“New ideas” floated by Department for Education amount to tired re-treads of initiatives which have struggled in the past

Is this the best that the government can do, in terms of setting out ideas for supporting schools to get the best out of pupils as England seeks to emerge from the debilitating educational and health effects of the pandemic?

The thought was prompted after reading a news report suggesting the Department for Education is contemplating a set of what in reality are generally re-treads of policies either enacted and then rejected in the past or floated unsuccessfully as such.

The Guardian reported that the Department for Education was “considering” the return of Sats tests at 14; removing the cap on teachers’ work hours in the national contract, to make it easier for institutions to extend the school day; “accelerating academisation”; and extending Ofsted inspections.

The proposals are “understood to be at an early stage,” the paper reported, adding only that they would be “considered” by the new Education Secretary, Nadhim Zahawi. But there is plentiful evidence already that the ideas have struggled in the past.

Return of tests at 14. Really?

On the mooted re-introduction of Sats tests at 14, more than 13 years after they were scrapped in 2008, the Guardian reported that this had been because they had been fuelled a “pervasive anxiety*” in pupils’ lives and distorted children’s education.

However, the immediate trigger for the tests’ abolition in 2008, by Ed Balls as Education Secretary, had been a test marking shambles through a privatised contract via the American testing organisation ETS. Rather than responding specifically to concerns about pupil “anxiety” – which applied at least as much in relation to Sats tests at 11, which were retained – the tests went because there was less of a rationale for them within England’s accountability structure than was the case for other national assessments.

Key stage 2 tests, for example, and GCSE and A-levels, correspond to national-level end-points in the education on offer by individual institutions. For all that I have been a critic of high-stakes accountability, from the government’s point of view there is a logic to using assessments at the end of pupils’ time at primary school to hold institutions to account; and ditto for public reporting of GCSE and A-level results.

By contrast, key stage 3 tests always struggled for justification, as a set of assessments which both had no importance in themselves for the pupil, and which were only ever a staging post on the way to more important assessments for the institution.

Surveying the chaos besetting the tests’ administration in 2008, it seems reasonable to assume that Balls looked at these assessments and thought: “why bother with them”?

Importantly, he was not alone: David Laws, the-then children’s spokesman for the Liberal Democrats who would go on to be schools minister during the coalition years, reportedly reacted to Balls’s decision by stating: “The Sats tests taken by 14-year-olds are…a waste of time”.

And one Michael Gove, at the time the shadow children’s secretary who would go on to become Laws’s boss as Education Secretary, also welcomed their scrapping, saying he had argued for “fewer national tests and more rigour”.

All of this seems relevant when looking at whether this floated policy has any future now. Surveying the prospective cost and potential logistics of setting up such an assessment – at a time when, you would think, both funds and central logistical capacity should be heavily in demand, given the ongoing effects of the pandemic in schools – the question must surely occur: why go there?

The Guardian reported that ministers were worried that key stage 3 had “got a bit lost”, with children losing focus in these years because there was no assessment at the end of it, and that some schools were starting to teach GCSE courses in year nine.

Yet it is hard to think why schools, without any further push than the mere existence of these new tests, would now suddenly emphasise teaching to KS3 assessments, when they would only have limited importance for the institution, and no import at all in themselves for the child.

The only mechanism, perhaps, for making that happen would be to make Ofsted place emphasis on KS3 data within school-by-school inspections. But, while the inspectorate has indeed been concerned about preparation for GCSEs happening too early, this seems to tally with a championing by Amanda Spielman, as chief inspector, of schools moving away from assessment-driven education. So it is hard to see HMCI suddenly becoming enthusiastic about countering that with another test.

Cap on hours

On the suggestion that the cap on teachers’ work hours be removed, this also has been mooted in the past and has not happened. However, in this case, Gove was an advocate for the suggested policy, rather than an opponent.

