Exams | ukwatch.net

Another Education is Possible

JamieSW — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:33:13 +0000

The testing regime in schools is breaking down. Before the summer break SATs papers were lost or badly marked; pupils were absenting themselves from the tests and head teachers were demanding an end to these wasteful and useless exams. One parent from Sunderland, truck driver Stuart McAnaney, has two sons: James, 11, and nine year old Matthew, at St Anne’s RC Primary School. He said, “I think it is absolutely disgraceful that this has happened. When James was sitting his SATs he was in a terrible state because he was so stressed. I think they should be scrapped altogether.”

From this month a new secondary curriculum has been introduced which encourages schools to put the creativity and fun back into learning. Some in government seem to have recognised that the teaching by numbers approach to learning doesn’t work for all children.

However, the pressure of league tables will force many school management teams to play only lip service to the new rhetoric. Teachers will be forced to continue teaching for the tests as accountability mechanisms such as performance management and lesson observations are used to enforce compliance.

This tension between creativity and the current testing regime can be exploited. Staff at Filton High School, South Gloucestershire, have begun to offer a glimpse of another type of school where learning is more engaging and relevant. We have started to develop a collective approach to curriculum design that engages pupils by dealing with relevant social justice issues and offers them a real audience for their ideas.

Since 2005 both teaching and non-teaching staff have formed a curriculum group called Alternative Futures. We wanted pupils to begin to act in a more critical way. Meeting after school, between 15 and 35 staff regularly attend and plan two-week themed cross-curricular learning projects around current issues. All departments have been represented. Laura Storey, an English teacher and South Gloucestershire NUT equal opportunities officer, says, “The cross-curricular nature of the fortnight enables our students to see the links between their lessons in a way that makes their learning both fun and relevant. Perhaps as important, it also enables teachers to work collectively. Many staff feel that we are beginning finally to control the content of the curriculum.”

Radical thinking

Notwithstanding the new changes in the secondary curriculum, as it stands the school curriculum is geared towards preparing young people for career paths and to promote “an efficient and flexible labour market”. What radical teachers have to ask themselves is, how can we promote radical thinking in our pupils?

With the rise in anti-immigrant racism and the success of the British National Party (BNP), this year staff decided to tackle the issue of cultural diversity, identity and racism. The school has increasing numbers of parents from Portugal and Eastern Europe. Bristol itself is a major centre of Polish migration. The council has estimated that between 15,000 and possibly 25,000 Polish workers have found employment in the city in the last two years. In last year’s council elections the BNP stood in a neighbouring ward to the school on an anti-migrant ticket and, with little canvassing, got 400 votes.

Therefore in the maths department they created a resource called “The Human Race – the Migrant Species”. This allowed pupils to examine the history of migration not just of peoples throughout time but of how mathematical concepts travel from one culture to another and become assimilated into our thinking.

They then went on to ask the pupils to examine two statements: “Too many immigrants are coming into this country” and “Our country cannot afford to help immigrants”.

Pupils were then able to use data to help them critically examine contentious issues based upon facts and not preconceived notions.

As Year 9 pupil Louis said, “I always thought that there were lots of immigrants coming to this country, but I see that was wrong.” Pupils were able to calculate that the difference immigrants make to our population is 0.03 percent. But unless we are able to develop critical faculties within our young people they will always be at the mercy of the misinformation deliberately fed to them by the political right who own the media.

This work was complemented by the science department who worked on deconstructing the concept of “race” as a non-scientific term by exploring the idea of genetic variation.

The English department took an empathetic approach to migration. Using photographs taken by photographer Guy Smallman, pupils explored the journey of a Polish migrant who is shown to be living in appalling conditions in a wood outside a small English town. Information about how immigration benefits society and the reasons why people change country was fed into groups who then began to try to create the “story” of the man in the photographs.

