Education and Learning
Report
The strategic aim underpinning the work of the Education and Learning programme since 2006 has been ‘to support innovative ways of increasing people’s education and learning’. In particular we have aimed to ‘support the development and dissemination and diffusion of new ideas that work in improving education and increasing the learning of people of all ages’. This past year has seen much of the work of our own Special Initiatives, and that of a number of grantees, progress from earlier development phases, to actively sharing learning and practice with the wider sector.
Due to shifts in government policy and public sector cost-cutting measures, the sector has lost a number of key networks and agencies that previously helped to foster the sharing of best practice, particularly for schools. We remain committed to ensuring that the new thinking and practices that we are helping to develop are accessible to as many people as possible.
Teaching and learning
Much of our learning this year has related to teaching and learning practice. Although we are clear that there continues to be a place for conventional, typically transmissive models of teaching in 21st century educational institutions, and that developing basic skills and core knowledge sets will remain important, these alone are not likely to be sufficient. In the words of our trustee Estelle Morris, we believe that “any 21st century education that stakes a claim to be relevant, engaging and leading to good-quality progression would surely look different to the one that served us so well some 30 years ago”.
With our focus on encouraging innovation, we are interested in understanding what sorts of differences are likely to be most effective in helping children and young people to engage with their learning, achieve better learning outcomes and become successful life-long learners and contributors to society. All of our Special Initiatives, and many of the organisations supported through our Open Grants, have contributed to this important area for educational enquiry.
Musical Futures has continued to address this specifically within the school-based music curriculum, while Learning Futures has tested cross-curricular approaches. Our What Works? Student Retention and Success programme has focused on practice in higher education. All three initiatives have published new resources this year that offer practical guidance to teachers and school and university leaders, together with key underpinning principles that help to illuminate the values and thinking behind the practices being advocated.
Under Learning Futures we have produced this year a series of publications that share several key approaches for enhancing student engagement and enabling schools themselves to become more engaged and engaging. These findings also have significant implications for wider issues of school organisation, structure and culture.
Research conducted under the What Works? initiative has consistently found that a strong sense of belonging lies at the heart of successful retention and success in higher education, and points to the academic domain as the area in which this should, as a priority, be nurtured. We shared our findings, and recommendations for how to ensure belonging, with over 250 university staff and leaders at a two-day conference in March 2012.
Our Learning Away and Musical Bridges Special Initiatives have also had a strong focus on teaching and learning practices, the former in the context of residential learning experiences, and the latter as a key element in strategies to improve students’ experience of their transition from primary to secondary school. Both of these initiatives will, over the next year, begin more active dissemination of their learning and sharing of the best practice examples that we have seen developing in our partner schools.
Open Grants themes
Through our Open Grants scheme, we awarded 44 grants, totalling £3,936,936, in 2011/12. These fall under three themes: Preventing and reducing the impact of school truancy and exclusion; Developing speaking and listening skills for 11–19 year olds; and Supplementary Education. We have introduced new funding priorities under two of these themes to encourage applications focused on some key areas where we hope our grants can achieve a significant and strategic impact.
Under the Truancy and Exclusion theme we are now inviting applications with a focus on supporting young people through periods of transition, particularly from primary to secondary school and when they leave school or formal education. Under the Supplementary Education theme we are also encouraging proposals to support the post-16 progression of supplementary school pupils from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. Secondly, we are keen to encourage the development of strong, sustainable partnerships between supplementary and mainstream schools, for the benefit of underachieving pupils.
It is particularly challenging to achieve high levels of commitment from both mainstream and supplementary school partners. We have been pleased to support several grantees that are leading the way in building and demonstrating the impact of such partnerships. Several of these grantees, including Shpresa, Amana, Enfield Voluntary Action, the Northamptonshire Association of Supplementary Schools and Languages Sheffield, attended a workshop at our offices to share effective approaches and discuss common challenges. Over the coming year all of our grantees will be invited to attend similar collaborative learning events to share their experiences and learning.
