Children are missing out on the best possible education because teaching techniques have never been tested rigorously, one of Britain’s most senior scientists has said.

Education needs to learn from medicine and other scientific disciplines by using rigorous experiments to determine which approaches work best, according to Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust, the country’s largest independent funder of bio-medical research.

He told The Times that Labour and Tory governments had reformed the education system on the basis of political dogma without any reliable evidence that their policies would benefit children. Whereas the merits of drugs were assessed by randomised controlled trials before they were given to patients, children were taught according to the ideological hunches and opinions of politicians and educationists, who could not know whether their strategies would work.

Questions such as optimum class size, whether boys and girls were better taught separately, and how best to teach literacy and numeracy, had never been investigated by scientific experiment, he said. The best way to identify the best methods was to split similar children into study and control groups and teach them differently, emulating the way that drugs were tested against a placebo. “Many more matters of public policy are susceptible to experiment than is often assumed,” Professor Walport said.

The notion of conducting controlled experiments in education is often criticised as unethical, as one set of children would miss out on the superior technique, but Professor Walport said that that was no worse than subjecting every child to untested policies.

“It’s not unethical to do experiments in education. It is unethical not to,” he said. “Many of the educational policies that are put into action are experimental as it is. They are just experiments without controls. When I raised this in Whitehall, I got the response: ‘You don’t possibly expect to compare educational outcomes like this, do you?’ But that missed the point. The point is that you do this when you don’t know.”

Some policies are tried out in pilot studies, but these rarely feature control groups, and the initiatives are introduced nationally before the study’s outcome has been evaluated. Research is often conceived to find evidence to support existing policies, rather than to decide what works before policy is decided.

“The scientific method, which is to ask the question, is almost the antithesis of the political method, which is to say I’ll tell you the solution,” Professor Walport said.

The Department for Education and Skills’s research budget, now about £4.5 million, was far too low, he said, and the department needed to appoint a chief scientist responsible for ensuring its research meets rigorous scientific criteria.

His call was welcomed by Nick Gibb, the Shadow Schools Minister, who said that too many education policies had been introduced without evidence. He said: “The look-and-say method of teaching children to read is a prime example. Where were the pilot studies that showed it worked? When the first proper study was done in Clackmannanshire, it found that synthetic phonics was a much more effective strategy. It was so successful that children were withdrawn from the control group as it would have been immoral to continue.”

Professor Alan Smithers, the director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at the University of Buckingham, said that it was not always simple to conduct controlled experiments into educational strategies.

“There are so many factors that affect success, including the background and ability of pupils and the skill of teachers, that it can be hard to separate out the effect of any one factor,” he said. “And the findings of research are rarely strong enough to overturn prior conceptions.”

In the balance

Reading
Whole-word approach to learning to read was introduced without evidence that it was more effective than phonics. Phonics is now making a comeback after research suggested it was more effective

Coeducation
There is little good evidence from properly controlled studies that shows whether boys and girls learn better when taught together or separately

Literacy and numeracy strategies
Introduced across the country after only minimal pilot studies into their likely effects

Specialist schools and city academies
Introduced across the country even though there was no research showing that either would have a beneficial effect

Class size
Little good research exists on the optimum size of the groups in which pupils are taught

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