Writing in Tuesday’s Times, in GCSE results week, columnist Rachel Sylvester lambasted the growing number of schools (both private and state) “gaming the exam system to boost their legal league table rankings to the detriment of pupils”.
Then she spoilt it by claiming that “a few simple changes” could make a difference. Heads should retain responsibility for the grades of any pupils they exclude, and there should be a register for all children who are homeschooled to make sure nobody has fallen through the net.
Her proposed solutions are simplistic, superficial and, as it happens, insulting to those who home-educate on principle, let alone to children excluded by schools. She suggests mere treatment of symptoms: the sickness lies deeper, in what she identified, in fairness, as “perverse incentives… forcing desperate headteachers towards cynical measures”.
Only this week Tes published a damning indictment of the way Progress 8 measures unfairly damn some schools. Manchester head James Eldon describes how the phone call from the regional commissioner (not a friendly one) comes as soon as those figures appear to dip. Under such pressure, can we really sit in judgement on a school that succumbs to the temptation to behave unworthily?
It’s madness: but the madness possesses an unnerving coherence. The inevitable is happening: chickens are coming home to roost - and they are, to coin a phrase, headless.
Unsurprisingly, it’s now revealed that three exam boards are producing GCSE-style tests for Year 7 children; great practice for the real thing four years down the line. One board, AQA, has produced an 85-minute Year 7 English language paper complete with mark scheme and assessment objectives.
Who’s surprised? Ofsted boss Amanda Spielman has complained for some time that the GCSE curriculum is creeping ever earlier, now squeezing out breadth even from Years 7 and 8 in some schools’ quest for better GCSE grades and Progress 8 scores.
Disingenuously, exam boards protest that they’re not heaping pressure on kids. These aren’t real, high-stakes exams, just practices, useful for teachers’ day-to-day, week-to-week assessment. By contrast, to many teachers (and, I hope, parents) this appears a cynical money-making exercise at the expense of children.
Up to a point. It surely is a cash-cow, and we can indeed argue that children may suffer additional stress: but it’s a logical development, however loath we might be recognise the logic. Exam boards are businesses. How do businesses thrive? By grabbing every sales opportunity. (That could be a good Business Studies question, come to think of it - except it’s not an EBacc subject). Boards know these tests will sell.
So who do we blame for this? First, I fear, ourselves. As a society we’ve let ourselves be bamboozled over the past quarter century by politicians and noisy sections of the media obsessing about academic standards, failing schools, naming and shaming, league tables, you name it. Successive administrations have accelerated the process, but it’s been going on since John Major was prime minister, if not longer.
For how many years have school leaders and their representatives deplored the unremitting pressure from government to get better and better at doing wrong things? How many more schools, underfunded and demoralised, must cut subjects and scratch around for teachers? How many more teenagers must descend into depression and anxiety, before we wake up and drain the poison so deeply embedded in our system?
How long, indeed, before education becomes an election issue, as it was (fleetingly) in 1997?
Don’t expect answers from government. In a recent letter to The Times, Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Graydon and Vice-Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham (presumably both retired from their respective services) bewailed the standard Defence Ministry response to a problem they cited: “No one who follows MoD press releases will be surprised … denial being the default position of both the MoD and the government about defence matters.”
Substitute Education for Defence, and you have our precisely parallel situation in a nutshell. “Crisis? What crisis?” as former PM Jim Callaghan famously never said.
Plus ça change.
Dr Bernard Trafford is a writer, educationalist and musician. He is a former headteacher of the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle, and past chair of HMC. He is currently interim headteacher of the Purcell School in Hertfordshire. He tweets @bernardtrafford
