Acknowledging the problems is the first step to getting better

Civitas, 18 May 2007

The element which has worried me most about education reforms under New Labour, is the way that learning has been squeezed out in order to accommodate improvement. It sounds like an oxymoron of course, but the Government’s desire to be seen to be doing well, as educationalist Alan Smithers once so pithily put it, has often forfeited children the opportunity of genuinely doing well.

An example of this perverse scenario is played out on the front page of the Times Education Supplement (TES). The TES exposes the fact that tens of thousand of pupils are being put up for ‘a new qualification worth up to four GCSEs but which government experts say an average 11-year-old could pass’. According to the TES, as many as 50% of secondary schools are thought to be entering pupils for a new qualification, the OCR national level 2 in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). This new, easier, qualification will replace the ICT GNVQ in many schools – the GNVQ a qualification which itself has been criticised extensively for lacking rigour, and therefore adopted as a strategy to raise schools’ position in the league tables with the GNVQ the equivalent in teaching time of one GCSE but potentially equivalent to four A*-C GCSEs. The TES describes the OCR in ICT as passable by an average 11-year-old, not based on the fact that tasks include sending an email, but because that’s what the Government’s own consultants have said. A document written by the Government’s National Strategies consultants, which the TES has got hold of, states that ‘a pass in the qualification’s compulsory unit “generally” equals level 4 of the key stage 3 national curriculum – the standards expected of an 11-year-old’.
As the TES points out, qualifications like the OCR in ICT do nothing to help the Government’s attempts to gain ‘parity of esteem’ between academic and vocational skills. On the other hand, how hard is the Government trying to bridge the gap? In many respects the Government is doing just the opposite of elevating the status of vocational skills with its persistent demeaning of vocational jobs. Just one of the ways in which this message has been conveyed, inadvertently or deliberately, is through plans to get everybody to university. A move heralded as democratic, but from which one can also extrapolate that the only really acceptable skills and jobs are academic-based ones.
Another major distraction to learning has been the relentless directives which schools have had to comply with – and prove so through stacks of paperwork. In the last two years alone, head teachers have been asked to implement 50 initiatives.
An extraordinary admission by the Government – that this level of dictation has been misguided – is oddly tucked into the back pages of the TES. Schools minister, Jim Knight, is quoted as saying: “For the past 10 years, we’ve driven accountability back to the top pretty hard. Perhaps we need to devolve accountability so we can step back a lot more.” One extremely welcome form of stepping back put forward by the minister is for heads to ignore paperwork which is not useful. Mr Knight described the move as ‘…a recognition that we need to focus on forms that make a difference and disregard the rest.” Another extraordinary admission: that a lot of the Government’s ‘forms’ do not make any difference at all. At least not for the better.