School league tables are not the way
18th April 2009

Just before Easter my school hosted Jo and Nancy, two young teachers from
England who are holidaying in New Zealand. They loved our school. Talking to them I heard the same comparisons between schools in England and New Zealand that I have heard many times in recent years, and which match my own experiences of teaching in both countries.

Given half an opportunity Jo and Nancy would swap their English classrooms for kiwi ones in a moment. Why? Because education in England has been hammered flat by high-stakes testing, relentless standardisation and a ‘blame and shame’ culture that classifies schools as winners or losers.
In England a broad curriculum - one that teaches art, sport, social studies and values - has been sacrificed for a narrow focus on literacy and numeracy, in which children’s achievement is measured against highly prescribed national standards.
Teachers churn out lessons prepared for them by specialised curriculum writers, all
their energies devoted to hauling their students over the standard, driven by performance pay, a combative audit office and the fear of their school slipping down the local league tables.

After nearly 15 years of this model there are many who believe education in England is in crisis. Teachers are demoralised and children emerge from schools ill-equipped to take their place in the world or, worse, with a pervading sense of failure. While commentators cry out for a more flexible and imaginative curriculum and primary teachers threaten to boycott the annual examinations, Gordon Brown’s government seems more intent on debating how much homework four year olds should be doing.

Recently our own Minister of Education, Anne Tolley, said she is happy that the new national standards in literacy and numeracy for New Zealand schools will lead to higher-stakes assessments and school performance being ranked and published in league tables.
There is nothing wrong with standards in education. Schools have always assessed children against standards of some sort. But there are two issues with national standards.
The first is the intention to set national standards only in literacy and numeracy. Actually standards will be set only in a few aspects of literacy and numeracy – reading, writing and number skills. Standards will not be developed for oral language, geometry or measurement skills. Much less will they be developed for science, technology, art, physical education, social studies, Maori, drama or dance.
And because school performance will be judged against the national standards there will be a tendency for reading, writing and number skills to dominate the primary school curriculum. These skills are important but they do not comprise the well-rounded education we owe our children if they are to compete in an era where creativity and problem-solving will be the measure of success.

The second issue is how widely school achievement information should be published. Mrs Tolley proposes that the data schools gather be minced together to produce a generalised rating that the media can pounce on to produce league tables.

League tables are destructive. They say nothing about the value a school adds to a child’s learning. They strengthen stereotypes about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ schools and widen social inequalities. They sacrifice the interests of our children to an ideology that believes learning is a commodity and that schools can be managed like businesses trading on a sharemarket.
Mrs Tolley’s ideas place our successful education system at risk. While countries that have embraced high-stakes assessment and reporting struggle to extricate themselves from the mess we should not repeat their folly. Jo and Nancy will tell you we should be learning from England’s failures – not repeating them.