Something is rotten in the state of education...

I would like to excuse, in advance, my ranting in this post. As you may well know, I am a teacher working at primary school level, currently teaching year 6 - the last year of primary school.

I love teaching children, but I especially love teaching this year group: there is a real feeling of adventure and journeying about the last year of primary school. There is one formative experience after another - residential trips, leavers' events, SATs - and you know that the children in your care will remember these experiences for a long time to come. However, the major issue in year 6, and in education generally, is that of assessment and how to measure the attainment and progress of children during their primary phase of education.

I have already blogged on my feelings about SATs tests. As I said then, I am in favour of using testing to gauge the level of a child's development in English and maths. Many people believe that the tests cause too much stress for children and teachers alike and that the results are not dependable due to the 'snapshot' nature of a written test; a child could be having an off day or underperform due to some other external factor. Also, it is argued that because many year 6 children spend most of the year in revision for the tests and learning how to perform to the maximum level for them, the curriculum is irredeemably narrowed and subjects such as geography, history and the like get squeezed out.

Whilst I have some sympathy for this last point, I have no time whatsoever for the first one. I went through my views on avoiding stress at all costs in my last post on SATs, and I'll do my best to avoid repeating myself here. It does seem strange to me that we feel the need to avoid any kind of difficult experience for children. Surely we should be teaching children to cope with stress and pressure in a positive way, not avoiding it. Negative emotion is almost taboo in schools: anger, sadness, anxiety are all to be avoided at all costs. Yet I believe that children should absolutely be encouraged to face up to these emotions and learn to accept and cope with them, even turn them into positive things. At the moment, the need to protect children from these things means that some children may never truly understand what it means to be stressed, to cope with the emotion and then overcome it. How will they function when they enter the grown up world of work, relationships and families without some experience of these emotions? Coping with testing in a controlled environments like school is valuable not only for the data it provides teachers and education authorities, but also for the life lessons that can be learned during the process: keeping a perspective on things, setting realistic targets, dealing with pressure etc.

As for a narrowing of the curriculum, I believe that this is not necessarily the case if the teacher is prepared and allowed to be daring and creative in their teaching. In fact, I think that year 6 offers more opportunities to broaden the curriculum than most other years, especially in the last term of the year when the tests are out of the way. Since the tests we have undertaken many projects that broaden the curriculum massively: entrepreneurial projects using real cash to set up businesses; a survey of the ecosystem of the school grounds and a plan to improve the diversity of plant and animal life; studies of London including a trip to the Natural History Museum and various other sights; a week long residential trip to Dartmoor getting involved with a plethora of outdoor sports; putting on a leavers' show with all the dramatic, musical and technical skills required to do so. I'm not entirely sure how those experiences represent a narrowing of a curriculum after they have spent most of the year honing and polishing the most important skills needed for life: literacy and numeracy.

So, yes, I do think SATs are important and that they should stay. I just think that schools and teachers should work harder and be more creative in how they approach them. However, the next big thing in assessment, the much vaunted replacement to SATs is called Assessing Pupil Progress, or APP as educational jargon would put it.

APP is a way of tracking a child's progress in English, maths and, in the future, science and perhaps ICT. Each child has a bank of charts and tables that follows them through school that the teacher uses to highlight specific targets as they are achieved, declaring when they were met and where the evidence can be found for the event. It kind of makes sense - assessment is continuous and fluid rather than a snapshot - until you think about what such a system really entails. The paperwork is hideous: I have not heard a teacher say anything other than that the work involved in keeping up is truly horrendous and that it significantly extends the hours a teacher invests into assessment at the expense of other areas of their job. It is cumbersome and, I am guessing, pretty inflexible. If a target is on the sheet, I have to show that a child has met it and then give evidence for that fact over multiple occasions. So, for example, if I am working with some naturally talented mathematicians, I cannot simply have a conversation with them to ascertain whether they can use, say, short division adequately and then move on to other areas they are more in need of covering; I will now have to make sure that there are several examples of short division in their books to prove their competence in using it. This is proper bureaucracy: needless paper trails that are utterly rigid and have no reflection on the needs of the real world and bypass any kind of common sense decision from the teacher.

APP seems to me to be a step backwards from SATs: it seems even less creative, even less flexible and teachers' instincts and opinions are even more marginalised in the face of cold, hard and evidenced bureaucratic 'facts'.

The problem is not the tests. The problem is the league tables that are published and put pressure on schools to 'play the game' and get to certain targets. APP won't change that fact - there will still be league tables - it will merely mean that teachers will have to play a different game: a game that will involve huge amounts of needless work to do something that already happens anyway. I think that lots of teachers will go off sick in the face of APP (I'm only half joking here...) and that, as a profession, we will merely get better at 'creating' evidence and cutting corners to keep the authorities - authorities that seem to know little about the every day lives of teachers and pupils in schools - from the door while we go about trying to make school a valuable experience for it's students.

No one has asked me about APP. At no point have my local authority asked our opinion. No politicians seem to have consulted me or anyone I know in education. It's just happening, whether we like it or not. It's not yet statutory, but we'll be starting in September regardless because that's what the authorities want. I'll give it seven years before it's scrapped and we try an entirely new approach. The whole thing feels political somehow, especially since the SATs marking fiasco of last year put the tests in the centre of a politcal battleground.

