Episode 100: The Primary to Secondary transition - Why is Key Stage 3 known as ‘The lost years’ in terms of progression?

Andy Psarianos

Hi, I'm Andy Psarianos.

Robin Potter

Hi, I'm Robin Potter.

Adam Gifford

Hi, I'm Adam Gifford.

Andy Psarianos

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Robin Potter

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Welcome back to another episode of the School of School podcast. And boy, are we lucky? Yes, Adam and Andy, we have a special guest here, Tim Oates. Tim is the group director of research at the Cambridge University Press & Assessment. And now, lucky us, we get to ask Tim all kinds of information about primary to secondary transition. I know my kids have just gone through this, but before we start to get his opinion about a few of these things, Tim, please introduce yourself and give us a little bit more background about who you are and what you do.

Tim Oates

Thanks, Robin, and thanks very much indeed for inviting me to talk today about this. It's a really important issue of transition. Just by way of background, yeah, I run quite a big research group here, about 50 people. We're a big non-teaching department of Cambridge University, over 6,000 people around the world. And we provide education services, assessment learning, and reform services right the way around the world. I'm very interested in comparing education systems, how and why they perform the way they do, and drawing insights from them. Not cherry-picking, actually drawing genuine insights, helping people to reflect on how they can improve their education arrangements in particular settings. So that's me. That's my background.

Robin Potter

Fantastic. So can you give us a little bit more insight into the primary to secondary school transition? And we're going to talk a little bit about the Key Stage 3, and you can explain to everyone what Key Stage 3 is, and how those are usually coined as the lost years in terms of progression.

Tim Oates

Yeah, that's interesting. So yeah, Key Stage 3 is the third of four main stages of education in England, up to the age of 18. We have two stages in primary. Key Stage 1, 2, which is two years duration, Key Stage 2, which runs up to 11. Then Key Stage 3, 11 to 14, then Key Stage 4, 14 to 16, then national examinations in a broad range of subjects. Then people go on to advanced level, choosing academical vocational roots through the system. Yeah, I mean, of course there were some important transitions in kids' lives at a much earlier stage. Those are really important. What happens in the home, what happens in preschool, what happens in the first bits of primary, those are very, very important. But when we look around the world, most systems have some kind of transition around about the age of 11, 12.

That often is from relatively small schools into much larger schools in many systems in England to it's from being supported by one teacher teaching a range of subjects to joining a big institution where one teacher teaches a single subject and therefore children are experiencing more than one teacher. And that transition has a whole series of elements to it. There are changes in curriculum, changes in pedagogics and didactics, change in culture, and in this period 11 to 14, there's a very distinctive change in the identity and the physiology of young people. They go through all sorts of demanding changes, which make real demands on how they see themselves, how they act, and how they interact with those around them and how they operate within this really complex institution we call secondary school. And it goes well for some, not so well for others, and we need to think very hard how we can best support this transition. Mathematics is an interesting strand because it goes quite badly for some in mathematics and we can talk a bit about that. But what's clear is it's a very important transition for a whole series of reasons.

Andy Psarianos

So why's it they call it the lost years, Tim?

Tim Oates

Yeah. Now this is interesting. We have something in England, which in the sort of two thousands was called the Key Stage 3 dip. What happened is that we had testing at the end of Key Stage 3. We don't have it anymore, but when we introduced a national curriculum in 1988, we introduced a big regime of testing in Key Stages 1, 2, 3. And then we had national qualifications at the age of 16. So we had vast amounts of data on kids for the first time, national data on kids. Before that, we used to sample, we had a national sample called the assessment performance unit sample where about 10% of the children in England would have matrix based tests. So some would be tested science, in particular areas of science, others in other areas of science, others in maths, others in literacy, and so on. And from that, we could get a picture of national standards.

It gave us a national picture, not a picture of the attainment of each and every child. When we had had the national assessment regime introduced alongside our new... And it's the first time we had a national curriculum in 1988, we suddenly had loads of data on kids. We've collected that carefully. We have something called the National Pupil Database. So we have millions of pupil records. Now we could begin to genuinely study individual children longitudinally. We had no bodies of data where we could actually trace through individual kids' trajectories. And what we found was a dip at Key Stage 3. Now we thought something was perhaps happening in terms of transition perhaps happening in terms of the curriculum in Key Stage 3. The first thing I said was, "Are we sure it only happens in England?" So a great researcher called Barry Creasey contacted people the way around the world to see whether countries, whether they had individual data or not, also experience something analogous.

