Cleverlands
Lucy is a qualified teacher, an education explorer and an international education consultant. She taught science and psychology at a secondary school in London for three years before turning her sights to research and policy and gaining a distinction in her master’s in Politics, Development and Democratic Education at the University of Cambridge.
Since returning from her groundbreaking trip around the world’s ‘top-performing’ education systems, she has published a report on teacher career structures for IIEP UNESCO, advised the UK government as part of a working group on teacher workload, and spoken about her work at conferences in the UK, US and Sweden. She now works as part of a team advising foreign governments on education reform at Education Development Trust. Lucy lives in Bath with her fiancé, Mark.
Praise for Cleverlands
‘Lucy Crehan’s book is a major breakthrough. For the first time we have the human stories and classroom interactions behind the international comparisons of school systems. As an itinerant teacher she has been able to reach deeper than any academic researcher could.’
Sir Michael Barber
Author of How to Run a Government,
Chief Education Advisor to Pearson, Managing Partner of Delivery
Associates and co-author of How the World’s Best-performing School Systems Come Out on Top
‘Lucy Crehan has written a remarkable and original book. Part travel memoir, part research review, she describes her experiences of visiting a number of the highest-performing educational systems in the world. Her conversations with parents and teachers bring these, often very different, cultures to life, and she shows how key features of education systems – more than is often realised – are profoundly influenced by cultural assumptions about the purpose of education and the nature of human potential. This alone would make the book worth reading. But what makes the book a truly important contribution to educational scholarship is the way that these insights are skilfully interleaved with the latest learning and teaching. The result is a book that will be of interest to anyone interested in how to improve education, and should be required reading for anyone studying how we can learn from other education systems.’
Dylan Wiliam
Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment, University College London
‘I first met Lucy at a Head Teachers’ conference, where she was presenting. I was instantly impressed by her brilliant talk which was fascinating in so many ways, and now her book, Cleverlands, is even more thought-provoking. The book details Lucy’s journey across the world to discover the best examples of how education and culture work together effectively. What impressed me most was Lucy’s ability to bring to life the sometimes meaningless data, by interactions with real-life characters with whom she immersed herself. This is a must-read, not only for teachers, but anyone involved in the education or coaching of young people today.’
Sir Clive Woodward
OBE Chairman and Founder of Hive Learning,
Rugby World Cup winning Coach 2003, Director of Sport for Team GB Beijing 2008, Vancouver 2010 and
London 2012 Olympic Games, Director of Sport Apex2100
This edition first published in 2016
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To all the teachers who welcomed me into their classrooms and all the teachers who would have done if I’d asked.
Dear Reader,
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Foreword
At the point of publication of this profoundly insightful book, international comparisons, particularly those heavily informed by the large periodic surveys, had become dominant in the thinking of those wishing to reform their education and training systems. Worryingly, the survey findings had increasingly been appropriated in order to instil domestic fear of falling behind – ‘Look at them and look at us; now listen to me… ’
Alongside this kind of misappropriation and misrepresentation, there have been some prominent mistakes, such as the failure to dig deeply enough into the history of educational reform in Finland. International comparisons carry ethical considerations, which too frequently are neglected. They need to be handled with great care. The data are one thing; their interpretation is quite another. Sound transnational analysis is by necessity demanding and complex, requiring an understanding not only of current circumstances but also of complex interactions in society and economy, and of causes and tendencies which arise from things past. Only then can ‘the way things are’ in specific jurisdictions be understood to any degree.
Lucy Crehan has added a vital qualitative dimension to quantitively focused international comparison. It is an essential read for all those wishing to draw insights from transnational comparisons, and a tonic to ‘cherry picking’ – the irresponsible myopia of the single extracted fact. But she has done something more than just add ‘colour’ to the surveys. Like all good social and natural scientists, she understands that observation is theory-dependent. It requires theory as its lens, and the things seen allow us to further refine our theory. Lucy’s text gives far more than colour – it penetrates deeply into the way education works in different national settings. This yields extraordinary insights, of value to those looking with curiosity at other cultures and to those wishin
g to reflect on their own practices. This is a book which should be read cover-to-cover by teachers, parents and policy-makers.
