The debate on the national curriculum testing and assessment arrangements, which has raged since the first pilot key stage 1 standard assessment tasks, has been bound up with the restoration of teachers’ professional judgment and self-respect.
The Government failed to anticipate the workload implications. It refused to recognise teachers’ anxieties about the effects of testing on the curriculum and about the use of results as school performance indicators and in league tables.
The boycott by members of the National Union of Teachers was part of a much wider battle to restore to the profession, ownership of the processes of teaching and learning. The NUT has always conducted its campaign on educational and professional, as well as workload, grounds.
Although Sir Ron Dearing was given the freedom to revise the national curriculum, he was prevented by John Patten from properly examining the purposes of the testing and assessment arrangements. One of the NUT’s most consistent arguments has been that while there has been a review of the curriculum, no such review has been conducted of the asessment and testing arrangements.
The NUT has been the only teachers’ organisation to seek its members’ views at every stage of the campaign. Its surveys of members’ views and its commissioned opinion poll of teachers’ views generally, showed the extent to which the professional views of teachers were being ignored by the Government. The opinion poll demonstrated that the NUT was speaking for the whole profession.
This consistent reflection of members’ views, and the fact that those views have acted as a proxy for those of the entire profession, has kept the issue alive. At its meeting with the Education Secretary in December, the NUT drew attention to its survey of its members’ attitudes to the 1995 arrangements. The dialogue with Mrs Shephard was constructive and professional. Considerable advances were made.
For the first time, in the words of the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority, “a full and thorough review of the school tests for 7, 11 and 14-year-olds” will take place. Within that review, in liaison with the Office for Standards in Education, these will be an evaluation of the impact of the tests on teaching and learning in schools. This evaluation will include the effects of external markers.
She emphasised that consultation with teachers must take place on the evaluation. This Dearing-style review will include regional conferences in the summer term for teachers on assessment issues. Teacher organisations will be invited to gather their members’ views.
In re-emphasising that KS2 test and assessment results would not be published in 1995, the Education Secretary made it clear that they had to be “bedded in” before a date for publication of the league tables based on the results could be announced. On “value-added” measures of achievement, she recognised that teacher organisations had a contribution to make separate from current academic contributions.
The union drew Mrs Shephard’s attention to the danger that test results at 11 could be used for selection of pupils by secondary schools. Mrs Shephard stressed that selection was not the purpose of the tests.
It was made clear that background factors such as social deprivation could be taken into account by the Government in future work on pupil achievement.
There is another legacy of John Patten’s ill-considered introduction of the 1995 arrangements for testing and assessment which has to be addressed. The Grant for Education Support and Training budget has been raided to pay for the new arrangements. This must be a focus of the review.
It is essential that the union continues to protect its members against excessive workload arising from testing and assessment. Now, however, having argued for a full review and consistently voiced professional and educational concerns, it is vital that the NUT can participate in that review. The NUT is, therefore, balloting members on the recommendation that they agree to undertake the 1995 arrangements.
The union’s campaign for the recognition of teachers’ professionalism has changed the situation. The NUT has shifted the debate on testing and assessment into a new and fertile territory. The establishment of a full and thorough review is a significant achievement for the NUT. It gives the profession a fresh opportunity to carry forward its arguments for sound assessment.
Doug McAvoy is general secretary of the National Union of Teachers
