Modern Childhood > Articles
Tests, Targets And Failure: Government Should Look And Listen
published in the Guardian, 2008
They must issue the people at the Department for Children, Schools and Families with blindfolds and earplugs as they enter the building. It’s the only way they can possibly miss the gathering storm of evidence that the English education system is going horribly wrong.
As Jenni Russell pointed out in this newspaper on Wednesday, every submission to a recent government select committee on education (except, of course, the one from the DCSF itself) pointed out that our obsessive tests-and-targets culture doesn’t work. Did they listen? No: advice from exam boards, academic researchers, professional organisations, the government’s own quangos, even the General Teaching Council – all was waved away in a cloud of complacency.
Then yesterday morning, another big gun – the independent Alexander Review of Primary Education – boomed the same message that we’re testing children far too much and starting them on the target treadmill far too early. Another airy wave. ‘Please go away – we’ve set up our own enquiry, and we’ll listen to that, thank you very much, not upstart Cambridge professors or anybody else who isn’t in our pay.’
Meanwhile, time ticks by and every year another cohort of bewildered four-year-olds is ushered into a system that is clearly failing. No one at DCSF acknowledges repeated research findings that an early start to formal education gives no academic advantage, and may be damaging for some children. Nor that children in countries where they wait till six or seven tend to outperform our poor weary offspring by the time they reach secondary school. They ignore the facts that, in these countries, the achievement gap between rich and poor is nowhere as wide as ours, and the drop-out rate in secondary school enviably lower.
Instead they insist schools treat education as though it were some sort of race – a steeplechase in which, sadly, many children fall at the first fence and never recover. This applies particularly to boys (who are often up to a year behind girls in terms of general development when they start school) and to children from disadvantaged homes who need more time to develop language and attention skills before starting on formal work.
And once they’re up and running, all children spend large tracts of their primary careers joylessly chasing test scores. Learning to read these days isn’t about discovering the pleasure to be had from books, or the joy of independent learning. It’s about knowing which box to tick on the literacy SAT.
In the circumstances, perhaps it’s understandable that the people responsible for this state of affairs prefer to cover their eyes and ears. It can’t be comfortable to think that the strategy they hoped would improve standards of learning, help boys overcome the educational gender gap and make things better for children from the least advantaged homes is actually having exactly the opposite effect.
But earplugs and blindfolds aren’t the answer. Neither is a DCSF-appointed enquiry, for which a directive has already been issued regarding the hoped-for findings. For the sake of the nation’s children, Ed Balls and his minions should open their ears and eyes to the work of Professor Robin Alexander and his phalanx of independent experts. The Primary Review: Children, Their World, Their Schools is almost complete. Instead of airily waving it away, they should be inviting the Cambridge professor to present his findings in Whitehall.