Teachers will work the system as long as they are under pressure for results

There's no room for error now schools are businesses. We need to hire more teachers and give them space to try new ideas

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• • Phillip Easton
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 3 April 2012 18.29 BST 
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Teachers have been 'gaming' the system to get their pupils through exams. Photograph: Rui Vieira/PA

According to a poll by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, 35% of teachers say they could be "tempted to cheat". I've been a teacher for 10 years, and those figures hardly surprise me. I've seen everything from teachers openly rubbishing other subjects to ensure revision session attendance, teachers advising pupils to retake a whole year to improve performance in one module (thus ensuring their results don't drop), all the way to teachers encouraging pupils to annotate texts in the form of a shorthand lesson plan. I've seen teachers using exam spec answers and teachers becoming examiners for a year to steal good practice: in other words, we all work the system. What really worries me, however, is that there is no grey area left untapped and staff will feel pressured to go that extra inch into full-blown plagiarism.

Of course, gaming the system to relieve pressure from senior management is as old as the hills. But to get your head around around the whole truth of the ugly situation means unpicking a much larger problem with education in the UK.

Let me burst some bubbles, to start with: schools are businesses. All employees at the schools I have worked at are held accountable for their results. Residuals (how well your students have improved on predicted grades) A*-C pass rates, Alps scores, t-Scores, value-added – all are unpicked by a good management team, in a bid to improve the business. Better pass rates equals a more attractive school, and therefore more students. More students means more money. We are businesses.

The switch to academy status is to most parents confusing and pointless – to staff it means that now, you are officially working for a corporation. These are not your fuzzy, friendly government-run schools, with endless patience for slack teachers. The potential here is to swiftly get rid of staff who don't make the grade. "Good!" you might think. "Lazy teachers! They have it easy anyway, let's cut away the dead wood!" And, perhaps, there is an argument for that.

However, when a teacher sits down and analyses their results, they are set targets. The targets are "aspirational", but still meant to be achievable. Even when your pass rates are 90% and over, or your Alps results scores are a 2 (1 being the best possible, 9 being the worst) targets are put in place. And here is where the problems can begin. It is very easy (and I have known this to be the case) that a teacher's worth is questioned in line with results. Lazy pupils? That'll be your fault for allowing that culture in your classroom. Lack of homework or revision? Why didn't you call parents in to make them understand the importance of the revision sessions after class?

The result is a Mobius strip of a career, where you can feel constantly that you're running to stand still. I've grown pretty resilient to it, but I can empathise with the teachers who haven't. By and large, we all do our best. If you put in the hours, your teaching is focused, you have a keen bunch of kids and you lay on the revision sessions, the outcomes should be good. But when they aren't, there is no room for error. The school up the road had a better year. Raise your game – Bogwood primary sent twice as many kids there this year, and we need bums on seats. And if your results are good, well open a paper and listen to everyone tell you it's because the exams got easier, and it was harder in their day. It might well have been, but it doesn't help the hard work we are doing right now.

Our current school model is not fit for purpose. Schools are hamstrung by a lack of funds to develop teaching practice, the space to develop new ideas, and the confidence to try them out. We need to be attracting innovators with visions for the future, starting with training staff and ending with a flexible, skills-based curriculum that evolves every couple of years. Teachers need time. Look at the current dropout rates of new teachers: over a third leave the job in under three years. Why? Pressure. Hiring more teachers would create jobs and allow us to teach smaller classes, and could create more non-contact time in which to develop the craft. Yet this idea is often ridiculed. Since when did we all get so blasé about the future of our youth?

AQA - Exam board to penalise private school pupils

By Richard Garner, Education Editor in The Independent
Tuesday, 27 September 2011

A controversial plan to rank all A-level students according to the schools they attend – which would allow universities to discriminate against pupils from private schools – is unveiled today by Britain's biggest exam board.

The radical proposal would allow universities to offer places to students from disadvantaged homes who showed potential but had performed less well in exams than their peers at better schools.

The plan by the exam board AQA (Assessment and Qualifications Alliance) provoked a storm of argument among academics and independent schools. There were immediate fears that candidates will be penalised simply because they achieve good A-level results at a good school. Independent schools are also alarmed that the approach could discriminate against disadvantaged pupils to whom they have offered scholarships.
Dr Tim Hands, headmaster of Magdalen College, Oxford, and co-chairman of the Independent Schools' Universities Committee, said: "It is extraordinary. It takes no account of home background or the amount of tutoring a pupil could have."

