UK education perpetuating, not breaking, poverty cycle

Civitas, 26 September 2008

While New Labour’s aim in education has been to generate greater equality, a damning report from the OECD written up in this week’s Times Education Supplement, states that the UK education system ‘still seems to perpetuate rather than break the cycle of inequality’.

One of the problems with our education system which the report, Raising Education Achievement and Breaking the Cycle of Inequality in the United Kingdom, written by economist Anne-Marie Brook, identifies is the way in which testing has become a major distortion through ‘gaming’ and ‘teaching to the test’: a ‘pioneering’ approach, gone sour.
‘The test-dominated education system in the United Kingdom has pioneered the use of school benchmarking techniques to raise school quality. However, targets may have biased some national measures of education performance, and there is relatively little evidence of improvement in performance when evaluated using international tests.’
The report argues that the link in the UK between home-life background and pupil performance is ‘unusually high’ compared to other OECD countries, leading to considerable disparities between performance across schools. In light of the fact that the UK government has a much more explicit equalising agenda than many other countries, this is sadly ironic.