Accountability, curriculum & SEND international review and CES exemplar

This project supported the development of the Centre for Education Systems (CES) with a programme of international comparative research and research translation, thereby generating authoritative information and insight to inform education policy. 

Why this project is important

Comparing performance across countries is notoriously difficult. Although comparable data is available, such as the OECD PISA output, it is difficult to know whether successes are due to particular national policies or the different behaviours and cultures across nations, or other factors. This can lead to arbitrary and incoherent policy borrowing.  

The core purpose of the CES is to address this by ensuring that policy makers are better informed, so that they can design and select policy instruments that are more coherent and more likely to achieve their intent.  

How the project was carried out 

The team undertook international evidence synthesis across ten international jurisdictions to compare with the four UK nations. Each review addressed six main research questions:  

1. What is the purpose of accountability/curriculum/SEND? 

2. What is the structure of the approach to accountability/curriculum/SEND? 

3. How is accountability/curriculum/SEND policy made and introduced? 

4. How is accountability/curriculum/SEND policy evaluated? 

5. How does context shape accountability/curriculum/SEND policy and reform? 

6. What is the evidence about the effects of the accountability/curriculum/SEND system? 

Each review comprised a realist informed synthesis that explored how different policies interact in different contexts and by which mechanisms they generate outcomes. The reviews combined expert interviews with reviews of academic literature and policy documentation. 

Policy stakeholders were consulted at an early stage to ensure questions, concepts and outputs directly responded to the intended users’ needs, and the team engaged with country experts throughout. Finding and outputs were then disseminated through roundtables, conferences, articles and training. Ultimately, through this work the project sought to demonstrate proof of concept for how the CES could establish an improved role for evidence in system level policy making.

CES founding members are: Lucy Crehan, Sam Freedman, Loic Menzies and Patrick Wall.  

The grant was administered by the Education Policy Institute who provided governance for the project. It was supported by an Advisory Board including: Steve Munby, Natalie Perera, Anna Vignoles and Dylan William. 

The review of SEND was undertaken in partnership with the research team undertaking an international analysis of SEND policy and practice.

Findings

A resource library was compiled that contains full reports for each review, summaries and intersectional analysis. In addition, lessons for policymakers are outlined as key takeaway findings for each topic: curriculum, accountability and SEND.  

Curriculum  

• Curriculum differentiation by early student choice or academic selection tends to reinforce existing inequalities. 

• There is a sweet spot where there is not too much or too little content specified, that allows for secure learning. 

• The introduction of ‘21st Century skills’ or generic skills are best designed and taught at a subject level to provide for assessment and reduce teacher workload. 

Accountability 

• Accountability systems need to balance a focus on minimum standards and the ‘basics’ with expansive attempts to promote ‘improvement for all’. 

• Inspection frameworks and performance measures wire priorities into the system, but schools respond in more or less learning-orientated or compliant ways depending on their time, expertise, and capacity to respond. 

• Accountability systems can focus on actors at different levels – including teachers, school leaders, governing bodies, or school operators, and this has implications for who feels pressure in the system. 

SEND 

• Although all jurisdictions aspire to educate more of their students with SEND within mainstream settings, an increasing proportion of students with SEND are educated outside of mainstream settings. 

• Early selection and tracking can be a barrier to inclusion. 

• Almost all countries are seeing rising rates of identified ‘SEND’, regardless of legal or medical definitions. Changes to identification processes are not enough, on their own, to deliver improved SEND provision and material improvements to support are therefore needed. 

• Systems are more likely to succeed where there is visible and high quality mainstream provision and this translates to confidence among parents and practitioners. 

• Devolved systems can allow for local tailoring and greater responsiveness, but can also lead to inconsistency and inequity. 

• Certain jurisdictions have successfully reduced demand for the use of special schools by investing funds at cohort and census based levels rather than on an individual basis, thus improving public trust in the mainstream provision. 

Proof of Concept 

Overall, the project demonstrated that the Centre for Education Systems is a viable and valuable approach to improving the role of evidence in system level policy making. The central challenge to ensuring long term viability is securing ongoing funding for the strategic ambition of system improvement