Examination of Witnesses (Questions 328
- 339)
MONDAY 18 FEBRUARY 2008
JIM KNIGHT
MP AND RALPH
TABBERER
Q328 Chairman: Now that people have
had time to settle down, I welcome the Minister for Schools and
Learners, Jim Knight, and Ralph Tabberer to our proceedings. Our
inquiry into testing and assessment is getting particularly interesting.
We sometimes say to ourselves that we know that we are getting
under the skin of an inquiry when we feel that we are more dangerous
than we were when we started, because we have a little knowledge.
We have had some very good evidence sessions, and we hope that
this one will be of even more value than the others. Do either
of you want to say anything before we get started?
Jim Knight: As is traditional,
I will not make a statement, because I do not want to delay the
Committee. On the letter that I sent to you today and circulated
to other members of the Committee, as certain portions of the
media have shown an interest in this subject, some clarification
might be helpful so that you have more facts to get you beyond
some of the fiction that you may have read in the newspapers.
The letter sets out the timetable for publishing an interim evaluation
of the single level tests in the autumn. In general terms, we
are very pleased with the progress of that particular pilot. Obviously,
I will be delighted to answer your questions on that and anything
else that you want to ask.
Chairman: Ralph?
Ralph Tabberer: I have no introduction.
Q329 Chairman: May I start us off
by saying that this testing and assessment all seems to be a bit
of a mess? We have taken evidence, which you must have read—your
officials will certainly have summarised it for you. We have had
so much evidence that shows that people are teaching to the tests
and using the tests inappropriately, and for outcomes that were
never intended. A lot of people have criticised the level of testing
and assessment, and we are looking at whether it is fundamentally
effective in improving the life chances of the children in our
schools.
Jim Knight: As you would expect,
I do not agree with you that it is a mess. Naturally, I have heard
a lot of the evidence. I cannot be accountable for what your witnesses
say, but I can offer you a bunch of other people who might say
something different. In respect of teaching to the test, there
is a yes and a no answer. In general terms, we are pretty clear
about our priorities in testing. We want people to focus on maths,
English and science and to get them right, which is why they are
the subjects that are tested. In that regard, we want people to
teach to those priorities. However, the vast swathe of teachers
and schools up and down the country use tests appropriately. In
order to help those who do not and to improve best practice generally,
we are investing £150 million over the next three years on
assessment for learning to improve the way in which the tests
are used. In respect of the charge that tests are used inappropriately
or for too many different things, it could be done differently.
As some people argue, you could judge national performance on
the basis of some kind of sample test. I am sure that that would
be fine with regard to judgments around the national performance
of the school system, but testing is about not only that, but
parents being able to see how well their child is doing in the
school system, pupils being able to see how well they are doing
against a national comparator and parents being able to see how
well individual schools are doing. If you want to do those sorts
of things, some people would argue that alongside sampling you
would have some form of teacher assessment. However, using teacher
assessment to hold schools accountable would put quite a significant
burden on teachers and assessment, so there would need to be some
form of accreditation on how the assessment is done to ensure
that it is fair and transparent and that it compares nationally.
When I look at the matter and begin to unravel the alternatives
and think about how they would work in practice, I find that the
current SATs are much more straightforward—everybody would
understand it. They are used for a series of things, and there
might be some compromise involved, but the system is straightforward
and simple, and it shows what our priorities are and gives us
accountability at every level. I do not think that it is a mess
at all.
Q330 Chairman: If you look internationally,
you will see how such a system looks like an English obsession.
Most other countries in the world do not test and assess as much
as we do. The Welsh and the Scots do not do so, and nor do most
of the countries with which we normally compare ourselves.
Jim Knight: I visited Alberta
in November and found that it tests just as much as we do. In
fact, we have shifted on the Key Stage 1 test in the past 10 years,
whereas Alberta has continued with externally marked tests that
are conducted on a single day. Alberta is one, but we could include
Singapore.
Q331 Chairman: My brother and sister
were born in Alberta, so I know a bit about it. It is hardly comparable
to England, is it?
Jim Knight: In terms of international
comparisons, which is what the question was about, Alberta is
out there alongside the usual suspects—
Q332 Chairman: I meant countries
like ours, such as Germany, France, Spain, Italy or the United
States.
Jim Knight: Some parts of the
United States, such as New York, do quite a bit of testing. Every
education system is slightly different, and it is difficult to
draw such international comparisons and say that this or that
is exactly the same from one to the other. We have a system of
accountability and testing; some countries test, such as Singapore
or Alberta, but others do not. We think that we have struck the
balance. Ofsted inspects schools, the Qualifications and Curriculum
Authority independently monitors and regulates the tests, and
the Office for National Statistics independently publishes the
results of the tests, so the process is perfectly separated from
Government. There is evidence that standards are consistently
improving as a result of the use of the tests and there is good
accountability to parents, which is important.
Q333 Chairman: The Government's watchword
when it comes to education and other policies is "evidence-based".
When you look at the evidence, are you sure that the testing and
assessment method, which seems to have been uniquely championed
in this country, is effective? Do you have any doubts at all about
it? Is it successful? Does it give children in our schools a better
experience and education than that provided by our competitors?
Jim Knight: I think that it is
successful. When I look at how standards have improved since tests
were introduced and since we increased accountability through
tests and tables, I can say that they have worked. That is not
to say that the situation cannot be improved. The Government are
piloting, through Making Good Progress, single-level tests
and testing when ready. As we signalled in the Children's Plan,
finding that those pilots are working may mean that we can evolve
SATs one step further. That does not mean that we want to retreat
from tests.