And the answer was that they did. And so there's something going on there in terms of the development of children, but we weren't complacent. We wouldn't just say, "oh, well that's just the way it is then. That's what happens to kids." The national inspection said, "Well, what might be happening in curriculum? What might be happening in pedagogy?" And researchers like Gene Ruddick, Morris Galton did highly sensitive evaluation work with schools and with young people to get their experience of transition put succinctly. What we found was a lot of variation in the cultural experience, a lot of variation in the emotional experience of kids moving from being often relatively small groups, one teacher, all subjects to these big intimidating institutions.

Massive socialisation into new friendship groups and so on, very challenging emotionally. And also some problematic curriculum approaches. And those added up to a lot of variation in the attainment between schools, 11 to 14 and overall a national dip that could not solely be attributed to maturation or other processes occurring physiologically with children. That's why we called it the lost years. Some kids went backwards and it was a national problem and it seemed to derive, at least in part, from things that we could do something about in terms of school policy.

Adam Gifford

I find this utterly fascinating, Tim. I've got a sort of hat in both camps. I'm primary school pretty much through and through, but in New Zealand I worked, we have this a system that that's decreasing, I believe intermediate schools where they year seven and eight, and it was almost like a transition to secondary schools. I've taught in those and I've also been involved in some secondary teacher training, but it's the anecdotal things that you used to hear regularly, like we don't trust the primary school's assessment, so we'll reteach things and therefore we lose time to teach something new, and to go through what's expected at Key Stage 3. I mean, didn't these anecdotal reasons stack up?

Tim Oates

I think they do. And I think the more you go into schools and actually unpack the practises, the more that there are important things that we need to attend to in the language, the culture, the assumptions and so on that are obtaining around this vital period of transition. And isn't it interesting, for example, that Australia is committing quite heavily in some areas to all through schools, all through campuses? Whereas other nations, we had the same kind of middle schools that you were describing. And these are fascinating differences and fascinating assumptions behind the policy in the importance of a stable culture, a known place, a familiar place, a place where kids feel protected and loved and so on. Now, I think what is critical in the kind of account you've just given, we don't trust the primary school's assessments. I mean, I've done fascinating linguistic and cultural analysis of that. This is quite negative, but I'll stick with it because I think it's... We're talking about the lost years, so we're going to tackle the negative bits for a while and then we'll go on to what positive things can be done.

Yeah, I mean, I've been into schools where they say, "Well, we don't trust the information coming up from primary schools from these national tests." No, no, absolutely. But at the same time, the school has got a data system which actually classifies these kids according to those data and puts them onto streams in mathematics on the basis of those data. I mean, that's schizophrenic, isn't it? That's not going to result in good educational treatment of these children. And that's real. I mean, I've been in schools and interviewed them and those kind of contradictions are there in the practise of the schools. I think it cuts both ways. There are kids for whom teachers assume that things must have been covered and in the right way. So the learning is embedded and enduring, and it's not. And other instances where there are assumptions that it must be covered again because you can't trust the primary schools to have delivered it well, and that being assumed of all children.

I think in mathematics, we've got often problems that when I look at the exam scripts at 16, the kids achieving very low grades, at 16 have problems with some of the fundamentals of number. Now, how on earth was that not recognised by the school at transition? Now, how have they been allowed to carry on year after year from 11 to 16 with misconceptions in relationship to number? How is it that they can't actually perform the four operations in an automatic way at the age of 16? How has that been allowed to lapse the way through these years? How is it that they find real difficulty detecting the mathematical structure in verbally stated questions? How has that been allowed to persist from the age of 14... It's from 11 to 14 and 14 to 16. Those are three aspects of mathematics that must be identified if they're problematic on entry to lower secondary.

And that all begins to hint at what the remedies are. And I do think there are some very simple things that we can do, which can crack all of this. Perhaps worse, Andy, with some interviews I did a few years ago, we had levels originally in England. And Andy, you and I talked about this a few years ago. We had levels. So you came from primary school knowing that you were a level four child and in some instances knowing that you'd done well and you'd succeeded in some level six mathematics and some other kids knowing that they were a level three child. Now, I looked at some children working in science. The secondary school, this was a term into secondary school, had labelled a worksheet with level four, level five and level six questions. So there was a series of questions and they had levels next to them.

