22 August 2003
If it is August then it must be time for examination results and, shortly afterwards, the annual bout of hand-wringing over whether rising pass rates are the result of falling standards.
But this year, the dissection of the A-level and GCSE results - another year of, wait for it, record numbers of passes and more A grades than ever - has been complicated by some unwelcome news on the Key Stage test results.
It would seem that seven and 11-year-olds are not getting brighter and doing better: ministers' favourite explanation of their older siblings' success. Their performance in KS1 and KS2 tests is resolutely defying the onwards and upwards trend.
The number of 11-year-olds meeting the required standard in English and mathematics has flatlined compared with 2002, at 75% and 73% respectively, all but destroying ministers' hopes of getting these figures up to the 85% target by 2004.
Seven-year-olds, alas, have done little to gladden the government's hearts, either. Their results in reading and maths remained static, with 84% and 90% respectively reaching the required standard. In writing, there was a five percentage point drop to 81% on 2002.
The KS3 tests taken by 14-year-olds, however, have given some cause for optimism in Whitehall. Their results showed a three point increase to 70% in those meeting the required standard in maths, and a one point increase in English and science to 68% in each case. But, as the KS3 strategy was only introduced last year, these results can hardly be celebrated as evidence of sustained improvement.
Despite an initial attempt by schools minister David Miliband to put a brave face on the lack of progress, congratulating teachers and pupils for 'maintaining world-class results', he later acknowledged that it was disappointing.
'We don't hide for a moment the fact that we would like to see faster progress. There are some very difficult nuts still to crack in primary education,' he said.
But if the prospect of failed targets were enough to persuade the government to give in to teachers' pleas and abandon them, ministers are not showing any sign of doing so yet.
Miliband indicated that ministers were, to coin a phrase, not for turning. 'It would be easy for us to hide behind an easy target but it wouldn't do any good either for young people or the country.'
But does this stalled progress necessarily show a lack of pupil attainment?
Eamonn O'Kane, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers, neatly points to the contradiction in recent responses towards exam performance. 'It is ironic when in one week A-level results go up, schools face accusations of dumbing down, yet the following week, when results do not significantly improve in Key Stages Two and Three, schools are equally condemned for not reaching their targets.'
O'Kane surely has a point. Doug McAvoy, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, was typically forthright in his condemnation of the results' publication.
He said 'real achievement' had again been 'obscured by pointless debates over whether arbitrary government targets' had been met.
'Publication of the test results is part of a tired and pernicious system of targets, tests and performance tables,' McAvoy added. 'It is high time the government cleared away the damaging machinery of performance tables.'
Meanwhile, former Ofsted chief Mike Tomlinson, delivering his report on this year's A-levels, said sixth-formers may be too tired by the number of exams they have to sit to do themselves justice.
It is not just educationalists who say the testing regime is too pervasive. Phil Willis, the Liberal Democrats' education spokesman, backs McAvoy's view.
'It seems the wheels have come off the government's target agenda for primary schools. Teachers must be allowed to spend more time diagnosing weaknesses and teaching appropriately. But above all, children must be given back their childhood.'
It is a line of logic that is becoming increasingly difficult to defy. Reducing the seemingly endless round of testing would free teachers to teach and pupils to learn. It might, perhaps, even lead to better-educated children.
PFaug2003
