit for purpose or whether they are measuring students by adhering to criteria that have little relevance outside of academia. Otherwise, we will just keep producing students good at passing examinations, but without the skills and creativity necessary for tomorrow's world and with a dulled appetite for life-long learning - the worst possible outcome for our children.

Peter Tait

Headmaster January 2012

The Parent-Teacher Accord

For schools to do their job, there needs to exist between teachers and parents an accord based on trust, confidence and the pursuit of a common purpose, usually that of providing the very best education possible for their children.

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Don't Tell Me What To Read

"British teenagers slumped from 17th to 25th place in an international league table for reading standards." December 2010

"We should be saying that our children should be reading 50 books a year, not just one or two for GCSE." Michael Gove

"Forcing children to plough through a list of "worthy" texts is not the way to instil a passion for reading.' David Hanson IAPS

"You want weapons? We're in a library! Books, the best weapons in the world. This room's the best arsenal we could have." David Tennant as Doctor Who

Michael Gove's announcement in March that he wished to raise the bar of children's reading and that children as young as 11 years should complete the equivalent of one novel a week stimulated a good deal of discussion in the media. A number of columnists applauded the attempt to place reading at the heart of the revival in educational standards and agreed with the need for a more methodical approach to measure reading in our schools; others, however, including The Children's Laureate, Anthony Browne were not convinced that this was the best way of raising reading standards or encouraging children to read:

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Streaming, Setting and Selection

Streaming: When pupils are put in a selected class for all subjects based on a judgement of their general academic ability and potential.

Setting: When children are placed in classes for individual subjects depending on their ability in that subject.

Selective School: When a school selects its students by an assessment of their academic ability and / or potential on intake.

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A Glossary to reading A Levels and GCSE:

Each year, A Level and GCSE results from local schools are published in the Blackmore Vale and Western Gazette to inform the public of how well their schools have done and to celebrate the success of the students. The only problem for members of the public is often trying to make sense of the different criteria used by each school as they try to show themselves to best advantage. With A levels, for instance, some schools use the percentage of A* and A grades, other A* - B grades, others, A* - C grades while a few just give a raw percentage with no reference to grades at all. That is before the idea of IB equivalent grades are included or account taken of schools that are selective to a greater or lesser degree, do selective culling of pupils at GCSE or prefer to follow the lead of Michael Gove by measuring their success by their Oxbridge results.

GCSE results are similarly fraught with schools using different measures of success with some local schools advertising their results based on A* and A while other use A* - B which can (and does) confuse readers. As a rule look for patterns over time and best / worst results to get an idea of range commensurate with intake at each school. More important, always, is knowing your child is meeting their potential. Schools can now measure and provide results relative to their baseline assessments and can therefore show how well the students are meeting or exceeding their academic potential and this is the information that is hugely more valuable (but rarely provided). If judging schools by exam results only, proceed with caution, ensure that you are comparing like with like and remember that all schools will put the best spin they can on how well they have done.


Old Preppers' Results: Each year, we try to gather as many A Level and GCSE results from Old Preppers as possible. If any parents and friends can let me know of impressive achievement by our old preppers, please do let us know. So far, I have heard at A Level of Ben Craw (3 x A, Sherborne School) and Robin Hawkins (3 x A, King's Bruton), at AS, Iram Hasan 4 x A grades and at GCSE Katie Morse (10 x A*), Fleur Morris (7 x A* plus 3 x A), both Sherborne Girls and Emma Tremewan (10 x A*), Siobhan Stewart (7 x A* including full marks in the three single science papers (Leweston)

Peter Tait, Headmaster September 2011

Too Far, Too Soon

"School trips are an essential part of every child's education and by not finding a way to make them happen we are failing in our duty to prepare them for life." Judith Hackitt, NASUWT Conference, 2011

"It is wrong to wrap children in cotton wool as they grow up. Trips and getting out of the classroom should be part and parcel of school life and always give the most people's most vivid childhood memories." Ed Balls, Conference for Outdoor Learning, Greenwich, 2008