Back in 2013, as Education Secretary Gove had submitted evidence to the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) arguing for the cap in the nationally-agreed contract, which limits teachers’ working year to 1,265 hours, to be scrapped.

Gove had argued that pupils in East Asia were “often learning for many more hours than their peers in England” as he advocated the move, though as I wrote the following year for the Financial Times, in reality lower secondary pupils in Japan and South Korea, on which the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development collects data alongside its PISA tests, received less teaching time than did their counterparts in England.

In any case, the STRB rejected his call to remove the cap, stating that: “We note that teachers currently work additional hours beyond directed classroom sessions and there is already flexibility for heads to deploy teachers according to the needs of their pupils.”

It should be noted that academies – now making up just under half of all institutions - already have the flexibility not to abide by the cap. Some trusts, such as Ark Schools, have long had a longer working year stipulated in teachers’ contracts, with a longer compulsory working week as a result for staff. But as far as I am aware this has remained a minority option, even within the sector which has the freedom to implement it.

And the policy which the scrapping of the limit would reportedly facilitate – the use of an extended teaching day in schools in response to the pandemic – itself seems to pose problems, as recent articles on this website about Future Academies ditching such an approach for its primaries seem to underline.

Academies

On the academies policy itself, the Guardian reported: “Ministers are looking at way to accelerate the academisation programme, to turn schools still maintained by local authorities into academies, though there remain concerns about the capacity of existing trusts to take on more schools and the number of academies that are failing.”

Well, yes, to the caveats in the quotation above. And it should be noted that there seems not to have been a flood of schools towards academy status since the last great ministerial push on this, when Zahawi’s predecessor, Gavin Williamson, talked about wanting all schools to become MATs back in April.

As well as this website’s tracking of the official data on this, a survey by the National Governance Association reportedly found last month that only five per cent of maintained school governors had plans to join a multi-academy trust in future.

If the DfE were, though, to abandon the notion of trying to encourage schools towards academy status, in favour of something more along the lines of forcing, there is the memory of 2016 in front of it, when Nicky Morgan, another former Secretary of State, had to back off plans to compel academisation for all after a huge revolt, including from Conservative MPs and councils.

Overall, academisation is at a point of relative stasis, with thousands of schools having academised, but with little sign that many of the remaining thousands are about to join them. Yes, the government would like to “accelerate” it, but, again, there’s a sense of “we’ve been here before” to this idea.

Ofsted

Finally, on Ofsted, the Guardian reported that there are plans to give Ofsted “greater powers, in line with commitments in the Conservatives’ 2019 election manifesto. The party pledged an extra £10 million to extend individual school inspections from two to three days, pilot no-notice inspections and train more inspectors”.

On this, the “no-notice inspections” is another idea which seems to come around from time to time, but which tends to hit problems when it does.

On extending Ofsted inspections from two days to three, although this is unlikely to be popular in classrooms, personally I think this is one proposal which in principle might have some merit, having been concerned in the past about inspections which have been known not to investigate properly goings-on in schools, with pressure on inspectors’ time sometimes cited as a factor.

However, as I understand it, inspection teams are now under huge strain just to get through their existing workload since Ofsted re-started routine inspections this term, while there has also been great pressure on the supply of new inspectors. While extra cash would help, whether £10 million would be enough would be an interesting question.

And, as with all these proposals, there is the question, too, of whether it would be the best use of limited resources.

Beyond the politics of picking a fight with unions who of course will not welcome them, there seems, then, little to say for these policies.  

Overall, when schools have so many other challenges as they seek to plot a recovery from the impact of the pandemic, this run-through of tired ideas seems unlikely to be top of many people’s list of initiatives worth much of a look.

*This quote seems to come from the conclusions of the Cambridge Primary Review, the weighty independent inquiry led by Professor Robin Alexander which was unflinchingly critical about education policymaking under both Labour and the coalition. Sadly, the idea that its findings were taken on board by ministers may not be realistic.