I just hope that they get the next system right. Maybe we'll just go back to old fashioned tests and try to train talented teachers that know how to do their job again...

SATs tests...the work of the devil or a power of good?

We - that is my year 6 class and I - are currently in the midst of the key stage 2 SATs tests. For those of you who don't know, or who are of the generation, like me, that doesn't actually remember ever being tested on anything in primary school, SATs are the tests all 11 year old kids sit at the end of their primary schooling. The idea is that we can assess how well they have progressed during their time in school thus far and use the data to judge an individual school's success or shortcomings. The school's results are published and used to sort an area's schools into a league table to gauge them.

These tests have long been the source of much tension and controversy between teachers, politicians, academics, parents and, of course, children. It appears to me that the majority of people think that these tests are an incredibly bad idea: they stress children out; they stress teachers out; 11 years old is too young to be dealing with such pressure; they cause schools to 'teach to test' and therefore limit a creative and holistic curriculum; they create unfair competition between schools; the results do not fairly reflect the whole picture of a school; the results are not always accurate, as witnessed in last year's marking debacle.

I have a guilty secret though. I am firmly in the minority of primary school teachers that wholeheartedly supports the tests. Let me make it absolutely clear right now though that I absolutely do not approve of league tables for schools based solely on attainment. A school should be judged on how far a child progresses from when they enter school to when they leave school, not on whether it can produce a percentage of children that achieve some arbitrary level of 'normalness' that is used simultaneously and indiscriminately whether you live in High Wycombe or Moss Side. The teacher jargon for measuring an individual child's progress is 'value added'. I believe that this is what counts; a child should leave school having made the most progress they can from where they began. This is what education is all about for me: improving yourself; broadening yourself; moving forwards.

However, I do not accept the 'it stresses children and teachers out' argument. I do my utmost to remove the stress of the tests from the children despite the fact that the catchment area of our school means that we have to work damned hard all year to achieve results in line with what is deemed the national average. We practice, we discuss, we devise strategies for achieving the best we possibly can. By the time the tests come around, the children are anxious to do well but they are so well versed and familiar with testing that it doesn’t seem that much of an ordeal. They set themselves targets, with my help, and they try to reach them. And I have never yet encountered a child that has not left primary school with a higher level of literacy and numeracy as a direct result of having sat those tests.

The trouble is that many primary school teachers are of my generation. If I'm honest, we were not taught particularly well during the 70s and the 80s. How many people that are over 25 or so can explain what a subordinate clause is, or how to use a semi-colon correctly, or use maths in a fluid and flexible way that suits your own way of thinking and the situation? I had to relearn all of that when I was training - before that I'd used scraps of knowledge gleaned from the occasional visionary teacher and pure gut-instinct. It must be said that many teachers also don't really know how much about this stuff and feel very threatened when they are compelled to teach it. Surely, then, it is a good idea to put concrete things like tests in place to ensure that teachers sort their subject knowledge out and make sure that they teach children to the best of their ability rather than bumbling along safely tucked up in their own comfort zone? The tests create a mechanism of accountability that teachers cannot avoid by hiding behind wooly, half-baked and faddish theories. They have to teach children basic crucial skills that can be measured and that will help them for the rest of their lives. The pressure is not, or should not be, on the children; the pressure is, and should be, on the teachers to do a good job. That pressure is on almost everyone else in all types of jobs in all types of industries because they are paid to deliver certain things. We are paid to educate children, and it is fair to expect us to do that as well as we possibly can. I am certain that there is no greater feeling of achievement or satisfaction than that which is found from helping a child achieve or even surpass their expectations. That alone is worth a bit of pressure.

And since when has it been wrong for anyone to experience pressure? We're all under some degree of pressure pretty much all of the time. Is it not good to teach children to absorb this, cope with it, turn it to their advantage? I find that most children actually enjoy these challenges; they like to measure how far they have come; they like to know what to do next to progress.

The danger is, of course, that some teachers turn the pressure that is on them to do a good job onto the children in their care. Cheating in these tests is incredibly common. Every year I hear many stories of teachers feeding answers, changing scripts, just generally not doing things by the book. Who gains from that? I think that it shows utter contempt and disrespect for the children and, for that matter, for the role of a teacher in society. If we are working in a system of testing, then lets at least make it raise standards of learning and teaching rather than it being just a game that is to be won at all costs. And, believe me, the motivation for teachers cheating in these tests is not to make the children feel better about their results, it is simply to paint themselves in a better light and to avoid recrimination and pressure from the authorities because they haven't been doing their job properly. I've never cheated in a SATs test, and if I was ever asked to, I would refuse without hesitation.

So, next year the headteacher unions are threatening to boycott the SATs tests. This is because they are fed up of being judged failures or successes against those arbitrary percentages that are deemed average. They want to be judged on what their children have actually achieved, and fair play to them. The science SATs, which were easily the most unpopular of the tests mainly because they are pedantic and poorly thought out, have already been scrapped. The government appears to be taking the system apart slowly to avoid any sudden embarrassing u-turns. What worries me, though, is what we'll do to avoid lazy, dumbed-down and faddish teaching instead; are we seriously saying that we'd prefer to raise up another semi-illiterate and innumerate generation that doesn't have the skills they need to learn and live their lives? Just because teachers don't want to be stressed out? I think we all need to get our acts together and learn how to teach children what they need to know and not be ashamed of doing a good job.

But then again, maybe I'm wrong.