In 2003, I was teaching in one of the worst-performing schools in the country, in Tower Hamlets in London. Even though I was a novice teacher, I was given a class of six and seven-year-olds due to take the Standard Assessment Tests (Sats) in English and maths in the summer term.
Our test scores had been below the national average and I was under enormous pressure from the borough’s education officials to achieve results. A few weeks before the tests, I attended a course for teachers which was headed by education experts in the borough to help us prepare for the tests. One thing we took away was “off the record” tips on how to achieve results.
The tips included keeping spelling displays on the walls, which meant children might be able to copy some of the words they were asked to spell during the tests. I think we were so desperate to achieve results that nobody said, “Hang on a minute, isn’t this cheating?” The overriding aim was getting through the Sats and hitting national targets.
It was also suggested that underperforming schools concentrate on literacy and numeracy in lessons, (which would be tested), but not bother with other subjects that we were required to teach in the national curriculum. We were told to fill in our planning schedules for lessons as if we were teaching all lessons, in case anyone checked.
Over the next few weeks, I taught for those tests. It was boring for me as a teacher and it was boring for the children. It was teaching to hit the performance targets rather than teaching for the children’s benefit. It was about producing a test performance I felt was artificial.
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Tower Hamlets is credited with huge improvements in primary school Sats results. Between 2000 and 2005, the proportion of 11-year-olds who reached the required standard in English tests went up from 67% to 77%. Its chief executive, Christine Gilbert, is going to be the new chief inspector of schools. But from my own experiences, the better results in the borough didn’t necessarily mean better schools.
The school where I worked had about 175 children, most of whom came from Bangladesh. It was so anxious to recruit staff that I was offered the job almost immediately after I applied.
It was deemed by the borough to be a failing school and a local education official, known as a school development adviser, was attached to the school. She was replaced and the new adviser announced that she was going to conduct a school inspection.
The week before, the whole school was tasked with creating a transformation. The timetable was suspended so teachers could get their pupils to create art displays for the walls. In the afternoons, children were told to play or to watch a video as we tidied cupboards and threw away resources that could not be neatly stored.
When the inspection was over, the plants that had been brought in from teachers’ homes were returned, covers were taken off the dirty cupboards and materials crammed into the disabled toilets were distributed again.
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It was an interesting lesson in attitudes towards inspections. Whether it is an inspection by a council education officer or an Ofsted inspection, a lot of artificial improvements are made.
The adviser who was attached to our school brought in literacy and numeracy consultants too. It all meant a huge amount of paperwork. Teachers at the school became demoralised and inevitably corners were cut. Once again, it felt like it was all about ticking boxes, rather than a commitment to improve the children’s education.
When I attended the seminar on the Sats, the message I took away with me was that success in the Sats must be achieved — and the methods used didn’t really matter.
We were told there was some information that part of the test would be on “giving instructions”. Over the next few weeks, I crammed my children on how to write instructions. It was monotonous, but they got very good at it.
After a while my class stopped asking why we were not doing creative activities or why we were repeating the same work. They knew the answer by then: Sats. Moreover, my efforts were focused on the children who could pull up the class average; the needs of both underperforming pupils and the brightest were a side issue.
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The test results that my class achieved that year did go up, but they were still below the national average. But from my experience, test results are not an accurate measure of how well children are taught, but a measure of how well they are taught to take tests.
A school with bad test results is not necessarily a bad school. More worryingly, a school with good test results may be resorting to damaging measures to achieve them.
Since I have left teaching, I have looked at school performance and the work of the schools inspectorate, Ofsted. As Chris Woodhead, a former chief inspector of schools, pointed out on these pages last week, Ofsted is, in my view, more concerned about filling in forms than the quality of the teaching the children get.
Christine Gilbert has got a tough job ahead of her at Ofsted but from what I saw in Tower Hamlets what we really need is a new approach to assessing the quality of our schools and teachers, which is about more than test results.
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Anastasia de Waal is head of family and education at the think tank Civitas and author of Inspection, Inspection, Inspection, to be published next month. She was talking to Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas
TOWER HAMLETS’ DEFENCE
The council had identified this school as causing concern. It would be little surprise if a teacher in the school at this time felt it was being challenged to improve its performance. It was and rightly so. But there is nothing to substantiate any suggestion that anything improper was being done in the school, or that the national curriculum was not being taught or that anything improper was occurring in the borough in relation to testing children: specifically, teachers are advised to take wall charts down during tests.
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Tower Hamlets is proud to have some of the fastest improving schools in the country. It is ridiculous to suggest that somehow we have found a way to cheat the system. Being able to read and write is fundamental to success and we make no apology for focusing hard on these core subjects.