The next stage was to give the groups information about shortages of workers in key areas in Bristol such as hospitals and schools. The pupils began to come up with solutions to staff shortages, as well as identifying any barriers that a migrant might have to taking up employment. Finally they had to write an autobiography as if they were the man in the photograph.

As with the other examples from last year’s project, an attempt has been made to embed learning in real, often controversial, issues. However, as this is a type of “offline” simulated reproduction of reality, a bridge is being built between everyday issues and more abstract concepts such as justice or equality.

This process allows pupils an opportunity to reflect and offers them the option of repositioning themselves to work out their own values and beliefs. During this year’s project on racism one Year 9 pupil, Tasha, commented, “I liked learning about other people. I didn’t like Polish people before – they’re foreign. But now I know they’re not trying to take over. I like the work we’ve done in English because writing about someone’s life makes you realise how hard life is for immigrants. They don’t just get everything they want, like benefits and a house, like we think they do.”

To make projects more real we move out of the four walls of the classroom and bring in people involved in the struggles we are exploring, to talk and work with students. Last year the school looked at climate change and had an expert witnesses’ day. One of these was Elaine Graham Leigh who represented the Campaign Against Climate Change.

Learning also takes place offsite. During the Climate Change project in 2007 Year 9 pupils were offered a choice of trips: to learn how to measure a community’s carbon footprint; to work with community artists to make fashion items out of “rubbish”; to cook in Bristol’s top organic restaurant.

This year pupils went out and asked questions of the public about living in a multicultural society, and some of the responses shocked the students.

We also decided to work with Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR). Martin Smith and Weyman Bennett led workshops on music and migration. On the last day LMHR put on a concert for all the school’s pupils with Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. and Bashy.

The National Union of Teachers (NUT) has been very supportive. This year acting general secretary Christine Blower attended the last day of the project. She told staff that she was working with LMHR to see how a website could be developed so that anti-racist teaching resources such as our own could be shared across schools.

Since the late 1970s education unions have been squeezed out of education policy development and shoe-horned in to concerning themselves with pay and conditions issues. Nevertheless, the successful ballot over the NUT’s political fund earlier in the year showed that many teachers believe that the union has to engage with broader political issues such as racism and fascism.

This concern with broader political issues is reflected during the themed learning projects. There is a real buzz among a wider layer of staff about social justice issues. Twenty five staff turned up to an after school meeting of the Alternative Futures group to hear Martin Smith talk about racism and migration. The discussion focused on how to expose the BNP and the relationship between multiculturalism and anti-racism. During the Climate Change project in 2007 discussion took place about individual and social responses to increasing levels of carbon dioxide.

Anna Brooman, who is in her second year of teaching, was a key organiser of this year’s event: “As a new teacher, working on these projects has opened my eyes to the wider political agenda behind education and has also led me to get involved in my union. Earlier this year I represented the school NUT group at the lobby of parliament. I also spoke about our work at the Education for Liberation conference in London in June. It has been a fast and very enjoyable learning curve.”

Outside of the school we have begun to tap into new networks such as the Global Education Network which is exploring ways of introducing “global” issues into the curriculum. We were able to explain how our model of curriculum change offers a coherent method to enable this. We have been invited to lead a session at the Climate Change and Development conference for educators in October. Not surprisingly, other schools are signing up to the Alternative Futures vision of education.

The “common sense” of government approaches to teaching and learning then is in contradiction with what many teachers feel they should be doing. One London teacher put this well. “In my school I have to train staff in how to prepare a lesson for Ofsted. After I have done this I then suggest what they could do on a daily basis. Needless to say, the two are not the same.” Alternative Futures is situated within this political contradiction.

There are also plans for a radical education conference on Alternative Futures next year sponsored by several university education departments. Educators are beginning to want concrete solutions to the present ideological and political crisis in education. The practical initiatives we have outlined begin to pose questions about the struggle for control within the system and offer a glimpse of a different kind of education based on the needs and interests of teachers and students.

