THAT'S 1, 2, 3, 5, 4, 7, 8 IN FAVOUR, 1 AGAINST

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The liberal educational establishment released a report yesterday. The Cambridge Primary Review was all over the BBC, and the coverage it received was one-sided - to say the least. Wherever I turned, the BBC seemed to be backing its recommendations to the hilt.
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Sarah Campbell's Today report came from Brentside School in West London. We heard from its headteacher, Melody Moran, who was an advisor to the Cambridge Review team. She argued for the advance of informal play-based learning - 'learning through play' - until the age of six. Sarah argued that play-based learning "doesn't dispense with literacy and numeracy skills." She asked Melody about SATS? She doesn't approve of them.
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You would have presumed that the next segment of the programme to deal with the topic would have featured a dissenting voice. Not so, it was a long, sympathetic interview between Jim Naughtie and the report's lead author Professor Robin Alexander (a long-time high-up in the liberal Educational Establishment). Fair enough, of course - if dissenting voices were to appear later.
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Characteristically, Naughtie prefaced his introduction with praise for the Labour government: "It [the report] finds a system it says has many good features and is in good heart, but the authors challenge the government head on about exams, about the scope of the curriculum, about the way children are introduced to formal learning - and when." He encouraged more in his first question, to which Prof Alexander replied, "We have a very good system of primary education" and "standards have risen". He went on, "What we're talking about is improving that system". In other words, Labour's done well but could do better - by following the advice of the liberal Educational Establishment all the way! Scrap SATS, league tables, and advance informal teaching and it will be full marks and a prize for Labour.
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Naughtie was not neutral, as you can tell from this editorial (disguised, unconvincingly, as a question): "A cry goes up from parents and many teachers that there are simply too many exams and that means that the schools, whether they like it or not, not least because they know it will turn up in league tables, and parents are encouraged to believe league tables, teach to exams, and the weight of that pressure is so great that it actually disturbs the educational process and it distorts it because they teach for the papers. Now do you believe that?"

To which Professor Alexander replied, "Yes."
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If you were waiting to hear an opposing point of view on Today, you would have been disappointed.
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Tuning into the BBC News Channel between 5.00 and 6.00 again, it was the same story. We had another report from Sarah Campbell which featured two 'talking heads'. The first was Claire Jones, head of Tref-y-Rhys Primary School, who supported the Cambridge Review: "It's a well-known fact that children do tend to learn more through play because they're enjoying themselves." "That's a view, said Sarah, "echoed by the Cambridge Review", whose other leader, Dame Gillian Pugh, then appeared as the other 'talking head'.
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The report was followed by an interview between a sympathetic Gavin Esler and Keith Towler, Children's Commissioner for Wales, who - surprise, surprise - was very keen on learning through play, and dead against SATS.
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Later in the same hour, Esler discussed the issue again. This was a joint interview with two supporters of learning through play - a 'parent', Beverly Huby, and a 'primary school headteacher', Gail Larkin. Gail mentioned in passing that she is also on the national council of the headteachers' union, the NAHT. The BBC didn't think it germane to tell us that at the outset.
Esler (unlike Naughtie) at least had the good grace to admit that he was biased on the issue of testing: "Do you think therefore, it's a kind of leading question, but there must be no coincidence then that some surveys suggest that British children are among the unhappiest in the world?". Gail Larkin did indeed think that they are the "most tested and the most unhappy."

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At the same time, on the PM programme, Elizabeth Owen, head of Tref-y-Rhyg Primary School, was interviewed by Carolyn Quinn. Last year the school dropped the entire primary curriculum for the strategies "essentially advocated in today's Cambridge Report". Unsurprisingly, she thought learning through play was proving a great success (but it's surely to early to say, I'd suggest!).
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Carolyn Quinn then interviewed schools minister Vernon Coaker (the only person on any of the programmes I review who dissented from this liberal consensus). All her questions came from one side of the argument.
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Are there no educationalists, parents, teachers, 'independent experts', journalists, tank-thinkers, etc, who think the Cambridge Primary Review is talking woolly liberal nonsense? If there are, shouldn't we have heard from them?
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