Social Action

Celebrating Black History Month at Action Tutoring

16 October 2020

black history month

Action Tutoring Programme Coordinator for Birmingham, Grace Brooks, talks about her experience coming from a mixed heritage background and discusses with colleague Fleur Nicholson, about steps we can take to increase equality and diversity in the school curriculum, in Action Tutoring and in society more widely.

We are finally in October, and at Action Tutoring we’re highlighting the need for reflection and celebration of Black History Month.

As a mixed-race woman, Black History Month for me is about being seen, heard and valued. Although when doing so, we sometimes forget to include those with mixed heritage in this group. Unfortunately, we are all guilty of overlooking certain groups, even within our own community. That is not to say we should pay no attention to Black history, but to say that we should look at all Black history: those from African descent, those from the Caribbean descent, those from mixed descent etc. Black history is our history and mixed heritage history is our history – they are not separate.

Black history is our history and should not be separately taught within our schools nor should you need to wait until university before you can learn about British Black history. So many of us are left unaware of the astonishing impact and contributions of the Black community across our history and our culture, including in our literature.

This absence was highlighted by the recent TeachFirst report ‘Missing pages’, which calls for an increase to the representation of ethnic minority authors in English literature lessons. For example, currently the biggest exam board does not include a single book by a Black author in their English Literature GCSE specifications.

Why can’t we see and teach our children the powerful impact that people of colour have had on our society when everyone was against us? That would personally inspire me if I was a 13-year-old girl, not just the white British topics I was taught in class. It is crucial to tell the whole story from all perspectives and celebrate every achievement and contribution.

We often forget to look at and reflect on how much of an impact people of colour have had and continue to have on our society; we are almost forgotten. We need to provide platforms for Black people to speak up, be recognised and celebrated and be appreciated in our community, and education is one place this can start.

Enterprises like The Black Curriculum can help to address the lack of British history in our schools.  So that all young people can be educated fully before reaching adulthood. This social enterprise delivers arts-focused Black history programmes to help equip young people, as well as providing teacher training and campaigning to change the curriculum.

We need to educate the younger generation by teaching an accessible curriculum for all, providing all children with a sense of identity and importance in our society. The work The Black Curriculum does, has the potential to inform and educate young people of colour on their own history, as well as their peers’.

The TeachFirst report includes perspectives from four English teachers on why representation matters and how they have introduced a greater diversity of authors in their own lessons. The paper also recommends other proactive measures that could help us progress, including changing the literature specifications for GCSE English, providing access to professional development for teachers and funding for schools to invest in books by ethnic minority authors.

We all need to recognise our privilege and ask ourselves what we will do to positively impact those around us. By acknowledging this you are accepting your responsibility and your potential to make a change. You must then decide on the actions you will take. These actions are not always big; they may be small, such as the way we speak to one another.

We need to ask ourselves: how can we personally take steps to increase equality and diversity? And not just for Black History Month but for every day of the year.

At Action Tutoring, we know we have a part to play in educating pupils. In the short term we are working to review all of our tutoring workbooks to audit their cultural representation and messaging.  Any new resources we produce will follow new diversity criteria.

We are also creating diverse suggested reading lists for pupils. These will also be useful for tutors who may ask us about the kinds of texts they could bring to sessions for ‘reading for pleasure’ activities.

We are also establishing a Diversity and Inclusion working group internally to ensure we make sustained anti-racist action central to how we work.

As part of Black History Month, Action Tutoring is encouraging people to share inspiring stories of Black and mixed heritage figures on social media, to celebrate the outstanding contributions made by Black and mixed heritage communities throughout history. Please tag us in your posts on twitter @ActionTutoring and Instagram @actiontutoringuk.

Open up the doors

20 August 2020

This GCSE results day, CEO Susannah Hardyman explores how Ofqual’s exam grading system reproduced the long-standing disadvantage that Action Tutoring exists to tackle, and looks at the consequences of the government’s grading U-turn for this and next year’s school leavers. 

