Queen's Speech

Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve Excerpts

Thursday 3rd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve]

My Lords, your Lordships' House is extremely fortunate in the two Ministers who have arrived on the government Front Bench. We all know that the noble Earl, Lord Howe, has for many years followed health matters with scrupulous and impressive attention to detail. No one could be better qualified, and it is marvellous to have him in his post. It was also a great pleasure to hear the maiden speech by the noble Lord, Lord Hill, from the Front Bench this morning. I think that we can look forward to serious engagement on a wide range of extremely difficult topics.

I will make one undertaking at the beginning of this speech; I will not plead for the protection of a particular area of expenditure. I have my favourites and my interests, and I have a long university career behind me, but I am not going to plead for those. I looked at what would be at the head of the queue, and it is of course the Academies Bill, so I decided that I would focus on the issues that legislation in that area will raise. We expect to hear, and a first reading of the Bill suggests that we will hear, quite a lot about governance. I strongly support better governance and more independence for schools, with the caveat that we must all realise that more independence means that some will do a less than ideal job. We cannot expect greater independence to have uniformly good effects, but it will have better effects, and that is its justification.

The topic on which I want to say something today is not directly about governance but about the concepts of accountability and assessment that are ancillary to governance. Rather too often, systems of accountability undermine the independence that governance supposedly secures for institutions, and systems of assessment can undermine our educational aims for pupils. Of course accountability and assessment are both needed, but we need intelligent accountability and intelligent assessment, and in these matters more is not always better. That is why I have a suggestion for noble Lords on the Front Bench as to where savings might be made.

I will give two examples of defective accountability. When at breakfast I mentioned the theme on which I would speak today, my son, who is a governor of a very poorly performing primary school in Tower Hamlets, remarked that the governors of that school are accountable for 98 school policies that run to 100 or so pages of A4. He commented that if they did nothing but review those 98 policies every two years, as they were required to do, they would do absolutely nothing else. That is a reasonable example of a defective form of accountability. Requirements of this sort seemingly delegate but actually confer a quite illusory independence that obstructs other activities. The test in taking forward academies is that we do not undermine their independence and the education that they might offer by imposing forms of accountability that obstruct them.

My second, and unfortunately far from local, example is the system of assessment by which pupils, teachers and schools now find themselves held to account. Pupils and schools are judged on the scores achieved in SATs, at GCSE, at AS and at A-level. These are used not solely for educational purposes, which might be their proper use, but to construct league tables with very heavy implications for the futures both of pupils and of schools. This form of assessment becomes a rigid and educationally distorting form of accountability.

We hear that academy status is to be available to the best schools. Behind that phrase “the best schools” lurks of course a system of accountability and in this case perhaps a system of accountability that is in part based on pupil performance and league tables. But if merit is to be judged by pupil attainment, schools will continue to be hyper-incentivised to push limited forms of educational attainment. Gaining academy status will not lead to real independence for schools.

I remember talking to the head of an independent school which was very close to the top of the league tables when AS-levels had been introduced a few years before. I asked her whether it had had benefits for pupils. In her judgment, it had not. It had reduced the educational attainment possible in the lower sixth by cutting into teaching time and requiring a relentless focus on less demanding—indeed, quite often terminally boring—examined content. More generally, the system incentivises schools to push those subjects where A grades are more easily obtained.

I rather naively commented that, given the position of her school, she could refrain from entering pupils for AS-level. Her reply has stayed with me. She said, “With parents like mine, I can’t. They want every point that is available”. Systems of assessment can undermine the independence even of independent schools. If they are used for ranking schools in the future, the independence which the coalition Government seek will be undermined because all schools will be driving their pupils across the same hurdles. Even if those hurdles are not very high, there are a lot of them. More passes is always regarded as better. Another generation will be subjected to Stakhanovite quantities of exams, rather than being given plenty of teaching and an interesting and thoughtful education in which skills are assessed by exams and by examiners who are permitted to use their judgment and are trusted.

For too long the assessment tail has been wagging the education dog. I hope that the Government can be bold enough to see that serious judgments of quality cannot be based on test scores. If schools are to have greater independence, they must be free to teach more and to examine less, to emphasise skills, including skills in academic subjects, more. I greatly welcome the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, who is not in his place, about technology colleges for 14 to 19 year-olds, but we need to free schools to concentrate on skills in academic subjects, not merely on the imparting, memorising and regurgitation of information—you may say factoids. We need better skills in languages, maths, science and writing. At A-level, pupils deserve to be offered an exam system in which reading beyond the syllabus is valued and celebrated, and not penalised as it has been by the examination system. There is a long way to go and I wish the Government well.