TThe back-to-school landscape is often categorised by celebrities who humble-braggingly claim that poor grades had no impact on their subsequent brilliant lives. “I think of Jeremy Clarkson,” the Headmaster author writes. Test Country“I always tweet during exam season. He said he failed his A-level exams but that it was OK.”
On the one hand, we teach young people that exams don't matter, that they can have a great life even if their education doesn't work out. Of course, that's true. But on the other hand, we keep pressuring our kids, evaluating and ranking them against each other. Of course, this has practical benefits too. Test Country This book is an attempt to chart a path between these two extremes. It's entertaining, insightful and essential reading for anyone interested in how we work with young people.
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This book is particularly timely. Ofsted has just announced that it will end school grading with just one word – no more “outstanding”. And this year's A-level and GCSE grades have returned to more muted pre-pandemic levels after several years of grade inflation. These are necessary corrective measures. But Test Country He argues that we have gone too far down the road of metrics, measurement and quantification, which are usually inevitably linked to economic factors (from government cuts to house prices in catchment areas), and have completely lost sight of the real purpose of education.
When I started reading the book, I was a little annoyed that the tone wasn't more angry. After all, the situation Sammy Wright describes is dire and in dire need of reform. Wright has been teaching English for over 20 years and is currently head of a secondary school in Sunderland. But he's also a novelist – and it shows. This book is a joy to read, and its strength is that it's not just an angry political polemic. It's a thoughtful, nuanced journalistic diagnosis that looks at education from all angles: the perspectives of children experiencing it, adults reflecting on their own education, parents, teachers and politicians. Michael Gove is particularly scathing, which is satisfying.
Test Country Wright handles his sometimes unsettling findings with ease, weaving a generous amount of self-awareness and dark humor throughout. In his 20 years as a teacher, Wright has endured just about every insult hurled at him by the kids he teaches and every awkward conversation imaginable (“I had to explain to a parent that their kid was in trouble because they'd shared a photo of a man having sex with a chicken.”) The one quality he displays as an expert witness and narrator is one he believes is sorely lacking in our education system: open-minded curiosity.
He deftly portrays the tension between social interaction and the acquisition of knowledge, making this clear through extensive (anonymous) case studies of teenagers. Sixteen-year-old Candace explains that she knows she wasted her school years fooling around, but feels she had no other choice, because “good” behavior means social isolation. Her behavior is “a reaction to the values of her peers and the pressure they exert.” School is not just a place for exams; it's a place to learn how to get along with other people, and as Candace says, “I don't think schools can stop that. It's human nature. They do horrible things sometimes.”
Test Country Wright asks the question: “What is school for?” The purpose of education, he argues, is to help people understand themselves and their place in the world, and to show them how enjoying learning something for its own sake can be fulfilling and useful. In good schools and with good teachers, this happens naturally, and it's the process that bonds both the “I don't care about grades” crowd and the A* students in the long run.
In the final 14 pages, he outlines a comprehensive rethinking of the entire education system, one that involves preparing students for life, not just preparing them to pass exams. It's hard to imagine that an algorithm-obsessed government would adopt Wright's clever, community-focused, learning-driven proposals in the real world. But he writes as if many of the best teachers are going to try to do well anyway, on top of their obligation to “teach to the test.” It turns out that the process of a good education is a bit like the process of doing well on any test, or in life: you have to be willing to put in the effort.