Unlike the A Level ‘fiasco’, as it is being widely termed in the media, this GCSE results day we know what’s coming – the government’s U-turn on Monday awarded centre assessment grades (CAGs) to pupils for both A Levels and GCSEs following outcries of injustice at the A Level grading system used.

Initially, instead of using CAGs, the government planned to use an algorithm developed by Ofqual for this year’s results. While overall this produced A Level results that looked broadly in line with last year’s, it didn’t take long to reveal that some big injustices lay under the surface. 40% of grades had been downgraded from the original CAGs submitted by schools and colleges, infuriating pupils and teachers, and when studied more closely it emerged that:

 

Why did this happen? The algorithm favoured smaller class sizes, where there were fewer pupils for teachers to rank, and also subjects with fewer entries like Classics. Both factors favoured the private school set-up and disadvantaged significantly larger colleges.

 

Further outcry ensued when it transpired there was no clear plan for an appeals process, with a lack of clarity on A Level results day on whether appeals would have to be paid for by schools and pupils (which would put those who are better-off financially at an advantage). Ofqual initially published appeals guidance on its website on Saturday, only to rapidly take it down again a few hours later.

 

This blog from our friends at the The Access Project – a charity that works to support young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to get into top universities – described the challenges faced by pupils that had not been given the grades they’d hoped for as they battled through the clearing process. These students suddenly found themselves in the midst of disappointment, having to advocate for themselves and argue their case to admissions tutors, a skill that many would not be equipped with if they didn’t have strong support from teachers and families.

 

The U-turn on Monday to award CAGs at GCSE and A Level has resolved some problems. I believe that given the circumstances and concerns that had emerged, it was the right thing to do. However, there is no doubt that other issues have been created, as highlighted brilliantly in this piece by Maria Neophytou, Interim CEO at Impetus, one of Action Tutoring’s largest funders. Evidence shows that disadvantaged pupils are more likely to have grades under-predicted by their teachers, so CAGs still can’t guarantee a fair result – a concern flagged very early in this process and a key one for Action Tutoring. Universities now face a huge challenge as more pupils than ever receive the grades they need to secure places, creating a huge pressure on admissions. Deferring may be the answer for some, but it will not be straightforward filling their year out in the middle of a recession. This also creates more pressure on places next year.

 

Inequality in education in the UK is not a new problem. That is exactly why Action Tutoring has existed since 2012, to tackle the attainment gap, with successful results. Lockdown has exacerbated these inequalities whilst also bringing them to the public’s attention. But, as Chair of the House of Commons Education Committee, Rob Halfon MP, said this week: This is a long-term problem which was hiding in plain sight in GCSE results before this year’s extraordinary events. It requires a long-term, targeted solution to tackle the persistent disadvantage.” 

 

Ultimately all of this matters because pupils’ lives and futures are at stake. Grades make a difference to where you can study, the course you can take, the jobs you might be considered for. It was a favourite mantra of my headteacher at secondary school, emphasised at the start of every September while informing the whole school assembly on that summer’s performance, “Grades open doors,” – they may not be the only thing that gets you through the door, but they give you a fighting chance of getting it open. When I was dropped off at university by my parents, feeling totally overwhelmed and unbelievably lucky to have been offered a place at Cambridge, the college had this beautiful huge door that opened up to the grounds. My mum looked at it and said, “See – Mrs Freeman was right. Grades opened doors.”  Yet, last Thursday, it must have felt to many pupils that Gavin Williamson was slamming the door firmly shut.

 

It’s precisely because grades open doors that GCSE results day matters so much. For pupils to progress into further education, employment or training, they need at least to meet national standards in English and maths. Action Tutoring focuses relentlessly on those at risk of just missing out on these pass grades, because without them, prising those doors to opportunity open becomes much harder. It would have been a travesty if GCSE pupils had faced the same results day as those picking up their A Levels last week, with all manner of longer term consequences for disadvantaged pupils who were more likely to be downgraded by the algorithm.

