Transcript: A brief history of IOE’s Department of Psychology and Human Development

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00:00:11 Professor Andy Tolmie 

Welcome to the podcast Psyched about Education. This series celebrates the academic excellence of work carried out at the Department of Psychology and Human Development and the impact this work has on policy and practice. In other words, how can psychology make a difference? 

I'm Andy Tolmie, Professor Andy Tolmie, Chair of Psychology and Human Development. My research is on learning in science, especially in primary schools. I'm your host for today and with me I have Professor Peter Blatchford, one of the longest standing members of the department, whose work on the effects of class size and use of teaching assistants has had international impact. In this podcast we're going to be focusing on the development of psychology within the Institute of Education and Peter’s work within that. So, Peter, can you tell me a little bit about your appointment to IOE and what the Institute was like at that time? 

00:00:59 Professor Peter Blatchford 

Well, I first came to the IOE in 1980. I was appointed to the Thomas Coram Research Unit. And the head of the Thomas Coram Research Unit at that time was Barbara Tizard, who took over from Jack Tizard, who sadly died. Jack Tizard was a pretty significant person in psychology within the Institute. So maybe I will just take a few moments to say a little bit about what I understand is the history of psychology leading up to Jack Tizard in the Institute. I highly recommend for anyone who is interested in the history of the IOE to look at the history of the IOE by Richard Aldrich. There was a first edition, which is on my bookshelf, but there's a new edition which has been published, which is really good. There you can pick up a lot of interesting facts and really quite fascinating history.

There are some significant figures in psychology at the Institute of Education going way back before the Second World War. Some of the key figures will be Philip Vernon on the psych of ed side and Susan Isaacs on the child development side. And there's other figures in the psych of ed, including Bill Wall and Brian Foss. Jack Tizard was appointed as the first Chair of Child Development in 1964, ‘65. And Jack was very interested in research being applied to practice and policy issues. He was a little bit suspicious, not suspicious, but a bit tired of research which was entirely theory driven and with a very narrow point of reference and resonance. He really wanted to focus on that. So, to cut a long story short, that was very significant in the founding of Thomas Coram, which was interdisciplinary. Psychology certainly had a role; it was one of many disciplines that were brought to bear on policy issues.

I was there from 1980 to 1999 working with Barbara Tizard and colleagues. Then, as is the way, well, we had an eight-year ESRC grant, but I left for a short period to work in teacher education and then came back in 1990.

This is one of the features about the IOE and psychology in the IOE – the very turbulent governance of psychology, which went through all sorts of different groupings. When I arrived in 1990 there was a grouping called Child Development and Educational Psychology, which split into two other groups, Educational Psychology and Special Educational Needs, and then Child Development, which was linked with Primary Education, with Kathy Sylva. But then, along with other developments within the Institute, the Educational Psychology and Special Educational Needs group split into two parts. It was only really when I think it was Geoff Whitty was the Director of the IOE that we had, as it were, a combination of the psychology of education, child development and special educational needs all together within the Department of Psychology and Human Development, with those three parts represented. 

Just one further thing to add to that: it was back in 2001 when this happened. I was appointed Head of Department for two years, 2001-2003. It's the time when all of these things were coming together. It's only in retrospect I realize how significant historically that was within the history of the IOE, psychology within the IOE. And my sense is, it's a really good place to be. 

00:04:53 Professor Andy Tolmie 

Can you give us perhaps also an overview of the main strands of your subsequent research with within that context? 

00:05:01 Professor Peter Blatchford 

At Thomas Coram I was involved in a study of children’s educational progress in infant schools, so children aged 5 to 7. This was under the direction of Barbara Tizard. That featured some of the main features of the research that I've done subsequently: longitudinal study, following children’s progress; certainly interested in educational outcomes, but as interested in the processes that might account for those outcomes; and ways of bringing psychology to bear on those results. 

