Green Euro candidate hits out at industrialisation of schools

A leading Green Party politician has condemned Government league tables that show nearly half the areas with primary schools not meeting new nationally set targets are in Yorkshire.

Cllr Andrew Cooper, who is lead Green candidate for Yorkshire & the Humber in the European elections next year, said he was at least as concerned about the process of league tables as he was about the findings. Greens would abolish league tables as they are currently devised and used.

Many areas badly affected by Government austerity
“These targets are nationally set and take no account of local issues," said Cllr Cooper . "It is telling that many of the schools identified are in areas of social deprivation which have been especially badly affected by the Government’s austerity drive.

League tables a crude mechanism
"Using league tables, which by default rank schools above or below others, is a crude mechanism for determining real educational needs and outcomes. It is not helpful and simply stigmatises schools where teachers, parents and pupils are often working incredibly hard in spite of frequently lacking resources or having to keep adjusting to changing diktats from central Government.”

Cllr Cooper went on to say, ”This comes in the same week we have heard that the Coalition’s flagship policy on free schools is running two times over budget and failing to meet need in areas with oversubscribed places. It is dreadful for the Government to now compound this assault on education by using a one dimensional process to assess our primary schools.”

Cllr Cooper added, “Greens want a very different approach to education. We support a model where needs are determined more locally but on a community basis rather than in the way free schools are allowed to operate, and in particular we want the education process to be one that is geared to individual children’s needs rather than Michael Gove’s latest idea.”

He said that Greens support primary children starting academic schooling at 6 rather than 5, which would be in line with successful education systems such as those in several European countries. Prior to that, building on the Surestart programme, a system of free nursery education should be available with an emphasis on learning through play. Greens would also adopt the Scandinavian model of “all through schools” where pupils would remain in the same school throughout their education but the schools themselves would become more local in their nature and smaller than some of the super-sized establishments found across the UK today.

“We want schools that are linked to the local community, not Whitehall, and that are central to the local area and focus on the varying needs of children,” said Cllr Cooper. “The Government has a two-faced approach of encouraging elitist free schools which drift off in their own direction but then imposes a one-size-fits-all assessment which simply tarnishes the reputation of less well resouced schools and even their local area."

Cllr Cooper concluded, ”Like any parent, I want my children to have an education that meets their needs, not some national target. Schools should not be exam factories; pupils are children, not widgets.”

Greens must make their alternative voice on education heard

I confess that what attracted me first to the Green Party was not the environment, although that has always been an important issue to me,  but its policy on education. It was refreshing to see a political party recognising the importance of play, being aware of child development and the dangers of one size fits all teaching methods, targets and curriculum. More recently all the three major parties have embraced the marketisation of education and the narrowing of its focus to competing with 'our major economic competitors'.

Childhood is being industrialised and education outcomes  reduced to a product measured by test results. Yesterday's suggestion of the ranking of all primary pupils in 10% bands and testing at five years old rightly caused consternation amongst educationalists, parents, governors and parents.

The Green Party is the only party to offer an alternative but must speak out loudly so that voters know we offer something fundamentally different. At present our voice on education is not being heard.

The ranking proposal was a dreadful blow to primary teachers who at the tail end of the summer term, are writing reports, holding parents' evenings,out in the heat with 30 children on school trips and organising end of term productions. Now as they rally to keep going until the end of term Michael Gove delivers notice that stress will be even greater in the future and that the labelling of children as successes or failures will start even younger.

Huge damage will be done to young people as a result and we can expect problems of low self-esteem, poor motivation and disaffection as a result.

I fully support the Letter to the Press initiated by the Charter for Primary Education  LINK which has been signed by some of our best children's writers including Malory Blackman, Michael Rosen and Alan Gibbons as well as educationalists, teachers and parents.

It is essential that Green Party leader Natalie Bennett signs this letter and I  hope my readers will sign it too:

We are writing to express our concern over the announcement on Weds of an increase in primary school floor targets, an increase in the amount of testing for primary school pupils and the intention to place all pupils in a league table ranked on ability. Rather than a philosophy of every child matters, this is a world where only the person at the top counts. Any child struggling to pass tests due to a special educational need is automatically labelled a failure.

Last month we held a conference to launch the Primary Charter. This was a conference which brought together teachers, parents, governors and teacher educators. We have produced a ‘manifesto’ for primary schools, outlining how we think pupils learn best. This includes trusting the professional judgement of teachers, allowing children to learn at their own pace and through play, while taking account of their own experiences. It involves giving pupils an opportunity to develop a love of learning and nurturing their ability to interact with others. We have already seen the damage done to children in this country through over-testing.

Research has shown that our children are unhappy and more worried about tests than in any other developed country. Crucially this does not lead to improved educational outcomes. There is no evidence to show that testing and ranking children improves their learning,but plenty that demonstrates the effect being labelled a failure has on their self-esteem and confidence. We prefer to look to the model of education we see in Finland where no inspections, no punitive lesson observations and minimal testing leads to consistently high standards, huge levels of teacher satisfaction, minimal social selection and an education sector that is lauded throughout the world.

