Raising educational standards: national testing of pupils in the United Kingdom, 1988–2009

Raising the basic standards of competence achieved by school children has become a primary objective of governments across Europe. A high performing educational system is taken to be fundamental in achieving European economic competitiveness. Children leaving primary schools with difficulty in reading, writing and arithmetic or a meagre understanding of science are unlikely to achieve the qualifications at secondary school required to secure jobs that will raise them above a poverty line. On one hand, in England, the government has pioneered a radical school reform programme over the last 20 years, including national testing of school children at regular intervals. On the other, high stakes testing was pursued only partially and briefly in Scotland and Wales and then largely abandoned after devolution. National testing in the UK has been associated with increasingly marked divergent outcomes in the UK. This article focuses on the following central question: how far the divergent reform policies in England, Scotland and Wales reflect differences in social policy objectives and how far a very different understanding in the means of achieving them? Empirical findings point to the widening gap in educational attainments across the UK countries and highlight the critical situation in Scotland where test results have stagnated in the last 10 years.