In this post I outline the means whereby the education system tyrannises teachers and pupils through extensive performance monitoring, and some of the negative consequences of this extreme surveillance.
This is the first broad-reason for why quitting teaching after 18 years in the not-so-beautiful game. You might like to read my first post in the series which sets the scene, and outlines the 11 overarching problems with the British education system which are forcing me into quitting.
I work in a 16-19 college, where life is relatively easy, for anyone working in a secondary school, I feel your pain, I know that things can only be worse!
NB I haven’t managed to quite keep up the pace I’d like with these: ironically I’ve been too exhausted from too many hours at the educational coal-face.
15 Surveillance mechanisms within contemporary education
There may well be more technologies of surveillance within education, but here I just focus on those concerned with performance monitoring: these are the means whereby teachers and students are governed (a term derived from Michel Foucault denoting the means whereby individuals are encouraged by neoliberal systems to take responsibility for their own actions).
- The raw exam results - The A-E pass rate and percentage of As and Bs (’high grades’) are regarded as especially important
- The ‘value-added’ or ‘ALIS’ scores - which measure how far, on average, students have progressed from their ‘GCSE’ score, against the average progression. The twisted thing about this particular measurement being that a negative score is weighted more highly than a positive score, with a U grade carrying an especially large negative penalty. In the past I’ve had a whole class of positive scores wiped out by one lazy idiot (may as well say it like it is) who failed.
- The ALPS score -which measures progression in relation to all other similar sixth form colleges - this is the crudest of the lot… you basically get awarded a colour coded number from 1-9 - 1-4 is ‘above average’ ‘hot’ and coded varying shades of red, 5 is OK/ luk warm, and 6 or below, shaded blue, are ‘BAD’.
- Retention figures - what percentage of students who started your course actually finished it? And yes, if a student finds a better offer, like an apprenticeship, or has to stop studying because of medical issues, that’s now the teachers’ fault.
- Attendance figures ….anything below 90% overall attendance is not satisfactory. You have to justify these at the end of the year as part of the ‘departmental review’, but of course collecting and monitoring this data via electronic registers is very much part of the daily grind.
- Interim reports - issued once every half term, so five a year, in which the students are graded in each subject according to ‘effort’, ‘time management’ and ‘class ethic’, in addition to their - these are sent to both parents and students.
- Course evaluation surveys - in which students are asked about 15 questions to evaluated the ‘quality of teaching and learning’, although you may as well just save everyone a whole lot of time and simply ask one question: ‘do you like your teacher’?
- Lesson Observations - in fairness to my college, we get a light touch on this, only once every two years: just as well, given the effort it takes to put on the total charade necessary to actually get an outstanding grade. Again I shit you not: you are expected to check every single students’ learning a minimum of three times in a lesson observation, and show that progress has been made from the beginning to the end of the lesson. In many schools, these micro-interactions can be surveilled at any time by an member of the SLT.
- All of the assessments students do - which are marked, fed back to and returned to students: their folders basically become a record of how good or bad your feedback is, which can be assessed at any moment by a member of the SLT. Ironically, the more marking you do, the more you open yourself up to criticism.
- The markbooks themselves are also open to scrutiny from above, at any time.
- Subject reviews - where we sit down with students and do a qualitative review of progress.
- Parents evenings - the nadirs of the year, and thankfully only twice a year for each year, but for the second years about 25% of the students are 18 at the time we have them. I shit you not, parents evenings for adult kids. (what surprises me most about writing this now is that I’ve never before stopped to reflect on this, had I done, I might have quit earlier.)
- The dreaded Strategic Assessment Review - once a year, typically i September, you review the department’s progress, or lack of it, from the previous year, and set targets for the forthcoming year, these are then reviewed and updated two further times in the year - in January and May.
- Minutes of department meetings - which have to be stored in a particular folder online.
- Faculty, all staff meetings and compulsory training events - which we have to attend throughout the year, all of these are subject to attendance registers.
This is the ALPS Thermometer - one of many indicators subject HODs are expected to justify their department's performance against in their annual 'subject reviews'.