Professor Alan Smithers, head of the Centre for Education and Employment Studies at the University of Buckingham, added: "There must be concerns about the ranking the candidates are awarded. The possibility for errors is enormous." The plan is contained in a paper prepared for discussion by Dr Neil Stringer, senior research associate at the AQA Centre for Education Research and Policy, and being circulated at the party conferences for debate this month.

It advocates the drawing up of a national system for ranking both candidates’ achievements and the educational context in which they were taught.

Pupils at weak schools would get bonus points; those at elite schools could be penalised in comparison.
Dr Stringer cites the example of St George’s Medical School in London in support of his argument. It offers places to students with lower A-level grades (BBC rather than AAB) providing that their performance is 60 per cent better than the average for their school.

“St George’s reports that students from poorly performing schools who are accepted into medical school with lower grades do just as well as their peers with higher grades,” he adds.

“This strongly suggests that students admitted through the adjusted criteria scheme learned enough at A-level and are able enough learners to compete successfully with students who achieved higher A-level grades under more favourable.”

Under the blueprint he has devised, students would be awarded an exam score based on their best three A-level grades and then placed into different performance bands. They would then be given the ranking for their school.

Dr Stringer says the system could either be offered to universities individually – or drawn up centrally by an existing agency like Ucas, which is currently reviewing its A-level system.

The AQA believes it can be an an alternative to allowing students to apply to university after they have got their results – rather than be awarded places on predicted grades. This plan, under active consideration from ministers and said by some to be fairer towards disadvantaged students, has failed so far to get off the ground largely because of opposition from universities.

Professor Smithers added: “I would hope that any university worth its salt would look at the candidates’ achievement and inform their own view as to their potential.”

Dr Hands added: “Cambridge University, which features at the top of many a global league table, has recently published research that shows prior schooling is of insignificant effect with regard to degree outcome.

“The proposer of this scheme might like to bear this in mind.”

Brian Lightman, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, which represents the majority of state secondary school heads, described it as “a step too far”. He said it should not detract from the need to provide all pupils with a good education in a good school.

Lee Elliott Major, of the education charity the Sutton Trust, which campaigns to get more disadvantaged young people into leading universities, said: “We support the use of so called contextual information when judging students’ potential and achievement.”

However, he added that the “bigger challenges” were in getting “more children with the grades at school to make university a realistic prospect and encouraging pupils to actually apply when they have the grades”.
Dr Stringer stresses in his paper: “The proposed system would not encourage or require universities to relinquish control of their admissions systems. It is not an issue of allocating students to universities on the basis of their respective rankings: admissions tutors would be free to make decisions.”

The AQA said the scheme could be considered as an alternative to Post Qualification Application – allowing students to apply to university after getting their results.

That, argued Andrew Hall, chief executive of AQA, would lead to a shorter teaching year if exams were brought forward.

“We have real concerns about the effect this could have on the performance of some students,” he added.
“So our Centre for Education Research and Policy have devised a different way to tackle the issue that doesn’t disadvantage any student and allows all applicants – from whatever their school type or background – to compete fairly for university places.”

* Meanwhile, plans to mark GCSE students on their spelling and punctuation and scrap most resits were published by Ofqual, the exam standards watchdog, yesterday.

It has launched a consultation on the proposals which would see teenagers – from 2012 – having to sit all their exams in the summer at the end of two-year courses rather than sit modules throughout the course.

They would also only be allowed to resit English and maths.

The reforms were first announced by Education secretary Michael Gove earlier this summer.

How the new system would work

Under the new system, a pupil at a weak school who got a lower grade than a rival pupil at a good school could still be given more university entrance points, writes Richard Garner.

The blueprint would work like this. James goes to a low-performing comprehensive in a disadvantaged area. He manages to get an exam score of 36 out of 40. However, he is entitled to bonus points as a result of his school's low ranking (it scores minus three in the rankings).

Adam, on the other hand, goes to a top performing independent school with no pupils on free school meals and got 38 for his exams. But he faces being penalised on his school's ranking (the school is given a "plus three" ranking).

It would, of course, be up to the individual university to decide what to do with this information but one way of using it will be to add three points to James's exam score because of the background he comes from and deduct three points from Adam. On that basis, the place would go to James.

The argument in the paper is that there are still vastly more points awarded for exam performance than education context and it is unlikely that any university would be as crude as to deduct the maximum ranking points from Adam and give the maximum three extra to James.

