Nearly half of British people believe that the Coalition Government has the wrong policies on schools, while similar numbers think that the standards of teaching in schools are worse than ten years ago, and nearly three quarters agree that the standards of pupils’ behaviour in school are worse than a decade previously, our poll has discovered.
- 47% of British people believe that, generally speaking, the Coalition Government has the wrong policies on education and school
- While just 24% think it has the right policies
- 46% believe that the standards of teaching in schools are worse than ten years ago
- Just 14% think the standards of teaching are better, while 23% feel that there is no difference
- 73% of people believe that the standards of pupils’ behaviour in schools is worse than ten years ago
- Only 3% think behaviour is better, and 15% think there is no difference between now and a decade ago
Tougher tests?
The poll comes amid Government plans to improve the standard of students entering teaching, including the announcement that potential students will not be allowed to enter teacher training in England if they fail basic numeracy and literacy tests three times ‒ the current policy is to allow prospective teachers to take unlimited re-sits on numeracy and literacy exams while they are training. Our poll discovered that only 14% of people believe that the standards of teaching are currently better than ten years ago.
Education and schools have dominated the headlines recently as last week Prime Minister David Cameron commented that a series of errors in school examination papers taken this summer is ‘not an acceptable situation.’ A recent spate of exam mistakes included errors in OCR's A-level physics and GCSE Latin papers, and AQA's GCSE maths foundation paper. In a statement last week, Ofqual, England’s exams watchdog, said it was ‘unacceptable’ that candidates had faced fresh errors after exam boards had provided written promises that additional quality checks would take place after the first wave of mistakes.
‘Our concerns are serious enough that our director of regulation is meeting with the chief executive of OCR today to understand how these recent errors occurred and to make sure, so far as possible, that there will be no more avoidable errors,’ the statement said.
