William Kitchen: Shameful review into education in Northern Ireland seeks to undermine grammar schools

Indeed, it turns out that this is a ‘New Decade’, with more of the same turgid recommendations contained within this report.

If implemented, these recommendations would mean our children would be educated in de facto comprehensive schools – a model which has failed miserably in England – in which academic excellence and rigour no longer matter, and in which they would be subjected to a curriculum model which has damaged children’s lives in, most notably, the US and Scotland.

Two sections of the report stand out in particular, notable in the main for their shameless perpetuation of the status quo; namely, the section on the curriculum, and the section on transfer from primary to post-primary. On reading these sections, the reader might be forgiven for feeling as though they are being transported back in time, to the anti grammar school reports of Burns and Costello, published in 2001 and 2004 respectively.

Indeed, like Burns and Costello, this latest report advocates for a curriculum model which has evidentially failed in any other country in which similar curricula have been adopted – a curriculum implemented in the main for its incompatibility with academic selection. A Trojan Horse curriculum to end the grammar school system in Northern Ireland.

The curriculum places emphasis on misconceived and ill-considered ideas of learning, resulting in a clearly negative impact on children’s educational outcomes. Furthermore, the reader of the review will also see further determined but subtle efforts to soften the academic selection process, and to replace it with a process of selection which would use schools as social sorting machines.

In 2001, the Burns Report put forward the notion that the curriculum would provide flexibility, in particular in Year 11 and Year 12 (GCSE level). Burns and his colleagues commented much more ferociously on the transfer arrangements at that time, calling for the abolition of transfer testing, to be replaced by a pupil profile (a disastrous method, which has failed miserably even in a country as advanced as Germany).

In 2004, The Costello Report, building on the findings from Burns, went on to unpack the discussions around the curriculum, in Chapters 2 and 4, where the focus was on supporting the work of The Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment (CCEA) in building ‘choice and flexibility’ into the fabric of the curriculum, with a focus on making the learning experiences more ‘relevant’, and to move away from the ‘academic diet’ to which they claimed many pupils had become accustomed. In short, the knowledge curriculum was replaced with a skills curriculum – in a fast-changing world, we were wrongly told that knowing things no longer matters.

In supporting the development of The Entitlement Framework, Costello and his colleagues endorsed the move towards CCEA’s proposal for a curriculum reform, which paved the way for the curriculum in situ today. The development of skills was to be seen as more important than the ‘over-prescription of subject content’; an approach based on a flawed theory and progressive ideology, mirroring the curricula from the US from the 1970s and 1980s.

Furthermore, Costello concluded in Chapter 7 of his report that the transfer of pupils at age 11, using transfer tests as the method of ‘selection’, should be abolished, and replaced with a pupil profile (which would gather information about each pupil from their primary 5, 6 and 7 school years). In this regard, Costello advocated for the same approach that Burns has outlined three years previous.

It is noteworthy that Dr Hugh Morrison – an examinations expert at The Queen’s University of Belfast, working in the Graduate School of Education at that time – wrote a response to these proposals for replacing transfer by testing, with pupil profiles, outlining the evidence which showed that pupil profiles, when adopted, widen the social inequalities which their advocates claimed to be interested in mitigating against. Central to Dr Morrison’s critique was the example of transfer by pupil profiles used in the German education system, which showed that children from poorer backgrounds were noticeably disadvantaged by the profile system in comparison to the selection-by-testing system.

Fast-forward to the current day, and we see that the recommendations in this ‘new’ Independent Review mirror the reports from Burns and Costello, but add no new evidence in support. What CCEA called “relevant learning” in 2001 and 2004, is now called “a living curriculum”. It is a different name, but the same idea. What CCEA justified in 2003 (in its Pathways documents) as “a junglelike curriculum for a junglelike brain” is now explained in a section on “how we learn” within Chapter 4 of this ‘new’ report. It is the same ideological nonsense, hidden under a new subtitle.

This failed, tinpot curriculum, is justified and defended by the review panel, despite the evidence clearly showing that it is based on a theoretical framework which was described by Professor Paterson from the University of Edinburgh as bringing about “the betrayal of a whole generation”, insofar as it is built upon constructivist principles. In his critique of a similar curricular approach in Scotland, Professor Paterson remarked that “the reason why the … curriculum is a plausible culprit for the [attainment] decline lies in what it gets children to learn. It belongs to a strand of curricular thinking known as constructivism”.

Why did the panel ignore this evidence? Why did they ignore the even more conclusive evidence, captured in Project Follow Through – the largest and most expensive educational study ever conducted – which showed that this type of curricular approach brings about negative effects on children’s educational outcomes? You might say they were unaware of this evidence. Not so; I presented it to them in the consultation phase of the report.

As for transfer, this new panel of experts arrives at the same conclusion as Burns and Costello, to create a triumvirate of ‘experts’ calling for the abolition of transfer tests, to be replaced by what are now being called ‘Learner Profiles’ (ie rebranded pupil profiles). In doing so, the Independent Review panel go even further than Burns or Costello, to embed new social engineering selection metrics in their recommendations, to force selective schools towards a more integrated approach on the grounds of religion, socio-economic background, and ‘newcomer’ status. In this new world, grammar schools would be selective in name only, and the system would become a de facto comprehensive one in which social selection would lurk just beneath the surface, so as not to raise any obvious suspicion.

Eminent sociologists, Bernstein and Furedi, warn of such an insincere approach to how we populate our schools, insofar as they create the false impression that comprehensive schooling can mitigate against wider societal issues, in particular in terms of socio-economic factors.

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New Decade, Same Approach.

• Dr William H Kitchen is an educational expert on Curriculum, Assessment, and Academic Selection