"Health and safety is one of the main issues. It's impossible to take large groups anywhere really interesting, so coursework is limited to local areas and small-scale studies." Comment to an ISI inspector from a 16 year old geography student

"The School takes pupils on many excursions abroad each year, and has recently visited Japan, China, North America, South America, Tanzania, Canada, Germany, Italy, South Korea, South Africa, Tunisia, Malta, Egypt, Greece, Cyprus, Namibia & Botswana, Kenya, Spain, Brunei, Spain, Australia & New Zealand, and the Himalayas." Leading Independent School Website

A recent report that tells of declining numbers of children visiting some of our major cultural and historical institutions, particularly the great art galleries and museums, makes disturbing reading. Recent figures released this week suggest that thousands of children are missing out on visiting such national institutions as York's National railway Museum, London's Science Museum and the Natural History Museum because of funding cuts. Further, twelve field study centres are about to close because of cuts to local funding with many others under threat.

Until recently, health and safety and the need for exhaustive risk assessments have shouldered most of the blame for deterring teachers from taking children out of school. In making these decisions, teachers were encouraged by teaching unions who advised members against leading trips for fear of being sued should anything go wrong. As the recession has started to dig deeper, however, it is more often financial reasons that are cited. The average cost of residential school trips rose fivefold between 2002 and 2007, and while the rate of increase has slowed, the damage has been done. Schools and families, both under the financial cosh, no longer have the wherewithal to cope with such extras additions to school and family budgets, especially as so many trips are now tendered out. Partly to protect themselves, schools have come to rely on companies to organise their trips and excursions, which in turn has led to fewer students being able to afford the opportunity to see life out of the classroom. As well as the demands of time required to plan such trips, students also have more grandiose views on what a school trip should be. Sadly the days of travelling by coach, of packed lunches and fending for oneself in self-catering hostels with all the commensurate social and practical benefits are no longer, not just because of a lack of imagination and energy, but because of the constraints of bureaucracy and time.

The same malaise is evident in trips abroad. Apart from trips for field work or to our great galleries and museums, many schools make use of the proximity of Europe for such purposes as studying the battlefields of World War One or for studying foreign languages. Such trips should be encouraged and can be done prudently with some careful planning and assistance from companies

By way of contrast, there is an increasing trend for wealthier schools - mainly independent schools - to treat the world as their classroom. Reading prospectuses and magazines from such schools is like reading a fist full of travel brochures, full of the remote and exotic. In a recent letter to the Daily Telegraph (14 May, 2011) one teacher recounted that he had driven a minibus with nine pupils aboard to play matches in Manchester and Wakefield. Of the nine, all had been to Europe, eight had been to South Africa, six had visited Australia or New Zealand and three had visited the Caribbean, all on previous school trips. Only two had been to Lancashire and one to Yorkshire, neither through the school . Sadly, while each trip has its justification, often philanthropic to help communities in the third world, one wonders about the effect of showing children so much of the world before they have learnt to pay their way in it. In the worst instances, some such trips smack of neo-colonialism or paternalism, at best. It is hard to escape the feeling that while students have been privileged so visit exotic parts of the world, and no doubt gained a great deal from the experience, many would benefit from staying at home and seeing a little more of their own country. Such indulgences by schools, and the pressures they place on their parents to fund them need to be considered very carefully indeed. After all when children aged 12 and 13 go on cricket tours to South Africa or New Zealand, you do wonder what is left.

"Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation"
Elizabeth Drew

Common Entrance: Fatally Flawed or Fighting Fit

Conference at Wellington College Friday 11 February 2011

What's the Problem: A Prep School Perspective

Where do we start?
The first problem is that here we are, once again, in 2011 still debating the pros and cons of Common Entrance - hence this conference and all the recent articles and meetings dealing with the same old issues: the problems of demand and supply, the problems wrought by schools that are unnecessarily and unreasonably selective, the costs of transfer in time and money, the culture of teaching to the test, the fact that through laziness and convenience, we have turned a syllabus into a curriculum. And so on.

