There is only one purpose in the government’s chaotic regime for primary school testing. It is control. No wonder headteachers are up in arms. The latest proposals for testing seven-year-olds have been variously delayed, leaked, abandoned and accused of “lacking in clarity”. They will, the teachers’ leader Russell Hobby said this week, “no longer give parents reliable information on a child’s progress.”
That, of course, was never the point. The point was the obsession of the education secretary, Nicky Morgan, with reforming school government, and with the targets, measurements and league tables needed to justify it politically.
If Whitehall officials were to issue constant instructions on how to perform heart operations or cure cancer, there would be an outcry from doctors. Yet every politician thinks he or she can teach. The primary curriculum has become a farcical straitjacket of box-ticking questions and answers. It leaves no scope for professionalism, for personal chemistry between teacher and children. It requires a robot rather than a human being. “Just teach the test,” is the cry of the state – because we need to know what you are doing.
Morgan is presiding over the greatest centralisation in the history of British education – at least since the Forster Act of 1872 and its notorious and short-lived “revised code”. Her proposed employment of academy chains to replace local education authorities is only a bastard privatisation.
It is so risky – like giving the NHS to Tesco or the Royal Navy to a cross-Channel ferry company – that it will need armies of commissioners to run it. They must find money, plan capacity, reorder admissions and extract measurable results to validate the reform. Already there are rumours that Morgan may reduce the idea to absurdity by renaming local education authorities as “chains” – millions spent on doing nothing.
The best school is one rooted not in a corporate culture but in its community. It is one in which teachers are answerable to that community and its parents. The role of the state, as in the health and social care, should be in inspection and financial support. When the state decides it must run something itself, it will fail. This reform will fail.