Where the teaching unions have a good point

The teaching unions have spent a lot of this week getting angry about one thing or another, but one of their number, the National Association of Head Teachers, did make a good point yesterday when reacting to Ofsted’s report on bright kids. Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers – not the most aggressive of the unions – said:

‘However, the government’s league table culture deserves a measure of the blame for this situation. For too long, schools have been forced into the middle ground, to get students over thresholds at the expense of both the most and least able. Education has become a numbers game, at the expense of the ethos and breadth that underpin a truly great education.’

Hobby is right that teachers have been too narrowly focused on thresholds rather than full potential. It’s one of the reasons GCSEs needed reforming, as these graphs show.