However, what is likely is that both Adam and James would be longlisted - something that would not have happened to James without the ranking system. Then James's potential would outweigh Adam's performance.

'I'm so glad I had the chance to take the International Baccalaureate'

Budget cuts mean fewer state schools will offer the International Baccalaureate. But it would be a shame if this tough but stimulating course was only available to the children of the wealthy, argues student Nastassia Dhanraj, who's just completed hers

Thursday, 21 July 2011 in the Independent

 

The International Baccalaureate – or the IB – has cropped up repeatedly in the news over the past few years; being heralded as a superior qualification to replace A-levels and revolutionise education worldwide. Such hyperbole was what led me to sign up to the course two years ago at the only state sixth-form college in my area to offer it. Now, government cuts are forcing headteachers at state colleges to either drop the course, or abolish plans to introduce it. This means that in future the only students who will get access to it will be those with parents rich enough to send them to independent schools. This will be a great shame for our state schools and for the future of Britain's education and its place in future international communication.

After completing the International Baccalaureate, I can say I am so glad I did it. However, that was certainly not always the case. I spent most of the teaching hours feeling like I was being punished for making the decision to be so pretentious as to do a qualification that only a few months before I had not even heard of, let alone known how to pronounce. But like all effective punishment, I see now it was for my own good.

The International Baccalaureate is not what most 16-18 year olds want to be doing. It is harder than I ever believed it could be, involving a huge number of taught hours. While my A-level contemporaries were lounging about in the college field, I was dragging my back-injury-inducing bag from classroom to classroom. It also has significantly more exams than A-levels. You have to do subjects you know you are – to put it mildly – abysmal at. The IB even dictates how you spend your free time, with a compulsory 150 hours of creativity, action and service needed to be completed over the two-year course, with the only incentive being: "If you don't, we'll fail you". But at the end of it all, I'm still glad I did it.

The benefits? Well, first and foremost the kudos from doing such an intense and "hardcore" qualification. Secondly, it forces you to expand your spheres of interest and as a result become a more well-rounded person – that sounds like flowery exaggeration, but is actually true. Perhaps most importantly – as this is supposed to be an education – you just learn more. By studying six subjects without the constant loom of exams every few months, you are able to absorb so much information and frankly, be better educated.
It's no secret that the traditional British education path needs a major overhaul. The once world-renowned A-level qualification is losing credibility by the day – and the Government knows it. By no means do I believe that A-level exams are getting easier; that is a huge insult to thousands of students who have worked exceptionally hard for them. However, more and more people are getting A grades, making it more and more difficult to distinguish which students truly make up the highest echelons of contemporary education. The introduction of the A* for A-levels was an attempt to fix this problem, but that merely attempts to hide the fact that the grades have become more inflated than the lips of Hollywood's superstars. I think this is to do with the basic structure of A-levels. With the modular format of the course, people can do numerous retakes until they get the grades they want.

With the IB, there are no retakes, as all exams are taken at the end of the second year. There is also a points system out of 45, which is a combination of the grades from all of your subjects, the compulsory Theory Of Knowledge course, and the personal research assignment called the "extended essay". Through this numerical system, it is far easier to distinguish between the achievements of students and is a lot fairer to those who truly are excellent and put the effort in, given that only 0.2 per cent of students studying the IB get the coveted 45 points each year.

The main reason that I think the Government's cuts to the IB budget are exceptionally short-sighted, narrow minded and foolish is that the International Baccalaureate, by its very name, encourages something that the future leaders and taxpayers of our country desperately need: a global understanding. The International Baccalaureate was forged out of the despair of the World Wars in an attempt to unite the world through education, by a collection of teachers at the International School of Geneva.

If there is one word that is constantly repeated in response to every instance of prejudice or infringement on human rights, it is education. It is not enough for Britain to sit back and feel that other countries need to be more educated in Western morality, without engaging in educating their own population in a way that actually takes the rest of the world into consideration.

At a time when international communication is growing ever more crucial, how can the Government possibly justify restricting the access of its own young people to a programme that is trying to unify the next generation through education? With some 876,000 students taking it worldwide, surely this is Britain's opportunity to take a forward thinking and pioneering stance and to set an example to the rest of the world that a global education is something we should be striving for.

If the Government goes ahead with these plans to reduce funding to the groundbreaking 139 state schools and colleges that offer the International Baccalaureate, they are not only condemning the students in the years below me to lose out on a more rigorous, fair and highly respected qualification, but also condemning the future of Britain to take a back seat in encouraging the world in global co-operation and understanding.