John Bald: Conservatives are deluded to think we have defeated the “progressive” educationalists

John Bald is a former Ofsted inspector. He is Vice-President of the Conservative Education Society.

The best news for education in recent years has been the election of Professor Stanislas Dehaene, head of neuroscience in France, to the Royal Society. Dehaene’s work over the past 20 years on the processes of learning, based on direct evidence of brain activity rather than the indirect evidence gained by inferring it from external observation, has provided a clear picture of the way the brain develops from infancy that calls into question every educational practice that is not consistent with it.

His election adds to the substantial number of Royal Society Fellows with a main or significant interest in brain research, and comes at a time when the Society is working to extend knowledge of the field beyond its own members. This is real science, not quackery about “learning styles” or “brain food” (water) that led to so many false dawns in the 00s. The French government has given Dehaene a unit to investigate the application of his work in the school system, and something similar is needed here. Dehaene was kind enough to describe this review of his major work, How We Learn, as “beautiful”, so I suggest it can be taken as an accurate introduction.

Dehaene’s overarching theory, that learning involves an adjustment in thinking to take account of new material, poses challenges to both sides of our current schism over the purposes of education. For Labour and its progressive allies, his demonstration that mental development is a process of adjusting thinking shows that their infatuation with mixed ability teaching is a blind alley. Earlier research, beginning with Santiago Ramón y Cajal´s drawings of brain cells which won him the Nobel Prize in 2006, identified the formation of links between brain cells and the deposit of myelin as an insulator through practice, as the basic process of development.

As the process of intellectual growth is exponential, the highest-achieving children learn at a much faster rate. For example, Marie Clay’s investigation of six-year-old readers in the 1960s found that the most able quarter made very few errors, and were often able to correct their own mistakes. The weakest quarter’s error rate was 20 times as great. They read proportionately less and were rarely able to correct an error. The needs of the two groups were so different that it was not possible for one teacher to meet both at the same time. The same issue arises in maths, though unfortunately, far too few teachers have the skills they need to teach the weakest pupils. Our opponents still control most teacher training and systematically ignore the issue.

David Cameron’s storming defence of his record on education and the responses to it show the challenge to our side. Blazing away as if nothing had gone wrong, it mirrored Jeremy Hunt’s rebuke to me, when I was Chairman of the Conservative Education Society, to focus on what was going right, not on what was going wrong. Did either of them really think our opponents would do the same? And was it not a huge embarrassment to David Cameron and Michael Gove to have trumpeted Perry Beeches School at our Conference, only to have it closed, and the head banned from teaching for corruption?

Chris McGovern, of the Campaign for Real Education, diplomatically suggested that the truth was more “nuanced “. The impact of phonics is one example. International reading scores have risen, in contrast to the progressive miasma in Scotland and Wales, but the inflexible form of phonics enforced by the government, and its prevention of sensible adaptation to meet the needs of children who find learning to read difficult, have been a big factor in the SEND crisis that threatens to bankrupt local authorities. This is not just because of the reading problems themselves, but because of the severe anxiety, poor behaviour and school refusal that failure to learn to read can generate. I am currently teaching a 12-year-old who could not read the, the most common word in the language, which is presented in government lists as an “exception”. Explaining the origin of th by Norman scribes, and demonstrating its frequency in common short words – this, that, then – has solved the problem, and provided the basis for a new neural network, in which each word reinforces the others.

Interestingly, this pupil can now read complex vocabulary related to his interest in marine biology – invertebrate, bioluminescent – following discussion and explanation. Synthetic phonics alone would not equip them to do this, as it would not show him where to place the stress on the words, showed in a very readable book or explain how to handle the variations in vowel (voice) sounds. Two Fellows of the Royal Society have shown in a very readable book (Frith and Blakemore, The Learning Brain) how an area of the brain develops to carry out this discrimination almost 20 years ago. It is high time everyone involved in this area took notice.

The multiplication check, a good idea in itself, shows similar inflexibility. Learning tables requires a major adjustment to the way children think about numbers, as they need to coordinate two columns, one rising in the basic sequence of numbers – 1x, 2x,3x – and the other in a multiple. Children learn these at different rates, and progressives have deliberately avoided investigating this. The government, though, imposed an all-all-nothing test that took no account of development, and gave no credit whatsoever to those who were still in the process of building the neural networks needed for complete success. A simple bronze-silver-gold system would have encouraged pupils and teachers alike, and I still don’t know why this idea was rejected.

Labour has shown, through blocking an Eton-sponsored sixth form in the North-East, and its vindictive VAT levy on independent schools, that it continues to put ideology before progress. On the Conservative side, allowing policy to be determined by ideological fantasists like Dominic Cummings, and ignoring the wiser counsel readily available from experts such as Lord Lingfield and our scientists, threw away a golden opportunity to reverse the progressivism that has prevailed since the days of Richard Crossland and Harold Wilson. It may not occur again.