We will also be finalising a directory to showcase the programmes we have supported under our Speaking and Listening theme. This will outline the opportunities and resources that grantees can offer to help young people develop the communication skills to enable them to contribute successfully in the workplace and their community as they progress into adulthood. We have seen a good number of our Speaking and Listening grantees this year reach stages in the development of their work where they are actively scaling up their programmes or disseminating resources to help others replicate or learn from their work.
I CAN, for example, has expanded its Secondary Talk programme from an initial pilot in 14 schools to 35 schools across the country, where it is helping to ensure that staff across the schools are confident in developing students’ communication skills. Through its Youth Amplified project, the Speakers’ Corner Trust, working with Leeds University, has developed a set of resources for young people and teachers/ youth workers, focusing on how to develop skills of expression, building common cause and influencing others. Peace Child International, the English and Media Centre and the Geographical Association are other grantees committed to sharing the learning and resources from their speaking and listening work with others.
“The Youth Amplified website and resources have been widely taken up – from schools across the country to BBC BiteSize. Thanks to this valuable funding, we have been able to help teachers to help develop the kind of speaking skills that our democracy badly needs.” – Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication, University of Leeds
The year to come
We hope that our commitment to developing new approaches to securing learner engagement and progression will continue to make a significant contribution as these approaches spread around the country. Through the work of our grantees and Special Initiatives, we hope to ensure that many more young people are confident and equipped with the skills they will need to help them succeed as 21st century workers and citizens.
Special Initiatives
What Works? Student Retention and Success programme
Learning how best to ensure student success in higher education
£22,546 in 2011/12
Significant resources have been invested over the past decade in attracting young people from under-represented groups into higher education. The goal of the What Works? initiative is to help build understanding about how best to support students once they arrive at university. The initiative’s purpose is to ensure that as many young people as possible succeed in what is often a daunting new environment and learning context. The initiative has been jointly funded with the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).
Twenty two higher education institutions, working in seven groups, have participated in the initiative by evaluating a range of interventions – such as personal tutoring, the use of student advisors, peer mentoring and induction activities – and researching the most effective practices to ensure high student continuation and completion rates. The three-year studies typically combined student survey data, qualitative research with students and staff, and analysis of institutional data. The studies were completed this year, at a time when profound changes in the higher education sector will make even more significant the strategies that universities employ to ensure all their students experience success.
Despite the diversity of evaluative methods and foci, findings and conclusions were remarkably consistent. All found that at the heart of successful retention and success is a strong sense of belonging for all students. Although some specific interventions were shown to improve retention rates by up to 10 per cent, it became clear that the key to boosting student retention and success lies not in any specific type of intervention but in ensuring that retention strategies are intentionally designed to foster student belonging and exhibit a core set of characteristics to help achieve this.
On average in the UK, only one in 12 students actually leaves higher education during their first year of study, but What Works? student survey data across several institutions found that between one third and two fifths of students think about withdrawing. This is a significant minority and suggests that student entry characteristics, for example, may no longer be sufficient indicators of likely withdrawal.
This finding, together with increasing numbers of part-time, mature and home-based students, has led us to our key recommendation: that proactive work to improve student belonging and engagement should be a priority for all university programmes, departments and institutions, and that belonging should be nurtured, as a priority, through the academic sphere.
Our What Works? report, ‘Building student engagement and belonging in Higher Education at a time of change’, sets out a series of recommendations for HEIs wishing to improve their practice in line with our findings, including a set of characteristics of effective interventions and approaches, and a set of strategic or institutional-level recommendations. In addition, a ‘Compendium of Effective Practice: proven ways of improving student retention and success’ has been published to provide more practical examples of successful interventions, drawn from the HEIs that have participated in What Works? and the wider sector.
