Two Stars and a Wish #11: Cold-calling; Scotland's curriculum, and exclusions of autistic pupils
Two great links and one I wish was better.
A blog post on cold-calling
THE COLD-CALLING DEBATE: POTENTIAL PERILS, POTENTIAL SUCCESSES
I'm not usually a fan of nuance. I'm used to people calling for more nuance only where they are almost certainly wrong, and they want to confuse matters. However, I rather enjoyed this nuanced blog post about cold-calling, i.e. asking pupils to answer questions without getting them to volunteer. It doesn't give any easy answers about whether we should use or avoid cold-calling in class, but it does explain why there may be no easy answers.
A stark description of the damage done to Scottish education by its politicians
PISA 2022 in Scotland: declining attainment and growing social inequality – Lindsay Paterson
In 2010, Scotland introduced its Curriculum for Excellence, a new curriculum for what had often been regarded as the UK's most successful education system.
"Our aspiration for all children and for every young person is that they should be successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors to society and at work" declared the Curriculum for Excellence. Unfortunately, these broad aims were accompanied by no clear idea of what knowledge was worth learning. This made the notion of a "successful learner" essentially pointless.
Now we can see the effects of this platitude-heavy, but knowledge-lite, approach to education. As this blog post summarises, kids in Scotland now learn a lot less. In particular:
As a result, over the whole decade from 2012 to 2022, the Scottish decline was equivalent to about 16 months of schooling in mathematics, 8 months in reading, and 18 months in science. The baseline of 2012 is significant because it is the first PISA group to have any experience of the Curriculum for Excellence after it was officially inaugurated in 2010. Thus the decline started to become noticeable at the moment when the new curriculum started to impinge systematically on children’s learning. The 2022 group was the first to have all 10 years of their schooling with the new curriculum, and attainment has never been so low as it is now.
Researchers being misleading about exclusions and autism
The Exclusion of Autistic Pupils from Schools
There are a few rules of thumb for judging whether somebody writing about exclusions and SEND is scaremongering.
The first rule of thumb is to look at their choice of base rate. Since badly-behaved pupils are highly likely to be labelled "SEMH" while at secondary school, the category of pupils classified as "no SEND" largely consists of well-behaved pupils. Using the exclusion rate for these pupils without SEND as the base rate for comparisons makes categories of pupils with SEND look far more likely to be excluded. This is the case even if their actual risk of exclusion in that category is the same as (or sometimes lower than) the average pupil.
The second rule of thumb is to check if the word "exclusions" is used to mean more than just permanent exclusions. Legally, suspensions are "fixed-term exclusions", yet in the data, they are referred to as "suspensions". Therefore, anyone who refers to the data on suspensions, but calls them "exclusions", is clearly up to something. Referring to actions that are not even included in the exclusion statistics (like off-rolling or sending kids home unofficially) is even more misleading.
Both rules of thumb give us reason to doubt the work of some researchers at the University of Birmingham looking at exclusions and autism. And, of course, their narrative blames teachers for not making "reasonable adjustments for pupils with autism to prevent exclusions". That's not to deny there are issues around how children with autism are treated. It should be possible for a child having a meltdown to be taken home by their parents without it being recorded as a suspension. Schools should not be put in a position where they have to record an almost purely therapeutic and compassionate response as a disciplinary matter. But nobody should be attacking schools for "excluding children with SEND" when they have no choice but to send a child home to achieve the safest outcome for all involved.
Thanks to Gwen for the graphics.