Half Measure

This is one my pupils (parental permission given for use) performing in this morning's assembly with her music teacher in the background. She, and others, were playing the keyboard to the school and eager parents. They were all terrific, not something I could have done at that age due to ability and nerves.

As I am sitting here marking SAT papers as part of assessing their understanding (and having gone through our school's Raise Online statistical report from Ofsted today), I am having my yearly internal rant. How do you measure the abilities of a child and the success of a primary school? Well, if you are the government, then you look at reading, writing and maths. How unfair is that?

What about artistic talents (and the huge variety there is: dance, drawing, sculpture, poetry, singing, music... to name but a few), scientific inquiry (dropped a few years back as a published measure), understanding and contextualising of historical events, ability to describe aspects of human and physical geography, sporting prowess, use and development of ICT capability, and, in my own opinion the most important one, pure moral fibre - how much of a quality human being are they in terms of their moral, cultural, spiritual and social awareness?

Individual Ofsted inspections do look at these in a very sporadic and occasional way, and as teachers we assess these and report to parents, but there is no real drive to put the whole child as the focus of formal assessment. Although important skills - it's always just reading, writing and maths. Clearly there are problems with precisely assessing the entire range of the aforementioned abilities logistically, but current measurements do punish those who's strengths may not lie in one of the three key areas. It can affect their self-esteem, confidence, peer relationships, workload and potentially restrict options, either presented or self-imposed. Children are made to feel bad if they have trouble spelling, performing written methods, writing stories (go on, when was the last time YOU wrote one in 45 mins flat) or writing neatly.

It's a necessary evil I know, and I do see the usefulness of assessment in many ways, but when you are using a restricted set of tools, you are never going to get an accurate measurement. Every child is talented and able, it's just that they are generally talented and able at different things.

This pupil is ace, she was incredible with her performance this morning. I still cannot read music, and I have tried so many times to learn, and could never achieve what she did today with years of practise. I am much more talented in the area of the extensive-rant-to-bore-a-visiting-Blipper.....Level 5 right there with that one :)