SATA - New Labour's education failure in microcosm

If you are looking for the reason why New Labour has spent more on education yet failed to improve it, look no further that the present entirely predictable crisis over SATS – Standard Assessment Tests. All the three notions that are wrong, and foolish, and muddled about government education policy are there:

First, the notion that if you hand anything at all over to the private sector, it will magically improve. Second, that if you want to make teachers and schools perform better, you set them arbitrary targets, and kick them if the targets aren’t met. And third, that everything in education can be measured in crude tick-box forms, which can be completed by anyone who can read, because no sophisticated judgements are required.

How else could we have got to a situation where schools have to revolve round the demands of simplistic little tests on their pupils; where those tests can be marked by people who have no qualifications or experience in education; and these people can be employed at a pittance by an American company to do work which could be done far better and with much greater understanding by experienced and qualified people whom the British taxpayer already employs?

And that is not the worst of it. Our government not only insists on finding someone – anyone – from the private sector to do work which the public sector could do better and cheaper; it then gives them a contract which means they can foul up as badly as they like, and still not be fired without a golden goodbye of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.

SATs are the tests taken at ages five, 11 and 14, to chart the progress of both schools and their pupils. They have always been unpopular with teachers, pupils and parents, but popular with politicians, for whom they provide a source of meaningless statistics which can be deployed to prove more or less anything. The administration of these tests has been outsourced to an enormous multinational company called ETS, or Educational Testing Services. ETS have been given a five year contract which is apparently binding no matter how badly they foul up. Nice work if you can get it.

As schools break up for summer, almost one in five primary schools still does not have a full set of marks, and many of the results for 14-year-olds are likely to be delayed, perhaps until September. The results we have are clearly flawed, and teams of ETS employees are searching for thousands of test papers which have apparently been lost. We know of incomplete marking, of pupils wrongly marked as absent, of pupils’ work being left to moulder in the schools, and much more. Any school putting in this sort of performance would be in special measures, and rightly so.

We hear calls for the resignation of the education secretary, Ed Balls, but that will change nothing. What we need is what I fear we’re not going to get – a change of policy.