Tim Oates CBE
Group Director for Assessment Research and Development, Cambridge Assessment
Chapter 1: PISA, Politics and Planning a Trip
As I approached the guard sitting by the entrance barrier to the school, I realised I was biting the inside of my cheek. I became more aware of my walking, the way the sticky Shanghai summer made smart shoes uncomfortable, and I rehearsed my limited Mandarin phrases in my head. ‘Wǒ shì lǎoshī’ (I am a teacher). ‘Wǒ shì yīngguó rén’ (I am English person). ‘Wǒ kàn xuéxiào ma’ (I look school?)
I’d arrived first thing in the morning before the children turned up in their colourful tracksuits, not wanting to cause too much disturbance to the school day, but all the same I had anticipated the guard’s initial reaction – confusion, followed by a shrug. He waited, I waited; he expected me to leave, I stayed where I was; I smiled, he picked up the phone. My Mandarin was not good enough to understand what he said on his call, but I imagine it went something like: ‘There’s a strange British woman standing outside the gates asking if she can look at the school; could you send someone down who speaks English?’ He hung up the phone. ‘Xièxiè’ (thank you). He gave me a nod.
A small, trim lady in a floral dress hurried across the courtyard a few minutes later, her expression displaying a mixture of curiosity and nerves.
‘Hello!’ I said. ‘I am so sorry to disturb you; I’m sure you’re very busy.’
She smiled and gave a polite shake of the head, ‘How can I help you?’
I told her that I was a teacher from England, and that I was interested in the education in Shanghai because their students do so very well in the international tests. ‘I’d love to come and see your school and learn what you are doing, if it’s not too much trouble. Can I come back on another day?’
Just turning up at the front gate was a last resort when my opportunity to visit a school in that kind of neighbourhood fell through. I’d already spent a week teaching in a school in a very poor area of Shanghai, and a week teaching, interviewing and observing in an experimental school in a well-to-do area, so I was keen to visit a regular neighbourhood school in Shanghai’s dense suburbs, near the house of the teacher I was staying with. My plan was to get an understanding of the school system in China’s largest city by living with its teachers, chatting to its students and listening for the cultural subtleties that aren’t picked up by ‘big data’. I was here because Shanghai’s 15-year-olds had outperformed teenagers in every other education system in tests of reading, maths and science, and I wanted to know how.
I’m a teacher by trade. I taught for three years in a secondary comprehensive school in a deprived part of London, a school that catered for young people from some difficult backgrounds and, for not unrelated reasons, a school that didn’t ‘produce’ particularly good exam results. It was hard work; there were days when I didn’t have time to eat lunch, or even use the loo, because I was running around finding students to chase up missed homework, or photocopying the worksheet that I’d stayed up until 11.30 the night before making. I moaned to my family, but I didn’t really mind about this bit – I assumed at the time that it was an inevitable part of the job.
What got to me was that the hard work I was putting in wasn’t making much difference to the children in my care. Much of it – lengthy lesson plans, extensive marking and regular data entry – was required by the school management to help them meet external targets and pass high-stakes school inspections. What time and energy I had left didn’t seem enough to overcome the systemic disadvantages that many of my students faced. Students like Dana in my Year 10G4 science class. This means she was 15 at the time, in the fourth science set out of eight, and had been working towards a ‘vocational’ qualification since she was assigned to this class two years ago. Her course was entirely coursework-based, and because it was not as rigorous as the alternative exam-based qualification, it precluded her from taking science at the next level (and therefore from studying anything science-related at university).
At parents evening, I told Dana and her mother that on this vocational course, she was working at a C-grade equivalent. Mum’s eyes lit up. ‘That’s great!’ she said. ‘I knew Dana was good at science. She wants to be a science teacher.’ Dana smiled and agreed, ‘Yeah, I’ve arranged to spend some time at my auntie’s school so I can get more experience.’ By this stage in the English system, without the possibility of taking science at the next level, it was too late for Dana to achieve – or even work towards – that goal. But it needn’t have been. Had she been in a better school, had better teachers, better resources and better support from the beginning – in other words, had she been educated in a better system – she could have at least had a shot.
