Re-examining Success. David Hughes J.
or psychological damage. That, of course, ignores two critical aspects.
1.Such testing regimes are faced by adults with greater maturity and experience. This is not a justification of the process, merely recognition that, hopefully, the person undergoing the process has developed the maturity to survive the ordeal. The burnout rate of junior doctors, military veterans suffering from PTSD and, for that matter, young teachers in schools, should lead us to different conclusions about the efficacy of these processes.
2.Military training and the experience of being a junior doctor or young teacher are transitory processes. There is a better time beyond the difficulties. For young people in the secondary school examinations process, the motivational factor, implicit or explicit, is that their whole future life experiences are entwined with their ability to thrive in a series of formal written examinations. This is both only partially true and fundamentally unhelpful in motivating them.
Compounding the problem of public examinations in secondary school is the issue of study leave. For five years, pupils are presented with a model of pedagogy in which the teacher teaches and the pupils listen and make notes and complete simulation exercises with support. Within weeks of the most critical tests of their young careers, they are ejected from school for ‘study leave’, and expected to work with a completely different learning model.
Effective study leave requires that the pupil instantaneously adopts a model based on working independently and autonomously with only the collected pearls of wisdom of the various subject departments to guide them on a programme of revision. Little wonder that so many pupils underperform. Worse, the most vulnerable pupils face the greatest challenges.
Pupils in care, outside the formal school system through exclusion, in hospital, with learning disabilities or in poverty do not conform to the expectations many schools have in their revision programmes. For them, there may not be a secure home, supportive adults, a wholesome diet or even a space of quiet and calm in which to study.
The die-hards will argue that the written examination is the time-honoured method of terminal assessment adopted by the great universities. It is not.
The great universities, going back to medieval times and before, from Padua to Alexandria, from Oxford and Cambridge to Heidelberg and Leuven, never used formal written examinations. Their assessment methodology was the viva voce, the oral examination in which the ‘mettle of the man’ (man because women in formal education in the higher education world only began to occur selectively from the late nineteenth century onwards) could be tested and the moral and ethical standards of the person gleaned from the quality of their reasoning and underlying assumptions.
The formal written examination is a format that only emerged with the rapid expansion of education at all levels in the nineteenth century, when the state made the connection between economic well-being and education, and particularly with literacy and numeracy levels being critical to economic success.
Moreover, the formal written examination is not a measure of excellence because its remit is so constrained. It looks only at the ability to recall information in a written format and under a time constraint. Little wonder that those in industry and commerce comment with disbelief that after all the years of formal education, young people arrive in their first period of employment so poorly prepared for the challenges and opportunities of work; indeed young people believe it themselves (Kashefpakdel, 2017; CBI, 2018).
UNIVERSAL EDUCATION PROVISION WITH A TRIPARTITE ELEMENT
The search for a more rational and expansive curriculum that would prove more challenging and stimulating for pupils and would give them greater insights into life and employment beyond school has a long and convoluted history in the UK.
The 1944 Education Act sought to ensure that every child received a secondary education and also promoted a tripartite system of schools. This tripartite division recognised that, broadly speaking, jobs came in three different categories:
1.managerial and professional jobs, which required further educational qualifications beyond statutory education;
2.clerical and administrative jobs, which required a foundation of a particular skill set that could be started in formal education and continued after school in ‘on the job’ and apprenticeship training;
3.trade jobs, for which the foundations, in the form of woodwork, metalwork and car maintenance, could be developed in school and honed further in an apprenticeship beyond school.
These three elements were reflected in the three types of schools:
1.grammar schools for those destined for managerial and professional careers;
2.secondary moderns for those who would fill the clerical and administrative roles;
3.technical schools for those being prepared for trade apprenticeships.
There was much to commend this system in providing a broad range of curricula that were appropriate to future roles. Whereas the grammar schools maintained the criteria of the formal examination, the testing in the two other school formats was much broader. Secondary moderns and technical schools required the individual pupil to work for extended periods on projects of a practical nature such as sample documents, model cakes and pastries, wooden or metal project pieces. Pupils needed to demonstrate a wide range of construction techniques or the ability to be observed stripping, repairing and reassembling a component of a motor car (Education Act, 1944; Trueman, 2015).
Some schools went further in promoting skills with an eye to the local economy. A school in the Nottinghamshire coalfield actually constructed, with the aid of the National Coal Board, a mock coal face in its grounds so that pupils could acclimatise themselves to the rigours of working underground in their future career. They also attended some of their lessons at the local colliery. This innovation was vividly captured in a film held in the Pathé News Archives in 1947 (British Pathé, 1947).
This breadth of educational experience in the secondary school phase, innovative as it was, did not come without issues. First, the whole system was based on the rather bizarre concept that the abilities of the child were set and largely immutable by the age of 11 and that a simple, formal examination called the ‘11-Plus’ could effectively group pupils into the three schooling types.
The main proponent of this system was Sir Cyril Burt, a psychologist. He believed that educational ability was usually inherited by children and that this ability could be proven in an examination taken at the end of primary school. The test really rewarded reading, writing and language, and mathematical comprehension skills. Important as they are, these skill sets alone cannot be said to comprise academic ability.
Put charitably, it may be said that the experimental methods by which Burt had come to these conclusions about ability had a number of statistical anomalies. Put less charitably, he manipulated the results to confirm his preferred model. Such revelations were part of the reason that the comprehensive system, which abandoned the discredited 11-Plus examination, gathered such momentum in the 1960s.
Second, the spurious nature of the 11-Plus could be gleaned from the fact that each year it was able to sort the pupils into the exact proportion of provision that each of the three types of schools offered in the local area. It was, therefore, not a rational test of ability but a rather brutal rationing mechanism.
Third, there was not parity of esteem between the three educational pathways at secondary level. Grammar school was the destination of choice for children of all aspirational parents, but was usually limited to no more than 20 per cent of the school population. In this rationing system, parents who had themselves sat the 11-Plus or the matriculation examination that had preceded it were best prepared and most highly motivated to ensure their children received the best preparation at home and school to succeed in the examination. This also explains why the 11-Plus and the grammar