We found, for example, that teacher expectations were very important when it came to understanding children's progress. There is a whole social psychological literature on that. A feature of that work was the study of what goes on within classrooms in some detail and systematic observation techniques for getting a handle on that, which was one of the reasons why I was employed, I think, on that project – from my PhD ‘73 to ‘76, the use of systematic observation techniques.

After I came back to the Institute in 1996 we started a big project on class size differences – a wonderful project in the sense of collaborations with people like Harvey Goldstein, who was the founder of multi-level modeling, statistical modelling at the IOE. A very important figure, I think. Peter Mortimer, who was the Director of the Institute. Collaboration between local authorities. Later on, the government stepped into to fund large-scale multimethod research. The key finding was really that looking at class size in relation to academic attainment – which everyone does, and usually concludes it doesn't really matter on the basis of that finding being very modest – is completely missing the point. You have to understand what people do in classes of different sizes in order to account for that result. I'll maybe come back to that point. We had a lovely team of folks; it really was a great team and I'm still in a sense working with most of them, even now after all these years.

We moved on to a policy-relevant study of support staff in schools, called the Deployment and Impact of Support Staff, DISS for short. That was funded by the government of the time, and was started in 2003 through to the end of the 2000s. This was similarly a large-scale study following children’s progress in relation to a number of factors, including the amount of support that kids had from teaching assistants. The Key finding: we found that the relationship between the support kids had from teaching assistants and how well they did was a negative one. So the more support they got the less well they did. That didn't go down terribly well with the government, as you can imagine, given how much money they’d invested in teaching assistants. So we did it all over again, and we found the same thing, but even clearer. 

This is where understanding the classroom processes at work is important, because we understood why we had that relationship is basically the way that teaching assistants were being used to support the children in most need within mainstream classrooms, which is in a sense taking the kids away from the teacher and other children actually, and, to a degree, their curriculum. And so it's a really important thing to do, the study of the process. Briefly, the next big project I directed, or co-directed, was a study of within-class groupings within classrooms, and it led on to a big study – which, by the way, Andy was involved in – on collaborative group work, developing an approach to collaborative group work and then evaluating it and then applying it to different classroom contexts. 

The DISS project then lead to: we've got an important finding, we think we know how to better use teaching assistants. One of the challenges for researchers is trying to, as it were, get those results into the system so they make a difference. It's a big challenge and I have to say I have a lot of frustration about what I consider to be high quality research which has had limited impact on policy and practice. But this particular project did have an impact and I'll come back to that a bit later on when we think about impact. But it did lead to a study trying to work out good practice and then two further studies of children with Special Educational Needs in mainstream schools. 

The only other thing to add, following on from my PhD work, is an interest in peer relations in schools, and how that pans out, particularly in school playgrounds. As I've often said, the playground is a site of special scientific interest, I think, because you see kids as they are, and you learn a lot about friendships and social networks and what they do. It's really naturalistic. But that's kind of the sum total of the work that I've been doing at the IOE. 

00:10:15 Professor Andy Tolmie 

It's a very, very strong history. Do you think there are particular characteristics that are a consistent thread through that work? 

00:10:26 Professor Peter Blatchford 

There’s the obvious methodological design features – so, tends to be larger scale, tends to be naturalistic rather than experimental. So in that sense it's a particular kind of way of approaching the research process. I think the SPRinG project, which is the collaborative groupwork project, was a kind of quasi-experimental study. But apart from that most of it has been ‘let's capture what happens in the real world’, let's model it using the most sophisticated stats that we can so that we pick up on any confounding factors, and let's do the studies which enable us to account for those results. And I think it's had some success really, that sort of approach. 

