Weighing the Pig

I'm sure you know this already, we are not doing that well in educating our young people. Well not compared with other countries that have running water and tarmac roads. The OECD makes sure that we know this by running their PISA tests globally and we don't make it into the top twenty for anything nowadays.

It gets worse. Having recently felt a little crushed by having to admit that our children were taught nothing more about computers than how to make slide shows and type essays we find that our performance in science has also dropped to similar lows... according to PISA.

Um, excuse me boys and girls in charge of education, were we not one of, if not the foremost nation in science and computing, or am I just imagining all those Nobel prizes of the 20th Century? What on earth have you done? However the arguments are spun quite simply we are not competing well with the world. But why not?

Here's a clue. In response to the depressing OECD news a well known Headteacher had no doubts. Johnny Foreigner clearly was cheating, or in modern education parlance was 'doing a GCSE' which translates in turn as 'teaching to the test'. His solution was that we should prepare our 15 year-olds specifically for the PISA tests in order to raise our place in the tables...Now if for more than one second this makes sense to you then you are part of the problem. You truly believe in testing, you don't know why, not really, but you know how important it is. If you are under 40 this is your world.

If  however something is making you uneasy about the above consider the proverb which says, " You don't fatten the pig by weighing it everyday". In the UK we love testing and hate teaching. Learning is OK... but only if it is for the test. Ironically unlike the pig, our children do grow fat, but that's due mostly to sloth and smoothies.

When I started teaching science and computers I taught science and computers. That which was taught was in line with a syllabus of course. It told me what sort of stuff should be included and eventually what scoped the final examination which would be at the end of two or three years work.

Steadily though, the syllabuses became more prescriptive and with the advent of league tables reduced teaching to the delivery of content matched to the published mark schemes. Progress could be tracked by dividing the content into modules and testing regularly, and if things did not go well re-testing. The examination boards which by now were private profit-driven companies did not object. At this point I left teaching.

Ten years later I have returned to try my hand at vocational science teaching. I find myself in a state-funded sixth form college which has a good record for passing tests. For me though the culture is a little shocking.
Testing, testing, testing is the key to success; no-one knows anything different. In science, even practical work becomes merely a way to illustrate the theory which is to be tested.

If I type the next paragraphs slowly maybe someone will get it. Excessive testing, creating a testing culture no-less, does not work. Oh, it appears to work all-right but only because it operates in a self referencing system. So a 'good at tests student' will become, with accurate preparation and motivation, a 'very good at tests student' and will get all the stroking and kudos a test-deliverer ( once called a teacher) can bestow.

For the rest, repeat testing is just a bore, maybe even humiliating; certainly the test-delivering-package ( once called a subject) is a bore. Don't expect hormone-fuelled adolescents to accept this status meekly. At best they will switch off and look at their phones, at worst they will take the place apart.

It will be a leap of faith too far for this generation of test-deliverers but if they returned to the notion of imparting to their pupils an appreciation and understanding of the subject they know and maybe once loved, free of neurotic OCD-testing all would be well.

And the most ironic of consequences would be that our PISA test results would improve.