Grammar tests, de facto policy and pedagogical coercion in England\u2019s primary schools

Ian Cushing

doi:10.1007/s10993-020-09571-z

Abstract

Since their introduction by the Conservative government in 2013, primary school children in England have taken a mandated grammar, punctuation and spelling assessment, which places an emphasis on decontextualised, standardised English and the identification of traditional grammatical terminology. Despite some concise criticisms from educational linguists, there remains no detailed and critical investigation into the nature of the tests, their effects on test takers, and the policy initiatives which led up to their implementation. This article contributes to this gap in knowledge, using critical language testing as a methodological framework, and drawing on a bricolage of data sources such as political speeches, policy documents, test questions and interviews with teachers. I discuss how the tests work as de facto language policy, implemented as one arm of the government’s ‘core-knowledge’ educational agenda, underpinned by a reductive conceptualisation of language and a problematic discourse of ‘right/wrong’ ways of speaking. I reveal how teachers talk about the ‘power’ of the tests, intimidating and coercing them into pedagogies they do not necessarily believe in or value, which ultimately position them as vehicles for the government’s conservative and prescriptive language ideologies.

Highlights

Since 2013, 10–11 year-old students in England take an annual mandated assessment in Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling (GPS) in their sixth and final year of primary school
This article has presented an analysis of the GPS tests, through a broad lens of discursive approaches to language policy and using Shohamy’s (2001) framework of critical language testing, which sees tests as non-neutral products of political and ideological agendas
Standardised Assessment Tests (SATs) and testing regimes have long been politicised in England (e.g. Marshall 2017), this article has been the first to examine the political agenda which underpins the GPS tests

Summary

Introduction

Since 2013, 10–11 year-old students in England take an annual mandated assessment in Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling (GPS) in their sixth and final year of primary school. My interest in this article lies in how the GPS tests cut across these, but with a particular focus on (2), in the ways that they might intimidate teachers into pedagogies that they do not necessarily value or believe in, uncritically advocate standardised English at the expense of nonstandardised forms, and frame language as an ideological system of ‘correctness’ imbued with notions of superiority, hierarchy and legitimacy (Bourdieu 1991). As Lingard (2012) demonstrates in relation to the Australian National Assessment Program, high-stakes tests can have damaging effects in the long-term, in terms of narrowing pedagogies and curricula to become overtly test-focused and degrading teachers’ work (see Menken 2008 for a critical discussion of the No Child Left Behind education policy and tests in the USA). This article is primarily concerned with the effects of the GPS tests on teachers, as policy actors who can be manipulated into pedagogies which reproduce the language ideologies embedded within the tests

Methodology and data

Findings

Conclusion