A primary concern

Civitas, 13 July 2007

It is a response utterly characteristic of New Labour: ‘deal’ with a problem – generally years late – by creating a completely new one.
As we’d suspected, under Brown the direction of school reform is not going to change. For the last ten years, a critic’s template might well have been produced to pull out each time a new schools’ scheme was announced. Initiative after initiative showed almost uncanny consistency in managing to evade the causes of the crisis at hand. Continuing this trend was yesterday’s announcement of a secondary curriculum overhaul, a move, theoretically, to give teachers more flexibility.

The primary purpose of yesterday’s ‘pruning’ was to free up the curriculum so as to allow secondary schools greater freedom to respond to the needs of their pupils. The madness of many of the proposals to achieve this flexibility aside (see yesterday’s blog), another glaring flaw lies unaddressed. For many schools, responding to pupils’ needs will mean focusing on basic reading, writing and maths. What is so extraordinary is that the government seems to think it entirely acceptable that secondary school pupils should need more time to secure the 3 Rs. There has been no recognition that the status quo when it comes to English and maths skills in our secondary schools is one of crisis; above all, the government is not linking what is a severe learning deficit to what is happening in our primary schools. How is it that with so many secondary school pupils illiterate and innumerate we are still celebrating the success of the Primary National Numeracy and Literacy Strategies?
The government of course points to the (nearly) ever-climbing primary SATs results in literacy and numeracy as evidence of successful primary curricula. But “do the math” as the Americans say: if pupils cannot read, write and add in secondary school, there’s something wrong with SATs results that say they can in primary. Sure enough, rising SATs results ‘add up’ against a backdrop of declining competence in the 3 Rs at secondary school, when current levels of cramming and teaching to the test in primary schools are taken into account (see evidence in the report Artificial Achievement on the extent of cramming for SATs tests, as well as today’s Times Education Supplement for fresh evidence).
The government therefore, has a primary concern in need of addressing.