The Education Reform Act 20 years on

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The Education Reform Act 20 years on

• Dylan Wiliam
• www.dylanwiliam.net

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Overview of presentation

• The key components of the Education Reform Act
• The two big myths about parental choice
• The effects of hyperaccountability
• Why this matters

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The 1988 Education Reform Act

• An extremely coherent piece of legislation
• Main assumption markets are the best way to
  improve schools
• To create a market, you need
• Choice parental choice
• Accountability formula funding
• Diversity grant-maintained schools, local
  management
• Standardization national curriculum
• Information national tests at 7, 11, 14 and 16

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Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln

• The potentially positive features of ERA
• National curriculum (the idea, not the particular
  curriculum)
• Local management of schools
• Formula funding (again, the idea, not the current
  policy)
• have been largely negated by tragic shortcomings
• The myth of parental choice
• fuelled by misleading information

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How to judge school quality?

• There is always an easy solution to every human
  problem
• neat, plausible, and wrong. (Mencken, 1917)
• Raw outcome data
• Useful when inputs are equal
• Completely misleading when they are not (e.g.,
  surgical survival rates)

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OECD
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Raw results vs. value-added

• Examination success rates combine two effects
• The quality of the teaching
• The quality of the intake
• The second dominates the first
• Contextualized value-added (CVA) is by far the
  best measure of the contribution that a school
  has made to the achievement of its students

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Differences in CVA are often insignificant
Middle 50 differences not significantly
different from average
(Wilson Piebalga, 2008)
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and are usually small

• 7 of the variability in secondary school GCSE
  grades are attributable to the school
• 93 of the variability in secondary school GCSE
  grades are nothing to do with the school
• A student who gets eight grade Ds at an average
  school will get
• five Ds and three Cs at one of the best schools
  (1sd above mean CVA)
• five Ds and three Es at one of the worst schools
  (1sd below mean CVA)

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(No Transcript)
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but some schools are amazingly good

• Moreton Community School
• 5A-C 30
• CVA 1090
• A student who gets eight Ds at an average school
  will get seven Bs and a C here

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The effects of hyperaccountability
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Effects of test preparation
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Literacy
Children receiving
years of the Literacy Strategy
1
2
3
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Numeracy
Children receiving
years of the Numeracy Strategy
1
2
3
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Standards at key stage 2
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Standards at key stage 4
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(No Transcript)
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Why does it matter?
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The changing demand for skills (USA)
(Levy Murnane, 2005)
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Conclusion

• Attempts by successive governments to raise
  student achievement have
• Produced only marginal improvements in student
  achievement
• that are primarily in skills that are
  increasingly irrelevant in work
• while performance on the skills that matter has
  declined
• thus threatening our future prosperity
• and alienating a generation of students.