Vic teachers told to teach to the test

	Bob Lipscombe at Media Conference expressing concerns about league tables

A leaked Victorian Department of Education memo, revealed by two newspapers this morning, has made a lie of official denials that publication of data from the My School website will lead to the narrowing of the curriculum and "suck the oxygen" out of primary school classrooms.

The Australian reports that the memo directs teachers to "explicitly teach" to the NAPLAN tests in order to improve overall literacy and numeracy results in Victoria. This vindicates Federation warnings that the publication of NAPLAN data would push Australia towards replicating the failed English experiment with league tables.

The memo also formalises what President Bob Lipscombe feared would be teachers' natural reaction to being unfairly ranked by test results.

"Teachers aren't fools. And if they are going to be judged by such measures, as inappropriate as it is, you're going to see [them] teaching to the test," he said of league tables. "You'll see the very things that they warned against in England, and most recently warned against by Dr Ken Boston, former Director-General of Education in NSW.

"The very man who was previously in charge of education in this state warned us not to go down the pathway they've followed in England. The person who told us that in England up to 70 per cent of teachers' time, up to 70 per cent of students' time - in the time leading up to the test in England - is now spent coaching to the test.

"The very man who warned us that drama, music, art, excursions all suffered enormously in the English education system as a result of the distortions that occurred around league tables."

According to The Australian, which obtained a copy of the memo, the directive tells principals to appoint a NAPLAN coordinator and offers a "blueprint for classroom approaches" that includes coaching skills for passing the tests such as learning the "test question vocabulary" and "skim and scan".

The memo was emailed to all school principals in the Loddon-Mallee region of Victoria two days before the launch of the MySchool website.

"We are now heading down the pathway that's been followed in England, where they've had league tables for the last two decades," Lipscombe said. "Despite those league tables being in place...there has been no significant improvement in student outcomes. In fact, if you look at the international measure of student assessment, Australia ranks well above England in those measures."

Boston, the former chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in England, has been an unexpected ally of opponents to league tables. "Despite their formal qualifications, many young people [in England] are...deficient in the soft skills that form an essential component of each individual's human capital, some of them to the extent that they are in fact unemployable," Boston wrote in Britain's The Sunday Times last year.

"The present problem is not the result of inadequacies in the primary curricul...The real problem is that teachers and schools aren't able to get on with teaching it. That is because the government's approach to the key-stage tests has sucked the oxygen from the classrooms of primary schools."

Lipscombe added: "It's a sad day when we decide that that's the example we wish to follow, that's the pathway we wish to go along. We are very concerned now that we are going to see distortion of what's taught in our schools."

The Victorian memo indicates that at least one state Education Department is determined to repeat England's mistake.

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Last Modified: 05 Feb 2010