I should have got this off my chest years ago.
When I started teaching English in the comprehensive system in 1998, I gave every Key Stage 3 pupil two National Curriculum levels at the end of the school year – one for reading and one for writing. By the time I left the system in 2011, it was a very different picture. English teachers were made to not only award every piece of Key Stage 3 ‘coursework’ a National Curriculum sub-level (e.g. low 5, straight 5, high 5), but also provide every Key Stage 3 pupil with four National Curriculum sub-levels – one for reading, one for writing, one for speaking and listening, and an overall level – at the end of every half-term. Furthermore, pupils were instructed to keep a record of it all in their student planner, and parents were issued with the quantitative data, usually without any accompanying notes to contextualise it, and told that at least two sub-levels of ‘progress’ was to be expected every year.
Deciding upon sub-levels was always very time-consuming and pretty imprecise, as every moderation meeting attested, and the combination of senior management’s creation of ‘minimum attainment grades’ and ‘target attainment grades’, with increased scrutiny of the ‘performance’ of teachers, muddied the waters significantly. I think it will suffice to say that no teacher wanted their quantitative data to make them look bad.
On top of all of this, government targets, usually enforced via the mechanism of Ofsted, led to the massaging of quantitative data. For example, in my last year of school teaching, Key Stage 4 pupils were compelled to spend hours filling out simplistic and boring booklets about work experience, and provided with answers to copy if they could not figure things out for themselves. P.S.H.E. (Personal, Social and Health Education) teachers who were supposed to be delivering sex education, or talking with pupils about alcohol/illegal drugs/mental health, or advising pupils on how to manage their finances, or discussing career options with pupils, were ordered to give over lesson time to watch pupils engage in this meaningless task. Why? Because completed booklets were, through some trick, equivalent to ‘respectable’ G.C.S.E. grades and senior management wanted the G.C.S.E. A*-C rate to go up in order to keep Ofsted at bay.
One of my responses to the news that this government wants every school to become an academy is that I foresee the unhealthy obsession with quantitative data only getting worse. Academy sponsors prefer to deal in quantitative, as opposed to qualitative, data, as it is far easier to understand (and be conniving with) numbers, than talk to people about their experiences. Moreover, it is especially important to sponsors that ‘their’ academy’s/academies’ quantitative data looks good, for how else are they going to attract pupils, parents, and teachers? I believe that enforced academisation will only make the preoccupation with quantitative data more pronounced, and that this, in turn, will only make the manipulation of quantitative data more prevalent.
If anyone is reading this and wondering what my beef is, I can tell you in one word: Anxiety. I saw pupils, teachers, and parents become increasingly uptight about academic attainment, and their worries were inextricably intertwined with the bombardment of quantitative data. It sucked out joy and broke my heart. That dubious data had been allowed to become integral to teaching English – indeed, to state education generally – and cause so many to doubt themselves led me to feel that I could no longer remain in my job – a job that I thought I would be in for life. Yes, there were plenty of other factors that contributed towards my decision to leave, but the development that I have described loomed large when I reflected upon what I was complicit in. Thank goodness there were no National Curriculum levels when I was at school. As someone who was keen to do well and prepared to put in the hard work, I think that I would have become a nervous wreck.
(Written on 16-3-16)
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