Will the latest - and most powerful - blow finally force the government to review its primary school strategies?
A report on standards for Cambridge University’s Primary Review published today, finds conclusively that although there have been improvements in primary maths and science, there have not in literacy – since the 1950s.
This suggests that the £500 million spent on the government’s National Literacy Strategy has been wasted. The blow for the government is two-fold, as not only does the Review’s report show that standards in literacy have not gone up, it shows that the testing system is woefully problematic. “Problematic”, to borrow the Guardian’s headline, translating as ‘Test results for third of primary students wrong’. The Review provides concrete evidence of what every teacher - and pupil - up and down the country knows: that the current testing regime shrinks the curriculum, compels teachers to neglect lower achievers and produces erratic data. The overall conclusion is that contrary to the government’s claims, their testing regime has not driven up standards but has rather masked stalled improvement.
As the lead researcher of the Primary Review, Professor Robin Alexander, writes in the Times Education Supplement (TES) today, ‘The consensus which these reports reinforce is now so commanding that it is hard to resist the view that sooner rather than later the apparatus of national testing must change radically.’
The government’s response however, suggests that a dogged resistance to admitting fundamental flaws in the system may mean no imminent overhaul. A spokesperson for the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) is reported in the TES as responding: ‘These reports use tunnel vision to look at education. Primary standards are at their highest ever levels…’ going on to trot out the gains in Sats results. So indoctrinated by their own spiel have the DCSF become, that they cannot even see the irony in their stock response. The architects of a testing system which has focussed obsessively on targets at the expense of learning, accusing the academics in the Review of having “tunnel vision” and then going on to quote the very results which the Review has attacked, is an amazing indictment of government myopia.
Andrew Adonis is quoted in the Guardian, arguing with yet more extraordinarily unselfconscious logic. He defends New Labour’s primary strategies by telling us that much of the (illusory, according to the Review) improvement in Sats literacy performance is attributable to the ‘emphasis on phonics’. A focus on phonics has in fact only become officially part of the National Literacy Strategy this September, phonics a comparatively small component in its last chaotically applied incarnation. As lucidly demonstrated in Channel 4’s Lost for Words literacy special, a central reason for poor reading amongst pupils for the last ten years has been the National Literacy Strategy’s omission of a phonic foundation.