SATs fiasco- Labour’s failure

tim — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 11:50:33 +0000

On August 15, the British Labour government’s regulatory body, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), terminated the contract of the company responsible for marking Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs) school test papers (which are mandatory for all school children in England aged 11 and 14 years.)

The QCA had only signed the £156 million, five-year contract with ETS Europe (a branch of the US-based Educational Testing Service Global BV) in February 2007. However, a series of major problems with the administration and marking of the tests this year caused almost a month’s delay in publishing the majority of results for key stage two (11-year-olds) and three (14-year-olds). Key stage three results were not released until August 12, although some were still incomplete.

Not only was the deadline missed, but the accuracy of marking was severely compromised, with many schools reporting that inexplicable results in some cases suggested that the markers either did not understand the questions themselves or that there was not adequate time to check.

When ETS was awarded the contract to administer the SATs, it had boasted of a new method to ensure marking accuracy. Markers would have to sit online tests every time they had assessed 80 exam papers, supposedly to ensure they were marking to the given criteria. In practice, however, the markers were given no feedback other than a pass or fail and could not adjust their marking accordingly.

Not only was the marker training inferior to previous years, but markers did not receive papers in sufficient time, as they were sent from schools to a central depot and then on. This meant the papers had to be marked under tremendous pressure during school term time, further undermining accuracy. Papers/scripts that were near the borderline of grades were not double-checked, as was the case in previous years. On top of this, some markers received no papers at all, while others received papers for the wrong subject. Unlike in previous years, pupil registers had to be checked online and marks for every single question submitted online—an extremely time-consuming if not futile exercise, exacerbated by crashed websites and helplines that went unanswered.

Following the virtual collapse of the test paper marking system, the QCA and ETS Europe agreed to dissolve the contract with immediate effect. Under the agreement, ETS Europe is expected to pay back £24.1 million of the nearly £40 million it received to run this year’s testing process and is to be stripped of the five-year deal. Government agencies will now oversee the delivery of the last 30,000 results and the appeal process. ETS has been banned from contacting schools directly.

ETS Europe had hoped to prove itself in the English school system so as to expand elsewhere in Europe. It won the SATs contract despite a catalogue of past failures to deliver on its commitments. In 2002, software errors by ETS led to serious failures, including giving the wrong marks, in the graduate management admission test (GMAT) in the US. According to the New York Times, in 2004, mismanagement by ETS led to more than 40,000 teachers taking a flawed exam and ETS paying out millions of dollars in compensation.

From the very start of its contract in England, there had been problems with the delivery and collection of test papers from schools, the electronic registration and moderating system crashed, and markers and schools could not log on. The helpline was constantly engaged. Thousands of teachers dropped out of the marking scheme, and many other markers resigned. A backlog grew, forcing ETS to set up 24-hour emergency marking centres. According to the Guardian newspaper, at one point, the National Assessment Agency went in and found 10,000 unopened emails from increasingly desperate schools.

Now, the exams regulator, Ofqual, has asked Lord Sutherland to head an inquiry into the delays. Ofqual head Kathleen Tattersall said that if there is a significant rise in schools appealing over results, then all 1 million SATs results should be annulled. The general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, Mick Brookes, said that such appeals “are set to rocket.” He has urged the schools inspection body Ofsted to disregard SATs results when making a judgement on a school. Results that Ofsted deems poor could contribute to a school being placed in the failing category of “special measures,” in some cases resulting in heads and teachers losing their jobs.

State education given over to the market

While no parent, teacher or child in England will shed a tear on the departure of such a clearly incompetent company from schools across the country, the more fundamental issue exposed by this latest crisis is not the marking but the actual tests themselves. But rather than replace the testing system, as most teachers, educationalists and parents have been arguing—well before the latest marking fiasco—the government intends to replace one company with another in order to continue with the whole flawed testing enterprise.

Teacher unions have already cast doubt on whether a new contract could be awarded in time to deliver next year’s SATs and called on ministers to overhaul the system. Schools secretary Ed Balls said he was “open to reform long-term.” He floated “lower-intensity” testing but flatly ruled out suspending SATs for 2009.

