Bacc to the future

What we should teach children has been a concern for many centuries – Aristotle onwards! Today’s answer is in the hands of the Secretary of State, and like his predecessors, Michael Gove has his own faddish ideas – and he displays an obsessive zeal in driving through change.

Why is this so important? First, the advent of universal secondary education introduced to age 15 in the 1944 Act, and now being extended to 18 by 2015, means that the national curriculum is universal in application. (I ignore the problem that academies are not bound by the national curriculum.)

Second, there is now a strong expectation that every young person should succeed on whatever measure the government chooses – at present, 5A*-C GCSEs including English and mathematics. This makes success a ‘high-stakes’ issue for young people and for schools.

It's in this context in which Glenys Stacey at Ofqual warned Michael Gove that the Ebacc could lead to 'more limited' teaching – she has noticed that schools teach to the test. This is naïve beyond belief – teachers have been teaching to the test as long as I have been in the business, and the challenge has always been to design examinations that assess what is valued, rather than what is easy to teach and measure.

If the system rewards teachers and headteachers for X and not Y, then, X will be delivered, with results improving year on year as teachers get more skilled, with a gradual drop-off in the rate of improvement, reaching an eventual plateau. And Y will no longer be valued or taught, except perhaps in private schools.