05 May 2016
Worldwide Educational Rankings
Are SATS tests really going to help?
by Lynda Goetz
“In my country the highest regard is given to marks and not learning”. This comment was made online by one Niharika Lahora from India in response to a request for input on what would improve education systems worldwide. http://www.mbctimes.com/english/20-best-education-systems-world. It goes to the heart of the current debate here in the UK on both the subject of academies and of the SATS tests. When parents are withholding children from school in protest against harder and ‘stressful’ SATS tests and many are questioning the reasoning behind removing all schools from local authority governance, irrespective of current achievements, one does begin to wonder at the constant governmental tinkering with the system.
The future of a country is the next generation. To be successful it will need its children to be well-educated and well-prepared to face the challenges of the time they live in; so education is not, and never has been, a purely parochial matter. It is a matter of national importance. As a Daily Telegraph editorial stated recently: ‘competition is fierce and grows more intense every year…we should have the highest ambitions for our children’. Does having the highest ambitions for our children really mean subjecting them to tests which, although dressed up by the Standards and Testing Agency as ‘providing information on how your child is progressing, compared to children the same age nationally’, are essentially a way of checking up on the schools and the teachers?
This latter fact is, of course, one of the reasons why the teachers and teaching unions are on the whole not keen on SATS. Apart from the administrative workload it imposes on staff, it could provide the wherewithal to assess the performance of individual teachers. The unions have, as the Telegraph editorial observes, never been in favour of there being any pay differentiation between good and bad teachers. SATS may provide the opportunity of introducing this, but because they introduce another target and yet another diversion from the real job of teaching, parents seem to have a valid reason to protest. My children are long since past the point of SATS testing, but the schools they went to treated those tests as they were originally intended, ‘as a snapshot’ of the child and the school at a particular point. There was no specific preparation. The teachers relied on the fact that their teaching was good and covered more than enough of the basics to ensure good results for the kids – which they reliably got. Over the years, as SATS have become more and more embedded in the system, ‘teaching to the test’ has become the norm. This is not good for either the kids or for the teachers – both are likely to end up bored and demotivated.
In a study conducted by the Pearson education group last year on the twenty best education systems in the world, South Korea came in at No. 1 with three more Asian countries taking the next places; Finland came in 5th and the UK 6th. In a different exercise in global rankings, also last year, http://fairreporters.net/world/the-best-education-systems-in-the-world-in-2015/, the UK education system effectively came in 20thand the US 28th out of 76 countries. Of the European countries, Finland scored the highest in 6th place with Estonia in 7th. In this particular set of rankings there were five Asian countries at the top of the list with Singapore first followed by Hong Kong and South Korea.
However, in yet another study, Best Countries for Education, conducted by BAV Consulting and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in the US, the UK came out top with Canada 2nd, the US 3rd, Germany 4th, France 5th, Australia 6th Sweden 7th, Japan 8th Denmark 9th and Netherlands 10th. Norway and Sweden were also in the top third. In this study, three equally-weighted criteria were used; top quality universities, well-developed public education system and “would consider attending university there”. So why did the studies give such different results? In the Wharton study, the third criterion may well have skewed the results in favour of English-speaking countries. English is, after all, the most prevalent second language throughout the world, so those countries where English is spoken are very likely to come higher up when considering if students from other countries would attend higher education. In this study, Singapore came only 17th and South Korea 18th.
That is hardly surprising. If British people were to be asked if, given the positioning of say Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan in two out of these three studies, they would like to move to any of these countries to take advantage of their education system, the answer would almost undoubtedly be ‘no’. What if that same question were to be asked of any of the Asians? Might they perhaps at least consider a move to the UK, the US or Australia?
Now interestingly, Finland does not have any tests for its schoolchildren until 13 and yet they come out 14 places ahead of the UK in a global school ranking system. All the Scandinavian countries do well, although not as well as they used to do in such tables. The Asian countries at the top of these ranking tables are all countries where children are pressured to do well. In South Korea many children attend school seven days a week! In Japan in 2014, suicide was the leading cause of death amongst 10-19 year-olds. Whilst the overall suicide rate in Japan is 60% higher than the worldwide average and cultural differences make for a very different attitude to suicide (Christianity has long taught that it is a sin; in Japan it is a way of taking responsibility) this is surely a cause for concern if there is any indication that it might be related to pressures at school. A 2013 investigation into child suicide in China concluded that the country’s over-competitive examination-oriented education system was largely to blame.
So, given that we live in an increasingly competitive world, should we be emulating the ‘Asian Tiger’ countries and piling the pressure on our kids to start academic training earlier and earlier as the government would like, or should we be listening to many of our educationalists and parents who are complaining that the system is squeezing the joy out of both teaching and learning? Professor David Elkind, a Jewish-American child psychologist and author, now aged 85, whose ground-breaking books included The Hurried Child and The Power of Play, has argued that ‘the movement toward academic training of the young is not about education. It is about parents being anxious to give their children an edge in what they regard as an increasingly competitive and global economy’. This too is where the government is coming from, but the fact that some parents are saying ‘enough’ should not be met with the threats of fines from county councils (who, by the way is going to mete out these fines for absence when all schools have been forced to become academies?) but by open debate on the concerns.
Most parents, after all, want the best for their kids. The best may not include being forced to try and learn to read at three when they are not ready, or to recognise the difference between a preposition and a subordinating conjunction at 11. That they should discover a love of reading and an understanding of basic grammar (which incidentally most English children do not have, one of the things which disadvantages them when learning foreign languages) is not in question. What is, is the timing and means of acquiring this knowledge.
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