16th November 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
In the news you’ll often read about schools complaining when a syllabus is changed without time for teachers to adequately prepare for the changes. Sometimes the way schools are rated is changed, as happened recently, and it’s worrying because different criteria can drastically effect a school’s ranking in league tables. These are all genuine worries for schools, and that’s due to the system, it’s not schools’ fault, but doesn’t this miss the point of an education system?
If our goal is to create better students, shouldn’t our education system be designed to do that? Rather than a set syllabus from which teachers can’t waver, it might be better to give schools and teachers the licence to decide what their students need to focus on to be better at that subject. Ultimately students will become productive members of society who need skills, not the ability to recall irrelevant information.
Do we really care how much a student knows about the Second World War, or quadratic equations, or Macbeth? Or tests examine this ‘knowledge’ but the idea is to present students with problems and questions they haven’t seen before and test their ability to tackle the problems. To this end, we could create more abstract tests which genuinely look at a student’s proficiency in the subject.
It makes sense for schools and students to want to know the criteria on which they will be assessed, but what if examiners began saying that assessments will be more abstract, less about content and more about skills. This would doubtless mean lots of criticism about moving goalposts, but provided that examiners are still able to explain grading systems objectively then it would definitely be fair.