Sources of demotivation

pete quentin, 13 June 2008

Education secretary Ed Balls announced this week that the lowest performing secondary schools, as judged by the number of A*-Cs at GCSE, will be closed or replaced if they do not demonstrate an imminent ‘turnaround’.
The National Challenge, as the proposed strategy for aiding these turnarounds has been termed, is modelled on the London Challenge scheme. As the Times Education Supplement comments, the London Challenge has courted controversy by advising schools to focus on those GCSE pupils who are borderline C/D – thereby on boosting the results in the crudest terms, rather than on whole-school learning. If, as the precedent of the London Challenge suggests, ‘failing’ schools will become ‘successful’ schools by bolstering the grades of a particular group of pupils through intensive exam preparation, then the reality is that for the majority of pupils these schools will remain unchanged. (Yet the government will have achieved the results it needs as evidence that it is improving schools.)

The meaninglessness of quick-fix school improvement strategies such as this, couple neatly with another government strategy to improve low-performing schools; a scheme which reveals the government’s stark failure to grasp/accept the root causes of underachievement in a context of socio-economic deprivation.
A new set of government recommendations out this week in the report The Extra Mile, suggests some ‘achievement-boosting’ ideas for low-performing schools in disadvantaged areas. The ideas are to be tried out in twenty schools, with each school given an extra £10,000 funding to do so. Many of the suggestions are perfectly sensible (although unlikely to need much additional funding). These include involving pupils in good- behaviour promoting schemes and taking them outside their neighbourhoods. Other suggestions are less sensible, notably the expensive makeover of the school entrance so as to make school more ‘appealing’.
But much more worrying than any wasted money, is the fact that the government considers a lack of motivation to underlie the achievement gap in schools. The strong relationship between the school which performs less well in exams and the school with the more difficult intake, suggests a problem more complex. Disadvantage has an enormous impact on how pupils perform in school. From the learning support which they get at home, to the food the household can afford and the work-ethic that their parents provide, home-life makes a fundamental difference. Throw in other correlations with low-income in the UK, such as English as an additional language and special educational needs. Yet, although the root causes of a learning gap between the affluent and the less so is complex, there is a simple policy which would be hugely beneficial. And that is giving teachers and schools the freedoms to respond to the needs to pupils. So on reflection, yes, there is a lack of motivation in schools – and that is down to teachers being prevented from responding to their pupils’ needs.