The government’s School Report Cards, the details of which were revealed this week by the DCSF, mark a significant shift from exam-driven assessments of schools’ performances. It is a change which potentially grants a holistic and more nuanced perspective for children and their parents of the type and quality of schooling children in England receive. A marked change from the overly simplistic data-led approach, which has all too often generated side-effects such as ‘teaching to the test’.
The School Report Card is designed, in part, to replace Key Stage 3 Sats results, scrapped earlier this year. The initiative is based on the American ‘balanced scorecards’ of a traffic light scoring system combining exam performance, pupils’ progress, Ofsted ratings and measures of pupils’ well-being, health, as well as the views of the parents and children of overall school life.
Whilst many in the education community hadn’t quite been able to understand the point of the government’s proposed report cards, their unveiling this week revealed that even the government is conceding the weaknesses in the current school accountability system. As reported in today’s Times Educational Supplement, the government ‘admitted’ that ‘league tables and Ofsted reports are failing to provide a true representation of school performance’.
The report cards have received a warm welcome from parents and teachers, and from the most vociferous critics of the test result based approach, the teaching unions. As the general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, Mary Bousted, commented “We are delighted the government has responded to our longstanding call to rethink accountability in English schools.”
Behind this warm reception is the hope that the cards will help to overcome dependency on league tables – a dependency which has fostered many distortions by creating target-chasing teaching, divorced from learning. Similarly, the cards may hold the potential to facilitate the empowerment of parents, by providing a greater transparency through deeper analysis criteria – including parents’ own views of the school. For schools, this broader approach would help encompass ’unrecognised’ and ‘unrewarded’ improvements that often remain hidden by the headline dominating league tables.
However, as with so many potentially good ideas, only time will tell whether the hopes that come with the School Report Cards are realised in their implementation.
By Saima Tarapdar