The government has hinted that the data-handling firm Capita may be contracted to run next year’s SATs. Ken Boston, chief executive of the QCA, said it would launch an urgent tendering process and that he expected organisations that previously expressed an interest to bid again. ETS was one of five companies short-listed two years ago. According to the Guardian, two of the three other major exam boards have already ruled themselves out of the contract, on the basis that they did not believe there was a strong enough educational rationale for the SATs tests. Greg Watson, head of the OCR exam board, said it did not bid because the tests were used to measure schools against one another, rather than qualifying a child at a certain level and diagnosing skills. A second exam board, AQA, also said it had not bid because of concerns about the purpose of the tests.

One unnamed senior examiner said that the process was so educationally “vacuous” that it would actually be more suited to a company such as Capita, which is used to dealing with large-scale public sector data projects rather than educational examinations. So indefensible have the SATs now become that a former aide of Tony Blair admitted recently that they risked turning schools into “drab, joyless assessment factories” where preparation for tests crowds out real learning.

The disparity between the overblown election promises the Labour government made on education policy and the subsequent mess that it has made in the school system has been widely acknowledged. But the government and the media are seeking to conceal how and why this has happened.

The cash-starved and moribund education system that emerged after 18 years of Conservative-rule was the one of the most glaring examples of the socially regressive policies of the Thatcher and Major administrations.

In the absence of a mass socialist alternative to address this, the right-wing “new” Labour Party under Blair successfully capitalised on popular support for a radical break with the pro-market policies of the past and for a reduction in the levels of social inequality that rocketed following the speculative boom of the 1980s.

On taking office in 1997, Blair and then-chancellor Gordon Brown kept rigorously to Tory spending limits while introducing cosmetic changes in education—such as more classroom assistants and the introduction of learning mentors. Most significantly, however, the Labour government sought to introduce the most pro-business agenda in education for a generation. Virtually every area of education was opened up to corporate profit making; from the building of school infrastructure, the development of business-friendly “specialist schools,” the increase of “faith schools” and to the setting up of private “academies.”

State schools have become testing grounds for ever-more uninspired ways to narrow the already prescriptive national curriculum and force children through a selective testing system. The effects of teaching to the tests—as in the present SATs—on especially young children is to squeeze out the joy of learning that should be inherent in an imaginative, widely scoped, generously resourced syllabus. This contributes significantly to the growing levels of disaffection amongst pupils that has been confirmed by international reports on the levels of unhappiness amongst children in the UK.

Furthermore, teachers have been demoralised as they are turned into part-time administrators of prescribed curriculum, while being scapegoated and even publicly hounded by the government for its own policy failures. Many well-meaning teachers have found themselves grubbing for each test paper point instead of being free to open young minds to the exploration and discovery of the world around them. Crowning it all, each school faces the constant threat of government inspection whereby they are monitored, praised or punished on the basis of fulfilling increasingly arbitrary targets. Schools are encouraged to compete against one another—via league tables—in a desperate bid for decreasing resources. At the end of this process, parents are thrown into a scramble to get a place at the “best” school for their children.

The end result of the corporate-inspired curriculum and the assessment system—the implementation of which has been the mainstay of the Labour government’s education policy since taking office in 1997—is the straitjacketing of the intellectual and imaginative capacities of children in order to provide for the demands of big-business and industry.

The government’s education policies have long since alienated millions of parents, but such is the damage it has caused, the very corporate interests that it sought to serve have signalled their dismay at the results of the school system. After complaining about the low literacy and numeracy levels of school levers, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) announced recently that it was withdrawing its support for the government’s new diplomas, which were intended to replace the current A-Levels (taken at 18 years of age). Whatever new schemes Labour devises in response to such criticisms, its continued drive to redistribute wealth away from working people to big business and the super-rich, further fuelling social inequality, means it is incapable of arriving at a “better,” or more just education policy.