I wanted to understand how education systems could be run better – how they could support their students to get better outcomes and have better opportunities without running their staff into the ground – and I looked beyond our borders to find the answers. But how can you tell which countries are doing ‘better’? Are there any objective measures that compare educational outcomes in different countries? And are they educational outcomes that we ought to care about?
The Politics of PISA
‘Europe is Failing its Students’1
‘Worldwide Survey Finds US Students Are Not Keeping Up’2
‘PISA Tests: UK Stagnates as Shanghai Tops League Table’3
‘PISA Report Finds Australian Teenagers Education Worse Than 10 Years Ago’4
‘Norway is a Loser’5
‘OECD Study: Finnish Teenagers are Best Readers’6
‘Canadians Ace Science Test’7
Every three years, the papers are flooded with headlines like these. They refer to the results of an international test called PISA – the Programme for International Student Assessment – which covers reading, maths and science. Each country that chooses to participate enters a representative sample of 15-year-olds to sit the papers, and in 2000 when the programme began, 43 countries took part. In the following 15 years, as the tests became more famous, more and more countries have signed up: 71 participated in PISA 2015, making up approximately nine-tenths of the world’s economy. You might think this is an odd way to express the number of children taking an education test, but there’s a good reason for it; the organisation that runs these tests is an economic organisation – the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Why do so many countries choose to take part in this testing programme? There are two answers to this question, one quite straightforward, the other more cynical. Firstly, the OECD suggests that the tests measure ‘to what extent students at the end of compulsory education can apply their knowledge to real-life situations and be equipped for full participation in society’. This gives governments information that complements the results of another international test – the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which measures how well eighth grade students have learnt the maths and science curriculum in their countries, rather than whether they can apply it.8
The results of both studies are broken down by subject, by type of question and by student background, allowing governments who opt in to the testing programmes to see where their education system’s strengths and weaknesses are, and to make those areas the target of education reform, capacity building or additional financial support – in an ideal world. Additionally, because PISA is carefully designed to measure students’ ability to apply and use knowledge, rather than just memorising it and reproducing it, participation in the programme can be a useful way of tracking the extent to which the education system is doing this successfully. This was one reason that China chose to enter students from Shanghai into PISA in 2009, and from several other Chinese cities in 2012 and 2015.
What is the more cynical reason that countries choose to take part in internatio
nal tests? Well, it stems right from the inception of the PISA programme. An unusual coalition of US Republicans and French Socialists first set the ball rolling for PISA’s design and implementation. Ronald Reagan, reeling from the dispiriting findings of the 1983 ‘Nation at Risk’ report on American education (the clue to its conclusion is in the name), wanted to implement national reform. However, he was met with resistance by state-level governments who considered education to be solely within their own mandate. He was therefore looking for a way to make education policy an international issue, so that he could bring it under presidential control.
Across the Atlantic, the French Minister of Education Jean-Pierre Chevènement sought to demonstrate the failings of what he considered to be an elitist French education system in order to justify his own educational reform. What both men needed was an international education survey that would allow for comparisons of educational outcomes between countries, and they looked to the OECD to provide it. It took a while to develop (as attempting to accurately assess problem-solving ability in three subjects across many different cultures is an enormously ambitious undertaking), but in 2001 the first PISA test results were published, and they were used as an excuse for reform by governments around the world. In Norway, the Secretary of State at the time of these early PISA results described using Norway’s poor performance as a ‘flying start’ to implement their reforms.9 In America, the PISA results were used as a key justification for a federal school accountability programme known as ‘Race to the Top’. And in New Zealand, the use of OECD data in defending controversial reform has been described by some educators as an ‘OECD hangover’.10
Using PISA results as an impetus for reform is, in itself, no bad thing. The German people went through ‘PISA shock’ in 2001 when they realised that what they had thought was a world-leading education system was in fact below average in reading, maths and science, and one of the most inequitable in the OECD. It provoked educational discussion, soul searching, and a TV series, and led to various evidence-based reforms across its many states that brought about an improvement in their education system and their PISA standing over the next 10 years.