@drnnewton
🔍 Education researcher 🖊 Writer 📚 Teacher 💡 Innovator • Academic at Cardiff Metropolitan University • Equity & inclusion, Curriculum & knowledge, Values & school culture, Transitions & student journeys See www.options-ed.co.uk
There's a lot of talk about the curriculum, but at the critical moment when students are choosing their post-16 courses, its importance easily gets lost. Here's why we need to make sure it's central to their decision-making.
theconversation.com/too-many-stu... @theconversation.com
I know that the grade boundaries for A-Level languages are also especially high.
There's not enough discussion of the long-term value of all the knowledge contained in subjects either. Their worth gets reduced to grade achievement or potential career value. Broader transferability is neglected.
We can prevent students regretting their course choices. This is especially common with A-Levels. Authentic interests drive deep learning & take us to unexpected places. Denying learners support to discover these is a structural flaw within the market-place of post-16 education.
My research shows that measuring these curricular interests is possible, that it can be done in a way that supports learners' course decision-making & that the resulting data provides a totally new way to evaluate the provision of post-16 education quality.
Current strategies used by schools & colleges are often more influenced by recruitment pressures, than supporting reflective choices based on rational evaluation of course suitability. The lack of research exploring the value of learners' interests hasn't helped either.
Second, pressures from family & peers distort evaluations of curricular interests. Sometimes this includes assumptions about the long-term career relevance of courses or the value prior achievement. Decision-making is hard work & we have natural biases towards simplifying processes of choice.
Learners are often told to choose what interests them, but many factors complicate how this advice translates into decisions about courses to study. First, there is evidence to suggest information about courses is not engaged with, open evenings & taster sessions are ineffective.
In a newly published paper, I show that it is possible to reliably measure students' post-16 curricular interests & that these interests are consequential to their future academic success. This is about operationalising subject curiosity & passion in new ways.
tinyurl.com/42jfvran
Let no one have any doubts, the Royal Family would have known exactly what Andrew was doing on the Balmoral Estate. Indeed, also who Andrew's friends were and what his proclivities were. It is impossible they were not aware.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c3...
My latest article now published, exploring the importance of subject-specific interests in post-16 course choices - a neglected area of guidance.
Rethinking post-16 course choice: developing a tool to measure curricular interest and support learner progression www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
We're facing existential threats to society because we have not been educated about how policy is made, knowledge is exploited and how the economy functions (often to protect privilege). There is collosion between the state & capital to obfuscate this knowledge. We need to reclaim it.
Curriculum reform needs to be focused on helping young people prepare for the challenges ahead: economic, geopolitical, environmental, social. That prep can't be just content inclusion. It must involve a reimagining of knowledge production in the age if AI & billionaire elites who control tech.
A truly democratic & socially dynamic school system is only possible when ownership of the production of knowledge & its uses in society are understood. This includes in the classroom with a shared endeavour to know & acquire skills aimed at equality & justice for all citizens.
Inside the blackbox are the human interactions between knowers (teachers), knowledge/skills, and students. The school system disempowers individuals because we deny them access to the means of production (who decides what counts as valuable knowledge, who exploits knowledge for power etc.).
Too much educational research is reductive, viewing education solely through the lens of outputs, defined by the capitalist state as a means to regulate the employment market (while giving the lie to meritocracy). In fact, the blackbox of learning is largely ignored.
I was 'underachieving' at school. I was engaged in delinquent behaviour. Knowing I was going to be grounded for several weeks, I decided to buy a book. I was 15. I chose 'Jude the Obscure' because I liked the sound of it. I had to read it with a dictionary. But it was the start of a new life.
As an educational researcher, it frustrates me that despite their impact fee paying schools are rarely studied. Attitudes & aspirations of pupils their are largely unknown. Teachers in the state sector are also generally oblivious to the specific advantages their students are competing against.
Sadly, research by Sam Friedman (LSE) & others have shown that across 'elite' jobs from media, judiciary, CEOs to top acting jobs & now even pop are dominated by the privately educated. We need to explain to YP in state ed what they're really up against. Knowledge that empowers.
My challenge to @zackpolanski.bsky.social is to imagine a transformed education system. One that equips yp to save society, democracy & the planet. This will fuse relevant skills, creativity & knowledge. There's no well-being in world at risk. There's no economy in collapsed society. Be bold Greens!
This must include how we empower democratic citizenship, how we teach about the economy, the environment & ways to improve equity. Then we can debate the kinds of content & pedagogy that will support those aims. Finally, we can ensure assessment matches aims, & isn't the tail wagging the dog.
Gove also leaned into debates about ‘knowledge-rich’ curricula, distorting how these debates were framed. This intersects with the perpetuating of tensions between skills & knowledge, that are flawed & unhelpful. What the country needs is a radical rethink about the wider aims of state education.
The debates about coursework versus exams is a red herring. CW can be taught just as prescriptively as prep from exams. CW can also further advantage pupils from middle-class backgrounds.
The problem is the specificity in the assessment, the amount of assessment & aims of the assessment.
Governments mainly focus on assessment at school level, with the sole aim of increasing GCSE attainment. They have occasionally intervened with content, but this tends to be superficial (like teaching about mortgages or ensuring everyone studies Shakespeare). They're often trapped chasing headlines.
Every curriculum needs to reconcile aims that combine personal development & social value, with curricular content, with experiences delivered through innovative pedagogy, with how learning is assessed & the outcomes this leads to. The coherence between these is key to educational value.
Exams tend to favour one kind of educational talent. She suggests that curriculum cuts to arts, sport & PSHE, alongside the pandemic, exacerbated children' s well-being problems. Linking course work as a key thread between WB issues & the curriculum in this way sounds persuasive but is problematic.
Devon then reflects that Gove's reforms greatly reduced course work, translating this exam focus across the state schooling, & it is implied that this has narrowed pupils’ opportunities to express their opinions, which in turn has contributed to the mental health crisis.
Finally, one pupil asked “What do you want us to say, what's the correct answer?” Afterwards, she asked the teacher what was going on and he attributed the response to the fact that these pupils were being coached to pass the high-stakes 11+ & 13+.
I recently heard campaigner @natashadevon.bsky.social in conversation with @zackpolanski.bsky.social discuss changes in education & curriculum. Natasha described asking pupils in a prep school for their opinions, explaining there was no right or wrong answer, but there had been silence.
An excellent article exploring this issue & our desperate need for more intelligent debate.
Studies on insider-outsider group prejudices address an important element of racism. In white majority contexts, there's empirical evidence to support Abbot's comments.
Huge thanks to colleagues at Arad, who are leading the overarching formative evaluation of CfW research & supported the research, and all my colleagues at Cardiff Metropolitan University.