The Accountability System in Schools is Broken, and Teachers Must Take Aim Against It
No one’s winning the accountability game at the moment, says JL Dutaut – but together, we could flip the system…
- by JL Dutaut
To support our new #JustLetMeTeach campaign, we have free primary and secondary teacher packs to download with practical advice to help you reduce your workload, refresh your teaching, and reignite a love of learning for you and your students.
Imagine a game. You score points by shooting down targets. Some require just one shot to knock down, some two or three, some more. You get the same number of points for each target, no matter how many shots it takes to knock it down. You don’t know which is which until you start shooting, but you get to the next level by shooting down a certain percentage in a set time.
What is your strategy?
Wisely, you start by shooting each target at least once, reaping all the easy points. Beyond level one, however, the game won’t let you get away with that.
So what next? Do you shoot every target twice more, or just once in the hope you’ll have time to get a third go? Oh, and did I mention? After level two, the easy targets start to stand back up if they’ve been down too long.
Welcome to Education 2018; the hardest game in town.
Just numbers
In multiple schools I have witnessed what I’ve called The Target Wall™. Typically, you will find The Target Wall™ in the Head of Year’s office – although it’s sometimes in the staffroom.
On it are the printed school pictures of every child in a year group. The staffroom variety tends only to show Year 11, because they are the only ones who matter to everyone.
The photographs are split into three groups: achieving EBacc at 9-5, 5/4 borderline, and the perennial ‘other’.
Whatever else politicians tell you about the improvements to qualifications, the new grading system, life beyond levels, this is the reality of their accountability system, especially in schools in areas of deprivation, where aspirations are lowest and accountability stakes highest.
“There are 200 students in my year group, which makes each one half a percentage point. We need seven more percentage points, so which 14 students should you be targeting?” This is a verbatim quote.
I’m sure I don’t need to prompt you to ask yourself what education might be like for the ‘others’. Nor indeed for the easy targets.
Unfair play
What’s that? You don’t do this? They just let you teach, and you shoot every target once or twice and it always works for you? I’m happy for you, I really am.
Except your benefit is precisely equal to someone else’s loss. Your students’ win in the dignity stakes is someone else’s students becoming little more than a fraction of a percentage point.
Your outstanding teaching – whatever that may be – is someone else’s inadequate. Worse, the inverse is also true.
The system is rigged. We’re playing a multiplayer version of the target-shooting game and some people get more easy targets than others. They get rewarded for it by being given more easy targets than others year on year.
Maybe you don’t. Maybe you’ve hacked this game (how are you doing for exclusions, by the way?); or maybe you’re really very good at it.
Still, the Outstanding banner outside and the dark green box that says ‘well above average’ on The League Table™ are of exactly the same nature as The Target Wall™ that was anathema to you moments ago.
Oh. Didn’t you realise? You are in turn someone else’s target. You’re one of the soft ones. They knocked you down ages ago.
You are a positive fraction of a percentage point in the retention figures (ironically, nobody loses their job for not knocking enough of us down).
So, are you going to stay down there much longer… or are you going to stand up again?
Turn around
Don’t worry. You won’t be alone. You’ll have us on your side – and everyone who has contributed to and bought and read and shared and discussed our book, Flip the System UK.
And it looks like you might have the NAHT on board too. They’ve just launched a commission into reforming what they call a ‘high-stakes, low-trust accountability system’ that ‘does more harm than good’.
Let’s stop playing games. You’ve got a gun in your hand and a target on your back. Which way are you going to face? If they just let you teach, please help make it so that they #justletmeteach too.
JL Dutaut is a teacher of government and politics and the co-editor, with Lucy Rycroft-Smith, of Flip the System UK: A Teachers’ Manifesto, (Routledge, available on Amazon for £15). Follow him on Twitter at @Dutaut.
We’re sharing this article as part of our #JustLetMeTeach campaign, in which we’re inviting teachers to share the moments when they’ve been able to pass on what excites them about their subject, and what has excited their pupils too – whether or not it helps children pass a test.
Get involved by using the #JustLetMeTeach hashtag on social media, or get in touch with us on our Twitter and Facebook pages.