Or perhaps it is a question of inertia, that we have not been bold or adventurous enough to question what we teach and why we teach it. And in this room, during this day, undoubtedly lines will be drawn and sides taken.

Frank Zappa is quoted somewhere as saying that 'people will agree with you only if they already agree with you'. I feel a bit like that every time Common Entrance is debated. Sometimes it is a little like arguing whether the ark was built of gopher wood or cypress - or if they are one and the same. Does it really matter? Isn't there something bigger going on?

Which is actually what I'd rather concentrate on.

Martha Nassbaum, in her forthcoming book 'Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities,' writes

"We are in the midst of a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance. I do not mean the global economic crisis that began in 2008; I mean a crisis that goes largely unnoticed, but is likely to be, in the long run, far more damaging to the future of democratic self-government: a world-wide crisis in education
Radical changes are occurring in what democratic societies are teaching the young, and these changes have not been well thought through. Thirsty for national profit, nations, and their systems of education, are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive. If this trend continues, nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful, docile, technically trained machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition and understand the significance of another person's suffering and achievements"

It is not the problem of how we manage transfer from one part of our sector to another that matters. That is - or should be - a relatively straightforward process.

The problem is that our traditional ways of educating and measuring children needs re-visiting.

Common Entrance should not sidetrack us from the more important issues facing us as a sector. Its original function of being the gateway into senior schools has changed significantly and we all accept that there are better, more reliable measures available. And yet, for many prep and senior schools, it still serves a purpose which may be selection or setting, of giving structure to year 7 and 8 or to provide a raison d'etre for the marketing of schools. All of which are fine. My concern, however, is that with any discussion of Common Entrance, it is too often a matter of the tail wagging the dog whereby the exam is determining how and what we teach. And that is wrong.

The Problem is in part due to a lack of vision, a lack of imagination, an absence of any awareness as to what the future holds. We should be responding to the national curriculum individually as well as collectively - and yet, as of yesterday, there had been no response at all from prep schools to the new curriculum review call for evidence. We should also be protecting the integrity of our subjects. This does not mean working harder, because, frankly, our students cannot compete internationally by that means alone, but we should be, could be, working smarter.

The problem is we are hitting the wrong spots. For instance, my school, like many now, uses midYIS and find that our lowest marks are in the skills assessment. Interestingly a senior school we send a number of pupils to have, likewise, identified skills as a major weakness with children from across all their feeder schools, pupils fine in verbal, non-verbal and comprehension, but weak in this crucial area, the product in part of an exam culture that promotes an ethos of teaching to the test. They have now introduced classes specifically to address the shortcomings - proofreading, perceptual speed and accuracy. Things we should be doing. We've got to get our pupils thinking more, to teach pupils to solve problems and to reason on their own.

Problem is that in Common Entrance we have created a cash-cow. Most schools now make their pre-selections then use Common Entrance to rubber-stamp places. It is recognised that Common Entrance needs a major overhaul and the examination board, ISEB, is responsive to change. But because senior schools don't have to prepare or pay for the exam, supervise it or justify their marking of it, it is too easy for them to just accept what is. When it was mooted to the ISEB Board that senior schools should pay the £100 fee per pupil for the Common Entrance exam, (£10,000 for every 100 pupils) just as they pick up the tab for other entrance exams ranging from scholarships to entry tests from local primary schools, the suggestion was met by a stony silence. Yet I suspect if they did so, they would look at the exams more critically and become more engaged in the debate regarding the vehicles of transfer to ensure they were getting value for money

The problem is one of integrity - we listen to the concerns expressed by HMC about Edexecel being part of the Pearson publishing group and yet are growing a flourishing partnership between ISEB and Galore Park which we need to manage carefully. ISEB needs to represent the best interests of its member schools, its customers as well as its constituent associations. It does not always do so.

