School failure

robert whelan, 16 October 2006

Following on from the National Audit Office’s conclusions that 13 per cent of the population are being failed by poor schools and preceding a report from the Public Accounts Committee warning the government about the impact of poorly-performing schools, the front of Friday’s Times Education Supplement reported the headline ‘No need to read books: Pupils can now gain top-grade GCSEs simply on a diet of extracts’.

The state of the education system is looking bleak. A research paper by Professor David Jesson from York University and Anthony Farrell, a head teacher has found that pupils can achieve A*s in English and English Literature GCSE without reading a single book from cover to cover. Perversely, feeding pupils the relevant extracts is deemed to be the more efficient way of achieving high grades. And not only the most efficient, also the official way it seems. According to the report’s authors this approach is something that the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA), the largest examining board in the country, actually encourages.
In the National Audit Office’s report published earlier this year, 1,577 schools were found to be ‘poorly performing’. A breakdown of these figures showed this to represent 23 per cent of secondary schools and four per cent of primaries. This is a depiction the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee is expected to reiterate tomorrow – as well as, by all accounts, laying some of the blame for this on the education watchdog, OfSTED. According to today’s Daily Mail, the Committee’s report will argue that OfSTED’s new system of so-called ‘light-touch’ inspection has ‘shielded’ a large number of incompetent head teachers, contributing to the increasing pool of poor schools. According to the Mail, the Committee will argue that OfSTED’s newly introduced emphasis on self-evaluation is allowing head teachers to determine whether their schools are providing a satisfactory education. This argument however, overlooks the key flaw in OfSTED’s ‘self-evaluation’ regime. The inspectorate’s version of self-evaluation would be better termed self-regulation, as it is by no means an autonomous process; instead schools are made to fill out a hugely labour-intensive self-evaluation form with extensive guidance on how to do so. As Chris Keates of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers has commented, OfSTED’s highly prescribed form of self-evaluation would be better described as getting teachers to do the regulatory work themselves.
Whilst there may be disagreement about the causes and definitions, there is consensus on the fact that we have an extremely worrying number of poor schools in this country.