EXAM SCRIPT (II)

ZERO RATING FOR CHEATING SCHOOLS
BBC News 6 Dec 2007

How many schools cheat to make their exam results look better than they should?
Impossible to know, for obvious reasons, but we do know that five primary schools have been given a zero rating because of evidence that they had cheated in SATs tests. Mick Brookes is the General Secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers. And they would cheat just to look better…, Mr Brookes?

-Erm... yes, I think that’s part of it, and good morning, erm… that’s, that’s part of it. Er…we…we think there’s undue pressure on schools over this whole business of testing, and… let’s just take this straight, it’s not about the test and the NAHT is not into a culture where children are not assessed, but it’s what’s done with the information that’s a problem, erm… and… and we, and of course, we… we don’t condone cheating in these tests either, and if people do that then they suffer the consequences.
-But what’s done with the information is it’s given to us parents so that we can make our own choice. Isn’t that a good thing?
-Erm…, well, indeed it is, and schools should be giving information to parents, but it’s also produced into league tables and we sent out a press release yesterday congratulating the schools that actually this morning find themselves at the bottom of those league tables because they must feel that all the work they’ve done over the year has been wasted, because there they are, down bottom of the league table; actually…
-Probably they deserve to be down the bottom of the table!
-Well… well, so they deserve to have … a community that has a large number of children with special needs.. It’s not, John, it’s not their fault, and this is, this is what’s happening, this, it’s polarizing what’s happening. I think that the work that’s going on in some of these schools that are down the bottom end of the league tables is fantastic, and some of these teachers actually have to take on problems with the children before they can even start teaching them, that they’ve encountered on the night before.
-Well, that may very well be the case, I’m sure it is the case in certain schools, but perhaps not in all! Surely you should accept, if you’re going to congratulate those who’ve done very well, surely you should say in some cases those schools that are at the bottom of the league table are there for a very good reason, that is, perhaps the head teacher has failed!
-Well… again, I think...
-There must be some like that, surely!
-John, you keep using that language of failure, and we’re…
-Yes, because some head teachers aren’t doing a very good job!
-Well, that’s what you’re saying. I’m saying that actually head teachers are trying to do a good job in sometimes extremely difficult circumstances. Now, we’ve got to stop criticising these people…
- Well, you surely…
- Hang on! We’ve got to stop criticizing these people and we’ve got to start supporting them. Now, where… where there are head teachers, and indeed teachers, and er.. working in a school, any member of staff that’s not actually doing a good job, there are measures in there to make sure that... erm... they either get support to improve, or they don’t stay with us. And we just rolled out this year a new performance management system so that every member of the teaching staff including the head teacher will have a thorough and rigorous performance management system applied to them. Now, that’s in place already. What the league tables do, I think at best they tell you where rich people live and, at worse, they deeply demoralize those schools who are struggling day after day trying to bring education to areas that… in the history of this country there has never been a quality of education.
- So you’d get rid of league tables altogether, would you?
-League tables would have to go, and… we don’t have a problem with testing and in fact, the fact that schools invest in buying standardised tests for years 3, 4 and 5 to check their progress I think shows that my colleagues are not against assessment, not against testing, it’s what’s done with the tests that’s the problem.


EXTRA: Now, we need to change that culture. The results have been a plateau for about the last five or six years and if we’re going to move on, then we surely need to think about this in a new way, ewe need to free schools up, we need to encourage them to be innovative and actually as Anthony Seldon, the master of Wellington College says, children are encouraged to develop an attitude of “if it’s not in the exam, it doesn’t matter”, intellectual curiosity is stifled, and young people’s deeper cultural, moral, sporting, social and spiritual faculties are marginalised by a system in which all must come second to delivering improving testing exam numbers. Therefore, liberal education is being replaced by a mere instruction. Now, that is bad news for our education system, it’s also very bad news for those people who’ve become disenchanted, disenfranchised and they disappear from the system as soon as they can.