We know what many senior schools want - they want us to prepare our pupils in a way that will enable them to get the best results possible at A Levels which will be reflected in the league tables five years on.
In many instances, prep schools are expected to get pupils beyond GCSE standard on arrival so they can go on and get their clutch of Oxbridge places.
Which is fine so long as prep schools are not expected to push pupils beyond their comfort zone or compromise their broader education and well-being.

Some of these highly selective schools, rife as they are with eating disorders, mental and depressive illness and a commensurate fall-off in student performance in their first year at university should come with a health warning. And judging by the widening of access on social grounds announced this week, it may all be for naught when their best chance of a university place might not be the number of A* at all, but where they come from and the opportunities life has afforded them.

Thankfully, though most senior schools, as those gathered here, want prep school children with a good work ethic, curiosity, a sound body of knowledge and skills and a sense of responsibility for their own learning. Sometimes, they just go about selecting them the wrong way.

Actually, we worry too much about what senior schools want. They will tell us they have their own issues dealing with IB, A Levels, modular versus linear, the Cambridge PreU and would like a little more lead from us in the KS3 curriculum.

We need to challenge our assumptions. The fact that we have a common exam is always trumpeted as a strength. Interesting, then, that Helen Wright, president of GSA called this week for universities to have their own entrance tests arguing
'I'm not sure that (A Levels) have ever been good enough for universities and it is quite right for universities to be specific about certain skills that they require and to have their own tests as a result.'
Which begs two questions. The first is the necessity for a common exam at Year 8, especially if a pre-test is adopted by schools; and the second, whether it should be us identifying and developing those 'certain' skills that the universities require?

Instead of allowing the constraints of A levels to be visited upon our children, we should be listening to what employers and universities are saying. Employers will tell you what they want, loud and unequivocally - good communications skills, analytical skills, computer literacy, better inter-personnel skills, an independent work ethic, initiative and ideas.

Likewise, the universities. A year or so ago, I wrote to the Russell group of universities asking what they saw as the major weaknesses of students arriving at their doors and what we, as junior schools, could do about it. Their responses were very illuminating.

Bristol bemoaned the drilling of pupils to pass the test and the fact that students were given highly detailed essay frameworks which required little independent thinking. Literary skills were often taught from extracts and not enough emphasis was given to reading for pleasure and sustained reading

Oxford mentioned a lack of self-discipline and good organisation skills
the absence of intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm
Edinburgh bemoaned the failure of some of their students in being able to write in coherent sentences.
Newcastle had launched various initiatives to develop writing skills to improve accuracy in grammar, spelling and punctuation and develop appropriate vocabulary and style.
Birmingham argued the need to develop active learning skills.
King's College London focused on the difficulties of students moving from schools where learning is planned, closely monitored and evaluated for them by their teachers to environments where they have to plan, monitor and evaluate large portions of learning by themselves.
The Imperial College in London was strongly supportive of 'efforts within schools to improve standards of English including spelling, poor sentence construction and punctuation and to encourage the development of study and thinking skills
And so on.
I would suggest there is plenty for us there for prep schools to get their teeth into, along with the soft skills that employers are screaming out for without compromising the academic standards we all aspire to.

As you will know, ISEB are launching common pre-tests in autumn 2011. These standardised, on-line tests will assess verbal, non-verbal, numeracy and comprehension skills. They will be adaptive and predict grades at 16+ and 18+. They will link to transfer at 13+. It is expected that some senior schools will test Year 6 candidates and others in Year 7.

It will be interesting to see if, armed with this extra information, senior schools will be less insistent on requiring another round of testing at Year 8 or allow prep schools to get on with the task of educating their children. Common Entrance is not the problem. The problem is that we have placed it at the hub of our learning and teaching when it should be on the periphery. In truth, the problem is with us and our failure to identify what is the best education we can give to our children to ensure our pupils can cope with the 40% of jobs that will be available to them, but which don't yet exist in a world that is changing far quicker than our schools. We need to get a move on.

Peter Tait