I was chatting to my wife about stats, tables and targets and was quite alaramed to discover:-
assessments from primary school is used to calculate expectations for pupils leaving junior school
assessments of pupils leaving junior schools are used to calculate expectations for GCSE results
The perception among secondary school teachers seems to be that primary schools tend to overinflate assessments to meet their targets and so do junior schools. So a secondary school has targets based on inflated results caused by target orientation and then they have no choice but to try and follow suit. If this follows into A levels then it all lends credence to the complaints you hear from universities about how much remedial tutoring is required before they even get students going on their degrees proper. My understanding is that this area is where there is a big difference between state and private education. The latter produces students with far less remedial requirements at degree level.
Accepted this isn't my area and I may not be translating very well but it does bear a horrible affinity to some corporate appraisal systems. In my view the main success this brings is an enhanced ability to manage upwards, with a blindness to anything not within direct target remit. Targets can also limit a structures ability to respond to change. People will continue to chase a number well after all hope of success has vanished.
A very astute observation. Assessment at primary and junior schools does not have the linguistic payload of GCSE and A-level exams. They are tick box and matched pair exercises with short verbal responses and, if I recall correctly some have migrated to teacher assessments.
It has been noticeable in my time as a teacher that extended writing and thinking in some subjects is no longer assessed as pupils are not equipped to cope with them
In maths and science the words 'derive' 'develop' 'demonstrate' and 'prove' have disappeared from the questions because pupils do not have the skills to be able to answer them. A/S and A-level maths and science are shadows of their former selves because to leave them unchanged would have lead to a collapse in the percentage of top grades and the inability of any government to be able to demonstrate an unremitting improvement in standards.
Highschools are held hostage to the inflated grades delivered by their junior partners.
At the end of the day one has to ask who exactly is being assessed:
The schools, the pupils or the teachers.
I'd argue that the pupils have become the unintended victims of a system designed to measure the ability of one school to outperform another by selecting courses that deliver maximum grades through minimal cognitive ability.
There's been massive grade inflation over the years.
When the National Curriculum was introduced it was stated that an average pupil would obtain a grade F in his/her exams.
The expectation that the average student gets five or more grade Cs including English and Maths.
The key stages were deliver one level of improvement per key stage. A high school was therefore expected to raise an 11 year old's level from say a four to a five.
This has now been raised to two levels at key stage three. I'm not sure what the foundation for this inflated expectation is because the kids aren't any cleverer, the teachers are largely the same, teaching quality is only marginally better and the demography of most school catchment areas is static.
The delivering the GCSE grades decreed as being the targets for our GCSE students has become an industry in itself with target setting meetings, post mortem meetings, intervention meetings, diagnostic meetings, quality assurance meetings, tracking meetings, one to one meetings all to justify why in some instances making a silk purse out of a sows ear is a non starter.
So much time so little of it to teach in......