 

With the government having made the decision to trust teacher judgment (and now looking set to rely on school based assessment for BTECs too, albeit with a very last minute change affecting half a million pupils), given the incredible circumstances we find ourselves in this year I would much rather risk grades being over-inflated than underestimated, with everything pupils have already been through. For anyone moving from Year 11 to the next stage in their life, getting back into learning again since school closures in March will be an enormous challenge and the job market will not be favourable for young people for a long while to come. Giving them the benefit of the doubt with their grades would seem to be the least we can do to help them with their next step, rather than risking giving them grades that under score them.

 

Whilst at Action Tutoring we had to say an abrupt goodbye to our Year 11 cohort, we are looking forward to getting back to what we love doing in September: running tutoring programmes, building pupils’ confidence and seeing their satisfaction as they finally grasp concepts they’d struggled with. With the National Tutoring Programme (NTP) on the horizon, the unprecedented need for catch-up support and now the option to run our programmes online, we know it’s going to be busier than ever. We are calling for the National Tutoring Programme to be extended beyond one year. Pupils need and deserve sustained support and the NTP could have the real potential in the long run not just to help pupils catch up from lost learning from covid-19, but to work to close the attainment gap in the UK further. However, we can’t deliver on our mission without the hundreds of volunteers that sign up to tutor with us every year. Would you or someone you know consider being one of them, or spreading the word to others? You really can help to open those doors for pupils, at a time when it’s never been more needed. 

 

Susannah Hardyman, CEO.

COVID-19 set to further widen attainment gap between the UK’s 28% of disadvantaged children and their more affluent counterparts in state education warns charity CEO

2 April 2020

Susannah Hardyman, CEO of education charity Action Tutoring discusses COVID-19 and the impact of school closures on children from less well-off backgrounds. 

March 2020 marked a seismic shift in education, with schools nationwide closing their doors to all but the children of key workers and the most vulnerable, whilst grappling to implement online solutions in a bid to provide effective teaching and learning to pupils. The shift also prompted unprecedented demand from affluent parents for private tutoring – an industry with an annual income of over £2bn – keen to shield with online support their children from spring/summer learning loss.

But what about the 28% of pupils in state education deemed as disadvantaged – pupils who may not have access to high bandwidth broadband to facilitate remote learning and likely won’t have space to work in which to work easily in cramped accommodation.  Currently every year 75,000 disadvantaged children leave school without basic qualifications in English and maths. Pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds are not less academically able, but lack of access to tools and resources means currently only 41% of this group pass English and maths GCSEs, compared to 69% of all other pupils.

Motivation is also set to prove a challenge. We all know that it is far easier to engage with a pupil in person than it is to motivate them to work online, especially if their parents are not available to support and encourage them or that child is struggling academically. Forcing attendance of online sessions will, I believe, be highly difficult to enforce or even encourage. 

Sadly, it seems inevitable that the current national crisis will further widen the attainment gap. While many schools are doing all they can now to mitigate this, and are proving themselves in so many ways as the fourth emergency service, disadvantaged children are going to need more support than ever before to catch up in the months to come. That support will no doubt need to take many forms, but tutoring is a well known, effective intervention that can play a big role in raising attainment.  

As a key provider of school-based intervention programmes incorporating tutoring solutions provided free to disadvantaged pupils, Action Tutoring is calling on the government to provide catch up funding for disadvantaged pupils once schools are back to normal business in addition to the Pupil Premium funding. This could enable schools to provide extra support such as additional tuition for disadvantaged pupils – who are already 18 months behind their more affluent counterparts by the end of secondary schools – to help prevent them from falling even further behind. In the short term, Action Tutoring, along with other organisations, are lobbying the Department for Education to provide laptops and broadband access to those that need it to facilitate home learning more easily.