The key defining factor is the naturalistic study of everyday behavior, which I was just fascinated in when I did my PhD and it's been a feature right through. Back in the day when I did my PhD, there was a strand of psychology called ethological psychology, which was the development of methods for understanding the behavior of kids. In a way, I've followed that through. My most recent work has been a Leverhulme-funded major research fellowship where I developed what I'm now calling an ‘eco-relational’ approach to classroom learning. It's a very inductive process of looking at all the strands of the work that I've done in order to arrive at a framework for understanding classroom learning, but also helping to improve things. So, an interest in the context within which children learn, which would include things like class size, but also the physical layout of the classroom and the task that kids get. The relational skills, which I and colleagues argue has been much underplayed, particularly between children. You can't put children in groups and hope it works. You have to actually think very carefully about the skills which you want children to use to work productively. So often kids get put into groups; doesn't work very well; self-fulfilling prophecy; teachers don't think it works and, even worse, the kids don’t think it works, so it just gets lost. 

One of the problems is that if you don't have this sort of framework in mind, then interventions which might work – we're encouraged to look at the results and meta-analysis to tell us which interventions to use, but the problem is if you don't have a sense of the context within which they work and the kind of skills that kids and teachers need to make it work, it's not going to work very well. You need to be mindful of that. 

I'm writing a book at the moment on this eco-relational approach and it's applying it to particularly collaborative group work, but also class size. One of the problems with class sizes: OK, we're happy enough, well, we're lucky enough to be able to reduce the number of kids in classrooms, but people tend to teach the same way as they did before. It's not being adapted, and when it comes to a large class there are all sorts of unforeseen consequences, particularly teachers burning themselves out trying to make do. And so it's applying this eco-relation approach to make things easier, really. 

And then, finally, for the education of children with Special Educational Needs, what the naturalistic research that we did in classroom shows is that the way that those kids are supported in classrooms is not always best designed to help them, particularly the use of teaching assistants. So we can reconfigure the way that we do that. I think there are some consistent themes, and I guess one of the key drivers is that we need to make sure that this research is connected to practice and policy and having impact. 

00:14:33 Professor Andy Tolmie 

I love the way it embraces the complexity of what's going on, that's so important. Last question: how has your work or psychology research in this area made a contribution to policy or practice? You’ve talked about some of that.

00:14:46 Professor Peter Blatchford 

It's a very interesting thing, that it's not really about the academic worth of the research – in terms of impact, sometimes. I think the SPRinG project, the study of collaborative groupwork – and Andy you may agree with me – was, I think, pretty sound, actually, it was a very rich project. Its impact on practice in schools is a little bit difficult to judge, but it hasn't had the impact, in some ways, I think it deserves. 

The project I've done which has had impact, and I'm quite proud of it, actually, is the DISS project, the Deployment and Impact of Support Staff project. We tried very hard after we got the findings I mentioned earlier about the negative impact of teaching assistants and the ways that we thought we could do a better job. It felt like we were hitting our heads against a brick wall, and the government of the day would not fund extra research to try to change the situation really. So a charitable trust, the Esme Fairbairn trust stepped in, and they allowed us the resources to do that. We were able then to move on and develop a systematic approach to professional development and school improvement – which I'm very pleased to say has really had quite a major impact. But I think you need all sorts of; I mean, other people can probably speak more knowledgeably about this than I can, but my experience is you need all sorts of levers to try to ratchet up the impact one can have. One thing we had was a collaboration with the Education Endowment Foundation [EEF]. We collaborated with Jonathan Sharples at the EEF to write guidance, and the resources of the EEF meant that all the schools received copies of it. Studies have shown that teachers are very aware: 90% of teachers are very aware of the guidance. It’s had a big impact on awareness and on changes in practice. And it's had a big impact overseas as well; certainly, we can verify that in New Zealand and Australia. So, it did have an impact. There's a lot of serendipity about which research seems to have that kind of impact. Let's kind of pursue it and that's good to see. 

00:17:25 Professor Andy Tolmie 

Great, thank you Peter.

That's it from us for today. You've been listening to Psyched about Education. For further details and other podcasts from the Department of Psychology and Human Development please see the links at the end of this podcast. 

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