Just like all her predecessors, Nicky Morgan, the education secretary, wants universal educational excellence. Every education secretary wants to shape schools policy to get better results. It is much, much harder than it looks. More than a year into her role, Ms Morgan has set out her agenda. She inherits from her predecessor Michael Gove a confidence in structures as the key to delivering better schools: there will be more academies and an ever-shrinking role for local authorities. A national teacher service is intended to get ambitious and talented teachers into coastal and rural schools that traditionally have problems recruiting high-flying staff. And, after a gap of more than a decade, she intends to bring back testing for seven-year-olds.
Testing at the end of key stage one was replaced by teacher assessment in 2004 because everyone hated it. Children felt stressed, parents of children who did less well felt miserable, and teachers felt it restricted what and how they taught and left them feeling – since the results were (not unreasonably) treated as a management tool – as judged as their pupils. The DfE insists that Ms Morgan does not want to reproduce the old system, but she does want to be able to compare schools from different parts of the country to make sure that all of them are making the best possible progress. Assessments have not been an unmitigated triumph. They are laborious and time-consuming. Independent research suggests that, unintentionally, pupils are sometimes treated as stereotypes – leaving, say, girls marked down for maths or a pupil from a dysfunctional home treated less generously.
Schools should be held to account for their results. No school leaver should be functionally illiterate. Testing can be an unbiased way of checking progress. But who is really being tested, the children or their teachers? Ms Morgan must be clear how the results are to be used. All the evidence of the last experiment shows that the more tests are used to monitor schools, the more schools teach to the test. She promises consultation. She must listen to what she’s told.
