Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools tells us that there are proportionately more problems at key stage 2 than elsewhere in the curriculum. His annual report shows: more lessons with “unsatisfactory or poor” teaching and standards of pupil achievement, more inadequacies in teachers’ subject knowledge, more unsatisfactory progress in reading, more incompetence in numeracy, more unevenness in science; generally poorer progress in the other foundation subjects. Curriculum planning and assessment were judged unfavourably in more junior classes and schools, and reports to parents were less detailed and precise.

This comparatively depressing picture is only marginally relieved by the discovery that the proportion of key stage 2 lessons with unsatisfactory or poor standards was only one percentage point better in independent preparatory schools (26 per cent and 25 per cent), with their presumably smaller classes and “high levels of (pupil) motivation and commitment”. At least maintained school parents are not paying over the odds for their children’s under-achievement.

I interpret the findings to mean that effective teaching is more difficult at KS2 than at KS1 and KS3. This is because it is more demanding to provide for the range and level of children’s understanding across 10 subjects, in-service training for the national curriculum and assessment has been limited, and class sizes are increasing. While these factors should not be used to justify poor teaching, they signal the limits that may reasonably be set on expectations for further improvement. The chief inspector’s report thus offers itself not simply as a set of findings about 19934, but as an agenda for schools over the next few years. Given the current constraints, what might schools do to help KS2 teachers? I suggest four areas.

Subject knowledge

The main issue here is that planning, teaching and assessment suffer because generalist class teachers cannot know enough in every subject of the national curriculum at a sufficiently high level. The conventional solutions are to use in-service training in subject knowledge and to deploy teachers more frequently as specialists or semi-specialists. These strategies can be useful, but as a nation-wide solution they are inevitably inadequate. Schools trying more flexible approaches often face financial constraints. There has been some resistance to “subject specialism” from Plowden-inspired progressives, but the Plowden report itself suggested that older pupils might benefit by being taught by more than one teacher.

Schools could base pupils’ learning more often on good quality class texts (including all forms of learning materials), in which the teacher can feel confident about the subject content, and concentrate on planning how best to use the text. The saving in teacher preparation time, and the reduction in subject uncertainty might not merely improve standards, but also challenge a professional culture in which the only virtuous teacher is the one who prepares all her own worksheets. Teachers in small schools might particularly benefit from such a strategy.

Classroom organisation

There are two main concerns, “whole-class” teaching and working in groups. The former is provocative only in the tone in which it has been raised, both in the Alexander-Rose-Woodhead (Three Wise Men) document and in Chris Woodhead’s annual report, which, after a question about why teacher expectations are so low, reads: “Why is it that in too many primary schools ‘learning by doing’ is preferred to ‘teaching by telling’. . .?” One response to this irritating caricature is that where such imbalance occurs it probably arises: a) more often at KS1, where standards apparently are higher; and b) from teachers allowing themselves to be guided by the 1985 White Paper “Better Schools” which claimed that much work was too closely directed by the teacher to allow for discussion and problem solving.

The claimed benefit of whole-class teaching is that it demands more of pupils’ thinking. We have not been helped to see the potential here by the conceptual muddle in the Three Wise Men’s report, confusing the size of the group with the teaching technique.

Direct teaching, research shows, involves high-level interaction between teacher and pupils, not one-way transmission. It can and should be used with small groups as well as with whole classes. Differentiating work according to children’s attainments, a major problem at key stage 2, cannot normally be focused on individuals, and will call for more grouping based on pupil attainment. This has been a trend since the early 1980s, and those who fear labelling, might reflect that it works both ways, raising self-esteem as well as lowering it.

Differentiated work based on group attainment might contribute to solving the old problem of the low expectations held for able children in primary schools, identified as clearly in the 1978 HMI primary survey as in this year’s annual report. It is also worth asking if grouping round tables needs to be so physically inflexible. When the teacher is teaching the whole class, up to a quarter of pupils have difficulty in paying attention because they don’t face her.

Assessment

The annual report notes that assessment which informs future work is not well developed at KS2. It is the longest of all stages, and there is little reason why national testing should wash backwards into Years 3, 4 and 5. If KS2 teachers were able to develop a more natural, largely unrecorded, but more systematic approach to diagnostic observation and reflection upon pupils’ learning, disciplined by the level descriptions, but disconnected from end of key stage testing, it could become the single most influential factor in improving pupils’ classroom progress.

Inspections

The impact of inspections on primary school improvement is the great unknown. If inspectors explicitly offer school improvement as one of their purposes, and if primary teachers can shed the dread of inspections, the action plans that arise could genuinely service the reform process. Before junior teachers fall about laughing at this prospect, they should recognise that inspections elsewhere - for example in secondary schools and university departments of education - have been tiresome, time-consuming, and stressful, but have frequently identified significant points for development.

Jim Campbell is professor of education at Warwick University.