I hope you don’t mind, but I must
get this off my chest.
As it was exam time (indeed two
of our grandchildren were at that moment wrestling with maths and Spanish), the
conversation was about the ever-increasing stress that young people were under
with the proliferation of testing from the earliest years. This appears to be
one contributory factor to the disturbing rise in young people’s mental health
problems. No sooner are they out of the exam room than they are on to their
phones comparing answers. But more fundamental than that is the constant focus
on exams and preparing for exams throughout school careers – because of course
schools are rated on exam success rate, and as a result the teaching is skewed
from education to exam-performance. What a wretched perversion! I think the
minister justified it by saying life was full of competition and kids need to
be prepared for it.
And of course he mentioned the
PISA ratings (the Programme for International Student Assessment – devised by
the OECD, which tests 15-year olds in maths, reading and science and then ranks
countries by their performance). He reckoned that the UK’s rating was
improving. How pernicious the whole system is! Our government is obsessed by
our PISA rating. It therefore puts pressure on schools by ranking them, by
results. Governing bodies and heads therefore pressurise teachers to get
results from their pupils. And the ones on whom all that pressure eventually
falls are the students themselves. It’s the inverse of that old saying, “Big
fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite’um; little fleas have lesser
fleas, and so ad infinitum.” In the case of schools it’s the students who bear
the weight of the pressure of the teachers, the governors, the politicians and
the self-appointed OECD on their backs… And we’re surprised that they have
mental health problems?
Oh, but don’t worry. The Minister
had an answer. Counsellors. The Government is providing money so that schools
can appoint counsellors. Now I value counsellors and therapists most highly,
and I’m very pleased that there will be funding for school counselling
services. I’ll be interested to hear how their recruitment gets on, though as
one listener suggested they will be easier and cheaper to recruit than physics
teachers. BUT it seemed to me rather like a government faced with a cholera
epidemic saying, “Don’t worry. We’ll pay for a lot more nurses. Then everything
will be hunky-dory.” No, in face of an epidemic, if you can, you sort out the
water supply and the sanitation. You go to the source of the problem. And in
the case of schools the problem is excessive academically oriented testing.
Of course,
Mr Gibb had an answer for this too: doing away with continuous assessment
(which could be part of some courses) relieved the pressure experienced by
students. I was very glad when Jane Garvey quietly pointed out that the
opposite was true for some pupils for whom facing a single critical exam was
far more stressful. Counsellors patching up students who have cracked under
exams is not the answer, Minister. The problem is the system and that is where
your attention should be focused. A very good place to start would be to jettison
your obsession with arbitrary PISA rankings (as suggested in Professor Aeron
Davis’s excellent and eminently readable book, Reckless Opportunists – Elites at the End of the Establishment).
Our children’s well-being is more important than that.
