This week the government announced its “Ten Year Plan”. The positive about the plan was that the government recognises that there are severe problems in the education system, particularly in the primary sector. The negative however, is that too many of their solutions critically miss the point. For example, testing. Balls indicated that he took on board some of the criticism of testing in schools; however he made clear that he perceives the issue to be testing young children. The real issue is the politicisation of testing.
The Times Education Supplement (TES) sounds positively weary this week, on account of the sheer volume of problems in the education system. An unusually downbeat leader charts New Labour’s recent proposals, focussing on the paper’s greatest contention, government targets. On this topic, the leader refers to a depressing two-page spread: ‘[Head teacher] Rebecca Elliott’s remarkable account of what happens when a school praised by inspectors fails to meet government targets.’
‘The Issue: centralised control,’ runs at the top of Rebecca Elliott’s story. The most important message that this head teacher’s experience conveys is the sheer clumsiness of Whitehall’s grip on every school up and down the country. To summarise, St Edmund’s school in Norfolk is a well-run school which is successfully managing to navigate a very challenging intake. Challenging meaning that half of pupils receive free school meals (an indicator of low-income background) and one in ten children on the child protection file. Surprisingly, Ofsted was able to stretch its tick-boxes to recognise the staff’s commitment to pupils and the continual improvement being made, albeit not in line with national benchmarks. The Department for Children, Schools and Families, however, is dissatisfied because the school has failed to reach the Sats targets in Year 6, three years in a row.
Highlighting the perversity of condemning a school which is clearly impacting beneficially on children’s lives, making progress and is considered good by the vast majority of parents, head teacher Rebecca Elliott refers throughout her piece to the school as a jam factory. Her greater point is that a factory where the “fruit” is often “damaged” or “bruised” is expected to produce the same as a factory “…supplied with the highest quality strawberries”. New Labour has fervently pursued a “zero-tolerance” approach to what is perceived to be underachievement: not in line with their central targets. The result is that schools in difficult areas often feel compelled to focus their teaching on the test scores, rather than the pupils. This is why so-called teaching to the test is so important because it is most likely to harm those for whom life chances hinge the most on real learning in school.
Elliott’s account is poignant, even tragic; the lesson the school has learnt is that improving the lives and learning of pupils from difficult backgrounds is being made a thankless task. The lesson that the government must learn, but has refused to so far, is that treating schools like factories and pupils like inanimate objects is disastrous.