Whilst exams may have been scrapped for this year, learning is for life and not just for exams. Good standards in English and maths in particular are crucial to progressing well in further education, employment or training. Schools will be and are doing all they can safely to alleviate the immediate impact of the current crisis on their pupils. This crisis has seen an incredible outpouring of community spirit, whether through food banks or local groups setting up to look out for their neighbours. But COVID-19 is going to have a long lasting impact on society. 

Volunteers and charities will be needed more than ever before, backed by the government, to help schools pick up the pieces and enable their pupils, whatever their background, to flourish in every way. The immediate volunteer and charity efforts are hugely encouraging but as many are saying, this is going to be a marathon not a sprint. Those efforts are surely going to be needed for a long time to come.

Over the last few years Action Tutoring has built up healthy reserves, which we are very thankful for at the moment. We are also grateful to our many funders who are standing with us through this period. However, we are facing a loss of income due to not being able to deliver in schools. Therefore, any donation would be very gratefully received to help us compensate for this and ensure we can be in a strong place to be ready to support our pupils as soon as we can safely do so. 

We also hope to engage many more volunteers to ensure we can help these pupils get back to where they should be.  

Apply here to volunteer or visit our fundraising page to donate – thank you for making a difference in a very challenging time.

We are also working hard to prepare an online offering of our tutoring model.  It’s still early days, but please do register your interest here if you would like to hear more about these developments.

Ability or attainment: what’s the difference and why does our language matter?

3 February 2020

Speaking about children as high, low or middle ability is commonplace within schools and educational discourse.  During my Action Tutoring work week, I regularly hear teachers and tutors use this language when discussing their pupils. They may say “X pupil is really low ability” or refer to groups of pupils as “the highs and the lows”, “the tops and the bottoms”, or even “the best and the worst”. I also often hear Action Tutoring pupils categorise or refer to themselves and their peers in this way.

Given that one primary pupil I spoke to was coincidentally sat in front of a very large Growth Mindset display, this greatly concerned me. However, knowing the current educational climate, which insists on the labelling, categorising and ranking of children, such comments no longer surprise me.

In the UK, children are grouped by their perceived ability from as young as three years old and this label often remains fixed throughout their school career. Disadvantaged pupils are disproportionately represented in low-ability groups and movement between groups is rare.

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It is widely known that socio-economic disadvantage is the biggest predictor of academic attainment and that gaps in educational outcomes begin in the early years of education and widen throughout schooling. Labelling children as ‘low ability’ therefore ignores the ways that societal factors impact upon a child’s academic attainment.

At Action Tutoring, we recognise that disadvantaged young people aren’t any less able, but simply have less access to the tools and opportunities which enable them to reach their potential at school. One of the challenges of working with disadvantaged pupils is instilling in them the belief that their current attainment and test scores do not define their capabilities. With high expectations, continued effort, and the support provided by targeted tuition, we know that they can achieve.

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When children are grouped by ability at school, it is most often based on prior attainment. However, equating attainment (assessment performance) with ‘ability’ (used in place of potential or intelligence) is neither accurate nor motivating for pupils and educators. Instead, it is this exact language which actively promotes the concept of fixed ability thinking, or the belief that intelligence is fixed, innate and unmalleable. With the growth in popularity of Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset approach in schools across the country, it seems strange that, for the most part, preconceived notions of ability remain unchallenged in our day-to-day language.

When we label children as ‘low ability’, our expectations of what they can achieve are limited, we set ceilings on their potential and we danger damaging pupils’ self-esteem and long-term aspirations. In contrast, we know that children who are encouraged to have a growth mindset and view ability as malleable are more likely to embrace challenges, display increased confidence and go on to succeed.

By becoming more aware of our language, and by actively choosing to replace the word ‘ability’ with ‘attainment’, we are far more likely to question why a pupil is low attaining, rather than accept their current attainment as indicative of their potential or intelligence.  There are a variety of reasons why a child may by low attaining. These may be cognitive, social, behavioural, or attitudinal, yet we need to dismantle the idea that low attainment automatically equals ‘low ability’.

