WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...
The BBC and Guardian report today that secondary schools are going to be, in effect, held to ransom by their feeder schools’ KS2 results… 
The Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT: part-funded by the DfES) is to write to heads of secondary schools, alleging that 20,000 of the 180,000 identified gifted & talented pupils they have identified will, according to their statistics, fail to achieve 3 As at ‘A’ Level:
We’d be grateful if you’d ensure they’re given the necessary support to realise their potential and we’re going to track these children independently at [key stage 3], GCSE and A levels. And if these children don’t get 3As at A level we want to know why. Because they should but the facts are that only about a third of them are.
Critics have quite rightly attacked the scheme as needless and misdirected. Even the director of the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth (Nagty), Professor Deborah Eyre, has expressed concerns:
Nagty continues to believe that schools and colleges should be helped rather than hectored to improve their provision for gifted and talented students by such means as increasing access to high quality professional development opportunities and supporting examples of innovative practice.
At the end of the day, the proposal by SSAT takes all the personality and quirks which make individuals human and reduces them to a number or (at best) a ‘potential’. The proposed ‘test’ for this scheme is laughable - KS2 tests? As anyone who works in a secondary school in Britain will know, most schools re-test their pupils as they enter the school in Year 7 to gain a more realistic baseline assessment. KS2 testing is too subject to coaching and - sad to say, but understandable in some cases given the pressure teachers come under - cheating. I don’t think I’m the only one to be concerned about this attempt to ‘pigeon-hole’ young people at such an early age. I really can’t see what positive effect it can possibly have.
Another thing I’m concerned about is the further and further encroachment of the state into the individual lives of its citizens. I made my first off-topic post (The end of civil liberties) about the issue of the introduction of ID cards in the UK, and this is along the same lines. On the surface, the legislation being brought in - banning smoking in public places, making ID cards compulsory to stop terrorism, etc. - seem reasonable. But if we step back a moment and think about what the role of the state really is, then perhaps we shouldn’t be taken in by the government’s propaganda. Another example of this comes today as the TES reports that as part of the Education Bill being debated today, “schools will be able to give misbehaving pupils detentions at weekends, as part of a package to improve discipline”. Since when should schools be allowed to interfere in the private life of the family? I realise there’s a fine line and that in a perfect world both school and parents/guardians work on the ’same side’ in the best interests of the child, but I do worry. It’s almost akin to the scheme whereby if you don’t pay your TV license they come and clamp your car! 
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