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Behind the
Tory Tests
at lies behind the current dispute over testing? Bob Sulatycki, secretary of Kensington and Chelsea NUT, looks at two recent
books that uncover the Tories' strategy for education.
HE VANDALS ARE after
our schools" ". So opens the
withering critique by Brian Simon and Clyde Chitty of the Tories' education white paper Choice and Diversity, aka chaos and perversity, which formed the basis of the last Education Act.
The most striking feature of SOS - Save Our Schools, and more particularly of the accompanying collection, Education Answers Back, is the formidable achievement of successive education secretaries in uniting such a diverse body of opinion against their policies. It includes many of those instrumental in devising those policies in the first place.
Here, lined up against education secretary John Patten, one finds Eric Bolton, senior chief inspector of schools, 1983-91; Professor Black, former chair of the Task Group on Assessment and Testing; and Duncan Graham, first chair and chief executive of the National Curriculum Council until he resigned in 1991. These are not closet socialists. They are not even part of the liberal tradition in education. Yet they all testify to the chaos and extreme right-wing manipulation of
current education policy.
The crisis has now been brought to a head by the revolt over Standard Assessment Tests (SATs), which has forced a partial but still significant U-turn over future testing, leaving Patten perilously exposed. Patten, however, has had the misfortune to be merely the one to pick up the mess left by those who went before him - notably Kenneth Baker and Ken Clarke.
It was Baker, as architect of the Education Reform Act in 1988, who bears responsibility for most of the policies that are now unravelling: opted out grant maintained schools, open enrolment, and local management of schools. As one author points out, schools now consider em-
ploying public relations consultants, whilst experienced teachers, at the top of the salary scale, are shown the door. The Education Reform Act also introduced the national curriculum and SATs.
The Education Reform Act was Baker's big idea; yet, as with his predecessors and successors, he quickly moved on. Short-termism, spiced with half-baked market nostrums, is the order of the day. The despair of those like Eric Bolton, someone who still upholds the idea of planning, is evident: "I suspect that if we were able to lift the veil hiding the government's intentions for education, we would find, not a coherent vision, worrying or otherwise, but uncertainty, confusion
SOS: Save Our Schools, by Brian Simon and Clyde Chitty, published by Lawrence and Wishart, £9-99.
Education Answers Back - Critical Responses to Government Policy, edited by Brian Simon and Clyde Chitty, published by Lawrence and Wishart, £9-99.
A Socialist Education Policy, by Bob Sulatycki. A Militant pamphlet. 50p.
All titles available from World Socialist Books, 3-13 Hepscott Road, London E9 5HB. Cheques payable to WSB.
Education • 21
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BR:
for STOP
REDUND
NO Educatler
smaller
class LTS rat ANCIES
Teachers have fought back against Tory plans.
and incoherence"
Yet, alongside a rampant market philosophy, there is a concurrent trend towards centralisation, an undermining of local democratic accountability, a war on elected local education authorities (described as "obstacles" in the last white paper), and a rigidly controlled national curriculum. The Education Reform Act gave the secretary of state 400 new powers. Michael Barber of the NUT calls it 'free market Stalinism'. As Professor Black accepts: "Those who gave dire warnings that the Education Reform Act would be an instrument of direct government control... have been proved correct"
The process continues. Another 40 powers were handed to central control via the last act. Any planning of the 24,000 state schools, once they become autonomous as local education authorities go, will be undertaken by the new, unelected, Funding Agency.
The disappearance of any local accountability, even if far from perfect, will spell disaster. It will facilitate massive school closures - Patten has identified oneand-a-half million so-called surplus school places. It spells the end for authority-wide pro-
22 • Education
vision: specialist music art and drama centres, training centres etc.
Schools will supposedly be freed from bureaucracy, but, as Bolton again warns, "it is surely a triumph of hope over experience to expect that such self interested, isolated, fragmented decisions, made in thousands of different institutions, will add up to a sensible, effective and efficient national school system".
tuition, teachers'
OVERNMENT POLICY IS
Gnow directed by the far-
right Centre for Policy Studies, whose chair is Lord Griffiths, new chair of the National Curriculum Council. Other members of the Centre for Policy Studies include John McIntosh, also a member of the National Curriculum Council and head of the London Oratory School, the first state school to threaten to abandon teachers' national pay rates; and Dr Marks, a new member of the School Examination and Assessment Council, who advocates a return to selective schools and streaming.
In fact, although some are more candid than others, they all believe in this and the legislation is designed to that end. The buzz words, 'choice', 'diversity'
and 'specialisation', are in reality more acceptable ways of presenting concepts such as selection, grammar and secondary modern schools.
Creating an elite tier of optedout grant maintained schools is an attempt to create a body of popular, over-subscribed establishments which then can and will select the pupils they want. It means schools choosing the pupils, not parents choosing the schools. As Lord Griffiths has explained: "if you give parents a real choice in the system, it is inevitable that the schools themselves will demand to choose the kind of pupils that come".
