Drilling for national tests

Drilling pupils for exams wastes time, says watchdog

      
      

                  · Schools warned against too much preparation
· Authority plans more assessment in schools          

      

                        James Meikle, education correspondent
Saturday  August    11, 2007
 The Guardian
         
             

The government's exams watchdog for England yesterday told schools to stop drilling children for national tests and forcing them to to sit practice Sats.

Valuable teaching time was being lost because of undue emphasis on preparing pupils for tests at 11 and 14, said Ken Boston, chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.

His remarks reflect growing concerns that schools are increasingly "teaching to the test" to improve their position in league tables, rather than offering a broad educational experience. The General Teaching Council, the body which registers teachers, recently called for an end to the Sats system, saying it was distorting the curriculum.

Dr Boston said: "In many schools too much teaching time is taken up with practice tests and preparing for the key stage tests in English, mathematics and science - at the expense of actual teaching in these core subjects and other areas ."

But the authority did not believe there was too much assessment in schools. In fact, there was too little. Sats were "world-class" and right for measuring how all children at a certain age performed in the basics. They were "not necessarily equally fit" for other purposes, however, which was why the authority was developing "progress" tests to be taken by children during each key stage of schooling in order to help assess how individual children were doing.

"We must focus on the sustained growth in educational performance through effective teaching of sound curriculum. Tests are the means to measure and report that growth; they are not fundamentally the means to achieve it. The key to driving up perfomance at key stages 2 and 3 (seven -11 and 11-14) is better teaching based on diagnostic assessment and personalised learning, not more practice drill in taking tests."

National figures for how 14-year-olds did in this year's tests will be published next week, as will A-level results for hundreds of thousands of teenagers. GCSE results are published later in the month.

Ministers do not believe children are overtested. Lord Adonis, publishing results for 11-year-olds this week, said setting targets for percentages of pupils passing had "galvanised" schools and time taken to sit national tests for 11-year-olds had taken up just 0.14% of key stage 2 teaching time. "The idea that we are overtesting our children isn't a view the government accepts. On the contrary, seeing that children leave primary school up to standard in the basics in literacy and numeracy is the highest priority of the education system."

Meanwhile, school headteachers will get question-by-question feedback from the exam board Edexcel on how pupils and teachers performed in A-level and GCSE exams through online analysis called ResultsPlus. The technology, which will also allow many thousands of pupils to get their subject grades on their computer or laptop rather than going into school on results day, shows exactly how each pupil has performed to a fine level of detail.

It will also show how well the syllabus is being taught by teachers, comparing schools with others. Jerry Jarvis, chief executive of Edexcel, writing in yesterday's Times Educational Supplement, admitted this development would "inevitably fuel concern about teaching to the test".

Eventually such analysis could be passed to students and, by implication, their parents. "This could ultimately enable students to challenge the system that teaches and assess them. That could arguably be the catalyst for very rapid improvement or could, on the other hand, be a recipe for endless litigation. I should stress we don't intend to deploy all the capability to students, but it signals a compelling direction of travel."

Mr Jarvis said: "We cannot undo the technical capability that now exists. Are we brave enough to seize the opportunity to make it a positive force for improving attainment?"

This year, Edexcel will allow teenagers to access their diagnostic tests online which, Mr Jarvis says, will enable them to identify where their strengths and weakness lie "before high stakes exams that will ultimately drive up league table scores".