From NCELP to NCLE

The news emerged yesterday that the DfE in England decided not to renew NCELP’s contract and instead have given the job of improving pedagogy and uptake in schools to what is called the NCLE (National Consortium for Language Education). NCLE is to be run from University College London (Institute of Education, Faculty of Education and Society). They will oversee a new Language Hubs programme, as well as specifically supporting German and Mandarin teaching.

A few thoughts have been running through my head about this development.

I am first of all pleased NCELP do not continue to get government money. They intend to continue their work under the name Language-Driven Pedagogy and I wish them luck. My issues with NCELP have been twofold. 

Firstly, the principles behind their lessons were questionable. The ‘three pillars’ model of explicit language teaching of phonics, grammar and vocabulary does not align with general principles of second language acquisition, as these are usually expressed by leading scholars - I’m thinking of writers such as Rod Ellis, Paul Nation, Stephen Krashen, Mike Long and Bill VanPatten. The Ofsted Research Review uncritically drew on the three pillars model and has been called into question in a series of scholarly papers.

Secondly, the NCELP lessons which stem from these principles are, in my view, dry, difficult and lacking in imagination. (I can only really speak of the French materials - I’m assuming the Spanish and German are similar.) I actually think they could have worked from the phonics/vocab/grammar foundation to produce much better, more accessible, more communicative lessons, but this was not the case. The NCELP lessons have been too driven by developing declarative, explicit knowledge about language, at the expense of implicit learning through communicative language use. The NCELP curriculum is highly ‘synthetic’ - based on the dubious idea that we build up language proficiency through a lego-style, step-by-step approach.

I assume NCELP were not asked to continue their work in view of the relative lack of enthusiasm from most teachers and their failure to generate enough momentum in terms of school take-up. Certainly, the last Language Trends survey suggested many more schools have been enthused by the Conti EPI principles. And most, of course, continue to work with text book courses, supplemented by other resources. I would love to know if any hard data was crunched to see if NCELP hub schools improved results or take-up. One problem was that the hub schools were already selected on the basis of existing success. Anecdotal evidence suggests some hubs and their dependent schools were less than enthusiastic, with a few dropping out.

The reason I have been a bit vocal in my criticism of NCELP resources is not just to do with their quality, but the fact that some academy trusts have been strong-arming departments into using them, in the belief that they government approved so must be good. In addition, because Ofsted in their research review have bought into the three pillars model, schools may have thought you have  to use NCELP resources to please the inspectors (this was never true, as has been reported by several Heads of Department). So it has bothered me that departments have been led down an ill-advised pedagogical path.

Now, it should be said that on social media, some teachers and schools report success with NCELP resources. I would be interested to know what these departments were doing before and I’d like to know more about the teacher beliefs about language acquisition. Because it has to be said that when teachers believe in an approach and deliver it effectively, results can be good. Some schools reporting success say they have used the resources selectively - NCELP have never said their lessons should be just used as they stand. Incidentally, schools who enjoy the NCELP resources might be wise to download them all quickly, in case they can no longer be held online in the future.

But what about the new NCLE? The staff at UCL don’t seem to share the same theoretical and pedagogical beliefs as NCELP. This article gives a flavour of where they may be coming from and I welcome the tone of the piece. Despite the DfE’s announcement that NCLE will build on the original TSC Review (2016), it is nor immediately apparent to me that UCL’s thinking is in line with TSC/NCELP.

Perhaps we are to witness a swing of the pendulum back towards a more balanced, communicative view of language pedagogy which takes account of a much wider research base than NCELP’s. I hope so. I can’t help thinking, however, that over the decades we have seen various initiatives come and go, each with laudable aims and  some money attached. National Languages Strategy, Asset Languages and NCELP spring to mind. I suppose this new £15+ million is to be welcomed. I hope it will be well spent.