Action Tutoring’s impact is clear; effective, targeted interventions can reduce the attainment gap and work towards breaking the cyclical nature of poverty and disadvantage. To do this, we must have high expectations for all pupils, acknowledge that ability is not fixed, and actively avoid labelling pupils. While changing our language won’t change mindsets over night, I believe it can force us to further challenge our preconceptions of what children and young people can achieve.

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Review of ‘Social Mobility and its Enemies’ by Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin

30 November 2018

Reading ‘Social Mobility and its Enemies’, a new book by Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin.

This book is a valuable read if you want to understand the sorry state of social mobility in Britain, and why our education system alone is not levelling the playing field for young people – but we shouldn’t be demoralised.

On the topic of social mobility, Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin make a powerful duo: The former is Chief Executive of the Sutton Trust, a foundation dedicated to improving social mobility in the UK through evidence-based programmes, research and advocacy. The latter is Professor of Economics at the LSE with a long list of publications on the economics of education and inequality in the labour market. The two have teamed up to produce a new book on social mobility in Britain and the main forces that work against it. Given the vision of Action Tutoring – a world where no child’s life chances are determined by their socio-economic background – I was very keen to get my hands on a copy!

‘Social Mobility and its Enemies’ is a neatly presented book of unintimidating size. In the first few chapters, I learnt some new and impressive-sounding terms – including ‘intergenerational elasticity’. Although I occasionally had to ask for help to understand the graphs, overall the book is quite accessible; the authors get their messages across using metaphors, analogies and real-world examples.

Tracking trends in the economy and in education over several decades, the book shows the relationship between low social mobility and inequality of wealth and income. To use a metaphor from the book: as inequality grows and the rungs in the ladder become wider, it becomes increasingly difficult for people to climb up. The book touches on the strong incentives to help talent rise to the top, wherever it may come from – the potential for improved economic growth, leaders with an enhanced understanding of the problems and experiences of others, and the strength and innovation that diversity can bring. It also shows how the choices of individuals can harm social mobility just as much as a broken system, as often well-meaning parents hoard opportunities for their children – whether paying for exclusive tuition or renting properties to gain entry into sought-after schools – even if this exacerbates inequalities down the line or holds back a less privileged child.

The book is not a joyful read. It is full of sobering statistics and draws bleak conclusions. Some of the findings are familiar – how the top spots in many professions are still dominated by individuals educated in a small circle of elite schools. At other times, the analysis presented is more alarming: one graph, with criss-crossing lines, starkly demonstrates how children’s development up to the age of ten depends strongly on their socio-economic status: children who perform highly in cognitive tests early but come from disadvantaged backgrounds show a steady decline in performance by age ten, overtaken by less able but more privileged peers, who overcome their difficulties over time. The link between family income and test scores is particularly strong in the UK. In another dismal passage, the authors consider growing illiteracy and innumeracy in England. There are clear links between these skills, employment prospects and health, but successive attempts to reform the system have failed to improve the situation. Many continue to leave school without the most basic English and maths skills they need to get on in life.

In the final chapters, the authors explore some ways that we might sweep away unfair advantages and unlock greater social mobility: for example, the possible benefits of using lotteries to determine school and university admissions. They stress the importance of a system which nurtures talents of all kinds, not just academic ones, and pursuing policies to improve equality of opportunity at a local level. One of the strongest messages is that when it comes to education, you can’t skimp on quality or on cost. “Lives cannot be turned around on the cheap.” The authors affirm that “if we have high ambitions for education to help improve social mobility amid growing inequality, then we must be prepared to pay for it.” Schools are facing the biggest funding cuts in a generation and “teachers are among the key public sector workers who warrant higher salaries.”

However, whilst our education system can and does transform the lives of individuals, teachers on their own can’t cancel out the “extreme inequalities” outside the classroom that play such an important part in determining children’s outcomes. Implementing new approaches to teaching based on cutting-edge research can only do so much. If we want to make real gains in social mobility, we need to make education fairer and reduce the extreme inequality in our society.