And I interviewed this child and I said, "Well, why haven't you looked at that question?" And they said, "Well, I'm level four. I don't look at level six questions or level five questions." I looked at the questions and I thought they were perfectly capable of answering them. So I took the next worksheet and I cut the questions up and took the numbers off, and then the child was perfectly ready and able to answer some of the level six questions, but they had been labelled and they'd assumed that label and therefore weren't tackling more demanding questions. And of course, if that persists through Key Stage 3 and is consolidated by the school information management system, the data on those kids, then they enter a cycle of low expectations. And that's really serious. And we think that's happening to cause these lost years, 11 to 14.

Robin Potter

So are you saying... I know you mentioned that England used to do that. Are they doing something like that now, not calling it levels, or have they just gotten rid of that labelling altogether?

Tim Oates

The answer, I'm afraid. So often education is yes and no. Now, two things happened. Okay? The first thing happened is that the levels were abandoned. They were officially abandoned, and that was a good thing. We wrote the rationale, we wrote the principles, we disseminated those principles. We tried to cut into this kind of self labelling and school labelling of content and have a nice sequential curriculum, which all kids should have access to, with the focus on equity and entertainment. The two together. The problem was that perhaps the void that created was not adequately filled with alternative practise. So in quite a few cases in those early years, schools said we're not doing levels, but actually their practises really perpetuated their youth just in another form by perhaps labelling children as not yet there emerging successful. So there was a problem of there was national abandonment, but perhaps in perpetuation of practise. What I think where I think we're going now is really good because we're emphasising that we have a national curriculum that schools need to follow it, or an equivalent that's the drive in inspection.

And it's about giving all children access to all content. And the kind of approaches we are now talking about have been clear in your learning objectives for a period of learning or a unit of learning. Assessing children, so on a continuous basis so that you can recognise misconceptions and correct them. Assessment which does not occur sole at the end of a period of learning to classify children, but using the assessment to identify those who have grasped the content, the desired content, and using assessment to identify those who have not, and supporting them in acquiring that content before moving on. And I think that's increasingly evident in classrooms across England, particularly in Key Stage 3 in this crucial 11 to 14 period.

Andy Psarianos

So Tim assessment is a... Well, I mean for you, it's not a dirty word, and I don't think it's a dirty word for us either, but for a lot of people, assessment just conjures up a lot of anxiety and people immediately think that it's an evil thing, often teachers. But it seems to me that at the entrance of Key Stage 3, there needs to be a proper way of diagnosing, I guess, where the gaps are and some form of gap analysis. Now are Key Stage 3, either the institutions or the teachers themselves, equipped to diagnose what children should have learned before they came in and be able to take some kind of appropriate action on that basis? It seems, and I don't know a tremendous amount about the decision making process, but streaming almost seems like it's accepted as inevitable in Key Stage 3, so that some pupils will be coming in on this stream and others will be coming in on a more challenging stream or whatever the case may be, and that those decisions are largely made out of non-empirical data. Is that fair?

Tim Oates

Yeah, I think that's very fair. So I think in all of our work in transnational comparisons, what emerges strongly is differences in teachers conception of the idea of ability. Okay? It's different in Japan, in Finland, Alberta, Massachusetts, England, and so on. In terms of managing far better the transition to secondary and this period 11 to 14, I think you're right. We have to increase the amount of assessment massively, but use it in an entirely appropriate way to understand the gaps, the problems and misconceptions, making sure that those gaps don't become a lasting impediment to the progress of the child. Where things are really panning out well in England, there is not only very good diagnostic assessment on entry... Not relentless. So the first experience when you get to secondary school is just loads of tests.

No, no. I mean, it's done sympathetically and in a supportive way, but it really sorts out where the kids are. But it sorts out where the kids are in terms of their understanding, knowing that their understanding is a complex mix of them as a learner and how well the primary school operated their curriculum. So that done well. I have seen in many schools, it eases the period of transition dramatically, and it enables much more structured approach to progression from the age of 11, much better equity, much better attainment. That's not the only answer though, because I've also seen brilliant practise in England and in other nations where there's much better linkages between the secondary school and the primary school.

