FINDING THE BEST STICKING PLASTERS

In a blog about complexity in education, I quoted Elinor Ostrom, who was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. It was therefore great to see this week that another woman has finally won the Nobel Prize again and her name is Esther Duflo. She won the award alongside her husband Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer and at the age of 46 is the youngest person ever to win the award. They won the award ‘for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.’ and you can read about their achievement here. Duflo and Banerjee wrote a book as well about their experiences a few years back and it is well worth a read – it’s called ‘Poor Economics’.

Their experimental approach has been their use of RCTs (Randomised Controlled Trials) to discover what programmes are most effective in order to alleviate poverty. Clearly it makes sense to do these trials or otherwise you could be spending a lot of aid money on programmes that don’t work and as we know in economics, there are finite resources and therefore we have to spend them as efficiently as possible but this doesn’t mean that their approach hasn’t been criticised.

Much of their work is looking at small scale projects and seeing whether the interventions work. This is perfectly acceptable of course but it only works on a micro level and avoids the huge structural issues that cause global poverty. This is summed up in this article by a number of rival economists (with fellow Nobel Prize winners amongst them) and this excellent article in the Tribune India by Pritam Singh that also discusses the dubious ethics of the RCT approach. In fact the last paragraph is a real gem – ‘The reason this approach is popular with politicians, aid agencies and global policy-makers is that they want to see quick results of their specific interventions rather than troubling themselves with the structural causes of poverty and the transformational changes required to deal with mass poverty.’

This final paragraph is important because it can clearly relate to education and the move towards a more evidence informed approach. In 2010 Michael Gove (then Secretary of State for Education) set up the EEF (Education Endowment Foundation) at the cost of £125 million to investigate ‘what works’ in education. Once again this is a laudable idea and since then they have run a number of RCTs (although some of these have been criticised), which have then been used to provide a toolkit for teaching and learning that schools can look at in order to prioritise their spending.

I have always found it a fascinating read and it’s also interesting to see how the data has changed over time. For example, I remember when it was first released and the data on teaching assistants was pretty poor (they were seen as high cost with low impact) and being a governor of a Primary School at the time, I remember the Head’s eyes lighting up as he had the evidence for reducing the wage bill. Over time, the data has improved for teaching assistants and therefore you do wonder how many decisions were made on such imperfect data. It’s also fascinating to see what’s ignored as well. Having a uniform has no impact whatsoever on education attainment but you rarely see many people arguing for the end of uniforms based on the evidence.

However, let’s go back to that Pritam Singh’s quote. At the time of Gove introducing the EEF to evaluate ‘what works’ in education, the government were slowly cutting back huge amounts of money in schools. Yes you could argue that the EEF was needed because now schools had to do ‘more with less’ but not only was school funding being cut but the whole country was being forced to endure the perils of austerity. To use a medical analogy, it was as if Gove had given funding to a nurse to find the best plaster to deal with a patient whose leg had been chopped off!

Therefore we can see a similarity between trying to deal with global poverty as with trying to solve the issues in education. The government likes the EEF/RCT approach because they can see quick results with specific interventions rather than troubling themselves with the structural causes of educational issues. It’s easier for Nick Gibb (Minister of State for Schools) to point to a study about the banning of mobile phones in schools or the work of researchED rather than discuss the issues of poverty that might cause behavioural problems in schools or the lack of funding for policing that has led to schools dealing with issues surrounding ‘county lines’. It’s also quite interesting to see that despite the huge increase in evidence informed practice that have been supported by these RCTs, the impact on results has been negligible because no one in government wants to tackle the structural issue of the bell curve when it comes to the distribution of exam results.

So it’s great that another woman has won the Nobel Prize in Economics and this is hugely important for diversity in the subject but I also think it’s great that Duflo winning it (alongside Banerjee and Kremer) has got the world thinking and discussing the effectiveness of RCTs in all areas of life and whether that truly is the best way of solving big problems.