It would be pretty silly, would it not, to point at a society very different to Australian society and say, “These guys do well in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) so let’s copy what they do.” Unfortunately, that’s about as sophisticated as much of the discussion about Finland has been. We simply cannot know whether anything we identify about Finnish education, or anything that Finnish educators highlight as a cause of their success, is the reason for the relative difference in performance of Finland and Australia.
And while the example of Singapore aligns far better with my own particular biases about what good education looks like, I would fault any similar approach that swapped out Finland as our object of affection and replaced it with Singapore (like that would even happen, but, you know).
Instead, the better comparison is to examine trends and variations within systems (and PISA have worked hard to make such data available, as I have written about before). This is what is so interesting about the graph in Part I of these two posts. Yes, I can see there is a trend and that’s what makes those schools that are bucking that trend so interesting. Perhaps we can learn something from them.
However, in order to learn from outlying schools, there needs to be some variation. If every single school in a state requires teachers to issues learning styles assessments and differentiate according to learning styles, we can draw precisely no inferences about the utility of this approach from a comparison of the performance of these schools. Fortunately, we have other evidence to draw upon in this case. The problem arises when we wish to draw inferences about the kinds of complex real-world approaches that schools tend to adopt – those large, messy policies that bridge research, experience, local conditions and inspiration.
That’s when introducing controlled variation to a system can help. No, it will never prove a cause-and-effect relationship, but it can enable us to make a few more tentative inferences. This is aided when performance information is made publicly available. In Australia we have the MySchool website that is set-up for the very specific purpose of informing parents about local schools. The UK government makes data analysis more easy. For instance, at the ‘compare school performance’ website, you can download spreadsheets full of progress data. This has not yet been updated for 2019.
However, you still need the variation. You need schools to be pursuing different approaches so that you have a chance of learning something about those approaches. In the UK this seems to have been aided by greater school autonomy and the Free Schools movement. In his recent post for the campaigning group Parents and Teachers for Excellence, Mark Lehain notes that a pattern is starting to emerge where those schools that combine a ‘warm-strict’ approach to behaviour with a knowledge-rich curriculum are appearing as outliers in the data. Once the 2019 data is available, we can assess this more systematically.
I would like Australian State and Federal politicians to reflect on how we may introduce more planned variation into our own state education systems and how we might learn from the natural experiment being conducted in England. After all, England and Australia have far more in common with each other than either does with Finland or Singapore, so there is a good chance that promising approaches identified by variation within England will also be promising here.
Filling the pail 
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Good idea. Won’t happen in Australia.
It happens in NZ. But the higher powers in Education just ignore the evidence and plough on with the trendy ideas of the day.
We had a “Numeracy Project” that was very progressive — and a total failure. That caused no rethink at all in how moving in a progressive direction wasn’t going to work.
It seems to me that if change is going to happen in Australia it is more likely to be in the independent sector. There are some structural differences between state systems in the UK and Australia that make it unlikely that an Australian state High School could implement either a knowledge rich curriculum, or a warm-strict behaviour approach. Some issues: centralised rather than school appointment of staff; levels of teaching out of area; lack of subject knowledge; lack of acknowledgement of importance of subject knowledge due to prevalence of B.Ed qualifications; attachment to progressive ideas; strong unions with uniformly progressive ideas (regardless of actual member views); rarity of staff moves between schools due to centralised transfer system…
This is a tough conundrum. You could implement “warm strict” and “knowledge-based” in one of two ways: either the planned variation way, where schools try out these principles if they want to, and external assessment and the market demonstrates to the government and the public that they are preferable, or the central enforcement way, where the government tells schools that these are the principles they must follow.
Planned variation and experimentation sounds good because it is (somewhat) scientific and because it lets schools have autonomy, but there are some problems. First, even if it works, it’s slower than the central enforcement method (supposing you tried out WS and KB in a few schools, then used something like NAPLAN results to demonstrate they were better, it would take, at the very least, five years to demonstrate overall positive effects, and then you’d need many more years for even the majority of schools to get on board). Second, if you give schools leeway to “experiment”, there’s no guarantee that they understand the principles of the experiment. Just like any educational idea (phonics is a good example), schools would interpret WS and KB as meaning whatever they wanted them to mean, and as a result the “experiments” wouldn’t be consistent enough to provide anyone with useful data (and could possibly discredit these valuable terms). Third, supposing the experiments show WS and KB to be good ideas, ultimately someone would have to suggest that they become mandatory, which calls into question why all the schools had to do the experiment in the first place when it could have been mandated 10 years ago.
Experimentation should be encouraged, but I think it should be within an existing principled framework. Or to put it really simply: the government already mandates a curriculum, so it could make it knowledge-based in a couple of years, and make everyone follow it. Experimentation would then solve the question of how to make this curriculum work in all sorts of different contexts. What’s needed is leadership from government on the issue.