Now, one of the best of these recently was where schools were handing a school in a complex rural area with many, many feeder primary schools adopted the simple action of giving examples of the kind of work which kids were expected to produce in secondary school in mathematics, literacy, history, science to the primary schools. And what was remarkable, the primary schools said, "What? They're expected to do this in the first year of secondary, we had no idea." You see, suddenly you've got better articulation between primary and secondary. You've got the idea of a learning progression, where there isn't an artificial break. What happened in these schools is they began to up their game in terms of the quality of writing, the extent of writing, focus on key concepts, easily doable, and raising the achievement in the primary schools and easing the process of transition to secondary. I mean, what a simple thing to do and what an effective thing to do.

Andy Psarianos

In a country like Singapore, systemically that can be managed by the Ministry of Education because it's small enough of a place and there's enough coherence preexisting in the system that they can make it part and parcel of their day-to-day business to make sure that secondary schools and primary schools are working together towards a common goal. But if you look at a system like England, it's a lot more complex. I mean, 20,000 odd schools. How should that organisation be formed? Because I suppose in the past, it would've been the responsibility of the local authority, but now we've got a local authority, we've got different types of schools, multi academy trusts, we've got obviously the independent school sector. We've got small independent academies as well. How should it work? I know that the maths hubs, I suppose, partially responsible for taking on some of this responsibility, but it's only 48 of them against 20,000 schools. How should it work in the system? What can the policy makers do to make this better, I suppose, is my question?

Tim Oates

Yeah. I mean, in a health service, we have small units, doctor surgeries, we have big units, hospitals, we have some very, very big teaching hospitals. I don't think the professionals in those different size institutions should have a different view about how viruses work. I mean, it would be crazy. So why do you expect something different in education? Now, it is true, Andy, that Hong Kong, Singapore, Finland, Alberta, the countries I've mentioned previously, they do tend to be small. They do tend to be about sort of five, 6 million. Estonia, a bit smaller than that. You can do certain things in that kind of context. South Korea bucks the trend. It's a system in which there's considerable educational attainment, and it's big. Japan also bucks that trend. What we need to do is know what the pedagogic practises are. We need to really drill down into the pedagogic practises and make them available to all schools just as we make clinical practise available within health systems.

And I don't think it's wrong to analogize between the two. What it means is we have to have an evidence-based approach to identifying good practise. What I think is really good in England recently, actually in a big system with a lot of within school and between school variation, the chief inspector has reformed school inspection. It's taken on board this distinction between a national curriculum, a list, a framework of things to be achieved, and the school curriculum, how you turn it into a motivating captivating programme for individual children, and recognising that that is a process constructing the school curriculum. And now inspection, the revised inspection framework actually looks at how that school is making decisions about how to articulate a set of common objectives into a meaningful programme for their individual children. And in inspecting that it can actually produce, the inspection service itself, can produce narratives about good practise, which can be reflected upon and adopted by other schools. And I think that's a really good thing.

Adam Gifford

Tim, one of the things that struck me most when I was in leadership in schools, I had a conversation with one of the secondary schools that took a big chunk of our pupils, and one of the questions I asked was about participation rates. When it came to a time that the children could choose whether or not to take maths, how were our children doing? And the assessment would suggest that they'd keep doing it because at the end of Key Stage 2, it looked like they'd find it no problem. And the participation rates were falling off a cliff.

As soon as they got the chance to jump out and stop doing maths, they would. Now, I've simplified this massively, but one of the things that we found was is that, and hopefully the changes that we've spoken about previously that are relatively recent changes to the way that mathematics is taught in the first instance in primary school, is that the children that were going up to secondary school, they were kind of rote learning some things and memorising some things and getting through, but I didn't believe they understood the mathematics at a level that they needed to. And so when they got into the secondary school, they were finding it quite difficult because their understanding was quite surface level. And I just wonder with something that we've spoken about before, that new approaches to the way that mathematics is taught with a better understanding, and not just the success criteria of whether the answers correct or not, but also being sophisticated enough to ask, how did you get it?

Are there other ways of doing it? Because I just think that part of the problem that I see having worked with children who really struggle with mathematics in secondary school was so much of what I found, again anecdotally, but quite a number of children, that they were missing something very early... Like a very early maths concept. They didn't understand part whole thinking, for example. And this was holding children back. And I still think you can go into some year six classrooms the last year at primary school and ask the whole class, what's nine plus five? And there'll be a big chunk of those children who are still furiously going with their fingers because they don't understand part whole thinking. And to me, I think going into secondary school, we really want them to understand mathematics. And I think at a level that there's far more support to do now, I feel, than when I first started teaching in primary school 20 plus years ago.

