Posted By Susan Young at 08/03/2010 10:12:54
Interesting to read the comments of new children’s commissioner Maggie Atkinson in the Sunday Times yesterday. Until very recently a director of children’s services, Ms Atkinson had made a chat with some local teenagers one of her final acts before moving to her new job.
What did they tell her? That they had too much work to do. From this, she concluded that 8 GCSEs might be a better number for most teenagers to be taking than 10 or 12, taking off the pressure a bit. Moreover, she’d apparently like to do away with the KS2 SATS for much the same reasons.
I’ve been impressed with Ms Atkinson when interviewing her in the past, so I’ve scratched my head a bit over this. Surely as a hands-on DCS such views shouldn’t come as news to her? Presumably her former authority has put pressure on schools to improve their results by getting teenagers (and ten year olds) to aim as high as possible?
Could she be demonstrating her detachment from Ed Balls after the mini row over her appointment, when the Commons committee on education was refused its right to interview her before she was confirmed in post?
But now I’m wondering whether there’s more of a sea-change going on among directors of children’s services, whose role encompasses getting children to work as hard as possible, often worrying about their achievements, at the same time as they are responsible for their mental and physical health and happiness. Are the education and health aspects of the brief becoming mutually contradictory?
I have just interviewed another DCS for another publication, and she too was expressing qualms about the way children are being pushed. One headteacher had asked her: “how come everybody has got to be average these days?” She was becoming, she said, seriously bothered by the effect on children’s mental and physical health.
So, if NAHT and NUT members do indeed vote against using SATs to assess children’s progress this May, there may be a growing body of support quietly massing in the form of the Children’s Commissioner – personally appointed by Ed Balls -- and perhaps more than a few directors’ of children’s services.
I’m also starting to happen what happens next if there is a boycott. By that, I mean how dear old Ofsted’s inspections will go ahead without the usual data on which they rely to make judgments. Will they accept teacher assessments with some form of external validation or will schools with no Sats data automatically fail on some technicality?
Given that infant school inspections must rely on teacher assessments, presumably this ought to be perfectly legal for Ofsted purposes – but I wouldn’t bank on it. And if they start failing schools right, left and centre, the consequences start to look weird. Will parents and local authorities rise up in revolt? Will governing bodies resign en-masse? Do we end up losing heads at an even faster rate than now?
And if those in charge are starting to get concerned over the effect on children’s mental and physical health of academic pressure, then are Ofsted’s new “raising the bar” inspections moving against the tide? Is the bar being raised because those softies in charge of local authorities are starting to worry about what’s happening to children who are all being forced to achieve at least an average level, and as a result are not felt to be pushing schools hard enough for the Government?
Last week’s horribly plausible TES analysis of recent inspections did indeed seem to show that schools are being seriously downgraded because the framework has been designed to “raise the bar”. I for one will be really interested to see exactly what is in Ofsted’s report on itself this week.
Susan Young is an educational journalist. Contact me at educationhack@googlemail.com