Elliot Major and Machin don’t shy away from the enormity of the challenge. There is no simple or easy fix. However, other countries as well as small pockets within the UK “offer rays of light” that the situation can change. Although we may not be able to replicate the exact environment and outcomes found in countries like Finland or Canada, it is encouraging, when faced with such a formidable task, to see it that others have been able to find a better balance.

At Action Tutoring, we can be proud to be part of an evidence-based initiative which sees promising results every year, supporting thousands of young people to progress despite their background and individual challenges. ‘Social Mobility and its Enemies’ makes a strong case for rethinking education and employment practices in this country, and it demonstrates how much evidence is now being generated to find what works. But, while we wait for new solutions to come to light, we don’t have to stand by and see more young people leave school without basic skills and qualifications, facing an impossible climb upwards. There are many organisations in this country working to counteract these biases, often through the efforts of remarkable volunteers, proving that individual choices can also be a powerful and positive force for social mobility.

Elliot Major, L. and Machin, S., 2018. Social Mobility and its Enemies. London: Pelican books – Penguin.

Why Finland’s education is fair and the best?

17 October 2017

Imagine it’s your birthday and a friend throws you a surprise party for you with all your friends there. However, when it’s time to cut the cake, you can cut it how you want, although you cannot choose the slice you want. You may want a bigger slice of the cake, though you may receive a small slice. Therefore, because you do not want to risk getting a small slice, you are likely to cut it into all equal slices for everyone.

This is the concept of Rawls theory of justice. He talks about how we cannot say we live in an equal society unless we know that no matter where we will end up, everyone will still have an equal opportunity. Therefore, everyone will still have the same slice of cake. He called it the ‘veil of ignorance,’ as he mentions we should imagine a state before we are born where we would not know what society we would be in. Would we be happy to end up in any society, or be happy with who we can end up with? Nonetheless, we know this is not the case and people can end up with a single poor mother or they can end up privileged. Society can end up being a good one or a bad one. We know that this all can have an impact on the child’s life achievements.

Some people may debate things are fairer now, however, let’s look at this concept in terms of education. We know not every education system is equal or the same. However, Finland’s education system is ranked at number one and has held the unofficial title as the world best education system in the world. There are five reasons Finland’s education has been debated to be the fairest and most equal in the world. Firstly, in Finland, it is argued that no child gets left behind. All families, for instance, families on a lower income, have childcare which is heavily taken care of. Schools also do not thrive on competition, therefore there are no league tables as they focus and concentrate on making sure every school has a good knowledge.

Secondly, pupils do not start school until the age of 7. They also hardly get homework, only take one standardised test at the end of their secondary school, so there is no pressure on pupils. They also receive 15 mins break each lesson as they believe less is more when it comes to education. They do not waste lessons on their students cramming topics, as they investigate fewer topics and go into more depth with the few. They believe children should learn how to love learning rather than learning for exam tests, then forgetting straight after leaving the exam hall.

Thirdly, teachers are given more respect, the same level of respect for doctors and lawyers, as they need a master’s degree to teach. In Finland, it is harder to get into a school to be a teacher than to be a lawyer or a doctor. Teachers also stated that they feel more appreciated, have more value, respect and trust. Lastly, people debate that Finland has fewer social ills. This means that most people living in Finland are middle class, and there is less economic inequality.

There have been many debates about how adopting some of the theses policies will create a fairer education system in the UK. However, we cannot ignore the cultural differences, as the Finnish society has different values and discourses in how they see what is best for developing people. I am not saying we should abandon our values and take on every educational policy that the Finnish education system has, however, they are a good role model to look at.

Looking at some of the policies mentioned, I believe some of the policies, such as reducing competition, placing more trust in teachers and creating a joy for learning, will create a better and fairer educational system in the UK. This will enable all pupils to have a similar slice of the cake.

The big question is that can our education system be fairer like in Finland, or is this just impossible for the government to achieve?

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