“The benefits that a university education typically adds to an individual’s career prospects and to their quality of life generally is widely recognised, but is something that needs greater articulation. The outcomes of the seven [What Works?] projects… will help to convey this message and provide an excellent foundation to continue both the sharing and development of good practice across the sector.” – Professor Eric Thomas, President of Universities UK
Over the next four years, we will be supporting a second phase of this initiative, to be led by the Higher Education Academy and aligned with its series of institutional-level change programmes. HEA will work with a number of universities to test our recommendations from the first phase, with a focus on teaching and learning approaches and interventions integrated with academic programme delivery. A key priority will be to build a strong evidence base of impact, with a standard evaluation framework and methodology applied across the project.
Learning Futures
Developing teaching and learning to achieve breakthroughs in learner engagement
£393,283 in 2011/12
Learning Futures has now reached the end of the development and piloting phase that we have funded since late 2007. Our primary objective has been to develop and trial innovative methods of teaching and learning aimed at increasing students’ engagement with their learning. In this we have joined a growing international movement of researchers and educators who have been looking beyond indicators of compliance as measures of engagement to a deeper sense of engagement, characterised by commitment, responsibility and a desire to prolong learning beyond the school gates and timetable.
Although we have only had two academic years of actively trialling approaches in our partner schools, their commitment and the combined expertise of our programme partners and staff mean that we are able to conclude our funding of this initiative, confident in the depth of understanding achieved. We have published a clear set of practical pedagogical and wider organisational recommendations to enable other schools to learn from and implement the Learning Futures approaches.
These approaches – Project-based Learning, Extended Learning Relationships, School as Base Camp and School as Learning Commons – are described in a set of pamphlets, ‘Learning Futures: A Vision for Engaging School’, ‘Work That Matters: The teacher’s guide to project-based learning’ and ‘The Engaging School: A handbook for school leaders’. This latter resource sets out some key implications and resulting recommendations, relating to wider issues of school organisation, structure and culture, to maximise engagement. This approach, we would argue, needs to balance the traditional dominance of curriculum subjects as the main basis for organising the school. The recommendations also warn of the invisibility of professional practice in some schools, which greatly limits opportunities for teachers to learn in a sustained way from each other’s teaching or collaborative reflection.
The schools with which we have worked are committed to extending and further embedding Learning Futures approaches, and we are pleased that the Innovation Unit will be proactively taking the initiative further and offering support to schools across the country that wish to learn from our work, to become more engaging schools. Further information on these opportunities and all resources are available at www.learningfutures.org
Learning Away
Achieving more through school residentials
£127,968 in 2011/12
Through this initiative, we aim to encourage schools to make a greater commitment to providing high-quality residential learning experiences for their pupils.
During 2011/12 we began to gather good evidence that residentials can have a strong, positive impact on academic achievement and a wide range of other pupil outcomes, including wellbeing, learner engagement, personal, social, employability and life skills. Working with 60 partner schools, both primary and secondary, we will be building on this to further demonstrate that these experiences can transform the learning experience of pupils and can also help to transform schools, with lasting impact. This is most likely to be the case when residentials are closely integrated with the wider school curriculum, when they are designed and delivered by school staff and pupils themselves, and when they exemplify the formula proposed by Minnett et al. (2008) that ‘powerful pedagogy + trusting relationships = student engagement’.
Learning Away teachers typically use highly pupil-centred strategies, with a strong emphasis on actively involving pupils in planning and making decisions related to their residentials to ensure relevant and personally meaningful learning opportunities. Secondly, the widespread use of practical, active, experiential learning approaches, often involving group collaboration and problem solving, is clearly proving significant in ensuring pupil enjoyment, motivation and engagement.
Many of our partner schools are also showing that high- impact residential learning does not need to be expensive or far from home. Several are investing in camping equipment and running residentials under canvas – some in remote locations, others in local parks or woodlands, and some in the grounds of their own or partner schools.
Over the coming year, the focus of our work will broaden from supporting the development of practice across our 60 schools, to a more outward-looking phase during which we will more actively share our findings and learning with the wider sector and seek to influence more schools to increase their commitment to residential learning.
