The White Paper

Education Secretary Michael Gove has announced that he is changing the education system to return to more traditional educational values.  He plans to aid students to achieve much higher results at Primary and GCSE level in both English and Mathematics.

With many students still not achieving a Level 4 in National Curriculum tests in Primary Schools and at least 5 A*-C grades at GCSE, Gove plans to bring in a higher standard of Headteachers to push the students at struggling schools to achieve these targets.  Other plans to achieve higher grades in schools include:

• extra funding to allow struggling schools to be taken over by successful heads
• improve the quality of teacher training
• to give teachers aptitude tests when entering the profession
• give teachers a greater control over the material they teach
• increase the salaries for the teachers whose classes are receiving better grades
• make more bursaries available to teachers to pursue masters degrees or other postgraduate qualifications to further knowledge of their subjects
• remove the current GCSE structure of frequent modules, which will be replaced with a single exam at the end of two years
• more plans to encourage academy-style independence to more school
• persuade people who have had successful careers elsewhere (eg. ex-servicemen) to go into teaching via the TeachNext Scheme

School League Tables

Reearch recently carried out at Bristol University has shown that since schools in Wales have abolished their school league tables, their GCSE results have become significantly lower (on average, a decline of almost 2 GCSE grades per student) compared to their English counterparts. 

As poor results were not released by the press, the weaker schools were not "named and shamed" so in turn were not as ashamed of their results as they would have been in the past.  This has resulted in far less improvement in the quality of teaching and management of these schools.

This shows that although the release of school league tables may become nervewracking amongst teachers, they influence far more motivation from the staff to improve.