Q334 Mr. Slaughter: Picking up on
what the Chairman has said, if I understood you correctly, you
said that in relation to national policy or, indeed, national
standards, which is whether overall standards of education and
learning are rising, there are alternatives to testing every pupil
in every school—in other words, it could be done by inspection,
sampling or the like. A valid criticism might be that there is
too much testing, which distorts the learning process, and that
you could do it another way as regards national results and policy.
Are you are defending testing every school on the basis of the
effect on that school? Did I understand that correctly?
Jim Knight: Yes, I think that
you probably have understood correctly. It is worth saying that
no pupil spends more than 2% of their time taking tests.[1]
Assessment, including tests, is and always will be part of teaching.
The question then is whether we should have national tests and
whether the amount of time spent taking and preparing for national
tests is too stressful. I do not buy that. I think that life has
its stresses and that it is worth teaching a bit about that in
school. I do not get the argument. I visit enough schools where
tests are used extremely well by teachers to drive forward and
progress learning. In the end, I flatly reject the argument that
there is too much testing.
Q335 Mr. Slaughter: It is the Government,
not us, who are thinking of relieving the burden of vivas in foreign
languages. Obviously, you are sensitive to the stress on the poor
dears.
Jim Knight: I am delighted that
you have brought that up. Certainly, the move that we are making
on the oral examination for modern foreign languages is because
of not stress, but standards. Ron Dearing has said that hit-and-miss,
one-off, 20-minute tests in which you are coached to rote-learn
bits of French, or whichever subject is being studied, are not
serving us well. Controlled teacher assessment during the course
that tests different scenarios in which people use languages is
likely to improve standards significantly, which is why we want
to do it. It is not because of stress.
Q336 Mr. Slaughter: I meant the stress
on the examiners—the native speakers listening to their
languages being mangled in those exams. Let us talk about individual
schools. You gave the example of information for parents, so that
they can look at league tables and select a school. That is free-market
education, is it not? It would aid parents in selecting and migrating
to schools, particularly if they have the time, knowledge, access
to the Internet and all that sort of business in order to get
hold of such information. Is that not part of the postcode lottery
for schools or of the segregation or decomprehensivisation of
schools?
Jim Knight: A lot of implicit
values are tied up in that. I will not say yes, but it very much
informs parents, which is a good thing. We explicitly want to
move to a position in which parents choose schools, rather than
schools choose parents, and I have debated that with the Committee
in the past. We believe in parental choice—we can rehearse
those arguments, if you like—but phrases such as "postcode
lottery" involve separate issues from whether we should publish
data about schools. Quite frankly, if we did not publish such
data, there would be an outcry that we were hiding things, and
the media would publish them anyway. I think that it is better
that we put them out in a controlled and transparent way so that
they can be scrutinised by bodies, such as this Committee, rather
than leaving it to the vagaries of how newspapers choose to publish
them.
Q337 Mr. Slaughter: Looking at the
positive side of that, as far as the Department and the inspectorate
are concerned, do you think that part of the role of testing in
individual schools is to identify the performance of schools and
of the teaching staff within them in order to alert you to failure
or underperformance in particular?
Jim Knight: I write to the top
100 most-improved schools in the country every year. Testing helps
me to identify success. I also keep an eye on those that are not
doing so well, and my colleague, Andrew Adonis, does the same—perhaps
he is the bad cop to my good cop. However, the data help us to
manage the system. We are accountable to Parliament and are elected
by the public in order to continue the improvements of the past
10 years in our education system.
Q338 Mr. Slaughter: I suppose that
what I am getting at is that if—you might not be with me
on this—one of the effects of publishing data is that parents
who are savvy enough gravitate towards or even mutate certain
schools, which results in more of a division between good schools
and bad schools in an area, that would at least allow you, or
professional educationalists, to identify underperforming schools
and to do something about them through, for example, the Academy
Programme.
Jim Knight: Yes, it allows us
to identify areas where we need to intervene. If we did not have
the tests and tables, something would be missing from the body
of information that we recommend that parents look at when making
decisions about which schools to choose for their children, but
they should not be seen in isolation. They are very simple and
easy for people to understand—they are easier than leafing
through Ofsted reports, which we also recommend—although
perhaps not as easy as chatting to other parents in the neighbourhood
or going to visit the school itself, which are the sorts of things
we expect parents to do. However articulate parents are, and however
much technology they have at home, those are the sorts of things
that we expect them to do when choosing schools for their children.
Q339 Mr. Slaughter: One aim of the
Academy Programme, as I understand it, is to target underperforming
schools, particularly in areas of deprivation, and to put good
schools—whether new or replacement schools—into such
areas. Do you see tests in the same way? Do they enable you to
focus resources on areas of deprivation or underperformance, rather
than simply to present information to third parties so that they
can deal with such things?
Jim Knight: Undoubtedly, they
are an indicator that we use. They are not the only indicator—we,
too, look at Ofsted reports and other factors, such as attendance
rates, when assessing how well a school is doing—but they
are undoubtedly the prime indicator. We have explicitly set targets
for the number of schools with 25% or fewer pupils getting five
A*s to C at GCSE and we now have the targets for 30% to get five
higher-level GSCEs, including English and maths. Ten or 11 years
ago, half of schools did not have more than 30% of pupils getting
five higher-level GCSEs including English and maths. That is now
21% of schools, but we have further to go. That measure helps
us to target schools, and we are doing work on that right now.
1 See the answer to Q 368 for correction and clarification
of this figure. Back
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