Instead we see an announcement today that the attainment thresholds schools must reach is to be increased from 60% to 85%. The government want to test children earlier and force a more formal education, learning by rote and parroting facts driven right down into the early years. We suspect this is part of a move to hand publically owned education over to the private sector though an increase in the number of schools forced to become academies. The signatories of the charter reject this model of education and appeal to parents, teachers and support staff to engage in a dialogue with schools to reject Gove’s vision. The primary charter can be found on primarycharter.wordpress.com

Bew Review should end SATs and league tables

"Too many schools believe that they must drill children for tests and spend too much time on test preparation at the expense of teaching and learning."

Wow, who said that - the NUT, Green Party, NAHT?

No, the Department for Education announcing an inquiry led by cross-bencher Lord Bew.

Schools drill children to pass the tests so as to get a high position in the league table and to keep Ofsted off their backs. The only logical outcome of an inquiry would be to abolish league tables and SATs, something I have long campaigned for.

Schools are caught in a double bind, particularly in areas such as Brent where there is high pupil mobility, many children newly arrived from overseas and economic deprivation. In order to reach the nationally expected Level 4 the curriculum has to be narrowed, particularly in Year 6, to concentrate on English and Maths and additional support given in the form of 'booster classes' often after school or in holiday time. Year 6 for many children can become an arid experience. If schools don't put children through this programme their results push them down the league tables and they will lose pupils to better 'performing' schools as well as have Ofsted knocking on their door.

This is not to take away the achievement of Brent schools faced with these pressures. Krutika Pau, Brent's Director of Children and Families, this week issued a circular congratulating schools for 'their work in driving up standards' in the borough. She notes that at Key stage 2 (SATs taken by 11 year olds) scores in English and Maths are above the national average for both Level 4+ and Level 5. The question has to be asked though, is it worth the pain and the pressure on both teachers and children?

I have likened the boosting to training horses to get over jumps by a mixture of encouragement, threats and cajoling with the addition of half a dozen people placing their hands on its rump to push it over. It can get over the jump in this one off 'snap shot' but...

There is another issue that is seldom addressed. Both the 11+ examination which used to be used to select pupils for secondary modern, grammar and technical schools and the London Reading Test used to band pupils into ability ranges to ensure a balanced comprehensive intake, used different result tables for girls and boys. Boys needed a lower score than girls to get selected for grammar schools or the top band. This was to correct the perceived differences in maturation of boys and girls at this age. Girls were seen to develop intellectually, as well as physically, earlier than boys. If the results of boys and girls had been treated equally there would have been disproportionate numbers of girls allocated to grammar schools and the top reading band.

Now they are expected to achieve equally and we have an on-going crisis about 'boys' under-achievement' with all sorts of initiatives including the televised antics of a choir master experimenting with a group of boys in a competitive outdoor classroom with shades of Lord of the Flies. Not so much pushing them over the jumps with hands on rump but pulling them over by tugging on their penises!

I confess that as a headteacher I shared in the collusion whilst also protesting against it. Perhaps the comment that pulled me up most sharply was the mother of a high-achieving, creative girl who accused me of robbing her daughter of her childhood, because of the additional work and pressure in Year 6.

In answer to some of the criticisms about the crudity of pure attainment (test results) statistics, a contextual value added score has been added to the league tables. A significant measure is whether children have made the expected progress from Key Stage 1 (results for 7 year olds) and Key Stage 2. To monitor progress the National Curriculum levels are each divided into 3 sub-levels. Normal progress is to move up two sub-levels a year. Better progress than this results in a higher value added score. Apart from giving schools a whole new burden of statistical recording and analysis it can result in the paradoxical pressure on teachers of  Key Stage 1 pupils not to grade their pupils too high so that they can make greater progress measured against a lower starting point. 

In fact real learning, as most of us know from our own experience, doesn't proceed in a smooth linear progression but there are fits and starts, periods of consolidation, a few steps back before a surge forward - the model assumes a mechanical or even industrial learning process that just does not accord to real life.

Because of the drilling and boosting, secondary teachers often question children's primary school results, when they arrive in Year 7: is this child really operating at Level 4? Some secondary schools retest their children with standardised English and Maths tests, ignoring the results sent in by primary schools. Copland High School ensures a balanced intake by using a non-verbal reasoning test.

Following on from last year's SATs boycott by the NUT and NAHT, the Conservatives were suggesting during the election campaign that children should take the Key Stage 2 SATs on arrival at secondary school, rather than in the last year of primary school. It is hard to gauge what the impact of this would be: it could liberate Year 6 teachers and enable them to return to a broad, balanced and creative curriculum or instead mean that Year 6 pupils are 'boosted' right up to the end of the summer term and beyond so as to safeguard the primary school's reputation.

Anyway as Greens we should welcome the review and urge that both league tables and SATs be abandoned to be replaced by formative teacher assessment that guides future teaching and learning for each child.