Section One:
The historical
context
was a particular issue for those schools serving
challenging communities or very small schools
where ‘success’ could be influenced by the scores
All of these factors together led to a much greater achieved by a few children. This also influenced
consistency between educational experiences some schools in terms of their willingness to accept
across England. Wales, Northern Ireland and children with special needs. In a world where
Scotland continued to have their own curriculums, parents could potentially choose the school for
which in the case of Scotland differed significantly their child, schools also felt a need to be able to
from the centrally imposed English Curriculum. ‘not choose’ some children. This situation led to a
There was considerable disquiet amongst the widespread boycott of SATs at 11 in 1993.
teaching profession at this time, who felt that their
professional judgement was being undermined, As a result of these different measures there were
and who had clearly lost control of their autonomy some conflicting tensions within the education
as professionals. From the Faculties of Education service. At one level there was more consistency
and Colleges of Education there was also a feeling across the community of curriculum (National
that the whole structure had been imposed Curriculum) of testing processes (SATs and GCSEs
without any reference to educational theory, for all), which were defined either at a government
research evidence or analysis of good practice. level or at an examination board level. But the
institutions in which pupils were receiving their
In 1992 Ofsted was set up. The Government, now education continued to be varied
_
there were still
under John Major, continued to believe that grammar schools and selection in some areas, but
schools should be accountable to Government for in others there were city technology colleges,
the standards of the education that were offered in grant-maintained schools and comprehensive
them. Ofsted was to be the body that would schools offering very different perspectives on what
inspect each school about once every four years. education might be like. In addition there was a
Private companies were employed to inspect perception that the education offered by some of
schools and to publish their inspection reports for the comprehensive schools was not of high quality
everyone to read. HMIs had in the past created full and had dropped to the lowest common
inspection reports which were shared with the denominator. As a result of that analysis,
school and the LEA to help raise issues that might specialisation was felt to be the solution by which
need to be addressed, but were not published individual secondary schools should bid to become
widely for all to read. The public nature of the awarded ‘specialist status’ in one of a handful of
Ofsted report was designed to ‘name and shame’ areas
_
sport, performing arts, modern foreign
those schools that were not achieving as they languages, science, mathematics and computing
should. being some of them. The intention was that
parents with children who had a particular
In addition, standard assessment tests (SATs) were competence or skill in that area could choose to
introduced, and were initially intended to provide a send their child to that school. There were
measure of the success of schools. This was restrictions on the number of students that the
particularly true of the SATs when children school could take on this sort of ‘selective’ process.
completed their primary education at 11 years of In practice this level of student mobility did not
age. In addition, the results were to be published come about, and now a very significant proportion
nationally as ‘league tables’. This created a of all secondary schools have specialist status in
considerable amount of disquiet and concern, and some area or other.
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