Falling standards in UK schools

ph. According to The Daily Telegraph the pass mark in the national English test for 11-year-olds has been lowered for the third consecutive year. Children who took the reading-and-writing paper in May will be judged to have reached the standard expected of their age group if they get just 41 marks out of 100.

Last year the pass mark was 44, a five-mark fall on the previous year, when it was 49. The latest change means that the English pass mark has fallen by 16 percentage points since 1996. When Labour came to power the following year students needed more than 57 per cent to make the grade.

Examiners marking the papers of 600,000 children were ordered to lower the boundary by the Government’s exam watchdog, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. The decision has led once again to accusations that results are being manipulated in an attempt to prove that standards are rising.

Despite the government spending more than £200 million on giving pupils a daily literacy hour as well as booster and catch-up classes, the English results have refused to budge. Nick Seaton, the chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: “The fact that the pass mark has been lowered for three consecutive years is a clear indication that standards are falling.” “Most parents and employers will be seriously worried that children can now get most of the test wrong and still be judged by the QCA [the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority] to have reached the required standard.”

Last year

Some 75% of the children who took spelling, reading and writing tests in 2003 reached the required standard. However, more than half of the 11 year olds who passed tests in English could not spell the words “effortless” and “participate”. Of these, just 12% spelt “thoroughly” correctly, while “rehearsed” was beyond 67.5%, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority found. These were some of the results found when the QCA analysed a sample of 215 successful candidates’ test papers.

It also found more than 80% had spelled words such as “together”, “important” and “involved” correctly. But “qualified” proved too hard for four out of 10 pupils. Only 43% spelled “effortless” correctly, while just 40% had “knowledge” right, with the silent “k” and the “dg” catching out many pupils. In addition, the analysis showed 61% spelled “participate” wrongly, with the “c” causing problems.

Back to basics?

Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: “I think that parents and employers will be absolutely horrified that more than half of 11 year olds haven’t learned to spell a fairly regular word like ‘effortless’.” “I would have thought that these are the very things that primary schools should be doing, although they say they are concentrating on the basics.”

David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: “I think that, rather than concentrating on whether schools are actually slavishly following the literacy strategy, we want to make sure that teachers are doing what they were traditionally doing before the literacy strategy was ever invented – namely, making sure their children can spell properly before they leave primary school. ”