Morning Star.png Dogma Imposed on Schools Under Cover of Outcries for Choice Ken Jones, The Morning Star, London, 26 March 2016 It is 28 years since a Conservative government introduced the Education Reform Act. Those with long memories will remember the rhetoric of "choice" and "freedom" that accompanied its introduction. Elated by its victory in the 1987 election, Thatcher's ministers promised to liberate education from what they presented as the grip of progressive teachers and radical local education authorities. Market principles would come to the rescue of a school system in decline: after 1988, in a situation where the survival of schools depended upon their capacity to attract students, the choices of parents would trump what Thatcher presented as the ideological preferences of professionals. But there was another side to the Education Reform Act. Alongside "freedom," it also introduced a much greater measure of central state control. And it is this latter tendency which has shaped the deep history of change since 1988. In England - though not in Wales and Scotland, where devolution has spared schools from the Conservative programme - government after government has worked to tighten the processes through which the work of schools is defined, measured, assessed and directed at the centre. "School led"? Not. Teachers are the operatives of this process; parents are mere spectators. Nowhere is this clearer than around issues of curriculum and assessment. The government is fond of saying that we have a school-led system. In fact, the hands of government are all over the schools, reaching into decisions about school curriculums and students' learning which should be nothing to do with politicians, and designing an education based on nostalgia for a time that has never existed, except in the imagination of Conservatives. When Schools Minister Nick Gibb publishes circulars on the correct use of exclamation marks and makes statements about the placing of commas in long numbers, he reveals something not just about his own controlling personality, but of the logic of the system at whose pinnacle he sits. These are the policies that have stirred the anger and dismay of primary teachers. The new system for testing primary children is based on a badly designed curriculum, heavy with inappropriate detail. The tests have been chaotically introduced, so that teachers are unclear about the standards that children are meant to be working to. The results of primary assessment cannot be taken as valid and reliable measures of the attainment of pupils and the work of schools. Dogmatic A dogmatic curriculum is being imposed on primary schools. Broad and creative learning is being sacrificed to serve the needs of "literacy" and "numeracy." Teachers have spelled this out in hundreds of blogs and tweets. Primary teacher Stephanie Northen, on the website of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, writes that: "the new tests and assessments have been designed, not to discover and celebrate what children can do, but to catch them out." Megan Quinn, a teacher in Camden, writes: "The testing system is utterly useless as far as I am concerned. It tells me nothing useful. It doesn't help prepare children for secondary school. It restricts and narrows and stops children developing the skills they need. It damages the mental health of our young people. The current system sends many children away with the feeling that however hard they try they will never be good enough - unforgivable. It sends others away thinking they know everything because they got full marks on a test - not useful." That is why 80,000 people have signed petitions calling for tests at Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 to be cancelled, and why the NUT conference this weekend will be repeating that call, and committing itself to a movement against primary testing on a scale larger than ever before. . Ken Jones is emeritus professor of education at Goldsmiths, University of London. He works for the National Union of Teachers. From: <http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-d2a9-A-dogmatic-curriculum-for-primary -schools#.VvYSIeJ9600> http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-d2a9-A-dogmatic-curriculum-for-primary- schools#.VvYSIeJ9600 -- -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. 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