Browsing by Person "Wrigley, Terry"

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Bad science, worse politics
(2014-03) Wrigley, Terry
Gove is absolutely committed to the neoliberal agenda of pushing schools into private management as academies and free schools. He is also driven by nostalgia for traditional teaching and content (grammar tests, his ‘glorious heritage’ view of English history, etc), and propped up by special advisers who substitute elitist ideologies for the educational knowledge they lack. Early in October, a document from Michael Gove’s top adviser Dominic Cummings was leaked to the Guardian. It reveals some of the strange ideas driving Government policy – ideas which even Gove can’t openly admit.
Baseline testing: Science or fantasy?
(National Association for Primary Education, 2017-09-15) Wrigley, Terry
There’s nothing hidden in your head The Sorting Hat can’t see, So try me on and I will tell you Where you ought to be. The selection of children into houses at Hogwarts famously involves a magic 'sorting hat'. A fiction, of course, unlike baseline tests in real schools. The Government's baseline tests at the start of Reception produce numerical data, so they have an aura of scientific accuracy. They are anything but. This article will focus particularly on the tests designed by CEM as one of the three approved providers of Reception Baseline Assessment in September 2015. This is not because CEM are incompetent but rather the opposite: they were the most experienced providers. Their test was based on PIPS, sold commercially to hundreds of schools in various countries and refined over more than a decade.
Beyond 'Ability': Some European alternatives
(Symposium Books, 2013) Wrigley, Terry
This article draws on European approaches to differentiation that do not entail fatalistic determinism. It describes two challenging initiatives in Denmark, where democratic learning and learning for democracy are enshrined in law. Other examples come from Germany, from the Bielefeld laboratory school and a sixth form college, where planning for diversity is the starting point for curriculum development.
Book review: Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility
(SAGE, 2020-03-17) Wrigley, Terry
Class and culture: Sources of confusion in educational sociology
(Institute for Education Policy Studies, 2013-03-31) Wrigley, Terry
This paper reiterates the centrality of economics (relations of production) in Marxist models of class, while avoiding the crude determinism which results from a neglect of cultural aspects of class formation. It explores the confusion in education and educational sociology arising from non-Marxist conceptions of class which place an exaggerated emphasis on cultural difference and see it as the determining factor. The paper explores some of the implications of non-Marxist models, including Bourdieu, for educational theory and practice. Critique is directed at the designation of different groups of workers as separate and mutually antagonistic ‘working’ and ‘middle’ classes and the deficit construction of workers thrust into poverty as an ‘underclass’ which is reproduced not by economic forces but by cultural habitus.
Evidence-based teaching: A simple view of “science”
(Taylor & Francis, 2019-06-06) Wrigley, Terry; McCusker, Sean
This paper examines the insistent claims by advocates of evidence-based teaching that it is a rigorous scientific approach. The paper questions the view that randomised controlled trials and meta-analyses are the only truly scientific methods in educational research. It suggests these claims are often based on a rhetorical appeal which relies on too simple a notion of “science”. Exploring the tacit assumptions behind “evidence-based teaching”, the paper identifies an empiricist and reductionist philosophy of science, and a failure to recognise the complexity of education and pedagogy. Following a discussion of large-scale syntheses of evidence (Hattie’s Visible Learning; the Education Endowment Foundation’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit), it examines in detail one strand of the latter concerning sports participation, which is used to illustrate flaws in procedures and the failure to take seriously the need for causal explanations.
For the many: A curriculum for social justice
(Symposium Books, 2018) Wrigley, Terry
In recent years educational preoccupations have largely focused on 'teaching and learning', often drawing on deficit models of teaching and encouraging myths about 'poor teachers' and 'bad teaching'. Debate about the curriculum has been discouraged - but this has not stopped it being 'reformed', often in profoundly reactionary ways. This article analyses developments in the English school curriculum and argues that Labour's proposed National Education Service offers an opportunity to consider what a genuinely socially just curriculum might look like.
‘Knowledge’, curriculum and social justice
(Taylor & Francis, 2017-09-04) Wrigley, Terry
This article considers the place of knowledge in developing a socially just curriculum. It pursues the unusual route of a critique of Social Realism, a small but influential tendency in curriculum studies which claims that knowledge has been squeezed out by recent curriculum reforms and that there has been a descent into relativism. This paper shares the Social Realist view that ‘powerful knowledge’ is needed, and particularly by disadvantaged or marginalised young people. However, it critiques Social Realism's limited definition of ‘powerful knowledge’, arguing that for knowledge to be truly powerful, it must open up issues of power and inequality. It contests the Social Realist argument that critical pedagogy which begins from a subaltern stance is intrinsically relativist, arguing instead that alternative perspectives can help uncover concealed truths and break through hegemonic paradigms and ideologies. It argues that this is entirely compatible with a Critical Realist epistemology. Furthermore, the paper presents reasons why a socially just curriculum needs to draw upon the vernacular knowledge of marginalised groups as well as the canonical knowledge of academic disciplines to produce truly powerful knowledge and a social justice curriculum.
