Why State Schooling Is No Longer Fit for Purpose

Civitas, 5 August 2008

Last month, Anastasia de Waal, Head of Civitas’ Family and Education Unit, undertook a nationwide telephone survey of secondary school teachers to ascertain how reliable and useful they considered current Sats tests (Standard Assessment Tests) taken by pupils in the final year of their primary schooling.
The results of the survey were published today and make for disturbing reading.

Nearly 80 per cent of the teachers surveyed believed these test scores had tended to exaggerate the level of ability of pupils. Most of these also believed the mismatch had been the result of schools ‘teaching to the test’, i.e. coaching pupils specifically for the tests.
Instead of, as intended, reflecting the level of ability of pupils, their scoring well in these tests had become the objective of their schooling. This had worked to the detriment of their education in several ways.
First, because the Sats test results formed the basis for school league tables on which their reputation had come to depend at least in official circles, primary schools felt themselves constrained to narrow their curricula so as to be able to focus on preparing pupils for the up-coming tests in English, mathematics and science.
In addition, secondary schools had become obliged to waste valuable time and resources re-testing their newly arrived pupils so as to obtain more accurate estimates of their true abilities.
Moreover, because their own effectiveness would be judged by how well they had been able to boost the level of their pupils’ performance when next tested at age 14, the exaggerated primary school test results had placed huge pressure on secondary schools to maintain an illusion of progress by similarly teaching to the next set of tests.
In sum, the education of pupils was suffering as a result of the current testing regime.
Testing primary school pupils per se was not the problem, argued the report. Rather, it was the particular test regime that had evolved over the years that had allowed and given incentive to schools to skewer their teaching to boost results with little true educational benefit for their pupils.
Sadly, it is unlikely the Government will respond to today’s report by reforming the testing regime in the manner recommended by the report. More likely is it that it will forbid teachers in state schools in future from participating in telephone surveys during school hours.
Testing pupils in the way they currently are at ages 7,11 and 14 was only one of three basic reforms introduced by the 1988 Education Reform Act. The other two were the National Curriculum and Ofsted inspections.
All three reforms were doubtless well-intentioned at the time. But each has since fallen victim to the law of unintended consequences and is arguably now having an overall adverse effect upon the education of the country’s young.
While today’s Civitas report shows up the defects of the Sats’ tests, a piece in the last week’s Sunday Times by former Ofsted Chris Woodhead explains why the National Curriculum and Ofsted have become unfit for purpose.
Basically, what has happened in the case of the National Curriculum is that control of its content has been ‘captured’ by the educational ‘progressives’ whose pernicious influence on education it was originally introduced to combat.
Likewise, in the case of Ofsted inspections, the originally intended objective and rigorous external scrutiny of schools has given way to a far lighter-touch focussing on the ‘self-evaluation’ of schools, calling for far less classroom observation of teaching. As Woodhead puts it ‘Once again a good idea has been rendered impotent, if not downright dangerous.’
The current state educational system badly stands in need of reform from root to branch. But any future reforms must avoid similar mistakes to those made in 1988. Of these, in hindsight, the gravest appears to have been an over-reliance on central regulation which forgot that a swing of the political pendulum could ruin even the best laid schemes of mice and woman.