All hands on deck, but for what?

Though the effect of continued testing is to raise test standards, some of this effect can be attributed to increasing familiarity with the test methods by both teachers and learners, increasing emphasis on preparation for the tests, and instruction specifically focused on the predicted outcomes of the tests.
Sean Neill, University of Warwick

Educational standards are being defined narrowly as that which can be monitored by inspectors and measured by national tests. Much as this approach is celebrated by government, only 6% of teachers in a 2003 survey considered them to be a reliable way of evaluating children's achievements. In the same survey, over 90% of primary teachers said tests increase their workload and make children feel stressed. Although this level of testing is not considered necessary elsewhere in the UK, for England the government is insistent that tests help 'drive improvement in all schools and for all children'. Nevertheless, as Sean Neill suggests, it could be that children are getting better at taking tests, rather than better at English and Maths, and that teachers are getting better at teaching to the tests.

The testing regime was bitterly opposed by teachers when it was introduced, and it seems that a decade and a half later they remain unconvinced. Teachers, however, are left with little alternative but to teach to central expectations: to teach the prescribed curriculum in the given way in order to achieve 'high stakes' test results. Those who have taught in different times must be wondering where professionalism is to be found in all this.

The new professionalism appears to be based on the elevation of what is to be taught as laid down by government. Teachers and classroom support staff are 'instructors' who dispense this curriculum. New professionalism is about the skill of delivering and monitoring the effects of this on children. It seems to be more a managing than a teaching role - hence David Blunkett's phrase 'teachers as learning managers'. The problem with new professionalism is the extent to which it removes teachers and others from local decisions about curriculum content and approaches to teaching and learning - this cannot be in the interests of children's deeper learning.

Old professionalism is based on the notion that education arises primarily out of an interaction - teachers and children working 'on' education together with high regard for the pupil's own interests. The source of professionalism lay largely with the teacher's on-the-spot judgements. Old professionalism, however, gave insufficient attention to the content of education and individual teachers were often left alone with the vast task of defining this for themselves.

Sadly, these two conceptions occupy somewhat polar positions. As is often the case in education, the pendulum swings much too far. Teachers in the past needed to attend more to the curriculum, but they also needed to open up their practice to parents and paraprofessionals. New professionalism has addressed these issues. However, there is now an urgent need to restore a central aspect of old professionalism, namely the freedom to make a curriculum interesting and meaningful to pupils. We fear that teaching to targets and to tests has caused much current learning in primary schools to be narrowly focused - a form of training rather than education in any profound sense. To deny teachers professional judgement through the low trust notion of 'delivering a curriculum' is to take the heart out of teaching and the soul out of education.

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