Modern Childhood > Info & links > Tests, Targets And Education
If you aren’t involved in education, your opinion of tests, targets and school league tables is probably influenced by how well your own child (and his/her school) is doing in the system. I know many schools where brilliant teachers and headteachers manage to provide an excellent rounded education despite political pressure to focus on specific measurable targets and questionable test results.
However, to someone who’s been involved in primary education for the last forty years, the overall effects of a centralised tests-targets-and-league-tables culture have been disastrous. (Just as disastrous as the laissez-faire educational policies that preceded it.) British education seems to be particularly subject to violent pendulum swings, so that a balanced attitude to teaching and learning is achieved only through the determination of dedicated professionals. Ask those brilliant headteachers and teachers who are presently bucking the trend, and I’m sure they’ll agree with me.
The article below, the one called Tests, Targets and Education in Modern Childhood Articles, sum it all up.
Hitting The Target And Missing The Point
unedited version of article published in The Guardian, 2008
‘I can’t understand why schools worry so much about league tables,’ said the middle class mum. ‘All the mothers I talk to in the playground want more art, drama and music for our children – more creativity. But the school’s fixated on test scores.’
‘Yes, it’s tragic,’ I agreed, ‘But tell me – if the school concentrated on creativity and ignored the tables, would you still be happy to send your child there?’
For a moment she looked ready to say ‘Yes’… then thought better of it. ‘Hmmm, maybe not,’ she admitted. ‘We couldn’t risk it, could we?’
And therein lies the problem. As long as league tables exist, in a risk averse society most people daren’t ignore them. Primary schools at the top of the league (which, by a strange coincidence, tend to be in the wealthiest areas) have a reputation to maintain; those at the bottom have to try to claw a little higher. The status of all interested adults (teachers, governors, parents) depends on how their Year Sixes perform in national tests.
So from four years of age, our children now live in the shadow of SATs. ‘No time for play in the reception class now,’ one teacher told me ruefully. ‘As soon as they arrive, it’s fast forward to the Key Stage One test.’ The curriculum is dominated by the core subjects of English, Maths and Science, broken down into a series of discrete‘learning objectives’ – closely matched to ‘assessment criteria’ – to be ticked off as children progress through the school.
There are ‘voluntary’ SATs for each year group, so children’s progress (and teachers’ competence in coaching their pupils) can be checked every summer. Then, in Year Six, come several months of concentrated exam practice, ‘booster classes’ during the Easter holidays for those who might not scrape the required mark, and sleepless nights for 11-year-olds terrified of ‘letting themselves down’ on the day. (‘What do you mean, don’t worry?’ cried my friend’s son hysterically, when she tried to calm him the night before his English SAT. ‘My whole future depends on these tests!’)
Not surprisingly, this regime leaves far less time for creative but unquantifiable experiences, like art, drama and music, which through the millennia have nurtured children’s imaginations and contributed incalculably to their emotional and social development. Less time also for the active, hands-on learning children need if they’re genuinely to understand the concepts underpinning the tests. Last year researchers found that the conceptual understanding of today’s 11-year-olds lags two to three years behind their counterparts in 1990. While performance on pencil-and-paper tests of has soared over this period, children are apparently less likely to understand the principles they’ve been trained to tick boxes about.
How did we get ourselves into this fine mess? Why, back in the middle 90s, did it seem a good idea to create league tables for small children’s achievement?
Partly, of course, it was the zeitgeist. Bewitched by the number-crunching potential of computer technology, we became obsessed with counting and ranking everything in sight, spawning a reductionist audit culture that has very little to do with genuine human values.
The major driving factor, however, was a worthy one: concern about children’s achievement in the 3Rs, particularly literacy. Several decades of dispute about teaching methods had led to confusion in the classroom, so like the target regime introduced to kick start the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies, primary league tables were meant to refocus attention on the basic skills and raise standards for children everywhere, particularly those in disadvantaged areas of the country.
A decade or so on, it clearly hasn’t worked. Research published recently by the independent Alexander Review of primary education shows that – on tests other than those for which children are coached – there have been only modest improvements in mathematics, and little change in literacy standards. And in last month’s PIRLS survey of international achievement in literacy, England had actually gone backwards, slumping from 3rd to 19th place.
Not surprisingly, the children trailing furthest behind are still those from the disadvantaged homes – statisticians last year found a direct correlation between league table position and postcode. The effects of languishing for more than a decade at the bottom of published charts are summed up by a poster in the loo of one low-scoring Liverpool school: ‘The flogging will continue until morale improves’.
So if no one benefits from league tables, if even middle class mums would be glad to see the back of them, if instead of encouraging social justice they’re helping to widen the gap between rich and poor, it really is time to get rid of them. Indeed, Wales and Northern Ireland have already abandoned the wretched things.
Sadly, English politicians, like those mums in the playground, are seriously risk averse, and no one wants to be the first to abandon a policy traditionally seen as ‘tough’. So on they go, aiming at pointless targets, publishing meaningless league tables, and completely missing the point of what education – and literacy – is about.
Obsessive attachment to tests and targets is worse in England than the rest of the UK, and England is now the only country that publishes league tables for schools. But even in Scotland (where the testing regime is designed to be more developmentally appropriate than the English version and league tables have never been used) a politically-motivated target culture threatens to derail the country’s new Curriculum for Excellence (see ‘Curriculum harks back to 1904’ from TES Scotland , January 2010 )
You’ll find me railing against this sort of educational culture in many articles in the Education section of this website, starting in 1997 (‘Orthodoxy is no dancing matter’) when the regime was just being mooted. They reflect the opinions of the overwhelming majority of teachers I meet in the schools (which is now well into the tens of thousands over the years).
And I’m not the only one. Practically every UK educational body, including the National Association of Headteachers, has pointed out that an excessive test-and-target regime, especially in primary schools, simply doesn’t work. If you want chapter and verse on the problems it throws up, see the journalist Warwick Mansell’s book and blog: Education By Numbers.