In fact, it is happening already. A 1992 survey by Leicester University highlighted the tendency towards selection in optedout schools. A more selective, in reality segregated, school system is the end goal.
A more selective
more school
the
system end
goal.
HE SATS HAVE a central
T role in this 'vision', particu-
larly the tests planned for eleven year-olds. It is very easy to see how they will be used as an 11-plus mark two - especially, ironically, if they are simplified into 'pen and pencil' tests. However, with the momentum of the boycott of tests for seven and fourteen year-olds so strong, the whole future of such testing is now in doubt.
Research from Warwick University shows infant teachers having to work a 55-hour week to implement the national curriculum, with one in five working 60 or more. But teacher hostility is not confined simply to the issue of workload, important though that is. A key purpose of the tests, particularly with the threat of appraisal, is to police teachers. Indeed, via league tables, they are intended to police schools as well. The misuse of the results is well highlighted in an essay
[page 24]
Standard Assessment Tests (SATs). Tests at seven, eleven and fourteen, planned to accompany National Curriculum Council (NCC). Set up to supervise the implementation of the national curriculum. Members solely appointed by the Secretary of State. School Examination and Assessment Council (SEAC). Set up to supervise testing and exam implementation. Members solely appointed by the Secretary of State. I by Caroline Gipps, which docu-| is capitalist society, ments the history of the first seven year-old SATs in 1991 the lies and deceit of people like Clarke, the unrealiability of the statistics provided, the abuse of the information.
The arguments against SATs and league tables are explored in further essays in Education Answers Back. One interesting point to emerge is that, in the USA, where standardised testing has ruled (and where pupil achievement is notoriously low) they have been increasingly discredited.
What is not sufficiently analysed, however, is the manner in which SATs mark an extension of the ideology and practice of the exam system into every school, creating an ongoing treadmill of examinations starting in infant school. Simplified tests will make this even more blatant. Right from the start pupils will be accustomed to the idea of being selected or rejected. It is no accident that the introduction of SATs is accompanied by an attack on mixed-ability teaching. Under the guise of differentiation, the Tories want to ensure that pupils get used to the limits on their horizons from an early age. Clarke and Patten have enthused on the need for streaming in primary schools. But neither volume examines in any depth the relationship of the new post Education Reform Act structure, with its attendant regime of testing, to the exam system as a whole, and thus to the demands of the labour market. It is as if education operates in a vacuum and that the main problem is that the government fails to listen to those involved on the ground. Of course they don't. But Patten and co operate within a wider context which has to be addressed. That context the national curriculum. Education has always served the interests of capitalism: in 'good times the system needed, and was willing to pay for, a relatively educated workforce. Things have now changed. That is the basis of all the reforms since 1986. In fact the roots of these changes can be traced back to 1976 when Labour's education secretary Shirley Williams opened The Great Education Debate', an attempt to get more 'costeffective' education - at a time when the long post-war boom was over and a Labour government was embarking on a programme of IMF directed public spending cuts.
In the context of capitalism, exams have always been a mechanism through which the division of labour has been achieved. All exams, however thoughtfully constructed, exist to this end. They are there to fail pupils, to ration opportunities, and to maintain class divisions.
All exams are there to fail pupils, to ration opportunities.
This explains the current onslaught on GCSE standards from the right. If an increasing number pupils are succeeding, then the exams are not fulfilling their function. Especially in an era of mass unemployment, the Tories see the need to reduce expectations.
In reality, there is no evidence to support the assertion of falling educational standards - on which supposition rests so much of the Tory case for 'choice' and 'differentiation'. Simon and Chitty in Save Our Schools quote from / that compreresearch showing hensive organisation has led to a considerable improvement of attainment. It is not listening facts, however, to such which determines government policy: it is the requirements of the system. FEATURE OF these vol- A umes is how far even radical 'critics accept as given the underlying assumptions underpinning the education system. It is a mark of just how far the terrain has moved since the mid- 1970s that in the emerging conover the content of troversy GCSEs, for instance, nobody ques. tions that, however the exam is constructed, its principal function remains that of segregating pupils post-16.
To question the value of exams per se clearly raises deeper questions about the organisation of society itself. Socialists support teacher assessment of pupils, including appropriate, diagnostic testing, but we need to recognise that genuine attainment and an incompatible.
exam system are A school system ruled by exams enforcs a pass or fail model of education that has nothing to do with real learning.
These books provide a searing indictment of the Tory education record, as well as showing the scope of the opposition that has now developed. As the SATs campaign has illustrated, there is huge potential support for a campaign, involving teachers, parents and school students, to resources for schools, reduce class sizes, prevent school closures, and democratise what is taught in schools. For a programme for changing education, you will have to look elsewhere. But for the arguments as to why it is necessary, these books are an indispensable resource.
Education • 23
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