Education: Social Mobility

Baroness Greenfield Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Greenfield (CB)]

I would like to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Nash, on introducing this highly important topic for debate. As a neuroscientist, I can appreciate only too well the impact that the environment, and thus the experience in the home and the classroom, can have on the physical brain processes, and subsequently on the unique individual that each child will become. The human brain is astonishingly “plastic”, which is why we as a species occupy more ecological niches than any other on the planet.

Our brains are constantly adapting to wherever we are placed and to whatever we are doing. Even thinking alone can drive an observable physical change in the brain. An intriguing study, which is much cited, showed this very well. It involved three groups of volunteers, none of whom could play the piano. Over a five-day experiment, the control group was exposed to the experimental environment but not to the all-important factor of five-finger piano exercises, while a second group learnt the exercises. Even within five days, you could see an astonishing change in their brain scans. However, the third group was the most remarkable. In this group the subjects were required merely to imagine they were playing the piano, and their brain scans showed almost identical changes to those who did the physical practice. Therefore, the important issue here is not the contraction of the muscle but the thinking that preceded it.

Such endless neuronal updating on a “use it or lose it” basis is particularly marked in critical timeframes during development within the first 10 years or so of life. So, if that is the case, what would be the ideal educational outcome in terms of mental prowess? For example, the Education Minister, Michael Gove, has suggested that all young children should learn a poem, but surely the more important, and harder, goal would be that they should understand it. There is a temptation sometimes to adopt the Gradgrind approach from Dickens’ Hard Times to aim simply to transmit facts. After all, you can readily train a brain—in certain cases, even that of a parrot—to give the right responses to a given input and to answer factual questions with factual answers. However, such success in, for example, activities such as Trivial Pursuit or pub quizzes is not regarded by even the most enthusiastic fans as the apotheosis of intellectual endeavour. Facts on their own are not enough; information is not knowledge. While collecting information may be simply gathering dots, knowledge is being able to join them up, seeing one thing in terms of another, and thereby understanding each component as part of a greater conceptual whole.

I would like to suggest that the more connections you can make in your brain across an ever wider and disparate range, the more deeply you will understand something. This connectivity, which is achieved through the plasticity of neuronal connections during development, could then be the key feature that defines real learning, and which sets the human brain above and beyond the information processing of a computer.

The work of the late educational neuroscientist John Geake provides hard evidence for this proposition. Geake’s imaging studies on gifted children revealed that their brains showed greater interconnectivity than the brains of those with average cognitive ability. Specifically, Geake’s findings led to the idea that giftedness is linked to analogical reasoning: for example, the analogy of the extinction of a candle with the extinction of life, as in the famous soliloquy in Macbeth. This ability to make connections where they did not exist before—to connect the dots—probably accounts for exceptional talents and creativity in many areas, including art, philosophy, mathematics, science and music.

So, how can the education system best provide an environment conducive to making such connections? Some might think the answer lies in digital technology. One meta-analysis of 46 different original studies involving a total of more than 36,000 students showed significant positive effects of computer use on mathematics achievement. Similarly, a recent large-scale analysis reviewed how educational software programs could beneficially affect reading outcomes in some 84 studies based on more than 60,000 students. Yet a report commissioned by NESTA in 2012, entitled Decoding Learning, concluded:

“In the last five years UK schools have spent more than £1 billion on digital technology. From interactive whiteboards to tablets, there is more digital technology in schools than ever before. But so far there has been little evidence of substantial success in improving educational outcomes”.

How can we reconcile these seemingly conflicting perspectives? I think it is done by flagging one all-important additional factor. The findings of the meta-analysis had indeed suggested that various reading programs, predominately computer delivered, generally produced a positive, but small, effect on reading skills. However, the really significant factor to emerge time and again has been that innovative technology has much more positive impact when accompanied by teacher support, so the greatest promise of digital devices lies not so much in the software and screen delivery themselves but in their use in close connection with teachers’ efforts. For anyone who has read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, or Goodbye, Mr Chips, this will come as no new insight. Nothing beats an inspirational teacher—not even an iPad.

Education research and practice supports this argument too. Sir Michael Barber has stated that the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers. Meanwhile, Pearson Education, in a recent report on worldwide school attainment, states that there is no substitute for good teachers. This conviction would seem nowhere more relevant than in schools in low-income areas. Take, for example, Mulberry School in Tower Hamlets—a non-selective, fully comprehensive school in which 76% of the pupils are entitled to free meals. The school has a policy to concentrate its resources on developing teachers and using as much of its budget as it can to pay for extra teaching and support for learning in a multitude of ways so that it maximises the amount of focused attention which pupils receive. The results have already shown considerable success. GCSE results doubled between 2005 and 2011 from 34% gaining A* to C with English and maths, to 78%, and, most commendable of all, 80% of students at this school now go to university.

So when it comes to giving a child the best start in life, to realise their potential irrespective of their background, we need to focus on ways of helping the young brain to join up the dots and to understand deeply what they are learning. This is best done by someone who can interact with them personally and act as an intellectual guide—a mentor. A mentor has been defined as someone who believes in you more than you believe in yourself. Could not more of the education budget go on ensuring that those key players—the teachers—have the best possible pay and conditions, so that they can focus on being much needed mentors, especially in cases where, as the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, has already flagged, a child comes from a background where perhaps they have not been able to believe in themselves at all?