This turmoil is good news for schools

Ellie Keen — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 13:09:37 +0000

In the long term, Britain’s economic woes could be good news for our schools, for two reasons.

First, they will decouple business from academies, which may mark the beginning of an end to the most damaging and divisive education policy Britain has seen in six decades of universal state education. One business is already reported to have withdrawn its academy sponsorship. Amey, once a
construction company which now describes itself as an “asset management consultancy”, wants to end its sponsorship of Unity city academy, one of the first academies, and one of the least successful, with just 12% of students achieving five A*-C grades this year.

Second, they will weaken the stranglehold business has over education. It is essentially to appease business that the government seeks to divide children at 11 or 14 into successes and failures, expanding the number of schools that are allowed to select some or all of their pupils. It damages the children, but it is convenient for their future employers.

Top business people will have less time to spend dictating how schools are run. And if they have any shame, they will be less inclined to consider themselves qualified to lecture to schools. Just possibly, Gordon Brown and his ministers will be less inclined to suppose that anything the public sector does, the private sector is bound to do better.

So there is, for the first time since Harold Wilson ruled in Downing Street, a chance of building an education system which will be a route out of poverty, not a poverty trap – a comprehensive system. Yet when I say that I’m off this weekend to speak at the annual conference of Comprehensive Future, the campaign for an end to selection in secondary education, some people look at me pityingly and mutter about “lost causes”.

It’s certainly true that those who believe passionately in not branding children as failures at the age of 11 no longer have the support of either main political party. But if causes were only worth fighting for when supported by one of the two ruling parties, many great reforms would never be talked of.

We know that when you select, you select out the poor – selective schools have a tiny proportion of children poor enough to be eligible for free school meals, for such children go to the neighbouring secondary modern.

We know that when you force one school in an area to take only the children another school does not want to teach, as they do for example in Kent, then you are setting that school up for failure.

A school, if it is to succeed, needs its share of the motivated children. A child in a household living below the poverty line is less likely than other children to succeed at school and to gain the qualifications which allow them to escape from poverty. The children of the poor are less likely to get places at selective schools, less likely to do well in public examinations and gain qualifications, and less likely to attend university. And the more prestigious the university, the smaller its proportion of students from poor families.

In short, poverty is hereditary. You get it from your parents. And it will be a splendid irony if the nation’s unexpected poverty were to release its poorest citizens from their dismal inheritance.

SATS - New Labour's education failure in microcosm

Ellie Keen — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 23:16:03 +0000

If you are looking for the reason why New Labour has spent more on education yet failed to improve it, look no further that the present entirely predictable crisis over SATS – Standard Assessment Tests. All the three notions that are wrong, and foolish, and muddled about government education policy are there:

First, the notion that if you hand anything at all over to the private sector, it will magically improve. Second, that if you want to make teachers and schools perform better, you set them arbitrary targets, and kick them if the targets aren’t met. And third, that everything in education can be measured in crude tick-box forms, which can be completed by anyone who can read, because no sophisticated judgements are required.

How else could we have got to a situation where schools have to revolve round the demands of simplistic little tests on their pupils; where those tests can be marked by people who have no qualifications or experience in education; and these people can be employed at a pittance by an American company to do work which could be done far better and with much greater understanding by experienced and qualified people whom the British taxpayer already employs?

And that is not the worst of it. Our government not only insists on finding someone – anyone – from the private sector to do work which the public sector could do better and cheaper; it then gives them a contract which means they can foul up as badly as they like, and still not be fired without a golden goodbye of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.

SATs are the tests taken at ages five, 11 and 14, to chart the progress of both schools and their pupils. They have always been unpopular with teachers, pupils and parents, but popular with politicians, for whom they provide a source of meaningless statistics which can be deployed to prove more or less anything. The administration of these tests has been outsourced to an enormous multinational company called ETS, or Educational Testing Services. ETS have been given a five year contract which is apparently binding no matter how badly they foul up. Nice work if you can get it.

As schools break up for summer, almost one in five primary schools still does not have a full set of marks, and many of the results for 14-year-olds are likely to be delayed, perhaps until September. The results we have are clearly flawed, and teams of ETS employees are searching for thousands of test papers which have apparently been lost. We know of incomplete marking, of pupils wrongly marked as absent, of pupils’ work being left to moulder in the schools, and much more. Any school putting in this sort of performance would be in special measures, and rightly so.

We hear calls for the resignation of the education secretary, Ed Balls, but that will change nothing. What we need is what I fear we’re not going to get – a change of policy.

Francis Beckett | ukwatch.net

This turmoil is good news for schools

SATS - New Labour's education failure in microcosm