League Tables and Testing
In England children are tested when they enter school,
either in the Reception or at the beginning of year 1. This is a low-key test, (Click here for
more detail on Baseline Assessment) covering a variety of
skills. It has been found to be one of
the most valuable predictors of later success, and has the greatest statistical
significance on results in later tests - interestingly enough, more so than
poverty. (follow the link for more detail -What is a successful
School?)
Children
are again formally tested when they reach the end of Key Stage 1, which in
England is when they are 7. (Remembering, of course, that some will be 7,
nearly 8, and others will have only just turned 7!) (Click here for link to Key Stage 1
tests)
The
last set of test’s come at the end of their primary education, in Year 6, when
they are 11. Again, some children will
be almost 12, if they have a September birthday, and others will have only just
turned 11. (Click here for link to Key Stage 2
tests)
Testing
will then go on throughout their secondary schooling. At the end of Key Stage
3, when they are 14, again at 16, when they take their GCSE’s, and again at 17,
and 18 if they should choose to stay on at school to complete ‘A’ Levels. A hefty load!
A
recent, much heralded pullout was included in the TES (Nov 02), which claimed
to list the ‘top’ 500 schools in both the primary and secondary
categories. By ‘top’ and most
‘excellent’ schools, it based its findings on the results of all the above
tests (except for Baseline Assessment!).
Personally,
this horrified me. Looking down the
schools, it seems that it was an exercise in class demarcation, and by class, I
mean social class, and NOT school class!!
The
following links will take you to a number of articles, which will hopefully
highlight some of the serious problems in using league tables to highlight
successful schools. I hope you will
find them enlightening, in seeing that the issue is much more complex than it
appears, and that using league tables alone, will give a truly distorted
impression of what makes for a ‘good’ school!
Many
of the links require Adobe Acrobat, which can be downloaded free from the
following link
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
The
use of value added information in judging school performance
What do Test Scores in
Texas tell us? (EPAA) This is a very good article, which describes some of
the problems in drawing too many conclusions from test scores, and looks into
the issues of how much they can really indicate standards are improving.