Re-examining Success. David Hughes J.
Village College, Cambridgeshire, in particular David Rooney, who gave me my first job in teaching, and Sheila Ginn who was a professional mentor to me in the first stages of my career.
Hartford High School, Cheshire.
Alderman Derbyshire School, Nottinghamshire.
Dukeries College, Nottinghamshire.
RSA Academy, Sandwell, in particular Mick Gernon, the Founding Principal.
Author dedication
I would like to pay particular tribute to my wife Jane, who took my febrile notes and turned them into short sentences with appropriate grammar and punctuation for publication. This is the second time she has endured this process in my support.
To Luke and Lucy, Owen and Dalia for being so enthusiastic, and finally to Iolo the Labrador for showing formidable impulse control when my writing ate into his walking time.
To Julia and Di at Critical Publishing for their unfailing support and enthusiasm, without which the book would not have come to fruition.
Introduction
Motivation and purpose
My primary motivation for writing this book is as an act of pupil advocacy. The examination process is a particularly harsh ordeal to impose on a person of any age. But, for young people in secondary schools, it tests their emotional resilience at a time of a tsunami of changes in their lives. I characterise the interests, motivations and progress of the learner as the micro-level of analysis within the book.
My secondary motivation is to challenge teaching colleagues to look more fundamentally at the process of preparing all pupils for examinations. This is the macro-level of analysis. Specifically, I have three concerns.
1.To explore the relationship between the learning regime across the two years of a GCSE level or Advanced level syllabus and the ‘revision period’ to see if expectations, processes and activities are congruent from the point of view of the pupil.
2.To come to a belated realisation that approaches to examination preparation, if they are to be successful, need to be personalised to the needs of the individual learner. If they are not, and every pupil has the same diet in a revision programme, you disenfranchise the most vulnerable and insecure learners to underachieve in the examinations, with related damage to their subsequent learning mindset and life chances.
3.For pupils to achieve to their full potential, schools cannot grant study leave without ensuring they have addressed parents’ concerns. Parents want to support their children to make the most of this independent study period so they arrive at the examinations calm, well-prepared and positive they can overcome the examination challenge.
These three considerations underlie a more fundamental concern that teachers need to address, namely what constitutes success in the examinations for individual pupils. This is where the micro elements that drive the individual pupil overlap with the macro-level of whole-school concerns.
Within the 30-year span of my teaching career, the orthodoxy was that the purpose of the school was to maximise the examination success of every pupil. This, after all, was the foremost arbiter of the success of the school. Indeed, as an institution, it would be difficult for a school to focus on any other statement of intent. Parents wanted this, pupils wanted this, the state wanted this, PISA international education comparisons emphasised this and senior leadership teams, the governors, and Ofsted were charged with ensuring that this was the case in every school.
This focus on school responsibility and accountability, which was both laudable and necessary to enhance pupils’ life chances, did have a considerable downside. This was the emphasis on more efficient ways to deliver curriculum content, rather than with broader concerns about the effectiveness of the learning received and implemented by the individual pupil.
Why I am qualified to write this book
My teaching experience has been confined to the English education system. However, my career has spanned experiences in a very wide range of schools, in part due to secondments and project management experience at local authority and national levels. This led to my work with leadership teams and individual teachers on learning transformation projects and cultural changes in learning models.
I have also visited schools in other countries to explore how they address their macro-level drivers and the experiences of pupils at the micro-level.
In the past decade, social media and technological developments have enabled me to collaborate with, and learn from, the experience of teachers and learners worldwide. I have helped to develop online courses for master’s degrees in Educational Leadership and have mentored trainee teachers across the globe. Conversations with teachers from five continents indicate that the concerns regarding revision strategies and the relationship between revision and more general learning outlined in this book represent a universal concern.
A great source of inspiration for me has been the input of former pupils going back to the start of my teaching career. I have been honoured by invitations to a number of student reunions and, since I finished full-time school teaching, social media has put me in contact with many more former pupils, some of whom are now middle-aged. I am always interested in their experiences after school and how happy and fulfilled they are. They are always keen to remind me of memories of incidents and experiences in my classes or on residentials.
What strikes me about their anecdotes is that not one recounts a factual thing I taught them. Every anecdote focuses on not the what but the how of learning. I find this particularly gratifying as I have, since my own school days, had an interest in what, at the time, could be encompassed by the term ‘study skills’. This has now expanded to include a whole plethora of elements comprising emotional and physical resilience and well-being, metacognition and independent learning.
My teacher training at the University of York was in a department that contained the Centre for the Study of the Comprehensive School and was devoted to leading research on effective learning. I was committed to a learning approach that emphasised a holistic idea of the how of learning, rather than being committed to subject knowledge per se. I had completed a multidisciplinary degree, and found in York’s Education Department a commitment to integrated courses in which pupil initiative, independent learning and interpretive skills were promoted.
I determined to teach and lead humanities departments comprising English, history, geography and religious education. I always held a more rounded view of learning than colleagues in single-subject departments. Where they emphasised the uniqueness of their subject content and methodology, I looked to develop a series of learning strategies that emphasised the unity of approaches to learning and teaching.
Seeing the child as an individual and being cognisant of particular circumstances
We are in the midst of what some commentators consider to be a ‘mental health crisis’ in secondary schools. The purported reasons for this are many and various, most lying outside the remit of education, but nonetheless impacting on it. In preparing pupils for the national statutory examinations, schools need to ensure that they are doing all in their power to support the health and mental well-being of their pupils. This requires that schools are proactive in supporting pupils through the full examination period in a way that few schools are currently addressing.
Child mental health and well-being were to be a short postscript to the book but, in the course of researching, two disturbing reports were published about child mental health. The first was compiled by NHS Digital (2019) and the second by the OECD (2018). The first focused on the UK, while the second was concerned with the whole of Europe. They came to some strikingly similar conclusions, which many have chosen to describe as a child mental health crisis in their scale and intensity.
Although a wide range of behavioural and emotional conditions were reported to have sharply increased in incidence across childhood, there were particularly high spikes of depression and anxiety associated with the ages 13 to 18. Coupled to the natural growth