Raising aspirations: selection for the non-selective state sector?

Children from poorer families leave school with lower educational attainment than children from richer families.  The attainment gap widens particularly in the primary school years.  It appears that this gap is at least partly explained by differences in the aspirations of parents and children from poorer and richer backgrounds.  So it follows that investment in interventions which raise aspirations has to be the right thing to do.

Unfortunately, it's not that simple.  Raising aspirations without a concomitant investment in raising attainment is at best a wasted opportunity and at worst ethically...misjudged.  Think about it: if you raise the aspirations of children from poorer families (with lower educational attainment) and then fail to raise their educational attainment you'll have children with unrealistic aspirations.  This is further complicated by the Education Endowment Foundation conclusions that "the relationship between aspirations and attainment is complex and not fully understood" and that "interventions which aim to raise aspirations appear to have little to no positive impact on educational attainment".  

The links between aspirations and attainment are indeed tangled.  It might make sense to think that an intervention aimed at raising aspirations leads to a change in attitude which in turn leads to raised attainment.  But the intervention might instead trigger raised attainment and it's this which leads to higher aspirations.  The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), in its review of interventions, questions research which suggests that there is any causal relationship between interventions focusing on raising aspirations and statistical evidence indicating a closing of the attainment gap between children from rich and poor backgrounds.  

The JRF review cautiously suggests that interventions which focus on behaviours rather than attitudes might be the way to go.  "Promising" interventions appear to involve:

• the provision of information (e.g. about home learning techniques, about what universities are like, about one's own progress through academic mentoring)
• improved learning opportunities (e.g. out-of-hours study support, non-academic extra-curricular activities,  peer education opportunities).

But some data which appear to indicate success are undermined to an extent by questions around selection. Take the Aimhigher project, for example, which sought to widen participation through mentoring, university visits, and summer schools.  The data suggest that these interventions had a significant impact, with 60% of mentees achieving five grade A* to C GCSEs compared with an average of 31% of all students in partner schools.  But as Smith notes in her evaluation report, 58% of mentees were female and schools were more likely to select female mentees because of "their attitude (more open and positive to new experiences) and the likelihood that females would positively engage with mentoring provision".  Were these students already more likely to achieve five grade A* to C GCSEs regardless of the Aimhigher opportunities?

Of course, these interventions are driven by a desire to widen access.  But if they focus on children who are already "high performing", the aspirations, and the capacity to meet them, may already be in place. Here's a child, you might say, who's doing better than everyone else - let's send her to a residential summer school, or take her to visit a Russell Group university.  That's fine, but maybe she's succeeding because she's already getting that kind of investment at home. This echoes some of the problems that lie in identifying and investing further in children identified as gifted and talented.  Do interventions which focus on raising aspirations simply provide additional opportunties for pupils who already have additional opportunities?  Ultimately, is this just selection (with an apparently inclusive tagline) for the non-selective state sector?

Why homework needs more thinking

Picture this.  It's the end of Thursday or Friday afternoon and you're handing out a worksheet to each child to take home with maths or comprehension questions to complete or spellings to learn or class work to finish.  What's wrong with this?

The problem isn't about children spending insufficient time playing or the disruption to quality family time.  Homework was never intended to be something that helped families bond or enabled children to play more.  The problem with homework is that too often it has no effective impact on learning.  Why?

1) Homework provides opportunities for pupils to consolidate misunderstanding or to learn things wrongly.  This isn't the fault of parents/carers.  If you want a child to learn something, sort it out in school.  (Of course there's the stuff that children learn at home, from interacting with people and things outside school, but I'm talking about homework, set by teachers for children to do when they're not at school.)

2) Homework too often emphasises or extends the gap between high and low achievers.  Let's imagine you've set the same five multiplication problems as homework for all, the children who get it will complete successfully, the children who don't, won't.  (This is a problem with worksheets in general.)  

3) You have no way of accurately monitoring who did what.  Some parents/carers will complete the questions on behalf of their children - so the children won't have understood how to do it but you'll think they have.  And some parents/carers will complete the work incorrectly.

