If one in twelve children sitting their GCSEs in 2010 raise what would have been a D to a C grade, in just one subject, and everything else stays the same, then the government will have met its supposedly tough new target for secondary education.
Would your kid have got 5 A to Cs anyway? They don't need extra help. They are doing well enough already.
Will your kid get way below 5 A to Cs? Then teachers would be stupid to try and raise their marks a long way; there are more promising students to focus on, just below the threshold.
Making this the measure of success means - forgive me - focusing on the few not the many. It means concentrating the energies of the secondary education system on the 45th - 53rd percentiles of the student population whose test results currently fall just below official acceptability. It creates a ridiculous distortion of educational priorities. It is another top-down target of the sort whose demise keeps being headlined but never actually cease.
This country needs a bonfire of official targets, a relaxation of the prescriptive national curriculum and room for innovation in education. And the Conservatives? They started this process of centralisation in the 1980s and propose, for example, forcing every primary school to teach reading using exactly the same method, so seem unlikely, on that evidence, to govern with a lighter hand.
Friday, 12 October 2007
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1 comments:
Not quite Neill. Unsurprisingly, the Independent misrepresents / misunderstands the school targets that have been set.
Your criticism - that threshold targets incentivise schools to focus on pupils just below the threshold, rather than those a long way below or already ahead - is right as relates to the current set of targets (i.e. those from the Spending Review 2004)
However, the key change this time around is that, in addition to the threshold targets, there will be a set of progression targets that schools will be assessed against. For students taking their GCSEs, for example, the target is 53% of pupils to achieve 5 A*-C including English and maths (the threshold target) AND for the proportion of children progressing by the expected amount to increase by 15 percentage points in English, and 13 percentage points in maths.
This will mean that schools now do have an incentive to focus on every student, because students progressing from (for example) a forecast U to a D will count, as will students from a C to an A or a B to an A* - none of whom would have counted under the old threshold targets.
It's all set out in this fascinating document
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/E/E/pbr_csr07_psa10-11.pdf
And incidentally, the Independent is also incorrect to state that the 85% target for 11 year olds meeting national standards in English / maths has remained. It has been replaced with a new target that assesses students making expected levels in English AND maths, recognising the importance of pupils achieving well in both, not just one or the other. It doesn't bear direct relevance on our discussion, but it irritates me when journalists(and the Education Editor of a national newspaper, for heaven's sake) are too lazy to read what's really been announced.
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