DAISY CHRISTODOULOU
Why the picky, picky detail matters
Last month, Nick Gibb, the former UK Schools Minister, published a memoir about his 10+ years in office. He was central to the big educational reforms England introduced since 2010: phonics teaching, a knowledge-rich curriculum, school autonomy, and assessment reform.
I wrote the foreword to the book, and I’ve written before on here about the success of these reforms. So I’m hardly a neutral observer, but for what it is worth I think the book is fantastic, and it has been getting rave reviews from others too (see here, hereand here.)
In my foreword, I emphasised the importance of content knowledge not just for education, but for politicians and policymakers. Nick Gibb really understood education. He’d done his research and visited hundreds of schools. He was given the time to develop his understanding too, because unlike most junior ministers, he wasn’t reshuffled to a completely different department after 15 months.
The educationalist Siegfried Engelmann liked to talk about the importance of the “picky, picky detail”. If you’re trying to teach a student what a verb is, it matters if all the examples you give have the verb as the second word. Picky detail really matters for policy reform too. In this post, I will focus on two aspects of England’s assessment and accountability reforms where attention to detail made a huge difference, and where policymakers in other areas could learn a lot.