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August 2016
TESTING MY INCREDULITY.

Can I begin this piece by offering my hearty congratulations to Nicky Morgan, the current Secretary of State for Education, on her recent achievements. In a very short space of time she has done something many thought almost impossible. She has shown herself, in my opinion, to be more incompetent, inept, dumber and totally out of touch with the purpose of education than her predecessor, the much, and correctly, maligned, Michael Gove. This performance is not something that should be sneezed at; vomited over possibly but it must have been quite a task to achieve this grading. Mr Gove, remember him, thought all modern children should learn the Kings and Queens of England by rote. In his day, an OK idea. You could only find them out from a book and not many of us carry such books with us. Today, it’s on google; it’s there anytime you want. Today more time can be spent on looking at other aspects of our history which can give an insight into life today and, more importantly for these youngsters, life in the future; a future that they will control.

Ms Morgan, and/or her advisors, have suggested that it would be a good idea to introduce tests for 7 year-olds. There are already tests for 4 year-olds, poor little things, although probably they have no concept of what these mad adults are doing to them. Ms Morgan’s stated reasons for these tests is to raise standards in education. Ha bloody ha. Ms Morgan has sadly confused raising educational standards with getting high marks in a test and exposing the results of these to public scrutiny. A scrutiny, if I may say so, that few members of the public are qualified to perform. A child who had a reading age of 3 a year ago and now has a reading age of 6 is still a failure if tested for a reading age of a 7-year-old but the school would be rated a success in my eyes.

In answer to a question about loading stress on young kids, Ms Morgan pointed out that these are tests not exams. Not one of the journalists at her press conference asked her to define the difference. I looked up the answer on google because to be honest I don’t really know. I got this:-
A test and an exam are both tools or instruments of evaluation. A test is diagnostic in nature as in checking learning after a lesson or series of lessons, while an examination is summative as in investigating the extent of learning after a series of lessons or after a period of time, some schools or universities call it “periodical test” or “periodical exam”. Many educators all over the world are still confused with the use of both words and its meaning, not just you and me. On the other hand, a quiz is a shorter version of a test focused on a specific lesson or topic which could be given unannounced or announced by a teacher after a lesson. Results of your quizzes, tests and exams are combined together to make a measurement of your performance so that your teacher or professor could make a decision or judgement whether you are failed or passed at the end of the school year. This is called evaluation.

I also got this:-
A ‘test’ sounds shorter and less important.

My guess from her other statements is that Ms Morgan would go for the latter definition and was just seeking to play down what she was doing in terms of harm to children. As I write this England are trying to save a Test Match and that seems pretty stressful.

But I digress. The first thing you need to do when trying to raise standards in education is to define what education should be. If its sole purpose is to have those leaving it with high exam (or test) marks, so be it. But if, as in my view as some of you may know, the purpose of education is to give young people knowledge, engender a culture of having a desire to learn and to help these youngsters have an enjoyable, fulfilling life, then giving them a test, at any age, marked by outsiders who have no idea of the young person’s background, or even general level of learning, will not improve the standard. Teachers can judge how a pupil is performing far better than a test (exam). They see these youngsters every day. They can convey their opinion to parents at parents’ evenings. Remove some of the time these poor teachers spend filling in forms and let them have more time assessing their own pupils. I would also point out that thousands of people pass their driving test; I know quite a few who should not really be allowed to drive. Passing the test did not increase their standard; it did give them the opinion that they could now drive.

The result of a test tells you nothing except that the child has answered the test question correctly in the same way that a robot could. Children are not robots. Each one has a different personality, a different learning style perfectly explained by Professor Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligence theories. If anything, we should test a child’s curiosity, their inquisitiveness, their ability to solve problems or better still give them time to learn these skills unencumbered by spending time specifically learning for a test.

It is seldom that I find myself in total agreement with the NUT but Kevin Courtney, the deputy general secretary, said yesterday: “It is quite staggering the degree to which the government is unable to understand how their approach to the measurement of the performance of schools, and the system as a whole, is turning schools into exam factories.” He added that the current system already meant that England had “the most excessively tested children in the whole of Europe”, said Mr Courtney. I could not agree more. We can test at 11, at 16 and 18 but that is all.

Besides which I can assure you that in my long working life I have met more than a few qualified people totally unable to do the job they were qualified for and lacking basic life skills: they did though have a piece of paper.

Maybe I am wrong and I would love to hear from those who agree or disagree. I have, though, over 35 years’ experience in the learning industry, closer to 50 if you include my time as a student.