Lisa Major MA PgDip PNCPS (Acc.)

This time of year, we put our 16-year-olds through a coming-of-age ritual. We make them sit in rows and write down things they have spent the last two years trying to memorise. We pit them against the clock, and prevent them from talking to each other. We tell them that this is the most important thing that they will ever do and their future life depends on it. We don’t just do this once. For most of them, we make them sit in rows and write things down between twenty and thirty separate times in the space of about six weeks. Maths, English, History, French, Biology….Again and again, they have to keep at it. Each time, we tell them how important it is and they better not have an off-day or be ill. Then we take their papers and we rank them. For some, the result will be accolades and glory. For others, failure and retakes. We know for sure that this will always be true, because these rituals that we call exams are designed to rank them. A third will always fail. There would be no top grades if we didn’t also have the bottom. It isn’t possible for them all to pass. And yet, every year, we talk as if this was not true. We pretend that it would be possible for them all to succeed, if only they and their teachers worked harder. Politicians talk about raising standards and accountability. We pretend that the problem is them not working hard enough, not an exam system designed so that hundreds of thousands fail. We blame them, not the exams. For the truth is that we have a coming-of-age ritual for our teenagers which involves a third of them being told they haven’t met the grade, that they are not good enough. We launch them into adult life telling them that they will carry the stigma of not understanding quadratic equations for ever. We put them all through intense stress, and then when some of them cave in we say they have anxiety and send them to see a therapist. And then we’re surprised when many of them say they just can’t carry on, that they don’t see the point. They don’t see potential in the future for themselves. We need to take a step back and ask ourselves why we do this to our teenagers. For the problem isn’t our young people. It’s not their fault that a third of them fail and many are chronically stressed. The problem is what we make them do. We’ve designed a coming-of-age system with a very high cost in human misery. Every year a new crop of teens will come of age, and despite their distress we just push them harder. We need to ask ourselves whether this is really the best we can do for our teenagers. We urgently need to think again.

Today Bridget Phillipson announced that a new target will be set of 90% of 6-year-olds passing the phonics screening check at the end of Year 1. Currently 83% pass at the end of Year 1 and 89% at the end of Year 2. They also announce a new reading test for children in Year 8 at age 13. They say that this is because strong reading skills are the foundation for everything else in education. These measures will backfire, and here’s why. You can’t make children learn faster by setting more tests. You can’t help struggling readers by putting them under more pressure. You don’t allow teachers to teach better by making them teach to the test. We are already putting too much pressure on our very young children. There is no evidence that pushing academic skills on them earlier leads to later success. The result will be a narrowing of the curriculum, more anxiety about reading, and more children who start to see themselves as stupid and inadequate before they’ve even turned seven. How children think about learning is the real foundation for everything else. If they’ve decided that it’s boring and hard before they’re out of the Infants, then no one is a winner. Yes, reading is important. No, more testing and early pressure isn’t the way to raise standards. It will create more of the problems the government say they want to avoid. Our children need something better. tes.com/magazine/news/genera…