Day: December 6, 2007

Well done The Guardian

At last a national paper that talks sense about the SAT results and has refused to publish the results as a league table.

They say,

“We’ve been obsessed with league tables. We like lists of favourite foods, top ten Christmas presents, the worst theme tunes ever and, for the past 16 years, we’ve been hooked on primary school leagues tables: lists of the top-scoring schools, the most improved, and the “value-added” table.

Not this year. The Guardian has decided against publishing school-by-school primary school results for 11-year-olds in English, maths and science in league-table format. On the following pages, we present a breakdown of the key stage 2 results for every primary school in England, geographically and alphabetically, but with no ranking lists.”

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Results of this year’s national tests for England show 77% of 11-year-olds reached the standard expected by the government, up one percentage point from last year. Not really sure what this means.

Perhaps more interesting is that a Manchester University study has shown that progress in maths stalls in the early secondary school years once the dreaded SATs are over with little progress made in year 7. I can well believe this to be true for many reasons: short term cramming in Primary Schools with at least one hour of maths every day followed by less maths in Secondary School. Another factor could be low expectations in Secondary Schools as children do again much of the work carried out in Year 6.

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