School league tables raise pupils' stress but fail to reduce attainment gaps
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Version 0 of 1. School accountability measures such as league tables fail to reduce gaps in attainment between disadvantaged pupils and their better-off peers, and instead result in higher levels of stress, according to research commissioned by the National Union of Teachers. The preliminary results of the research by academics at London Metropolitan university also found that successive waves of policy around testing and inspection had narrowed the range of subjects available to less academically-able students. Related: Teachers’ strikes loom after election unless funding crisis tackled, NUT says “Despite the government focus on reducing gaps, including pupil premium payments, the attainment gap at GCSE level between pupils eligible for free school meals and those who are not has remained at about 27 percentage points throughout the last decade,” the researchers found. “There is no evidence that holding schools accountable will reduce attainment gaps, particularly in a context in which the economic gap between the richest and the poorest in society is increasing.” A survey of teachers for the study reported increased incidents of stress suffered by pupils as a result of the intense focus on testing, with 90% of teachers saying that standardised tests and exams caused many pupils to become “very anxious”, and 94% of secondary school teachers reporting that some pupils at their school developed stress-related conditions around exam times. Teachers said that lower-attaining pupils are often removed from other lessons to do extra maths and English, and so experienced a narrower curriculum than their peers. One primary school teacher said: “They are six years old, and all their school experience tells them is that they are failure [already] and have to be pulled out constantly to work on things their peers can already do, and miss out on the fun bits of learning.” Those pupils “are often the disadvantaged pupils who are less likely to have access to wider learning and cultural opportunities outside school,” the researchers noted. The research, released to coincide with the NUT’s national conference in Harrogate, will be published in full later this year. The academics also found that Ofsted grades appear to be “strongly related” to the proportion of disadvantaged pupils in a school. While more than half the schools with the fewest disadvantaged pupils were judged to be outstanding by Ofsted inspectors, only 15% of schools with the highest quintile of disadvantaged pupils received the same grade. At the other end of the scale, less than 1% of schools with the fewest disadvantaged pupils were rated inadequate, in comparison with 13% of schools with the highest quintile of disadvantage. “One implication of this pattern of Ofsted judgement is that disadvantaged pupils are more likely than their peers to be taught in schools judged ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’, in which staff are likely to be more stressed and the pressures to be greater,” the researchers noted. The NASUWT teaching union said that the government’s pupil premium funds – which gives schools more than £1,000 per child from disadvantaged backgrounds – were failing to reach their target, after its members reported that many teachers did not know if the funds were being spent on improving results for the less well-off. |