ETS, SATS and leaves
nick cowen, 16 July 2008
The past month has the seen the Government’s SATS exam system implode in the bureaucratic equivalent of an ageing star collapsing into a black hole. There were delays to the SATS results and claims that the delays were just to make sure that the release was orderly and complete. Then the release this week was neither orderly nor complete with some results delayed until September and head teachers have been forced to send poorly marked or unmarked exam scripts back to the company, ETS Europe, that is meant to be managing the scheme. There was blood on the radio 4 airwaves this morning as John Humphrys eviscerated Ken Boston for the QCA’s handling of the scheme and it turns out ETS Europe have managed to score a lucrative £156 million 5-year contract to administer the SATS marking.
How has this happened? We have argued before that treating schools as factories and putting teachers on a production line, with ‘good grades’ as the intended outcome, is a hopeless method of improving real academic outcomes, but now it seems that the government itself has lost interest in ensuring its flawed system functions in some minimally acceptable way. Whatever happens now, no one will trust the results are accurate and reflect the real efforts of pupils and teachers: the system of measuring outcomes has become far less worthy of trust than the institutions they are meant to be holding to account. In the end it comes down to the currently named Department for Children, Schools and Families remarkable tolerance for failure. While anyone can be unfortunate and end up employing a company that turns out to be incompetent, only a government department could voluntarily lock itself into the same scheme for 5 years with no opt out. While an independent school could certainly be poorly served for one year by an independent examiner, it would certainly be the last year it was allowed to happen: the examiner would be sacked.
Is there a solution? Not while the system for funding the state education system in this country is so top-heavy. In our recent report, Swedish Lessons, we have suggested one of the primary causes of waste and inefficiency in the system is that funds labelled for schools are ring-fenced at the Whitehall level and carted off to be spent in large lump-sums by ministers and civil servants on projects that they have decided are important (like the SATS exams) but in many cases do not actually contribute to any real improvement in student outcomes.
Imagine if instead of £156 million being spent by the DCSF, besides all the other countless initiatives that it engages in, all that money was put directly into the budgets of individual schools (distributed on the basis of the number and type of pupils attending a school). Schools would be required to find some way of independently testing their academic outcomes. They may choose the state-blessed SATS system, or they may decide to use something else, or they may club together with other schools to produce a bespoke scheme. For example, Civitas’s own supplementary schools now use a testing scheme called InCas, administered from Durham University, which in its first year has proved successful at tracking the progress made by our pupils in the basics of reading, spelling, mental arithmetic and non-verbal reasoning. If schools had the ability to experiment, and so long as they were required to use tests that were independently verifiable, occasional minor failings within some schools might still take place, but the sort of catastrophic systems meltdown that is unfolding in front of us now would not be possible anymore. It would also mean that schools and pupils could opt-out of the low-value qualifications that are trumpeted only by the government in favour of ones that are more respected by employers and universities.
Is this the direction the government are going? Nope. In what can only eventually become a recursive loop of testers testing the testers, a nascent quango, OfQual has been given the job of ‘independently’ examining what the other education quangos are up to. The only question is how long will it be until OfQual needs its own independent body to examine how good a job it’s doing!
[This post was amended on 18 July to correct an error that suggested the 5-year contract between the government and ETS was irrevocable. In fact, the government should be able to terminate the contract but may be penalised with a fine if it chooses to do so]
You said
“Is there a solution? Not while the system for funding the state education system in this country is so top-heavy. In our recent report, Swedish Lessons, we have suggested one of the primary causes of waste and inefficiency in the system is that funds labelled for schools are ring-fenced at the Whitehall level and carted off to be spent in large lump-sums by ministers and civil servants on projects that they have decided are important (like the SATS exams) but in many cases do not actually contribute to any real improvement in student outcomes.”
the problem is even deeper. namely it is the mind set that govenment knows best when in fact government is the least qualified body to speak to the needs of schools. The problem is the education system. We don’t need a system; we need a market, where schools are run by parents and teachers, each school with it’s own vision of what constitutes the elements of a good education. We need schools for academic’s, schools for artist’s, schools for the sporties, schools for trades, faith schools, secular schools and most important of all home schools with tax credit to all who don’t use the state system. State education has become a mass baby sitting service. A government that was genuinely pro choice would make sure that every parent in the country was made fully aware of their right to educate their children at home and would provide the support through tax credits. In the Internet age home education is a more viable option for the working and middle classes than ever before.