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Parents used to worry when to tell their children not to believe in Father Christmas. After yesterday, they ought to worry when to tell them not to believe in exam results.
Sats grades have become meaningless. First, we had the shambles of the marking. In true New Labour fashion, ministers gave the job to ETS, a cut-price US company.
It couldn't give a damn about the integrity of the British education system. On the other hand, it was cheap and allowed Ed Balls to shift the blame to it when the marking went haywire. ETS's marking duly did go haywire and Balls duly ducked responsibility.
Everyone enjoys reading about bureaucratic failure and I'm sure parents lapped up the accounts of ETS sending papers back to schools unmarked, or telling heads their children had not sat the tests when the heads knew perfectly well that they had.
But vast exercises to examine every 11- and 14-year-old in the country are bound to have glitches. Most parents would have thought blunders were the exception. If their son had done well at English or their daughter excelling at maths, they might have assumed that their education was coming along nicely.
Maybe it isn't, as a devastating survey from the think-tank Civitas suggested this week. Nine out of 10 secondary school teachers told it they didn't believe Sats results reflected children's real abilities. They didn't show that primary schools had coached children well in English and maths, merely that they had coached them to pass exams.
Schools were so exasperated they were organising new tests because they didn't trust the results of the Sats tests. When we start having exams to check on other exams we ought to realise that the education system is in danger of disappearingup its own posterior. The best way to stop it vanishing from view is to cut back on the number of tests. At present markers are being overloaded. There are, for example 40,000 English teachers in secondary schools. Between them, they have to mark the GCSE English papers of 600,000 pupils, the A-levels of 250,000, AS-level papers of 250,000 and national curriculum tests for 14-year-olds by a further 550,000.
There are too many national exams and the tests for 14-year-olds have got to go. We used to manage well enough without them.
More broadly, we have to start trusting teachers again. Ever since the Sixties, politicians and parents have been rightly contemptuous of the educational fads which swept the profession. The testing mania is as much about monitoring teachers' performance as checking on the attainments of their pupils.
But the Sixties were more than a generation ago. It's time to leave Ofsted to deal with bad teachers and schools. The rest should be allowed to give children fewer but better exams - and results they can believe in.
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We have teachers who can administer tests from setting to marking. If they appear to have mismarked their class to boost their own level of efficiency they will be caught out by the head teacher whose job it is to oversee and check the marking of in house examinations and by the fact that their pupils will not achieve the same results when they sit their GCSE's or other outside exams.
This needs to be achieved by giving teaching staff the time to do this as they always used to be able to when they didn't have to administer today's stupid system.
Simple example is that at one time learning multiplication tables "parrot fashion" was frowned upon but without the ingrained instant knowledge of the product of 2 single integers no one can possibly ever work out more complex multiplication. This is fact not surmise and since it was realised children have been able to improve their mathematical skills.
Let's get back to basics or perhaps look again at the American system of grading whereby a child only progresses to the next higher grade if they can pass the exams.
- Rick Grain, Stourbridge West Midlands
Does Mr. Balls have any educational qualifications at all? If not, why on earth is the lunatic government employing him in his present capacity?
- Lezl, London
I have a story for David Cohen but I wonder if you're the same guy. It's in response to a story he published in the Evening Standard of Monday 14 July. How can I get hold of him if you're not him? Sorry this wasn't a response to your story but your help will be highly appreciated.
- Wycliffe Odhiambo, london
