exam-factories

Exam factories? The impact of accountability measures on children and young peopleCore subject 21 day-long booster sessions which remove them from non-core subjects andthey are expected to simply catch up, even though they might be in the middle of controlledassessments. This places additional stress on the pupils. (Secondary, ‘Good’, W)Spending more time on certain subjects inevitably results in spending less time on other subjects; thisis discussed in Section 5.4.3.4 Additional teachingThe list of strategies used by schools included two focusing on the provision of additional teaching.These were:• Provision of small group or individual teaching; and• Provision of extra classes after school, on Saturdays or in school holidays.Practice varied between primary and secondary respondents (Figure 6).Figure 6: Percentage of respondents in mainstream schools reporting that listed strategies were‘key’ in their schools, by school phase (N = 6,617)80%70%60%50%40%30%20%10%0%Provision of small group orindividual teachingProvision of extra classesafter school, on Saturdays orin school holidaysPrimarySecondaryWhile Figure 6 shows the number of respondents indicating these were ‘key’ strategies in theirschools, it is worth noting that in this case many other respondents indicated that they were sometimesused.These strategies were not significantly related to Ofsted grades, but were reported significantlymore frequently by those in schools with lower attainment and higher proportions of disadvantagedpupils.Some additional teaching is open to all pupils (for example, lunch-time or after-school revision sessionsfor students taking GCSEs) but many sessions are for pupils who are targeted either on the basis oftheir attainment level and target grades, or because they belong to a particular group. In particular,disadvantaged pupils may receive extra tuition because the school has received specific ‘Pupil Premium’funding to raise their attainment.Additional teaching has a number of potential impacts: the intention is to support pupils and enable themto achieve better results, but there are other possible impacts on teachers’ workload and the curriculumexperienced by pupils.21 See footnote 21.­28