Schools have improved in recent years, says a primary school teacher, but the renewed emphasis on testing won’t work for all pupils – and the cuts present a danger to many children’s education
“I used to work teaching English abroad, then some years ago I came back to the UK and qualified as a primary teacher, specialising in modern languages. I got a job immediately at a school in outer London, serving a catchment area that’s predominantly white working class.
Under Labour we saw a number of education initiatives – including an attempt to push children into learning languages, which I’m afraid has since faded away – and now we’re seeing a new one: under the coalition there’s a real emphasis on ‘back to basic skills’, with more formalised testing of English and maths for children as young as six. In part, this is driven by the transparency agenda: we’ll put the test results on our website, along with details of whether the children have done their homework and how their performance is changing.
So we test spelling, reading comprehension and maths on a weekly basis, and that’s before we start preparing the children for SATs. Tests can be useful for individualised learning, because we can see exactly how the pupils are doing in different subjects, but they now take up a full morning of every week – and that’s quite frightening for children aged six to 10.
My timetable is now incredibly crammed, and the time pressure makes the kids more wound-up and me more tense. What’s more, there are fewer opportunities for creative work using, for example, role-play, creative writing and topic-based challenges. The test-based approach will be effective for certain types of learners, and it keeps the higher-ability children motivated, but the children who learn best in a more kinaesthetic [movement-oriented] style will be left behind.
We teachers are also tested, in that to reach my next payscale, I have to make sure that, for example, more than 90 per cent of my children get a level 2C or above in science. This approach has produced results: it’s very hard for failing teachers to stay in their jobs these days, especially given that senior managers can do observations, ‘drop-in’ on classes and monitor teachers’ planning. As long as my managers support me to achieve that target – rather than just telling me at the end of the process that I haven’t hit it – then the system is fair on teachers.
However, it can be unfair on some of the pupils: because these targets affect my own appraisal, when I look around my class sometimes I see levels and sub-levels rather than children. I’ll select poorly-performing children for targeted interventions who I think I can get up to that standard, but unfortunately those who are never going to make it up to level 2C get left behind. It’s not in my incentive structure to spend a lot of time with them: I’m looking for 90 per cent, and if I get that it’s ‘job done’.
Still, at least our system sets a baseline for 90 per cent of the pupils. I’m worried that we seem to be moving towards a system like they have in France and Spain, with more formalised learning and centralised lesson-planning. Often, on the continent there’s much less individualised learning, less catering for different types of ability or learner; the teachers walk in and say: ‘Right, we’re doing the exercise on page 57’. Our form of teaching demands more of individual teachers – we have to spend a lot of time on lesson planning and preparation – but it produces higher-quality lessons. We get lesson-preparation time in school hours, and it’s worth its weight in gold. There are whispers that the coalition wants to get rid of that dedicated time, but I think doing so would cause an absolute revolution in schools.
Nowadays, of course, much of the talk is of cuts. We’re starting from a good place: a lot of money went into schools under Labour, and we benefited. But the money’s gone now, and the cuts have arrived – first for teaching assistants. They’re being pressed into taking a voluntary pay cut – which isn’t nice, especially given that they earn so little already – and we’re losing assistants so that rather than each teacher having an assistant, we’ll draw them from a pool. That’s going to have an impact on individualised learning and on the use of intervention groups – which we use to give extra support to low- and high-achievers.
There’s a sense in the school of: ‘Here we go again, another new initiative’. I think people are pretty much resigned to another wave of change, but each new initiative does stress teachers and children – and the reality is that many fade away again without having achieved very much.
I’d say that primary school teachers have really known what they’re doing for 20-plus years; the national curriculum is a good document, and we’re quite capable of following it. Yet while the coalition says it wants to support more local freedoms, the reality is that it has a certain view of achievement – and that’s academic achievement, with lots of testing and grading of literacy and maths. Under this approach, some children struggle – and they may be put off school altogether – while others get good grades on a narrow set of measures. Is that really what we want from a child? I don’t think it’s a holistic enough measure of success.”