The Numbers Game

Lesson observations, school performance against OFSTED or SEF or SIP criteria, SATs results, optional SATs results, pupil reporting, assessment of individual pieces of work, pupil tracking ……. on and on and on. All of these areas have been blighted with the cancerous obsession with assigning numbers – see my Blog http://becktonboy.blogspot.com/2007/06/assessment-2-what-are-results.html ..... 3 years old and still apposite I think.

The attempt to squeeze children into a spreadsheet and fit them on a graph fills me with nausea. The whole crock of levels, numbered targets dreamed up from numbered lists of mythical, often non-sensical levels, tracking an individual's or a group's progress against these phantoms is utter, utter rubbish and of absolutely no value to us or the children we teach. They barely have any meaning when applied to schools because they are so inaccurate and so very easily influenced, measuring not how well a school does anything, except make the figures making up the spreadsheet look good. They are beloved of the number crunchers and their attack dogs because they are not really interested in real education.

Good teachers or schools that end up having to take the numbers game seriously because of the damocletian threat of funding impact or interference, just think Woodhead or clone/OfSTED, end up frustrated and confused. The fault is not theirs it lies with the bizarre, pointless system we are trying to operate in good faith.

My advice to anyone having moral or philosophical difficulties with levels (not standards) of achievement: operate the system in the spirit it was created: make everything look as good as you can as quickly as you can, by the least damaging means possible and try to get on with educating in the time and with the energy you have left.