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Examination factories
JOHN PRANGLEY
How can Christian schools assimilate the market-oriented reforms of the past 18 years without losing their vocation? The recently retired headteacher of St. Augustine's Roman Catholic and Church of England Upper School, Oxford, warns in particular against making examinations the measure of everything.
The continuing revolution in schools has brought significant losses as well as gains. Education is now another market, encouraging greed, unprofessional behavior, short-term views and neglect of certain groups - defects less prevalent in the old culture, before market forces were brought to bear.
The purposes of education are endlessly debatable, and the government's thinking has evolved. Its purposes are revealed in its priorities for action, especially since it took a more active role through the Education Reform Act. The trade competitiveness which already damages the world environment is now deeply affecting the way we run schools.
Governors were made more independent of local education authorities, head teachers were given more power to manage, a national curriculum was promised. As a stream of glossy directives issued from Whitehall, teachers' goodwill was eroded.
The Education Reform Act's first proposal also for the curriculum arose out of an egalitarian tradition. Every child was to have a broad and balanced education, with compulsory access to 10 subjects until the age of 16. As this gave the opportunity to learn some subjects which could previously have been dropped at the age of 13, the idea was welcomed.
Subject boards, full of specialists, set to work to develop syllabuses of depth and breadth. The recommendations of these boards would have required a 10-hour school day just for the children, and teachers would have had no time to go home. To add to the burdens, the government then proposed that schools teach "cross-curricular themes". The overload was ludicrous. These errors were predictable, but the government had stopped listening to teachers.
After spending millions of pounds on the "reforms", the government realized that space had to be created for schools to breathe. Something had to give. So it reduced the number of subjects to be taught compulsorily until the age of 16: art, music, languages and social studies are no longer "equal" to other subjects and pupils can drop them or treat them as half-subjects. Proposals for cross-curricular themes vanished. The required content of all subjects was reduced.
Teachers are our most precious resource. In this rather frenzied market-place they continue to endure enormous stress and pressure, yet Mike Tomlinson, the head of Ofsted's inspection teams, was reported last week as declaring brutally that it was not the teachers he cared about but the children.
While schools kept trying to respond to the unrelenting orders and counter-orders, the government decided to measure educational achievement.
But the subtler, deeper purposes and goals of schools are not easy to determine in an objective way, and so tend now to be neglected in the classroom and in governors' meetings. The ideas of education as "conversation between the generations" and school as the "leisure-place" for a pursuit of meaning have been relegated to unlit back-burners. Schools have been forced to focus more narrowly on the mechanisms of "schooling".
Accountability is reported through Ofsted inspections and league tables. Schools are held up for comparison. What can be measured is measured, except that no mention is permitted in Ofsted school reports of the annual diminution of resources, the deterioration of buildings, or the low morale or high sickness and breakdown rates of teachers.
Certainly, the focus on performance and better management has produced some good effects. More self-aware and self-questioning, schools now produce mission statements. Catholic schools base theirs first on the love of God and neighbor, but share some aims with other schools: the pursuit of excellence, the fostering of the potential of every child, and so on. Most schools put the children's needs at the heart of their endeavor, and speak of them as ends and not means, children are not "consumers".
It is in the aims and policies that you find the traces of older idealistic purposes for education. Policies for behavior, equal opportunities, anti-racism, anti-bullying, service and so on, incorporate a wish to create a community where people feel equally respected and the school gains the co-operation, affection and happiness of its pupils.
Since, however, the Government chose competition to be the major engine of reform, schools are judged mainly on the number of "poor, sound, good or very good" lessons taught, the number of pupils with five or more GCSE passes at "A" to "C" grades, and the percentage of passes at A level. Qualifications are the prize of this Exam Grand National, in which Gas Street Mixed competes with Eton.
Managements therefore concentrate their resources on maintaining a respectable place in the tables. There is no escape, because the health and the survival of a school depend on its performance. What can a head teacher, anxious about performance in the all-important GCSEs, do to prevail? Let us examine how the market leads him or her to consider pursuing new tactics, some of them immoral.
The head may urge teachers to improve pupils' performance by teaching them "to the exam", concentrating on examination technique. These manouvres will not, of course, encourage those diversions which illuminate or develop broader understanding.
The head may instigate investigations of the relative merits of examination boards and bet on "futures". Members of staff may be encouraged to become examiners, to gain an advantage by knowing how to answer the questions successfully. (The examination boards themselves, also "in the market" for customers, are inevitably tempted to give better results than their competitors.)
The head may direct attention to the borderline children adjudged able to obtain a "C" grade if given extra help. When teachers provide that help, they increase the number of students in the significant category - five grade "A"s to "C"s. This may lead to relative neglect of the children with special needs, at both ends of the ability scale, as their performances cannot be so sign)ficantly changed. Such children may have less spent on them, especially as school budgets continue to shrink; but it is more help they need, not less.
The head may exclude pupils whose misbehavior consumes staff time. As these usually perform poorly in examinations, their banishment improves exam scores. More children thus fall into the no-man's land between institutions, and some into crime.
The head must compete for pupils, since local education authority schools are funded according to numbers on their rolls. He may spend resources producing glossy literature to attract parents, or, with an eye on future results, may begin subtly to select the kind of children admitted, especially if the school is over-subscribed. He may even descend to poaching children from other schools, by, for example, creating bus routes in middle-class areas near other schools, confident that "parental choice" is paramount.
Each headteacher must make moral I choices about these tactics for improving the public face of the school. Competition brings the temptation to play the system to the advantage of one institution. It tends to undermine the integrity of the school as a moral society. Schools are not in the business of shifting goods as in a supermarket, but should be acting justly towards people.
As the changes in the National Health Service show, markets are dangerous. When people abandon professionalism, cease to take the broader view and to feel concern for the whole service, or withhold support for colleagues, it is because competition poisons the wells of community.
Gone are the days when Keith Joseph affirmed that he cared most about improving the lot of the bottom 60 per cent. Further selection will encourage the consolidation of a disaffected and dangerous underclass, for whom the worst educational provision will be declared adequate by those in power. These are the young people who have always suffered most in the education service.
The Catholic Church enthusiastically embraced the comprehensive principle of giving all children the best in the same institution. If the rich knelt beside the poor in church, why not have a school system which mirrored that comprehensive community? We reduced the appalling waste of working class talent under the old selective system, and the injustice of the superior funding of grammar schools compared with that of secondary moderns. Subsequently, Catholic comprehensives became a success story in the state sector.
Catholic headteachers have a tradition of co-operation, but such mutual support has diminished. Catholics and others are disillusioned by the way some headteachers and governors, against the hierarchy's wishes, embrace the opportunities to steal a march on other schools. Rivalry of a noxious kind between Catholic schools has begun to appear. The ideal of "community", once taken for granted as a common aim, is succumbing to the institutional greed of some schools.
Increasingly, a school's raison d'e^tre is as an examination factory. The commendable will to succeed is deemed to justify decisions which are morally dubious, just as states embrace militarism "in the interests" of national security. No school can claim to be a moral, loving institution if it takes initiatives which ignore justice and damage the wider community.
It is difficult to keep the interests of others in our hearts in this new culture, but if a school fails to live up to its vocation one is justified in asking: "What is Christian about this school?"
This article was excerpted with permission from The Tablet, 15 February, 1997
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