Every once in a while, we hear of the next silver bullet that will cure all our ills in education. Whether it is shiny new technology or possessing the right mindset, the headlines promise much. Soon enough, however, research evidence, replication and real-life stories from schools reveal a more complicated narrative of difficult changes, struggle and a lot of outright failures.
We tend to try to sweep away these failures and forget about them. We do the same with the countless other failures that happen in classrooms, yet it is important to acknowledge an awkward truth that, despite our best-laid plans, most new strategies in schools will fail.
And we need to embrace those failures because we can learn a lot from them.
At my organisation, the Education Endowment Foundation, we sometimes receive criticism for apparently wasting time and money on “failed” research. However, when results come back suggesting that, for example, project-based learning is harder than advertised or that promising approaches such as peer tutoring can fail, we learn just as much about what is likely to work in schools as we do from supposed “successes”.
How easy is it for schools to focus on failure in the same way? It’s tough. Always being under the looming threat of a poor set of exam results or a dodgy Ofsted inspection means that focusing on failure takes a lot of courage.
And yet, we must quietly focus on failure if we are to do our best for our pupils. By doing so, we can stop approaches that are failing and minimise teacher workload while limiting the damage to learning.
The value of a ‘pre-mortem’
We can do this not only after the event but also before, by focusing on likely indicators of failure. For example, given that the curriculum will be front and centre in many school development plans in the coming year, we would do well to scrutinise leading indicators and likely failures in this regard.
We can conduct a “pre-mortem”, anticipating why our efforts might fail. We should ask: are our teachers’ beliefs about the curriculum shared? Is their level of knowledge similar? Are we offering them time and support to do the job in the long term? Are we retaining teachers to maintain this development?
Other leading indicators of curriculum success or failure relate to our pupils. For example, a deep, rich curriculum may be beautifully designed for key stage 3, but it turns out that a large number of Year 8 pupils have below-average reading ages and so can’t access it - fast-forward to failure in Year 11.
We cannot fend off failure completely, but we can better plot our next steps and face failure with a plan.
Alex Quigley is national content manager for the Education Endowment Foundation. He is also a former teacher and the author of Closing the Vocabulary Gap
This article originally appeared in the 11 October 2019 issue under the headline “Hope for the best, prepare for the worst”
