The recent House of Commons Children, Schools and Families Select Committee inquiry into assessment included much testimony about the effects of the league table/target/Ofsted inspection regime of hyper-accountability in the classroom. 

I include below some extracts, mainly a list of evidence from organisations sceptical about test- and exam-driven schooling. It is, of course, selective, but is meant to illustrate the breadth of concern.  Only one organisation, the Department for Education and Skills, among 52 submissions to the inquiry last year, was unequivocally in favour. An extract from its submission is included in the summary below, with a fuller account in the section of this website on Government evidence.

The full submissions are available here:

- Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education: “The continual testing and practising for tests has resulted in a narrow and impoverished mathematics curriculum, and poor quality teaching of that curriculum.”

- Institute of Educational Assessors: “We may be churning out individuals who can pass tests and who can achieve good results to a given, known test but who cannot necessarily apply their knowledge and skills to other situations, hence the concern from employers about skill levels among young people.”

- The Royal Society: “It is clear that aspects of our current assessment system are holding back students’ and teachers’ performance and creativity, contributing to a declining popularity in the physical sciences and mathematics and inadequate recruitment and retention of specialist teachers in these subjects.”

- Hampshire County Council: “The assessment regime has become enormously burdensome for schools. National Curriculum (NC) tests have now expanded out of all proportion to their usefulness.” It also calls for a more “humane” system.

- General Teaching Council: “Tests are used for too many purposes and this compromises their reliability and validity. The tests can depress pupils’ motivation and increase anxiety. They do not adequately serve the interests of parents or pupils and they lead to a narrowed curriculum and encourage ‘teaching to the test’. The system diminishes teachers’ professional judgements because summative outcomes reached by the teacher carry less public weight than the outcomes from end of Key Stage (KS) tests, although the received wisdom that KS tests and public examinations are error-free methods of assessing pupil attainment is misleading.”

- Institute of Physics: “We believe that current assessment arrangements are promoting too narrow a range of skills and understanding, principally there is too great an emphasis on testing students’ ability to recall facts. This leads to a situation where there is insufficient teaching for understanding or creativity, with accompanying negative effects on students’ motivation and enjoyment.”

- Association for Achievement and Improvement through Assessment: “We believe the current testing system is limited in measurement of children’s performance across the National Curriculum programmes of study.”

- Campaign for Science and Engineering: “We do not doubt that students appear to work harder at school than those of ten or fifteen years ago, but too much of this extra effort appears to have been devoted to the narrow and unremitting demands of national tests.”

- The Wellcome Trust: “Primary teachers felt that national tests had a negative effect on children’s enjoyment of science, because of the increasing tendency to ‘teach to the test’. An over-emphasis on curriculum content and pressure to prepare for national tests were felt to reduce opportunities for investigative work and lead to science frequently being taught as a collection of facts.”

- Institute for Public Policy Research: “The current national tests do not provide highly reliable or valid measures at the level of the individual pupil. National tests are used in performance tables and can trigger Ofsted inspections. They thus exert strong incentives on school leaders and teachers, and this can have unintended outcomes. The current assessment and accountability framework can impact on valuable elements of assessment such as assessment for learning. This can happen through narrow and shallow learning, questions-spotting and risk-averse teaching.”

- Association of School and College Leaders: “Assessment in Britain requires a radical review. In England, young people take externally set and marked examinations at the ages of 7, 11, 14, 16, 17 and 18. The system is at breaking point as more and more examinations have been added to an already over-examined system.”

- Association for Science Education: “Although the issues relating to testing and assessment are generally generic and apply across all subjects the impact of some practices has had a particularly detrimental effect on the teaching of science and has, in turn, contributed to the disaffection with the subject expressed by pupils across all phases of education.”

- Mathematical Association: “Coaching for the test, now occupying inflated teaching time and effort in almost all schools for which we have information at each Key Stage, is not constructive: short term ‘teaching how to’ is no substitute for longterm teaching of understanding and relationship within and beyond mathematics part of a broad and balanced curriculum.”

- Department for Children, Schools and Families: “The benefits of a national system of assessment have been immense. The aspirations of pupils and their teachers have been raised. The public has a right to demand such transparency.”