Testing times for schools

Target setting has not been welcomed by some teachers

Ed Stourton examines how educational progress is measured, in a report for BBC Radio 4's Education 2000 discussion forum

Click here to listen to the full programme

The new educational orthodoxy says children should be tested and school performance monitored from the earliest years.

The last government introduced the national curriculum and league tables - now this one has set national targets. And from this year schools will have to publish the individual targets they are setting themselves.

"If the purpose is to shake people up and ask questions within their own institutions then it's an excellent idea," says Judith Jones, the head at Adderley Primary School in Birmingham.

"But if we are going to have to meet the targets, then there are some concerns, because it is possible that people will set low targets in order to attain them, which is not going to do the children any good whatsoever."

Weighing up improvement: how should different types of schools be evaluated?

There are also worries among teachers that the new orthodoxy on targets and testing does not take account of individual qualities.

By 2002 the government wants 80% of 11-year-olds to be at the right reading level, and 75% to have the maths skills expected of children that age.

But Dylan William of King's College London says slavish worship at the altars of testing and targets could be damaging.

"If you make the stakes very high you will find that people get better and better at the things you're asking. But because you can only test a limited part of all the things we value in school, you tend to make those things very important.

"This has been summarised as starting out with the idea of making the important measurable and ending up making the measurable important."

A key to the government's efforts to meet the targets it has set schools, is the literacy hour - a period set aside to teach traditional reading skills. It is the government's favoured option for improving standards, and some schools worry they will be penalised if they do not use it.

Not so Judith Jones, who says that "there was clearly a need for something. If a school can't get to the required standards and has no justification for this, then the school is right to be criticised because the children aren't getting a fair deal".

At the Adderley School they have adopted the testing and targeting ethic with a vengeance, and meetings to set targets are a regular feature of school life - but even here there are worries about applying blanket standards to circumstances that can change.

"We have a cohort of children coming through in which 39% are on the special needs register. I want to value their achievement and instead of schools being constantly hammered because they didn't reach the national average, I would hope that they could be given little benchmarks to say - 'yes you have got that far. It's still not good enough but you've made considerable progress'."

Local authorities to be inspected

As well as measuring the progress of schools, the government has also put local education authorities under greater scrutiny. The Education Act last year gave Ofsted the job of checking on standards in local authorities as a whole, not just in individual schools.

The government is encouraging more experimentation in how schools are run

Manchester was one of the first local education authorities to be inspected under the new regime.

David Singleton, in charge of the programme, says "what we expect the local authority to do is to consider seriously and to carry our our recommendations".

This year's Standards and Framework Act gives the local education authorities a central role in the battle to raise standards in schools. But Professor Kathryn Riley of the Roehampton Institute says it doesn't define the powers and objectives of local education authorities clearly enough.

"Local education authorities are very much on probation. The government is waiting to see if they can deliver," she said.

"But the question for me is: To deliver on what? What is the model for what makes a good local authority. That isn't explicit enough."

Experimenting

Some of those running local education authorities have begun to look over their shoulders at the government's flirtation with different ways of organising education.

There are the Education Action Zones, where experimental groups of schools are run by parents and local business as well as the local education authorities, and there is talk of giving the private sector even more direct involvement in schools' management.

"I think it's a case of the government backing lots of different horses. It's saying we'll see if local authorities can hack it, but meanwhile let's try something else as well and see what works," believes Kathryn Riley.

Authorities like Manchester are under pressure - from a public that has been promised higher standards, from the politicians who made the promises, and, more directly, from the inspectors of Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted).

At the local education authority offices in the city centre a new chief education officer, David Johnston, is settling in, and he is confident they can meet the standards Ofsted expects.

"What Ofsted did was sharpen the focus and intensify the action that the local authority had to take and for the sake of the young people no one regrets that."