Layer 40 Driving Up Standards

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As a teacher I have to say there’s nothing finer and better in life than seeing a good teacher inspiring, motivating, enthusing, enabling and leading children towards a lifelong love of learning for its own sake.

But there’s nothing worse than seeing a poor teacher boring, frustrating, dulling, demotivating and turning children away from the whole idea of schools and learning, and making their lives hateful and intolerable.

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The final word on SATs week. The Today programme on Radio 4 did a final review last Saturday. Some points from the programme:

“Our teachers pushed us really hard.
Children were crying and shaking
Year Six is all Sats - and no creative subjects.”

And the teachers said:

“We assess every half term, so we know where the children are anyway.
League tables are just there to judge the success of the school.
The purpose of the test is to judge the school.
We need to test a broader range of achievement
There is a tremendous amount of pressure to do well in the tests.”

And in response some dumb arse defender of the tests said,

“The SATs just amount to 5 hours at the end of six years.”

Totally refusing to see that the tests distort the teaching and the curriculum on offer. 5 hours! Incredible. They just don’t want to be in the least bit honest about the pressure to constantly practice for the tests, and the fact that most schools have felt a need to change their culture, to work for test scores rather than to meet the real developmental needs of all children and all of their intelligences.

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Why the hell would children want to be in a school where they have no interest in the curriculum on offer, and where they get bored, frustrated and alienated every day? Would you, as a parent, want that to happen to your children every day? Of course not.

Would you, as an adult, want to put up with a working life where you get bored, frustrated and alienated every day? Maybe you’re reading this and saying, “That’s exactly what I do”. So why do you do it? “Because I need to earn money!” I hear someone say. So you do it for the money? Fine. Do children get money for putting up with such a life? No. So why should they?

“Get real!”, people are shouting. “Learning isn’t about self-fulfillment and having fun. Learning can’t always be interesting. Besides when kids have passed their exams they WILL be able to earn decent money! That’s why they have to go to school!”

Really? Well maybe that applies to your kids, though you might want to consider that all children learn best and achieve more where the curriculum is relevant, when they have some say in what and when they learn, and when the learning is lively, interesting and motivating.

Is it not reasonable to expect schools to work in this way? Or do you just want schools to go on cramming kids for tests as their key objective, the thing on which they will judged and measured?

Besides, the children most at risk are those that know they’re never going to be ‘competitive’ when it comes to tests - the ones who recognise that their forte, though they may have other (and perhaps more meaningful) strong points, is never going to be their ability to perform well in academic tests. In which case they will never be competitive in the market for the kinds of careers they require exam passes at high grades for them even to gain entry to college courses. At least that’s the way the world looks to them. Though they may feel differently later in life, in which case they can resume studying for exam passes, etc.

Frankly the world looks a pretty bleak place for kids who like to cooperate rather than compete, who like to create and imagine, rather than regurgitate in tests after remembering ‘facts’ and ‘concepts’. For kids who know that they can, in any event, find the things they’re interested in on the Internet, so what’s the point in cramming it in school?

So who can blame kids who refuse to spend their lives doing meaningless things, being hectored by unsympathetic teachers, being disciplined for not wearing the prescribed naff school uniform, being told that only black lace up shoes are acceptable in the ‘Academy’. Academy? Pah!

Who can blame kids for wanting to spend their days riding bikes, playing in the parks, walking in gardens and beside rivers and streams, exploring the woods, hanging out in libraries where they can please themselves what they read, watching TV, watching films, listening to music, and so on. Does any of that sound so terrible?

There is a middle way, even with our current system and its crying need for a learning revolution, and finding that way involves making schools at least tolerable and enjoyable in parts for the less academically able, and indeed the academically able, who are not, after all, stupid and recognise that the pleasure of doing well in tests cannot cancel out the precious time and effort that's wasted in grading and testing children, rather than continuously assessing, with the students' involvement, whether positive, realistic and mutually agreed learning goals are being reached.

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Another hot topic of news today was that “Children could trigger a full Ofsted inspection if they say they are "bored" or unhappy at school under new plans.”

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/pressass/20080519/tuk-boring-schools-may-get-inspection-6323e80.html

So here’s another big stick to beat the schools with! It’s been going this way for a while, to be fair, though. We’ve known for some time that having driven schools to narrow down their curriculum and do more cramming, the government and Ofsted would eventually turn round (when middle class parents, for example, started complaining about their kids’ fucking boring schools) and tell the schools that high tests results alone are no longer enough - the kids mustn’t be bored either!

And woe betide any school that thinks it can now start making learning interesting BEFORE HITTING THE TARGETS FOR SATS AND GCSE’S!!! There will be no changes to the target-setting, testing and Ofsted regimes, you can bet on that. What we have here is an add-on demand to those that are already established, and kept there by the Establishment. Duh Management.

So now, inspectors will ask children and parents whether the learning on offer is boring, and then zap the schools where the answer is yes. A qualitative survey, followed by a bureaucratic response. It’s no better than the previous system. It’s actually worse. Not only does the system not trust the schools and teachers, it will now positively encourage the whistle blowers in its “relentless efforts to drive up standards”.

And how come Ofsted hasn’t concerned itself before now with children’s actual experience of school? What’s going on here?

Stand by for a whole raft of resignations from school managers and teachers who have just had enough of the hypocrisy, the unreasonable demands, the confused priorities, the reversion to Victorian practices, the whole anti-child culture that has as its highest priority “preparing children for work” - for a working life of dull obedience, and conformity to ‘standards’.

No wonder our society’s fucked, people are continuously over-stressed, more and more children and adults suffer from mental and emotional illnesses, more and more murders and violent incidents are happening all around us. So much for driving up standards.
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