Science: Unlocking potential

Dr Caroline Oprandi Keeping you up to date with science and technology at PACA

I often read the ‘Secret Teacher’ from The Guardian website and I was sad to see yet another teacher leave due to the immense pressures they are under. The secret teacher wrote, “20 August is the day of reckoning not just for every 16-year-old in England, but for every secondary school teacher too, the day where I felt a nail knocked into my teaching career coffin. Our results were the lowest in the entire school. Collecting the data, I felt physically sick. I knew with numbers like these my working life would no longer be the same. In my oversubscribed, overachieving school I would be labelled as an underperformer and afforded no second chances. If I stay, I will be made a scapegoat. When Ofsted visit our results will be critiqued and the department subjected to ongoing criticism and monitoring.”
In 2014, when I was doing my teacher training, I was appalled to see this type of practice going on. Schools had changed so much since I was last there, especially this obsessive measuring of children against targets. So I took a look at the Department of Education School and College Performance Tables to see where the demand for all of this obsessive data collection comes from. The amount of information needed for these tables is eye-watering and it reminded me of when I would compile information as a Management Consultant for a Drinks Company. However, for this role I was measuring the production efficiency of machines producing orange juice cartons; not the efficiency of instilling learning into school children.

The most absurd data entry from the government’s website has to be the ‘Value Added Measure’. The website states that: “the current Value Added Measure takes into account prior attainment (results at the end of Key Stage 2 and 3), which is the biggest single factor affecting pupil results. However, other factors outside a school’s control, such as gender, mobility and levels of deprivation, have been observed to have a further impact on pupil results, even after allowing for prior attainment. Taking these additional factors into account requires a more complex model, which we are in the process of developing and introducing, for use by the Department and Ofsted. We call this measure Contextual Value Added (CVA)”.
Really?? So after years of the Department and Ofsted beating children and teachers with this VA measuring stick they have finally realised that “other factors” can affect a child’s learning. Trust and common sense is needed back in the teaching profession and fast; rather than complex, debatable measures that require vast quantities of taxpayer’s money in order to compile.
On a positive note though, I have been nominated for an award to be presented at the House of Lords, by Lord Sainsbury. Apparently they were “enormously impressed by the nomination and really appreciate my immense dedication to inspiring young people in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths”.
It’s ironic really that once upon a time I was focused on improving the efficiency of the production of Lord Sainsbury’s orange juice! Thankfully I am still able to see the distinction between the two roles: that school children are in fact children and not a carton with a number on from the end of a factory line.