The new head of Ofsted, Amanda Spielman, says schools should be ashamed of some of the tactics used to bolster their league standings (Ofsted leader takes aim at schools, 24 June). But what does she expect when the Department for Education has been pushing this for the past 25 years?
In the days of the technical and vocational initiative, as head of humanities in a Kent secondary modern school, I knew all the humanities teachers in two neighbouring schools. We worked together, we planned together, we shared things that worked. Then grant-maintained schools arrived in 1988, with Ofsted following in 1992 and academisation more recently, and we stopped talking to each other. We were in competition.
In the last seven years, the DfE (especially under Michael Gove) has pushed an academic menu to the exclusion of all else, unsuitable for many young people. My pupils once had one lesson a week of careers education, one of social education and a third of religious education. Now they have one a fortnight for all three if they are lucky. And sex education probably consists of a visiting speaker to talk about condoms and STDs. Design technology is disappearing, drama and music are under threat.
Now retired, I oversee exams in the school and watch youngsters struggling with Shakespeare, with algebraic equations, with chemical formulae and see them close their exam booklets and put their heads down. Such topics will be appropriate for many students, enjoyed by many students but not all. However, schools feel the students have to be entered for these exams because not to do so will affect the standing the Ofsted head talks about.
Brian Thomas
Marden, Kent
Amanda Spielman’s views will resonate with many teachers. Before I retired, it was dispiriting to witness the main aim of education being how to achieve as high a position as possible in the league tables. As head of a department, I found myself in a dilemma; if a large number of pupils wished to take the subject there would be a strong possibility of more pupils failing the A-C grades. One could play the system simply by putting off the least academic pupils or not allowing them to take the subject altogether. By selecting the academically brightest it would be a sure fire way of achieving a high percentage of the highest grades, but what about the pupils who wished to take the subject for its intrinsic values and interest?
As a department we took the position that those who wanted to take the subject should be allowed to do so even though we were aware that this may go against us in exam results. This may not have been the strategy Ofsted would have approved of with their relentless focus on exam results but we felt we were doing the best for our pupils. It is a pity that Amanda Spielman was not head of Ofsted earlier, with her more enlightened and progressive views towards education.
Frank Lowry
Bebington, Wirral
Very ripe of Amanda Spielman to tell schools to be ashamed of tactics used to bolster their league table standings when exam results were precisely what started this publicly punitive system of educational measuring. The inspection system her organisation runs was tied, from the start, to exam results – irrespective of social factors.
Tactics re what you use when survival depends on it; schools literally lived or died by the cosh of Ofsted reports.
Mark Lewinski
Swaffham Prior, Cambridgeshire
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