A head teacher of a primary school told me tonight, 'schools are lying' about the results for their tests of young children. Young children take SATS tests (in year 2, I think). Children are then tested again in year 6. The government uses the figures to create tables of 'value added' by schools. The idea is to measure how good the schools are at improving the educational standards of children. The reason the government introduced this was not unreasonable: to give credit to those schools which have an intake from difficult backgrounds yet which manage to improve the educational performance of such children.

But, as with many government tests and targets, ways have been found to manipulate them and render them unreliable, perhaps even meaningless.

A head teacher told me today that schools with 'good' intakes (i.e. middle class children with English as their first language) 'lie' about the results of the first assessment. They mark the results down. He named three primary schools in London which, he argued, had absurdly low marks for their Key Stage 1 assessments. Judging by their names, these were Church of England or Catholic schools (in the state sector).

By marking down their results for younger children, these schools could easily achieve a big improvement by year 6. So their 'value added' looked good. But the whole thing was a farce and an illusion. The obvious implication of what he said was don't trust 'value added' tables.

Incidentally, how does a school mark down its test results? According to a colleague of the head's, the Key Stage 1 test calls for quite subjective judgements by a teacher of a child's command of English and his or her knowledge of the world. If that is right, it would be easy to assess young Jonathan as having only a modest command of English, compared, at least, to Benedict or Charles, his companions at St Toff's school in Belgravia.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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