Primary concern
Anastasia De Waal, 7 August 2009
This week Key Stage 2 (KS2) Sats have, once again, been under close scrutiny. Today’s Times Educational Supplement (TES) reports that ‘National test results for 11 year-olds have remained largely static’ though the Guardian has gone for a more hard-line ‘record drop in English results – a quarter leave primary school unable to read and write properly’.
It’s worth noting that this ‘record drop’ is only one of 1% and, according to schools’ minister Diana Johnson, this ‘blip’ is largely due to the influx of non-native English speakers sitting these exams.
Today we also see that special educational needs (SEN) expertise in schools is ‘hampered by outdated cultural attitudes’ wherein children are being limited by indecipherable statements and their achievement demotivated through a lack of encouragement. It can be safely assumed that support for children with English as an additional language, is too in need of a radical shake-up.
The third newsflash in today’s TES is the ubiquitous stress factor for teachers (no surprise there), much of which is attributed to national curriculum testing and the high demand for compressed teaching in order to hit overblown and wildly optimistic targets. To hear politicians claim that standards are stalling, slipping even, and the call for ‘neither government nor schools to be complacent’ is a further, damning indictment of the communication procedures (or lack thereof) between teachers and the government. Complacency is not the issue here: the demand for a systemic change is.
On the one hand we have two 11-year-olds in five with substandard literacy, and on the other we have teachers, backed into corners, squeezing the grades of those very same students up a notch or two for their new schools’ admissions data – something that Civitas has touched on before.
Case in point: the government’s previous ‘efforts to push up standards’ (as Johnson put it) at KS2 seem misguided and, at worst, shambolic. All such ‘efforts’ appear to have been channelled into blighting the lives of many a year 6 teacher, pressurising them to inflate the levels of their students prior to the transition to year 7 purely to meet unrealistic objectives.
This ‘gulf’, or disparity of achievement spanning the gap between year 6 and 7 has led secondary-level teachers to hypothesise, at length, about what precisely goes on during that 6 week transitional holiday; some sort of literacy lobotomy? Why is it that the year 7’s emerge in September snivelling into their crisply starched shirt sleeves about grades that have plummeted from the lofty heights of level 5 to a meagre mid level-3? As a secondary teacher, I for one have fielded a not inconsiderable amount of phonecalls/hatemail from perplexed parents of said outraged offspring.
Christine Blower, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), a union which is calling for the scrapping of the KS2 Sats commented that:
“The national curriculum testing arrangements are long past their sell-by date. Teachers are no longer prepared to allow the damage they cause to continue.”
This ‘damage’ encompasses more than simply an impoverished curriculum, useless testing strategies and clumsy target-setting. The very fact that the media has leapt on this ‘meaningless’ 1% decline in the latest primary results, means that the KS2 teachers will be the ones feeling the aftershock come September. The testing system needs to change and the teachers need to have more support, as well as freedom and voice.
The predicament of our primary teachers aside, there is still an issue of how we can raise literacy standards in general, especially in low-income areas. The relationship between poor literacy and poverty is a very serious problem and the horrifying news that 15% of Neets (youngsters not in education, employment or training) die within 10 years of ‘falling out of the system’ is an urgent reminder that the basics of literacy and numeracy must be in place for these young people.
Initiatives such as the enterprising Arsenal ‘Double Club’, aimed specifically at male Key Stage 3 students, are shining examples of how to re-engage the disenfranchised. This particular scheme focuses on literacy and football coaching in tandem, using football professionals and the Ros Wilson literacy course, which is based on music therapy and ‘peaceful learning’.
Nothing, however, is as fundamental to the re-engagement of students as ensuring that teachers are not disenfranchised. A successful teaching force – and subsequently successful students – rests on adequate classroom support, less target pressure and a government which applauds rather than undermines teachers’ innovation and efforts.
By Kate Pretsell
The tragic irony of our education system as it stands is that in attempting, by way of regular testing, to gain a greater ability to gauge children’s progress, that progress has been made to suffer. A child will never benefit from their education if they fight against it, and this is precisely the attitude engendered by the constant demand that they jump through hoop after hoop. It is easy as an adult to forget how important a driving force the imagination is for a child, and that by failing to engage with it the battle in the classroom may already be lost. Unfortunately, a system based upon frequent testing is not, in the hands of all but the best teachers, compatible with imagination. Target-setting is a political tool, and as this blogger so rightly says, is rendered clumsy and useless when applied to Education. Teachers are not factory workers screwing heads on dolls; they will never succeed in making our youth flourish if they are treated as such.