Saturday, 11 August 2007
Open access
This is good news: examiners are going to let candidates see where they went wrong on their papers and show up poor teaching in the process. Funny that. I recall that when David Blunkett first proposed to follow the Irish example of allowing pupils to see their papers after they were marked, it was the exam boards who predicted the end of civilisation as we know it. Now it is the teachers' unions (who also would rather prefer that we didn't publish school-by-school results, and have successfully persuaded the Welsh not to do so) who are moaning about Edexcel's excellent idea. Let's have more such openness, not less.
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There are positive reasons for schools' results not being published in a competitive fashion. You can't assume one school or it's staff is better than another just because it's A* - C results are high. Example: a school is in a deprived area, it's intake is from 4 large council estates where aspiration is zero and unemployment is extremely high (through their own choice I should add), 3 other "failing" local schools have been shut and now feed into this one remaining school and all the kids want to be "cool gangsters". How in heaven's name are you ever going to attract high achieving pupils to this same school when their published results are so low? How do you change the whole ethos of these kids' expectations in life? You can't make a children like this jump through exam hoops.
Publishing schools' results is what causes a "failing" school to continue failing. The middle class schools, with the motivated middle class parents' who can afford to buy houses in the area of "successful" schools perpetuate that "successful school's success. It is the attitude to work and success which we must tackle. This begins with in the home, with successful relationships and parenting.
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