Posts Tagged standards
Failing all tests
Posted by Anastasia de Waal in Education on 17/07/2009
Problems with primary testing, from distorting the curriculum to painting a misleadingly positive view of basic standards in primary school, have been at the forefront of the school standards debate for well over a year now.
Autonomy for standards
Posted by Anastasia de Waal in Education on 01/05/2009
Ken Boston, former head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), may not be the man we look to for wisdom on running independent exam watchdogs. Boston famously resigned from his job of overseeing exam boards and qualifications, for the QCA’s lax role in the primary school Sats tests which came to a head last summer.
Don’t force children to play the Government’s war-games
Posted by Nick Cowen in Education on 31/10/2007
More powers, new targets, less tolerance for failure, a boost to several central government run schemes (Teach First and Teach Next), are the only discernible content of Brown’s latest speech on education. The tone of the speech makes it sound as if the government, having annexed and occupied the education system decades ago, still finds itself combating a never-ending insurgency of ‘failure’. These forces of failure cannot be tolerated and must be eradicated.
‘Independent’ QCA to be made… independent again
Posted by Nick Cowen in Education on 26/09/2007
Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families has just announced that the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority will be overhauled into an independent watchdog equivalent to the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England or the Food Standards Agency. This rather raises the question of what exactly the QCA is at the moment, considering that it is barely ever mentioned by ministers without the accompanying authoritative claim that it is an independent ‘guardian of standards’, and that an even more independent international panel has described the resulting exam system as one of the most tightly regulated in the world. Just how much more independent can you get? Apparently, much more.
What do they take them for?
Posted by Anastasia de Waal in Education on 16/08/2007
It’s not the efforts of A-level students in question, but the government’s efforts to educate them.
A new report released today by Civitas argues that A-levels have become more about preparing the government for the next election than preparing students for their future; that knowledge and skills have been forfeited to make government policy add up, and that students have been discouraged from taking subjects with riskier ‘grade-returns’.
The Results Generation, exposes the way in which the government has focused on artificially generating indicators of improvement instead of focusing on actually improving schools. This prioritisation of grade gaining over quality devalues both A-levels and students.
A new consensus: A levels ARE less valuable
Posted by Nick Cowen in Education on 19/07/2007
When the Civitas report on Blair’s failure to improve education over the last decades was released, Jim Knight MP squared off against Robert Coe, whose work we have cited, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme (approximately 12 minutes in from the beginning). To the whole nation, he denied that exams had got any easier during Labour’s time in government and that an A level today had exactly the same value as a decade earlier. Perhaps he had no other choice but to take this line. The dramatic rise in exam results had to be due to the prudent stewardship of New Labour’s education reforms. What a difference a couple of weeks make! Now a new government adviser acknowledges that A levels have lost value at least in his area of Physics and Maths.