I’ve just about survived 16 years of being subject to these 15 terrifying tools of surveillance, but on compiling the above list, it’s no wonder that I’m finally (literally) going mental. Frankly it’s a wonder that my mental health’s survived 16 years of being subjected to such a truly horrific regime of surveillance.
The official government policy agenda that lead to this situation is that of ‘marketisation’, which started with the 1988 Education act - which gave parents the choice over what school to send their child to, and linked school funding to the number of pupils - which should, theoretically, encourage all schools to drive up their results, as the schools left at the bottom would either close down or be taken over (with the management sacked.
Initially the ‘data’ which allowed parents to make an ‘informed choice’ about which school to send their child to was pretty much limited to exam results, but since then technological advances mean that the remit of performance monitoring has expanded in both breadth and depth - the latest development in my college is an app which allows parents to view their child's ‘ILP’ entries.
Four problems with Performance Monitoring in Education
Below I select out four negative consequences of the increase of surveillance and performance monitoring within education: namely as follows:
- The narrowing of the curriculum and teaching to the test
- The judging of students within a 2 year-time frame
- The categorising of students based on grades and educational triage
- The rise of the professionalised, bureaucrat-teacher and the corrosion of character (yes that’s from Sennett!)
NB - this isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s enough for one post I think…
The narrowing of the curriculum and teaching to the test
The most immediately obvious problem with so much performance monitoring is that education has become increasingly focused on passing exams, and ‘teaching to the test’.
Or as HIll (2007) puts it:
The cultural meaning of schooling has radically changed and is now more explicitly geared to performance, results and efficiency
Or as Ball (2003) puts it:
In cultures of performativity, value as represented through grades, points and quantifiable targets, holds the potential to supersede values’.
From my own experience as an A-level sociology teacher (ironically) there is so much you could potentially learn/ teach in ‘A-level sociology (the subject I teach), but for many years, centres around the country have narrowed their focus to teach just 5/6 core modules over two years, because this is what students need for the exam. Before the ‘tyranny of the test’, many years ago now, centres were able to take a much a much broader approach to teaching sociology, rather than having to focus in on the nitty-gritty specifics of the specification as laid-down by the exam board.
I also now teach less content than ever (students do more of this at-home) and focus much more on ‘teaching to the test’ - at least 25% of my lesson time has become devoted to exam style ‘training’ and an entire 6 weeks at the end of a two year teaching period of A-levels is now devoted to nothing other than ‘revision and exam training’, and this is representative of all other subjects.
There is now also much less time devoted to discussion, of what’s going on in the world for example, and I don’t remember the last time we had a ‘good old tangent discussion’.
NB - you cannot not do the above, because every 6 weeks you are required to produce ‘data’ for interim reports which ‘measure’ progress towards ‘target grades’ and students are asked ‘do you know your target grade, and how to reach it’ and ‘do you know how you are assessed’ as part of the course evaluation survey they get given in December. (Don’t ask why they get given this in December rather than at the beginning of the year!).
Teachers are judged on their ability to get students’ results within two years….
A levels and BTECs only measure students’ ability within the narrow, predetermined time windows of the formal assessment framework: this is fine assuming the following:
- They blossom intellectually or creatively at 18 years of age
- They don’t have any developmental problems associated with adolescence.
In other words, it’s not fine: the only students who are assessed ‘fairly’ within this system are those who have a relatively ‘easy life’ between the ages of 16-18 and don’t have their studies disrupted by friends, boyfriends, grandparents dying, enthusiastic entrepreneurialism, or just general adolescence.
And even if you aren’t held back by any of these normal life events, you still have to ‘peak at the right time’ for the June A-levels, or maintain ‘several peaks’ if you’re submitting BTEC modules. It’s as if we’re expecting students to behave like athletes.
This is possibly more serious a problem for those doing artistic subjects. As Sheridan (2002) notes:
... many of the great artists were only comprehensible long after they died; you [students], however, have to be comprehensible by June’.