Tim Oates

I think there are too far too many false oppositions in educational discourse and educational theory, that rote learning versus understanding. No, no, no, that's a false opposition. The way that human cognition works. Rote learning is a critical part of the acquisition of discipline knowledge. But of course, the purpose is understanding and the purpose is seeing the mathematical structures in things and solving problems. But rote learning, memorization has a key role to play in that. It doesn't reduce the rote learning or memorization just as much as it doesn't reduce just to mathematical understanding. So I think retention of complexity in the discourse around mathematics and education is absolutely vital. This knowledge versus skills, theory versus practise, rote learning versus understanding, these are just unhelpful oppositions, which are over politicised and confuse policy makers, confuse parents, confuse in some cases teachers and schools.

I think when we look at the very best methods at mass education, we see rich discussion about mathematical problems. They're committing to memory of things that need to be committed, like number relationships, number bonds, and so on the form of operations. So they can become automatic, enabling high level critical thinking, enabling high level problem-solving. Our knowledge of that from areas of professional work like mathematics and aviation is now being strengthened by cognitive work on cognitive science on the learning of very young children, the way that long-term memory has to be chockfull of remembered things, so they can be brought into our relatively small and not very effective short-term memory for working on problems. So I think the kind of problems that you've outlined often exemplify and are caused by these false oppositions in thinking. The very best maths pedagogy moves from real problems to the abstract representation of those problems. Not on a weekly basis, week one, the abstract, week two, the application, but no, again, Jim Stigler's observation of math lessons in Japan says, mass educators go around this relationship between concrete and abstract on a sort of 30 second rotation.

You look at the way in which fractions occur in the real world to understand the abstract representation. And you do do that... You go around that cycle hundreds of times in an individual lesson. That's how we know that really deep mathematical understanding builds up. It's true Russian mathematical pedagogy as well that I've seen in Kazakhstan based on a long tradition of the maths institutes in Russia. They will do the mechanical things, they will look at the verbal problems, but it's always for the purpose of building up deep understanding of mathematical structures. There's a concern for being able to be automatic in the four operations, but there's also a deep concern to make sure that this is building up mathematical understanding and that understanding is checked by rich questions to really probe understanding. And where's the barrier to doing that everywhere in primary, in secondary, at university in professional practise.? There aren't any. It's just good pedagogy and good didactics.

Andy Psarianos

So Tim, why does this keep happening then this kind of pendulum swing where, you seem to have... It's almost like the American political system in a way where we've got those who feel quite strongly that... Let's pick on mathematics. Mathematics, they have an extremist, fundamentalist view about mathematics should be entirely around discovery and all this kind of stuff, versus mathematics should be entirely around procedures and memorization. And there's very few people who seem to be saying what you're saying, which is, look, of course you want the children to know their number of facts. Of course you want children to know their multiplication tables. Why would you not want them to know that? Why would you not want them to be able to recall that? But that's not enough. They have to also then be able to take that and apply it and reason with it, which seems like, to me, that's the obvious answer. Why do we have these fundamentalists at both ends that think like, "Let's stop talking about other nonsense, it's all about this"? Why does that keep happening?

Tim Oates

Well, you kind kind of summarised it well yourself. It's kind of a human trait, isn't it? And you have to explain it. Partially, I think what happens is that we do build up good practises in education. They become automatic for teachers and for institutions. They've become embedded in institutions. And every so often something comes along from research, which is good and is well evidenced, but requires a change in practise. The risk then is that you overstate what's wrong with what we've got in order to get the change. And at that point, you've got the pendulum swing occurring.

I think it's incumbent upon us who are deeply committed to evidence-based improvement in education, not to overstate, overstate the deficits that we're trying to address. And when we state the assets of what we've got and the assets of what we have just discovered and how to combine them, then we get genuine scientific accumulation and then we get well-managed improvement in education systems. I think we've got good examples of it around the world. We can see it in Germany after they experienced their PISA shock in PISA 2000. We've seen it in mass education and literacy in England. We can do it, but Andy, it's all too easy to lapse into that natural human trait of overstating the problems of what we've got already, indeed and overstating the assets of what we are proposing. And then you get false oppositions and those pendulums swings.

Robin Potter

So much to think about, Tim, we just love having you on. So thanks for joining us.

Tim Oates

Thank you very much indeed. It's been a great pleasure.

Andy Psarianos

Thank you for joining us on the School of School podcast.