My dad taught Philosophy and Sociology all of his professional life, and in his retirement continues to study and think about these subjects. He recently gave a talk about the work of John Gray to the Erasmus Darwin Society in Lichfield, Staffordshire.

John Gray is currently Professor of European Thought at the LSE, and has been an outspoken and controversial academic throughout his career. He has written about a great breadth of topics, but the thread of thought that ties his work together is his rejection of our contemporary belief in the progress of mankind.

The prepared text of my dad’s overview of Gray’s views is an excellent introductory text, with a good bibliography pointing towards further reading. I would strongly recommend this text to students as an overview of his thought.

John Gray, An Appreciation

The Education Guardian reports that the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust urge school exam overhaul. It is encouraging to hear another voice added to the growing clamour for change.

The SSAT argue that the government has “consistently exaggerated the technical rigour of national assessments and the GCSE“. They argue that by changing the curriculum and therefore changing the content that is being tested, it becomes extremely problematic to maintain and compare standards.

The SSAT also argue that there are testing cause a degree of stress and that the level of continued stress that students are exposed to has become unreasonable and counter-productive. In place of the SATs they suggest using sample testing of randomly selected pupils to monitor performance.

The response from the DCSF is staggering: “… we are not looking at sample testing of randomly selected pupils … It is hard to see how any sample of children could be truly representative of one school … the idea that children are over tested is not a view that the government accepts … we don’t believe that in this day and age parents can be expected to have hidden from them the real achievements of their children at school.”

If the governmental body responsible for our curriculum do not understand sample testing, then I am deeply concerned with the science curriculum; if do not understand how sample testing can give representative data, then they do not understand science. Science is based wholly upon the statistical analysis of sample data. Given a sample and the overall population size, we can very accurately calculate how representative that sample is. Simply, this argument is nonsense.

The original premise for introducing SATs was as a means of measuring schools performance. The DCSF statement concedes that they have now become GCSEs for younger students - performance assessments for the students and their parents to measure themselves with.

Despite this the government does not accept that children are over tested. I am absolutely and utterly convinced that the government is wrong about this. Sadly, there is no easy way of measuring what level of stress is acceptable to expose children to. However, I would have thought that until tests GCSEs, the natural inclinations of all parents and teachers would be to minimise unnecessary stress. This is not the government’s inclination.

Channel 4 News has recently run a major report about how low-achievers are being left behind in the school system.

It is encouraging that the media is starting to pick up on the reality that testing and league tables helps only the government and not the students. As far as I am concerned, this is patently obvious for the majority of teachers in schools. The testing regime was a top-down initiative which never really had the students’ best interests at heart.

In the report, Mary Hilton of Cambridge University argued that in their last year of primary schools, children in England are “trained and drilled for the tests and its disastrous”. Ask any parent whether they would prefer their child to experience motivating and engaging ideas in classrooms or test revision, and they would all want the engaging ideas… that is unless they had become caught up in a system whereby they worry that their child will be disadvantaged in some way by not being drilled for the test.

This is a problem: testing regimes bootstrap themselves; by introducing a mandatory testing regime, everybody must be seen to perform at least at their level of expectation within that regime, but everyone will strive to perform better. Therefore increasingly attention will be diverted towards the regime. More and more people spend more and more time focussing on the test rather than on what the test was introducted to test.

SATS help the government because they make measurable the achievements of schools. One ought to have reason to pause at this idea. What exactly has been measured?

The improvement that any student achieves while at school is due to a combination of three factors: the speed of their natural development, the nourishment (in every sense) and education that their parents provide, and the education that the school provides. At the very best measuring students’ academic performances does not measure what the school adds to the students. The clearest example of this is that in comfortable middle class areas where, other things being equal, parents tend to have more time and more knowledge about how to educate their children, schools perform better than in deprived areas. In what sense can SATs be thought to be comparing the two schools’ performances by comparing their SATs results? Value Added measurements attempt to get around that problem, but it is not really clear that they do.

Do tests actually measure understanding? At their most sophisticated, testing measures understanding by asking questions which catch students off guard or are unusual in some way. Then the student must adapt using what they know to this new scenario. There is a good reason why at around 16-18, as learners begin to move into an abstract sphere of understanding, that the first meaningful tests that students sit occur in cultures around the world. Before then, tests are likely not to measure understanding.

Driven by the desire for all testing to be standardised and comparable, tests have increasingly become tests of memorisation. Testing 11 year olds will inevitably test learnable skills not creative understanding. Thus, SAT questions are familiar and routine. Performance in answering routine questions can be improved through drill. It is not unreasonable to argue that one of the things tests actually measure is the amount that a child has been drilled for the test.

What is worse, Channel 4 News reports that experts argue that the testing regime is actually particularly bad for lower achievers at school. Not only are they counter-productive, they are particularly counter-productive for students at the bottom of the pile. One can only hope that the clamour to overhaul this current system will grow and grow.