Member News
Philip Parkin, general secretary of Voice: the union for education professionals, comments on the children, schools and families committee report 'School Accountability'
With its report School Accountability, the children, schools and families committee has once again hit the nail on the head – recognising what is obvious and practical to school staff, but which the government cannot or will not see.
Schools are being smothered by a suffocating tide of initiatives, targets and tests from a headline-obsessed government, and inspected by a creaking, overblown bureaucratic regime.
Schools are crying out to get away from teaching-to-tests and for a 'period of stability and a chance for their own efforts to improve performance to bear fruit', as Barry Sheerman so eloquently puts it.
The government's obsession with testing everything that moves has distorted the curriculum and caused stress and anxiety for students, teachers and parents. The current system of 'accountability' is for the benefit of the government rather than for providing information for parents and taxpayers.
Teaching and support staff are professionals and should be treated as such, and allowed to use their own judgment and training, rather than being patronised, herded and force-fed by targets, tasks and toolkits from Whitehall and Ofsted. They need professional freedom, not bureaucracy and micro-management.
I am delighted that the committee believes that the proposed School Report Card 'should not carry an overall score'. Voice agrees that 'a Report Card can never be a full account of a school's performance'. Like any institution or organisation, a school has strengths and weaknesses across the many aspects of its work, which is about more than just test and target results. Good schools support the development of citizens who can offer much more to the wider community than examination results alone.
Schools are already the most over-inspected, over-accountable, minutely examined institutions in the country. School league tables give a limited view and fail to give credit to the wider progress individual children have made, but I do not want to see one crude indicator of a school's 'performance' replaced with another – a 'Report Card' with a 'B plus, could do better' style of mark. That would be shallow, pointless and meaningless.
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