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Academy programme is still unproven
• WHAT concerns me about both pro-academy letters (Results have improved, March 13), is the way the statistics and quotes were used to try to validate the still-unproven academy programme.
Simultaneously, there is an acknowledgement that education and how it’s to be delivered, needs to be looked at by an education commission about to be set up by Westminster.
An in-depth MPs’ committee of enquiry into academies and trust schools was published last year, looking at the data provided by schools willing to open their books.
Academies are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, and do not have to publish a breakdown of their results.
It highlighted the 12-fold increase in taking up vocational qualifications (GVNQs) usually in ICT and applied science, While there is nothing wrong with vocational qualifications, there is a major problem with how each GVNQ intermediate pass, is judged to have an over-inflated equivalence to four A*-C grades at GCSE level. Thus a sudden improvement in GCSE pass rates may be a sleight of hand, and not in reality a marked improvement in academic attainment.
Conflicting messages are therefore being given.
“Outstanding” Ofsted reports are countered by schools being put on the Ed Ball’s “hit-list” of failing schools (which includes two academies in Westminster) while damning Ofsted reports are sometimes given to schools with higher attainment levels and not on the “hit-list” as in Pimlico’s case.
Until government and local councillors stop seeking the quick fixes of statistical evidence to show “improvements” in results, the “social mobility” concerns they profess to hold, will never be addressed.
Equipping our youngsters with tokenistic examination results, will do nothing to help those aspiring to university, or improving their ‘life chances.’
Our hard-working teachers, meanwhile, are caught in the middle of political dogma regarding the over-evaluation of educational outcomes and data, of target-setting and tick boxes, at the prey of statisticians.
Do we want our kids to have an education, acquiring knowledge and finding out what interests them or do we want them to be simply an exam fodder statistics?
Georgina Schueller
Address supplied
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