A new curriculum for a new public school
(Symposium Books, 2019) Wrigley, Terry
This article is written in response to widespread concerns about the inadequacy of the school curriculum in England, and the urgent need to rethink what public education should involve. It builds on earlier contributions in FORUM and elsewhere by discussing curricular opportunities arising from Labour's proposal for a National Education Service. This is particularly timely given the limited horizons and understanding shown in Ofsted's call for better curriculum planning. In contrast to neoliberal obsessions with schooling as the production of human resources, and the neoconservative dependence on tradition, the article discusses how we might build a curriculum oriented to social justice, environmental responsibility and democratic citizenship. It addresses core issues such as age appropriateness; the relationship between everyday and academic knowledge; the importance of cognitive, practical, aesthetic and ethical dimensions; and how we might make a socially just and politically serious selection of knowledge. Whilst drawing on the strengths of earlier curriculum development, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, it also points towards more recent international developments drawing on place, story and enquiry, which have been eclipsed by high-stakes acccountability regimes. This broad ranging article throws out a challenge: how to avoid retreading a traditional path of alienated knowledge acquisition and create a framework for authentic learning and really powerful knowledge.
Not so simple: The problem with 'evidence-based practice' and the EEF toolkit
(Symposium Books, 2016) Wrigley, Terry
There are increasing calls for policy and practice to be 'evidence informed'. At surface value, there may appear much to commend such an approach. However, it is important to understand that 'evidence' and 'knowledge' are being mobilised in very particular ways. The danger is that rather than promote a rich and lively debate about what counts as evidence, and how it can help educators, the reality is the development of a narrow 'what works' agenda which in turn imposes a 'one best way' approach to pedagogical practice.
Opening up pedagogies: Making a space for children
(Symposium Books, 2016) Wrigley, Terry
This article argues that children and young people in places such as England or the USA are subjected to an educational regime which constrains their development and eclipses their emergent identities. Paradoxically, the accountability systems which claim to make children’s learning visible to management create a distortion of vision by emphasising only the child’s ‘data shadow’. The article argues for pedagogies which provide space for each learner’s authentic encounter with our cultural inheritance as human beings. It concludes by presenting the idea of ‘open architectures’, a set of pedagogical methods which holds children together as a learning community while providing spaces for initiative.
Poor children need rich teaching, not deficit labelling
(Routledge, 2018-06-07) Wrigley, Terry; Gannon, Susanne; Hattam, Robert; Sawyer, Wayne
This chapter explores directions of curricular change in the context of neoliberalism and austerity politics in the UK. It examines a succession of flawed explanations for underachievement in schools, which in various ways construct working-class students as intrinsically defective learners. It highlights the failure of managerialist school reform to produce greater opportunity or equality. After a brief history of neoliberal and neoconservative trends in curriculum reform, I outline some key principles for pursuing curricular and pedagogical justice.
The power of ‘evidence’: Reliable science or a set of blunt tools?
(Wiley, 2018-05-03) Wrigley, Terry
In response to the increasing emphasis on ‘evidence‐based teaching’, this article examines the privileging of randomised controlled trials and their statistical synthesis (meta‐analysis). It also pays particular attention to two third‐level statistical syntheses: John Hattie's Visible learning project and the EEF's Teaching and learning toolkit. The article examines some of the technical shortcomings, philosophical implications and ideological effects of this approach to ‘evidence’, at all these three levels. At various points in the article, aspects of critical realism are referenced in order to highlight ontological and epistemological shortcomings of ‘evidence‐based teaching’ and its implicit empiricism. Given the invocation of the medical field in this debate, it points to critiques within that field, including the need to pay attention to professional experience and clinical diagnosis in specific situations. Finally, it briefly locates the appeal to ‘evidence’ within a neoliberal policy framework.