4) Some parents/carers are better equipped to support their children than others.  Often these will be the parents/carers of the most able pupils in your class.  So, again, homework will serve to widen the gap between the least and the most able child.

5) Homework creates unnecessary workload, particularly if you're expected to mark work which children (or parents/carers) complete at home.  This reduces your time to focus on learning and teaching in the classroom.

What's the solution?  Your school will have homework policy ("...parents and school working in partnership...regular homework...linked to the taught curriculum...") and Teachers' Standard 4 requires that you set homework to consolidate and extend the knowledge and understanding pupils have acquired.  The government have stepped back from telling schools how many hours of homework a 5-year old should do so there's nothing stopping you (within the bounds of the school homework policy) from deciding what to ask pupils to do.  So when you're setting homework, make it something that children can take ownership of, that doesn't contribute to widening the gap between more and less able, that allows you to check on misconceptions or misunderstandings, and that doesn't add to your marking workload.  How?

• Set tasks which don't  necessarily involve writing or recording on paper.  These could be "Think about..." activities, observation or physical/kinaesthetic activities.
• Link these tasks to lessons you'll be teaching in a couple of days, or next week.  Be clear with your pupils that the set task is in preparation for such-and-such lesson.
• Use the introduction of this lesson as an opportunity to hear children's contributions and adjust the homework tasks you set to ensure that all children can participate.

For example:  Think about why some people walk to work, others drive, and some cycle or use public transport (in preparation for a lesson on writing a balanced argument or a geography lesson on urban transport choices).  Or: Sit in as many different chairs as you can find (in preparation for a D&T or history project on furniture design).  Or Look for right angles around your home (in preparation for a lesson on the properties of shapes).

"How are you challenging your gifted and talented pupils?" isn't theright question.

Gagné defines giftedness as "the possession and use of untrained and spontaneously expressed superior natural abilities" and talent as "the superior mastery of systematically developed abilities (or skills) and knowledge".  In both cases, Gagné  is talking about people who fall in the top 10% of their age peers. The Oxford dictionary provides a less clear distinction: talented is "having a natural aptitude or skill"  while gifted is "having exceptional talent or natural ability".  In essence the terms are interchangeable, perhaps both implying some natural quality, although to be gifted seems higher up the scale ("exceptional") and less "trainable", if we take Gagné's definition.  

So on that basis and assuming an even spread of Gagné's 10% of giftedness and talent throughout the world, the top 10% of readers and writers in your class - let's say the three pupils who form the ablest half of your highest ability group in English - might be gifted and talented.  But what if talent is not evenly spread? You might ask yourself how those three pupils might compare in reading/writing ability on a local, regional or national level.  Are they gifted and talented, or are they just the most able 10% of a class that in general is operating below local/regional/national expectations?  In this case, shouldn't your energies be focused on raising the attainment of all?

How about other gifts and talents?  How are you challenging pupils who have superior mastery of or superior natural abilities in sewing, or keepy uppy, or Super Mario?  Have you tested all your pupils for their mastery of these gifts and/or talents, or are we just talking about literacy and numeracy when we refer to gifted and talented children?

And just suppose talent is fostered or encouraged by children's experiences outside school, through the systematic support of parents and carers.  And just suppose some parents and carers are better able to provide this systematic support?  Could that be a possibility? Let's take literacy, for example.  The American Psychological Association notes that parents from low socioeconomic status (SES) communities are less likely to provide a positive literacy environment and less likely to read with their children.  This is about socioeconomic class.  The children of parents of higher SES (measured by education, income and occupation) are more likely to get the support at home that leads to the label gifted and talented.  Potentially, schools are more likely to label middle class children gifted and talented.*

And then, how about this scenario.  What if children from higher SES backgrounds with a richer literacy experience at home and who, let's say, get taken to concerts and galleries and theatres by their parents and carers, are rewarded for their giftedness and talent at school with additional book clubs, reading opportunities and concert, gallery and theatre visits.

I'll leave you to work out what the right questions are.

*Read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers for other examples of how the identification of giftedness and talent is distorted by factors such as when and where you're born.