A former teacher gave me an insight last night about how schools react to targets. One of the key targets in Britain is to get as many children as possible obtaining GCSE passes rated at between A and C.
What is the consequence of measuring a school in this way?
It is quite remarkable. In two schools she had worked in, there was a board in the staff room with the names and photographs of the 20 or 30 children, out of a year group of about 270, who were borderline between getting grades C and D. The clear idea was that the teachers should be able to identify these children and should concentrate on helping these children to get C grades instead of D. That way the school would be seen to be doing well.
The teacher told me that, consequently, there was no similar effort to help those expected to Bs to get As, let alone to stretch and develop those expected to get As to go beyond the syllabus.
It is extraordinary to imagine this board of photos in the staff room – it is reminiscent of those television police dramas in which the suspects and other people connected to a crime are put up on a board.
The story may also help explain something about Finland. Finland is one of the top performing countries in the world in educational attainment, according to the PISA study of the OECD. But when I met a Finnish young woman she told me that she had been very frustrated at school. All the efforts had gone onto getting students up to a certain level. As one of the brighter children, she had been bored and her abilities were less developed that they could have been. Apparently the Finnish system has been to assess schools by their results and I guess the assessment is based on something like the A to C grades that exist in Britain.
A few other stories from the British teacher:
Following advice or guidelines or something of that sort from OFSTED, teachers spend an extraordinary amount of time assessing what level children are on. They devise tests and see what each child has mastered. You may think this sounds a sensible thing to do. But she says that the time it takes is entirely disproportionate and the kind of things they are assessing are often pointless. She would rather have been teaching.
Another facet of modern state education is well known, she said. A new head can come in and improve the GCSE results by 20%. How? By switching students to exams which officially are equivalent to GCSEs but which, in fact, are easier because they involve a lot of coursework (and presumably the teachers can ‘help’ a lot with coursework). The result is ostensibly better educated children. In fact, the result is probably children who are worse educated. She said that there were a number of other such tricks of the trade with no benefit to the children.
On the basis of what she said, state schools sound like a kind of game. The idea of the game is to reach targets. The idea is not to achieve the best possible education of children.
We talked about how some exam boards – as was exposed in a recent scandal – do all they can to make their exams easy to pass. In this way, the exam board is chosen by the schools and the board makes money.
But why, then, I wondered, do the better private schools go on the opposite tack? They go for the most difficult exam boards and often take the more challenging international GCSEs rather than the British ones.
She said that they go for the tough exams because these are the ones that the universities respect. Some of the so-called science taught in state schools is regarded by the universities as a bad joke. So the better private schools are playing a different game. They are measured not by the number of A to C GCSEs they get. They expect to get mostly As and A stars. The key thing for them is to show parents that their children go on to get good A level results and get into the top universities. In other words the better private schools – and indeed the very top grammar and other state schools – are playing a different game. They want to develop the top students. They also want to save the weaker ones since the parents also want even the less able children to get tolerable results. It is a different game. And the results are different.
Posted by James Bartholomew
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Indexed in Education