Musical Futures
Transforming music education in schools
£147,997 in 2011/12
Musical Futures has now been running in secondary schools for seven years, with more than 500,000 students having benefited to date. The initiative is grounded in our belief that music learning works best when young people are making music themselves and when their existing passion for music is reflected and built upon in the classroom.
Our 31 Champion Schools have continued to exemplify the Musical Futures approach and ethos and between them ran 45 continuing professional development courses for music teachers, attended by more than 300 practising teachers and 240 teacher trainees during the 2010/11 academic year. We estimate that more than 150 schools in England are introducing Musical Futures to their music departments each year and that well over 1,000 secondary schools are now using Musical Futures to help deliver their music curriculum.
During the year we launched pilot programmes in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, working closely with a number of schools in each country to develop their Musical Futures practice and pave the way for the wider take-up anticipated during the next academic year.
We welcomed a report from Ofsted, ‘Music in Schools: Wider still, and wider’, which conveyed a deep understanding about what excellence in music teaching and learning should look like. One of our Musical Futures Champion Schools, Flegg High School in Norfolk, was chosen as the subject of one of six best-practice case study films that accompanied the report. The report also highlighted that too much music learning in school is inadequate or barely satisfactory. Musical Futures practice in schools also inevitably varies in its quality, and in its fidelity to our core principles. We will be working over the next year to try to improve consistency of delivery given the resources and structures that we have to support the programme.
Musical Bridges: Transforming Transition
Improving practice to support young people as they progress from primary to secondary music education
£178,049 in 2011/12
Musical Bridges aims to address, in relation to music education, the problems children often experience as they transfer from primary to secondary school, such as a lack of continuity of learning and progression.
This year we have completed an initial piloting phase of a continuous professional development (CPD) programme that brings primary and secondary teachers together to better understand effective practice and plan how to support transition. In the coming year we will be piloting this further via ten music services and working to finalise a CPD package to be made available to schools through the new music education hubs due to launch across England in August 2012.
During the year we published our ‘Changing Key’ report, setting out findings from a longitudinal investigation into pupils’ experiences of primary to secondary school transition in music. Despite high musical aspirations being expressed by most new Year 7 students involved in the study, many began defining themselves as non-musical during their first year at secondary school. Their often narrow views of what it means to be ‘musical’ highlight the importance of inclusive music education, in which schools value the widest range of students’ musical engagement, both in and outside school. Our findings also suggest that many pupils would have benefited from more complex music teaching at primary school and from a better match between supply and demand in instrumental lessons at secondary school.
We have launched a website (www.musicalbridges.org.uk) to host resources and best practice examples. We will also be developing a musical biography resource for pupils to facilitate the sharing of information between primary and secondary school teachers. We hope to share our experience of this process to support efforts to take forward the recommendation, within this year’s Review of Cultural Education by Darren Henley, for a national cultural education passport for students.
Open Grants Scheme
The Education and Learning Open Grants scheme operates across three themes.
The Speaking and Listening theme supports activities, taking place in or outside of school, which develop the oral communication skills that all young people need to become effective, contributing members of society.
The Supplementary Education theme supports the work of supplementary schools (defined as schools which operate on a part-time basis, led by voluntary sector organisations and with the active support of parents and the local community) primarily for the benefit of children and young people from black and minority ethnic communities.
The Preventing Truancy and Exclusion theme aims to support preventative work that will reduce the chances of children and young people reaching the point of persistent absence or exclusion from school, by enabling those considered to be most at risk of this to achieve and progress alongside their peers.
Grants awarded in 2011/12
Somali Community Parents Association
Supplementary Education theme
£129,670 over two years
In front of a packed hall, with microphone in hand, a Somali teenager feeds back on why his team thinks communication is important: “It is most vital when looking for a job and it helps you understand different people from different backgrounds,” he says, reading from a long list.