It also grates on me that this isn’t how I personally work - over at my main revisesociology blog, what I like about it is that I can churn out ‘mediocre posts’ NOW and then go back to the ones which get the most hits, or which I’m most interested in at my leisure - I don’t have a deadline to produce my best work, I can constantly refine. (NB this also works MUCH BETTER than steemit for me, which is why I don’t post here much).
Teachers are encouraged to identify students by grades and treat them accordingly
There is a nasty little concept (developed by Gilborn and Youdell, 1999) called ‘educational triage’ - which describes the battlefield mentality which educational institutions now adopt towards different ‘tiers’ of students - basically students are grouped based on their perceived ability to get 5 A-Cs at GCSE into those who are ‘fit’ - and can be left to get on with it; those who are hopeless, who just need to be managed, and those who will pass 5 GCSEs at grades A-C but with assistance.
In my post-16 institution, educational triage takes the following form:
The dead are written off at enrolment/ interview - if a student has below a certain average GCSE score, they are not allowed to do A-levels, only the lower-status BTECs; for the very lowest GCSE score students, who have typically failed English or Maths GCSE, these have to do a ‘level 2’ programme
The ‘wounded’ students - those ‘in need of assistance’ are identified through their GCSE score in relation to their ability to pass the subject (for example historical data within a certain subject might tell us that students with an average grade of B at GCSE are going to pass, while students with a C/D average have a 50-60% chance of passing a certain) - students categorically predicted to have a low chance of passing are required to do extra support classes in that subject - they are triaged, in other words.
The vast majority of course are just 'left alone'. Or they are merely just subjected to regular levels of educational surveillance.
Finally, in something of an ‘evolution’ of (/regression from?) the triage model, at my college we also have something extra for the ‘high ability students’ - something called ‘The Aspire Programme’ - basically lessons in how to ‘promote yourself’: extremely fitting for our neoliberal age: the programme basically consists of self-promotion lessons for the children of the upper-middle class.
The problem I have with all of the above, besides the stereotyping through GCSE result, is the predetermined differential allocation of resources based on those stereotypes - the reason we give extra support to the C/D borderliners is because the ‘pass rate’ is a key indicator for the college, and the reason we give something extra to the high-fliers - well the A/B rate matters too, but so does the university entrance rate - it’s a key ‘marketing tool’ for the college.
Dependending on how you see surveillance, your view of who the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ are might vary - you could actually argue that those being ‘triaged’ are the losers, because they are subjected to…. Even more surveillance! At least the ‘ordinary’ students just get regular levels of surveillance - I won’t say they get ‘left alone’ because if any of these fall below their targets, they get triaged.
Teaching has become about impression management, not teaching
Stephen Ball (2003) notes that one result of the increasing focus within education on performance monitoring is that
commitment, judgement, and authenticity within practice are sacrificed for impression and performance.
In other words what gets lost within institutions obsessed with ticking performance boxes: those teachers who can demonstrate that they’re ticking boxes at the correct time junctures do well, those teachers who are ‘characters’ but not so good at admin, but probably better teachers, lose out.
A further problem is that those teachers who are good at ‘walking the management walk’ and ‘talking the management talk’ are the ones who come to have influence within education. I’ve seen this in my institution in recent years… there are so many (new) managers, so many people holding you to account on all of the above measurements - and not a single one of them is particularly talented: for the most part, they’ve just talked the management talk at the right times. (NB - I KNOW this is a very common problem in education).
The problem is that when an institution suffers from an ‘over-bureaucratisation of performance management’, anyone with any character is forced into leaving said institution and pushed into posting the truth on the blockchain - ring any (non-Pavlovian) bells?
Sources
Ball (2003) The teacher's soul and the terror of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18 (2).
Gilborn and Youdell (1999) Rationing Education: Policy, Practice, Reform and Equity.
Hill (2007) Critical teacher education, new labour and the global project of neoliberal capital, Policy Futures in Education, 2 (3).
Sheridon (2002), quoted from Hennessy, J (2013) At the alter of educational efficiency: Performativity and the role of the teacher, English Teaching and Practice, 12 (1).