Life after levels

Life after levels might feel chaotic at first, but if schools ask for government input, they could get more than they bargained for, says Mick Waters...

There is some consternation in schools about the lack of information on life after levels. The government’s belief in schools’ autonomy and the ministerial attitude about not getting involved in detail has put the onus on each school to decide what to do when the levels go. Given that the same ministers in the same government have recently offered detailed advice on how to punish children and are very clear about how pupils should calculate in mathematics or learn phonics, some have cynically suggested the reason life after levels is being left to schools is that ministers haven’t a clue what to do. Don’t you believe it; they are politicians. They are not worried about levels at all, but they are concerned with power and yet more centralisation of the school system.

First, they criticise the system they invented. Levels were set in place in the late 1980s when the national curriculum was devised to help teachers help children make progress. Assessment came later, as did technology, data, targets, floor targets, levels of progress and sub levels…along with the relentless focus upon all of these in the inspection process. Ministers are now questioning levels as imprecise measures and they are sceptical about sub-levels and even the vagueness of measuring progress as we do. That’s rich after many schools have failed and heads and teachers have lost their jobs on the basis of these figures.

Next ministers say it is up to the professionals to do what is best for children. All the school has to do is demonstrate pupil progress against national curriculum requirements, even though academies are not required to follow the national curriculum.

These two steps are classic political manoeuvres. First take away the things people moan about and, second, tell them to invent their own system.

What then happens is that the people who cried out for freedom don’t know what to do because they have been shackled for so long. They dare not step forward in case they step out of line. Some brave souls try something new and others copy so a few prototypes develop and the rest cry, ‘Which is best? Please guide our autonomy’.

This will happen with levels. Because of the fear of inspection, many schools will cry out for guidance, many systems will evolve and schools, possibly via unions, will call for order from this chaos.

Here are some predictions. After a year or so of ‘chaos’ and uncertainty, ministers will ‘respond’ to the concerns of teachers and provide some pilots of new assessment processes. The unions will celebrate a ‘victory for common sense’ now that every school will not have to re- invent the wheel. The new, easily managed and understood system will be heralded as world leading practice. What will it be?

Ministers will suggest that a yearly assessment is probably the most sensible course of action. They will call it ‘straightforward’ or ‘non-bureaucratic’ and insist it is an indicator of progress made. The yearly assessment could be accompanied by a year-by-year set of work books to take children through the essentials of the national curriculum. These might even be divided into 39 weekly exercises and there could be assessments periodically. The assessments could be done online so that results could be analysed and spewed back for the school and parents pretty well instantly.

Scores could determine where pupils ranked against each other, possibly on a national level. To make it easy to understand, children could be ranked in 10 ‘deciles’ to show their performance comparative to all pupils in the country. The school’s performance could then be measured on how children had risen or fallen in the decile rankings.

We need to stop making it sound worthy by calling it assessment, which is a palatable word for something that has become far from pupil focused. What has developed over the last 25 years is not even testing of pupils. It is crude product control to measure the school.

The colossal industry that is SATs costs many millions of pounds annually to measure each school against the rest. The tests, though carefully devised and piloted, offer a 15 per cent chance of a child being placed in the wrong level, which will affect opportunity for life. It is right that we do something different, but the something different will probably not be about assessment. It will be about more centralised government control of learning and product control of schools.

We should be careful what we wish for when complaining of a lack of direction in life after levels.

Mick Waters’ latest book, Thinking Allowed on Schooling (Independent Thinking Press, 2013) deals with this and other schooling developments.

About the author

Mick Waters is Professor of Education at Wolverhampton University. He was Director of Curriculum at the QCA from 2005-2009.