Targets. Progress. Value-added. Attainment levels. Stretch and challenge. Intervention and support.
I would be shocked to my core if you could show me one teacher who has not been in a meeting where these concepts have been discussed at great length.
We are living in an age where there is increasing accountability across all service industries, and where “feedback” is requested for every service – even visiting a public toilet.
The idea is that, ostensibly, feedback improves performance. It provides an indication of what the service is getting right and what it needs to work on. That all sounds fine; it’s important to say thank you to people who are going a good job, and to be able to complain if the service is poor.
However, there is an unspoken element here, where you are not just required to do your job well – it becomes necessary to prove that you are doing your job well. This mindset has crept into every aspect of the labour market, and teaching is no exception.
“There has been a slow but steady shift towards assessment-led teaching.”
Whether you work in the state sector, independent sector or the international sector, you will be appraised regularly, and a significant part of that appraisal will be the progress and performance of your students. As of course it should be. It stands to reason that the ultimate goal of any teacher should be to help their students to progress. But what should that progress look like?
The easiest way to show educational progress is through numbers. Data. Movement along a scale or continuum. The easiest way to get that data is to test, score and grade. There has been a slow but steady shift towards assessment-led teaching, which I believe has been driven by the need for schools to prove that they’re doing a good job.
School leaders and classroom teachers are conscious that the people paying their wages want to see progress, and in the independent and international sectors that means parents. The parents are the customers, and the customer is always right.
“It would take a confident leader to buck this trend to constantly prove progress with tests and grades.”
This is quite often reflected in practice through a curriculum based around assessment opportunities. Weekly, fortnightly, monthly or termly grades can be instantly shared with parents, and numbers can be crunched by data managers. It would take a bold and supremely confident senior leader to try and buck this trend, but what we are seeing more and more frequently in the classroom is an increased number of anxious children who ask: Is this going to be graded? Will this be in the test?
Rather than enabling children to take delight in the acquisition of knowledge and experience, the heavy focus on proving progress seems to be sucking the joy out of learning.
Think about the last book you read, or a documentary you might have watched recently: would you have enjoyed it in the same way if you knew there was going to be a test on it afterwards?
“This heavy focus seems to be sucking the joy out of learning.”
Children are under pressure from all sides, and perhaps what they need is some respite from the relentless assessment regime of their daily school experience, where they must feel that their worth is weighed, measured and judged on an alarmingly regular basis by most of the authority figures in their lives.
Children the world over are experiencing mental health issues – many of which are rooted in educational pressures (Keane, 2023; PA Media, 2023), but there is no indication that things are going to change any time soon.
Education that is focused on testing must surely be a major contributor to anxiety in children and yet here we are, blithely continuing down a path that could be setting them up for an adult life riddled with mental health problems – all in the name of ticking a box to say that we deserve to be paid.
What I would like to see, in a utopian world where such things might happen, is the development of schools where children can just be children while they are children. I would like to see children being guided towards a love of learning and exploration, discovery, wonder and creativity.
It’s going to be hard to unlock the genius of future generations if we insist on teaching them that the only way of being deemed “clever” or “smart” is to pass a test, or gain a certain level in an exam. There are countries in the world where “educational competition is downplayed” (Pellisier, 2023), but they are small islands of anomalous practice in an ocean of assessment-heavy national and international systems.
“There are countries that downplay educational competition, but they are anomalies.”
Just as the shift towards assessment-led teaching has been incremental, the further shift towards enjoyment-led learning could take place through small but manageable increments.
I want to make an earnest plea for school leaders and education policy makers to consider that perhaps reducing the assessment burden might be a more effective way of supporting staff and student wellbeing than putting on yoga classes after school, or teaching deep-breathing techniques during a lunch break.
This will require some brave decision-making, and some very firm and frank discussions with parents, but the benefits could be enormous. The shift away from assessment-led teaching would require school leaders and policy-makers to place more confidence in teachers’ professional judgement, which is where my utopian dream begins to fall apart.
“A shift towards enjoyment-led learning could take place through small increments.”
Whilst most teachers I know (and certainly all those who are worth their salt) can tell you within a couple of weeks of meeting a class what their students’ abilities are, that does not translate too well on a spreadsheet as “evidence”. Those same teachers can easily tell you who is “top”, “middle” or “bottom” in their class; testing merely confirms what can be judged professionally (and discreetly), but it cements that position in a child’s mind and adds a level of pressure that brings joy to no-one.
If we want to instil a love of learning in our young people and foster their creative talents rather than point them off towards a world of anxiety and poor mental health, it is vital that we at least start a conversation about the actual value of testing – who is it for? Does it really help the students in our care, or is it predominantly a way for teachers to satisfy their paymasters?
What the customer wants and what the customer’s children need are perhaps two very different things.
This article first appeared in the latest Spring 2024 edition of International School magazine, out now.