The problem of reductionism in educational theory: Complexity, causality, values
(SAGE, 2019-04-26) Wrigley, Terry
This article seeks to examine some of the problems in current policy, pedagogy and practice through the concept of reductionism. It examines various forms which this may take involving inappropriate scientific methodologies, a diminished sense of structure (or, conversely, agency), temporal confusion and teleological/ethical reductionism, drawing on examples from natural and social sciences as well as education. It draws on Critical Realist understandings of causality, stratification and emergence to ground the discussion ontologically and epistemologically. The article then builds on this theoretical foundation for a critical discussion of teaching and learning, poverty-related underachievement, school development, and evidence-based teaching.
The problem with randomised controlled trials for Education
(Routledge, 2020-02-07) Wrigley, Terry; Beckett, Lori
Terry Wrigley engages with Philpott & Poultney’s (2018) chapter on randomized control trials (RCTs), particularly the debates around whether they are a useful approach for informing teaching and school development. He critiques as reductionist the claim that RCTs provide a 'scientific' form of research in education. Further, he reflects on the adoption of meta-analyses as a 'gold standard' by various national agencies, and the circumstances which have made Hattie's (2008) Visible Learning publications popular. The chapter looks towards viable alternatives in engaging teachers with research in order to develop the argument for research-informed teacher learning.
Rethinking poverty and social class: The teacher's response
(Trentham Books, 2012-07-30) Wrigley, Terry; Arshad, Rowena; Wrigley, Terry; Pratt, Lynne
Forty years ago it was easy to believe that child poverty had disappeared from modern Britain. It belonged in the past or to distant places – images of Oliver Twist or African famine victims would spring to mind. It was assumed that residual poverty in Britain was largely due to idleness or alcohol. Few can still believe this now. Despite dramatic advances in productivity associated with computer technologies, and a boom time for the super-rich, child poverty statistics are scandalous. In the UK poverty more than doubled during the 1980s (the Thatcher period), fell slowly after 2000 when the last (Labour) government set a slow pace for its disappearance, then rose again after the financial crash. Almost a third of Britain’s children are living in poverty - on average nine children in a class of thirty (Child Poverty Action Group 2018).
Rethinking school effectiveness and improvement: A question of paradigms
(Taylor & Francis, 2012-06-28) Wrigley, Terry
The purpose of this article is to contribute to progressive school change by developing a more systematic critique of school effectiveness (SE) and school improvement (SI) as paradigms. Diverse examples of paradigms and paradigm change in non-educational fields are used to create a model of paradigms for application to SE and SI, and to explore the implications of their hegemony, their rootedness in a neoliberal policy environment, and their limitations as theories and methodologies of school evaluation and change. The article seeks to identify reasons for the inadequacy of orthodox SI in helping schools face contemporary challenges, including schools serving populations burdened by poverty, and finally identifies some alternative approaches to educational change. The article draws examples from an English context, but with international resonances.
Social justice re-examined: Dilemmas and solutions for the classroom teacher [Second Edition]
(Trentham, 2019-11-04) Arshad, Rowena; Wrigley, Terry; Pratt, Lynne; Arshad, Rowena; Wrigley, Terry; Pratt, Lynne
UPDATED AND EXPANDED EDITION Teachers want to do their best for every child, but worry about causing offence and often shy away from troublesome issues. The classroom situations and strategies presented here will help teachers negotiate their way through complex situations and bring about constructive change. This book clarifies concepts and value differences and the subtle ways in which inequality often works. Theoretical as well as practical, these chapters look from inside out from the perspective of the teacher. They cover a wide range of issues: race, gender, poverty and class, sexuality, religion, English as an Additional Language, Islamophobia, Traveller children and ADHD. The book is essential reading for student teachers, early career teachers and teacher educators, but will also be invaluable for experienced teachers as they navigate their work in an increasingly diverse society.
The zombie theory of genetic intelligence
(Symposium Books, 2019) Wrigley, Terry
The notion that 'intelligence' or 'ability' is genetically inherited refuses to die. This article reviews the way such a notion has long been used to justify inequality in society, and considers the methodological failings and deceptions, and the interpretative blind spots, of those who advance the heritability of 'intelligence' as a basis for understanding people's learning.
The zombie theory of innate IQ
(2014-03) Wrigley, Terry
Attempts are being made to resuscitate the idea that ability is predetermined by our genes – doubtless linked to moves within the Conservative Party to reintroduce grammar schools and selection at 11. Recent research by Robert Plomin claims that 60 percent of achievement in GCSE Maths or Science is genetic. His work is acclaimed by Michael Gove’s senior adviser Dominic Cummings. (See the linked article earlier in this issue Bad science, worse politics.) The belief that academic ability is genetically inherited has long served to justify inequality. The tendency for children from prosperous families to score higher on IQ tests was used to justify these families’ wealth.