Whose education system is it? Lessons on standards, quality and accountability from the Cambridge Primary Review
The Cambridge Assessment Conference is on the same day as the formal launch, at the RSA in London, of a national debate about the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review. Issues from the Review - funded by Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, based at the University of Cambridge, directed by Robin Alexander and the most comprehensive enquiry into English primary education for 40 years – therefore provide the focus for this keynote. Cross-cutting much of the Review’s evidence have been major questions of policy, control and accountability, especially in relation to the vital matter of the quality of primary education and the standards achieved by children in England’s primary schools. It is on these matters that the keynote will concentrate.
Robin Alexander is Fellow of Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge, Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Warwick, and formerly Professor of Education at the University of Leeds. Educated at the universities of Cambridge, Durham, London and Manchester, he has taught in schools, colleges and universities, has served on government advisory bodies and national enquiries in the UK, and has undertaken research, evaluation and consultancy in several other countries. His research and writing on education since the 1980s have covered policy, pedagogy, curriculum, evaluation, international comparative and cultural studies, primary education and teacher education. He has been consistently wary of professional and political orthodoxies, and his approach to the central educational questions of value, purpose, content and process remains radical. His 2001 book Culture and Pedagogy won top education book prizes on both sides of the Atlantic.
Since October 2006, Robin Alexander has been directing The Primary Review, an independent enquiry into the condition and future of primary education in England.
Professor Alison Wolf
Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management, King’s College London
The role of the state in educational assessment
In the last quarter-century, the English system of examinations went from being one of the most decentralised and unregulated in the world to one of the most centralised and most heavily regulated. The justifications for this change were classic; the need for accountability, the danger to standards in an unregulated market, and the pressures of global competition. Yet we are hardly more confident of the quality of examinations than before; and one testing crisis after another now seems to land on ministers’ desks. This talk will examine the lessons of recent experience for how and when the state should actually be involved in educational assessment.
Alison Wolf holds the Sir Roy Griffiths chair at King’s College London, where she directs its MSc in Public Services Policy and Management; and is a visiting professorial fellow at the Institute of Education, University of London. She writes regularly for the UK national press, including the Guardian, Times Higher, and Prospect; and is a presenter for BBC Radio 4’s Analysis. She publishes regularly on policy issues with think tanks such as Policy Exchange and the Social Market Foundation. She has been a specialist adviser to the House of Commons Select Committee on education and skills and is a member of the editorial board of Assessment in Education, a Council Member of the United Nations University and a Commissioner for the 2020 Public Services Commission (established by the 2020 Public Services Trust). She was awarded the 2008 Sam Aaronovitch memorial prize for her article ‘Round and round the houses: the Leitch review of skills’ (Local Economy).
Professor Wolf’s research focuses on the interface between education institutions and labour markets, and her publications include Does Education Matter?: Myths about Education and Economic Growth (Penguin); Diminished Returns: how raising the leaving age to 18 will harm young people and the economy (Policy Exchange); and Competence Based Assessment (Open University Press). She is a member of the International Accounting Education Standards Board, and has been an adviser to, among others, QCA, the OECD, the Royal College of Surgeons, AQA, the Ministries of Education of New Zealand, France and South Africa, the European Commission and the Bar Council.