This is one of the first sessions of a PHF-funded speaking and listening skills course run by the Somali Community Parents Association (SOCOPA), a support project in Leicester that motivates and champions the local Somali community with a range of advice, training, English classes and addiction mentoring.
Its founder and executive manager, Abdikayf Farah, says: “Since we began in 2005 we have always worked with our local schools, helping families engage and integrate as well as educating the school about our culture.”
Despite best efforts, attainment at school-leaving age, particularly among boys, is low. “Just filling out an application or making a call to a prospective employer is challenging for many young people,” says Abdikayf.
The course is a pilot – run during the three half-term holidays – to support 11–19 year olds with their speaking and listening core skills by engaging them in community projects and debating issues relevant to the Somali population.
Crammed into the first week were visits to older people’s homes, hands-on painting and decorating and video- making. “In each situation they were interacting with other people,” explains Abdikayf. “At the end of the week there was another presentation – attended by parents – where the whole group reported on its achievements.”
The subsequent weeks of the course saw the young people explore issues of democracy and cultural awareness, examining stereotypes and challenging perceptions of themselves within the wider community. The grant allowed SOCOPA to enlist partners to deliver what is an intensive programme including a session with the UK Parliamentary Outreach Service, a Q&A session with the local MP, and support from a number of other charities.
“The feedback has been amazing. The whole community has got behind the project. The young people really enjoyed it and their confidence shot up,” says Abdikayf.
“It’s not easy working with a community that has experienced the trauma of civil war for such a long time. There is little trust between each other but with our philosophy of openness and transparency we hope to rebuild that trust. It’s challenging but when you see the results of projects like this it’s also very rewarding.”
Languages Sheffield
Supplementary Education theme
£135,000 over three years
In Sheffield, educational achievement for black and minority ethnic (BME) children is well below the national BME average. The Foundation funded a project that enables bilingual children to gain accreditation when learning their mother tongue, providing opportunities for having their achievements recognised for the first time.
“Less than a quarter of our bilingual children sit a formal examination in their home language,” says Caroline Norman at Languages Sheffield, part of a consortium that has set up the Home Language Accreditation Project (HoLA). “Gaining a GCSE in their own language has a knock-on effect on achievement across all subjects and can significantly improve a mainstream school’s exam results.”
A 12-month pilot, completed in September 2011, followed over 150 pupils from five community language schools – Chinese, Korean, Russian, Arabic and Mandarin – and matched up their learning experiences with the education database that documents their mainstream achievements. Certificates were sent to their mainstream schools, some of whom had no idea of the extra-curricular learning.
“One primary school was astounded that three of their less academic pupils had clocked up over 100 hours of Arabic through regular attendance at a Saturday school,” says Caroline. “It changes perceptions amongst teachers and raises self-esteem when the certificates are presented during school assemblies.”
Although taught to GCSE standard, few community language schools have the resources to enter their students into examinations. HoLA is now supporting mainstream schools to enter these candidates as part of their regular exam season, although the subject has not been part of their own curriculum. “We can organise a trained, native-speaking examiner for the speaking part of the test, and coordinate students coming together at one venue to sit the examination,” says Caroline.
PHF’s support is paying for a project manager and support workers to organise what should become a sustainable initiative. Part of the project is to train the community language school tutors so they can be more employable by the mainstream schools as classroom assistants or learning mentors, further strengthening connections between the sectors.
“While we have the resources we intend to influence national policy,” says Caroline. “There should be more qualifications in community languages – a Somali GCSE, for example, would benefit that community hugely – and a national roll-out of our initiative is completely achievable.”
Development Education Centre (South Yorkshire) Preventing Truancy and Exclusion theme
£107,948 over three years
Development Education Centre (South Yorkshire) works with schools to raise awareness of how global issues affect everyday life. It developed a pilot project that used the latest learning techniques to foster greater understanding between Year 6 pupils from different backgrounds.
