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When a government is well-run, it is in the business of improving outcomes. So, in the case of schools, its education ministry will be devoted to turning out pupils who are literate, numerate and well-rounded — the three things that parents consistently say they want in surveys, focus groups and, if they’re paying to send their children to private schools, with their wallets.
When a government is poorly run, it tends to focus on improving performance indicators. In education the relevant department becomes devoted to producing ever better grades each year. This is what both employers and parents fear when they talk about “grade inflation”.
The difference between the two approaches is not always obvious, however. Producing pupils who are more literate, numerate and well-rounded ought, all things being equal, to result in ever-improving grades. In the United Kingdom, Conservative politicians often suggest that the rising number of university graduates getting firsts is a sign of grade inflation and falling standards. This is possible, but given the improvement in teaching at primary and secondary school level — driven in part by Tory policies — it is equally possible that a university student in 2024 is just better-educated than one in 2004.
One reason Conservative politicians have been right to obsess about England’s standings in the global Pisa rankings is that while these surveys are imperfect, they remain a decent metric that can’t be gamed by national governments or shaped solely by anecdote.
Education is in many ways an easy challenge for policymakers, because literacy and numeracy rates are targets you either meet or you don’t. But other areas of policy are harder to crack. For example, the American criminal justice system has some of the highest reoffending rates in the world. Countries that have better reoffending rates than the US have achieved them in a number of ways: by recruiting better teachers to work in prisons, so that inmates leave with their skills and prospects enhanced, for instance; or by encouraging companies to hire ex-offenders.
What unites schools and prisons is that there is broad political agreement about what we want out of them: but disagreement over how to get there. The targets you set might have the effect of driving one thing you care about but at the expense of another. Sometimes, fewer, more tightly contained targets may be more effective at driving excellence than pursuing a lot of them.
In education, some private schools in England are doing just that, by reducing the number of nationally-recognised qualifications they offer. Since 2005, pupils at Bedales, a private school in the south of England, have taken just five GCSEs in order to devote more time to their own Bedales Assessed Courses (or BACs), which encompass everything from game design to classical civilisation. From 2027, Latymer Upper School, a private establishment in London, will teach just two GCSEs: English language and mathematics. (Most schools teach at least eight.)
When I talked to teachers and headteachers at state schools about these measures, most were envious. They thought the freedom that would come with knowing you were delivering the essentials of a good education, turning out pupils who were both numerate and literate, while being able to focus on wider and deeper forms of teaching for other subjects, would improve their schools no end. But some were horrified: they believe that not offering nationally-recognised qualifications in music, history or social sciences would simply result in their departments having less power internally and less respect from parents. Where parents are committed to getting a good education, teaching large numbers of subjects without a recognised qualification at the end may work well. It is less clear how easy it is for schools where parents are less engaged to replicate this.
One reason targets are attractive is that they give those teaching particular subjects a degree of power. A target to increase the number of people taking a computer science qualification strengthens the computer science department. A target to increase the number of inmates leaving prison with a qualification increases the clout of the education officers.
But targets also give those who set them a sense of achievement, which is why they can often multiply well past the point of effectiveness. Perhaps the most widely applicable lesson from what schools such as Bedales have done with their qualifications is the importance of regularly reviewing whether your targets are working as they should.