A committee of MPs has issued a report critical of the outcomes produced by the current programme of national testing on the 'core curriculum' of English, Maths and Science. The committee says that an initial goal of using SATs to measure pupils' progress has been over-ridden by counter-productive consequences such as schools 'teaching to the test' in order to make their own statistics look good, and that the results have been bad for theeducation of the children themselves.
There is direct evidence that SATs are not materially helpful in improving outcomes. One problem is that if an able pupil "over-achieves" on SATs in the early years, the school can, bluntly, afford to ignore that child in the knowledge that their over-all result statistics will not suffer as a consequence. The result is that there is then no year-on-year improvement, and a child who has initially performed at a level in advance of actual age can 'coast' - still scoring acceptably on SATs from the school's perspective, but not acquiring basic learning skills which will be vital in later stages. The school may note that the child "appears not to try very hard", but as long as they are not actively disruptive in class, nothing is likely to happen.
The real problem in this case is when the child has some specific learning difficulty - masked by innate ability and not revealed through the relatively blunt instrument of SATs. In that case, any underlying problem may go un-noticed and therefore un-addressed for years... at which point it's either too late, or requires an inordinate amount of remedial work.
Do the SATs results deliver greater accountability on the part of the school? Absolutely not. The parents can't go to them and say "you are failing this child", because the school will simply point at SATs results which are still average or above. Do they make it possible to exercise parental choice? Absolutely not. If the parents move the child to another school, they will face exactly the same problem.
Broken As Designed.
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Hi Robin,
Long time no speak Dude, hope you're AOK.
Thinking about your latest post there's more than the two players of the School (and it's teachers) and the Child in question. Obviously there's the Government setting the SAT targets and the (local) Education authority driving the Schools it governs to respond to those targets, but you don't talk about the Parents, apart from in recriminations to the School ("you are failing this child").
I feel Parents should have a personal responsibility to validate the education that their Children receive, and to actively take part where possible.
This needs to be a re-iterative process, and rather ever get to the stage where Schools can be vilified for failing their Students, they need to be guided to make sure that they are constantly providing a level of education which engages and develops their Students.
Just my perspective.
Of course this view doesn't take into account where, for whatever reason, a parent or guardian cannot ensure that the level of eduction being received is appropriate for their Child. Sadly in these instances the Parent or Guardian in question will never question the School, as they themselves will not be aware of the issue to raise anyway (almost a Zen "does a tree fall in the forest if there is no one to hear it fall" problem).
I've always wanted to say this: </SOAPBOX>
Ciao,
Wayne
Posted by Wayne Horkan on May 13, 2008 at 10:10 PM GMT+00:00 #
I agree that the parents have a responsibility to be engaged in their children's education... and there are a number of ways in which they can do that.
Probably top of my list is "expectations". I think if parents communicate low expectations to their children, whether actively or merely through indifference, there is almost zero chance that any other stakeholder will be able to redress that.
However, I think I would stick to my point that the SATs process (including all the Key Stage testing) can actually hinder parental engagement from having a positive outcome. I didn't set out the whole process at length in the blog post, but in the case I describe (where an able pupil is basically ignored because their SATs results aren't actively bad), it takes some time for the problem to become apparent. The child's results flat-line rather than improving test by test.
The point is, the SATs results can give a school a first line of defence (justification for not intervening) because they're apparently not out of line with the norm.
It's interesting, isn't it, that the introduction of 'parental choice' between state schools has coincided with the archetypal caricature of the middle-class 'pushy parent'. This recent Commons report strongly suggests that part of the tension between teaching staff and 'engaged' parents arises out of the fact that the parents are predominantly interested in the over-all outcome for the child, and the teachers are, through force of circumstance, more likely to be pre-occupied with optimising test scores.
Isn't it staggering that the core of their recommendation appears to be this: in addition to the SATs process (as an attempt to get an objective measurement of achievement), the teacher ought to have some say in whether the child is actually performing up to expectations. Actually that isn't staggering; what's staggering is that we should have reached a point where that recommendation needs to be made.
Posted by Robin Wilton on May 14, 2008 at 09:59 AM GMT+00:00 #
While SAT scores in Mathematics and Science may be going up, the number of students able and willing to read these subjects at university seems to be going down. Good teaching instils a lifelong interest in a subject; teaching-to-the-test certainly doesn't.
Posted by Richard Veryard on May 15, 2008 at 07:13 AM GMT+00:00 #
And I seem to remember hearing that universities often find they have to assume that new students will need to be (re-?)taught the basics.
An incredible piece of sophistry from Jim Knight in his Radio 4 interview yesterday: 'SATs work, because the results show that pupils who do well in them go on to do well in GCSEs'.
I see.
Wouldn't the real proof that they work be that pupils who do badly in SATs go on to do well in GCSEs?
Posted by Robin Wilton on May 15, 2008 at 08:49 AM GMT+00:00 #