How Schools do Policy by Stephen J. Ball Meg Maguire & Annette Braun

Author:Stephen J. Ball, Meg Maguire & Annette Braun
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Figure 4.2 Commercial technologies of assessment

Costs

There are costs of various kinds involved here in addition to the software. Specific funds are allocated to support these interventions, which might be used in other ways, including the buying in of agency teachers, away days, weekends and visits, paying teachers for overtime and tutoring, producing and buying revision materials, etc. Learning support assistants (LSAs) are also allocated to support specific targeted interventions. Schools were able to apply for, but did not always get, money from the ‘intervention budget’ which was part of the Standards Fund administered by the DCSF. Other monies were allocated specifically for interventions. There are also costs in terms of the distribution of teachers’ time, effort and attention, which are also part of the rationing process outlined above, and there are opportunity costs in relation to other kinds of classroom work and other kinds of learning experiences which are not attended to. There are all sorts of issues involved here in the ways in which finite resources are allocated and performance and equity focuses can be deployed to support very different sorts of distributions.

We got an outside agency in to do the Easter holiday sessions.

(Nicola, head of English, Atwood)

[I]t’s amazing how much time you spend chasing up kids to attend these things.

(Sonja, Mathemathics, Atwood)

[W]e had examiners come in from the exam board. I don’t think that worked that well… we can do it in-house in future rather than paying Edexel [Examination Board] quite a lot of money.

(Martin, head of Mathematics, George Eliot)

[I]t costs the school a lot of money to re-enter them [for exams].

(Molly, GTP English, Campion)

[Y]ou get more support, you get more budget… it balances out.

(Daisy, NQT Mathematics, Campion)

[Targeting] determines the allocation of LSAs.

(Nicola, head of English, Atwood)

And certainly they were talking about some extra after-school lessons, maybe paid, for kids that are on that C/D borderline.

(Douglas, HoY, Mathematics, Wesley)

This is this new government scheme that they’re going to pay teachers extra money to do extra hours of tutoring on a one-to-one basis, £25 an hour. It’s quite a difficult process, the deputies identify the students who are borderline, who would benefit from one-to-one. It’s quite controversial because you’re going to get parents saying ‘this child’s getting it, why isn’t my child getting it?’

(Molly, GTP English, Campion)

For the schools these costs are also investments. First, in the immediate returns they may generate in terms of boosting examination outputs, and second, as a result, in making the school more attractive to parents within the local performance economy (see Chapter 2).

Discomforts

There are also emotional costs which arise from the narrowness of ‘focus’ and the pressures to ‘improve’ which constrain the enactments of ‘standards’. Not all teachers are convinced by the rhetorics of performance, and many teachers are not convinced all of the time. Some discomforts were expressed in interviews, but more public expressions of concern seemed to go unheeded in the face of the pressures to perform and the risks of underperformance. The technology does not respond to dismay or dissent,

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