David “Tricky Dicky” Cunliffe must really, REALLY hate research, given his recent foray into Education.

David “Tricky Dicky” Cunliffe

“Smaller class sizes” whines Mr Cunliffe.

“2000 extra teachers” bleats Mr Cunliffe.

“$350 million to fund it” gasps Mr Cunliffe.

What an intellectual lightweight Mr Cunliffe must be , says me.

If I could show you a summary of 50,000 individual research studies, and over 800 meta-analytic (a study of studies) studies, that concluded that “smaller class sizes” don’t make any difference at all to teaching outcomes, and that teacher quality, reinforced by regular real-time supervision and incremental skills and performance progress via regular evaluation was the key to teaching success, what would your response be?

Incredulity? Surprise? Disbelief?

Unfortunately for “Tricky Dicky” Cunliffe, one of my academic roles is as an Outcomes Researcher, so every time Cunliffe makes a populist, vacuous, absent-of-evidence claim about………..well…………anything, then I can simply smash his claims down with valid, reliable, and consistent evidence to the contrary.

Professor John Hattie is a name known by most in the International Education field, and he is one of our own.

Here is a study presentation that Professor John Hattie has compiled that illustrates the factor effect size of “what works” in delivering quality teaching.

Class size ranked 105th out of 138.

Seriously, if David “Tricky Dicky” Cunliffe is the supposed IQ and debating giant of the Labour Party, then I literally cannot wait until we cross paths in the public arena.

Because for me, it is going to be a case of Barrel, meet fish, with me doing the shooting.

ends

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