Well now is the time to reflect on where we are in England’s quest to be an outstanding education system.  And I am going to fight off the cynicism and try to take a rational view or the prospects ahead.

I’ve been at this game a long time – 42 years. I’ve taught and led in tough inner city environments, suburbia and rural locations. I have taught in grammar, comprehensive and community schools. I have taken on specialisms in technology, arts, sport, science and business and enterprise. I have led schools to beacon status and others out of special measures. I have been an executive head of three schools. I have even led in schools abroad. So I suppose views count for something even if they might not all be correct. A bit of humility never comes amiss.

In all cases and in all environments I have met and worked with inadequate teachers. But in the vast number of cases I have worked with a profession rich in talented, generous with their time and high in their expectation of young people – sometimes to the detriment of their own health and families. It is good to remember that when we start to look for areas that need improvement. There is and has been an unnecessary bashing of the profession , not so much in terms of substance but in terms of tone.

There are however  in the latest reforms lots of important improvements. Things that will bring quality to the education of young people.

1. To escape the way schools have had to ‘play games’ and make a huge range of strategic decisions about the exams to enter, when to sit them, which board to use is a blessing. The repeated re-sitting  of modules occupies teacher and student time, but more importantly disrupts quality learning and narrows the rich experiences students could enjoy.

2. Believing that all young people, whatever their social and educational background have a right to a rich, full and challenging curriculum has to be a bottom line.  Having a mind to the wider cultural curriculum for all is essential. It is far too easy to believe that some young people might better be served with a narrow vocational offer and low expectations in core skills.

When I talk to my international colleagues it is not surprising that their governments are reviewing the quality of their systems, but it is worrying how they readily take mechanistic approaches to try and improve things; approaches that seem to be only loosely  based on any educational research and ignore all we know about the way children learn. Talking to my colleagues in Sweden this week, there seems to be real concern that schools should identify clearly the precise amount a time that must be spent on each subject at each stage. All the research tells us that the amount of time spent studying a particular subject does not have significant impact on outcomes.; it is much more to do with the quality of instruction and learning and the way students are motivated.

It is also interesting in Sweden and US how teachers increasingly have to be accredited to teach particular subjects at particular stages and phases, whereas here in the UK once you are qualified to teach it is transferable to each phase and it is for each school to ensure people have the ability and competence to deliver a particular curriculum to a particular age group. There is no doubt the quality of the teacher is one of the key factors that leads to student success, but to think that restricting teachers to narrow subject or phase qualifications is the answer is blatantly wrong. We can all thing of situations where  we have had to place a brilliant teacher in charge of a class and subject in preference to another with brilliant results. We should not underestimate the impact of  a quality professional as opposed to someone with just subject knowledge.

But more importantly and taking Voltaire’s medical cynicism as a guide, we really do need to trust what we know works in education and not allow what seem intuitively logical  changes to dominate over evidenced research.

So in removing the equivalency nonsense and the  repeated modules and controlled assessments that only get in the way of quality learning, let’s not believe the best way to assess progress is to resort to an end of course examination alone. In so many of the best educational systems summative assessment is a small part of the grading system.  The Kunskapsskolan approach is to have a series of units of work with extensive feedback and assessment at the end  that checks understanding and learning and provides a review script to revisit at he end of the course. Students get to know what they understand and know and what they need to do enhance the quality of that learning. Demonstrating their knowledge at each stage might be a test, a project, a presentation, or even an exhibition. It has to be the most fit for purpose approach. Assessment is a part of the learning along the way with a chance to test this against  a final summative exam. The final grade or mark is a professional summary of the whole course.

If we are not careful we will substitute repetitive examination of modules with cramming for final examinations, training for real in depth understanding and learning.

If we believe that a personalised approach is the way to ensure all young people achieve their best outcome, then we really need to recognise that some young people will struggle to show what they know and can do in a system geared to terminal examinations. It is easy to be critical of some of the qualifications that were accredited as equivalent to GCSE, but there were many young people who for the first time where able to feel that they had achieved something of value. It seems that most of these are still available and it might be good to find a way to value these  rather than just seeing a set of subject-based core subjects as the only measure of a student’s achievement. Feeling a sense of worth is a great motivator.