“Some of the secondary schools in Sheffield take children from both the mono-cultural leafy suburbs and from ethnically diverse inner-city schools,” explains Clive Belgeonne, leader of the Building Communities Through Dialogue project. “By the time they first meet in Year 7 they might have already formed damaging assumptions about each other.”
To counter this, the project engages ‘pyramids’ of one secondary school and four corresponding feeder primary schools. Pupils from contrasting primaries are matched to become pen pals, before attending sessions – at ‘neutral’ venues – where participants are encouraged to discuss an issue, ask questions and invite debate. Using methodologies such as Philosophy for Children (P4C), Clive says, “pupils are invited to dig deeper around the issue and begin to recognise – and respect – conflicting perspectives.” Older pupils from the secondary school are also involved, supporting them during their P4C activities.
PHF’s support for this programme stems from the observed impact of the pilot on teamwork skills and confidence. Disruptive behaviours that can be indicators of future exclusion were seen to reduce in participating pupils. Transition from primary to secondary school is a key time in a child’s development, and the aim of this project to ease the process was attractive to the PHF Education and Learning team. The funding extends the pilot to a range of primary and secondary school groupings in Sheffield. The project will now evaluate closely pupils’ perceptions of their school environment and willingness to mix with those of different ethnic backgrounds, and the impact this has had on truancy and exclusion at secondary level.
The grant provides for extensive research and analysis by experts in the social and emotional aspects of learning. “By engaging in this open-ended dialogic learning we hope pupils’ self-confidence will improve as they realise they have something to contribute,” says Clive. “It isn’t always about a right answer: a diversity of views is beneficial for learning. We already have evidence that P4C techniques have a positive impact on behaviour and attendance.”
Clive expects that, once established, participating schools will continue with the mutually beneficial collaboration: “Most schools recognise that anything that can help pupils feel more confident and integrated during transition is a good thing.”
Completed grant
National Literacy Trust
Speaking and Listening theme
£124,751 over two years followed by a new grant of £200,000 over 27 months
Launched as a two-year pilot, Words for Work is a National Literacy Trust (NLT) programme aimed at improving young people’s communication and employability skills. Local business volunteers and secondary school pupils come together through creative workshops to explore speaking and listening in the workplace.
“For years employers have bemoaned young people’s inability to present themselves effectively, work in a team or engage with the public,” says project manager Sally Melvin. “With ‘top down’ pressures on schools to stick to a rigid curriculum and focus exclusively on exam results, the teaching of essential life skills is too often neglected.”
After testing and developing the scheme with two enthusiastic secondary schools in its first year, NLT expanded its pilot to another 13 secondary schools in year two, eventually engaging 450 pupils and 180 business volunteers.
“I’ve learned about body language and how to discuss different issues; how to communicate with people I don’t know,” says Norman, a 14 year old from a Birmingham academy. “School is not going to help me get a job, but Words for Work can help.”
Feeding back on the project, participating teachers related how pupils’ attainment levels increased and, significantly for the Trust, other staff acknowledged the positive effect of this ‘off-curriculum’ intervention. “The confidence levels of students trebled throughout the project,” said a teacher at a Lancashire school. “The change was unbelievable.”
However, not all schools fully engaged with the project, and a thorough evaluation allowed the Trust to amend its approach.
“We learnt two things: we needed a local contact to drive the project forward and, as a small team, we didn’t have the capacity for a national roll-out,” says Sally. “So we went back to PHF who listened to our new plans to grow the project.”
A second grant is now supporting the Trust to engage local organisations who have an existing relationship with schools and businesses to act as regional hubs. “We are effectively franchising the programme, actively recruiting partners like education business partnerships and football community trusts, to manage and deliver Words for Work,” says Sally.
Although recognising quality assurance and effective evaluation may become future challenges, the Trust hopes to have set up 20 hubs within two years, each supporting five secondary schools – potentially reaching thousands of children.
Prompted by its success with Words for Work, NLT hopes a forthcoming curriculum review will support a change of culture where teachers are trained in the value of speaking and listening skills.