Education Metrics and the Cobra Effect

There is a story – probably apocryphal – from the period of the British Raj in India: At one time, Delhi was plagued by a great number of cobras which presented a danger to the populace, so the authorities offered a bounty for each dead cobra presented to them.

This was an initial success but after a while some local entrepreneurs saw the advantages of breeding cobras which they could kill and claim the bounty on. This was easier and more profitable than hunting them, until the authorities got wind of what was going on and refused to pay any more rewards. Having no more profit in this business, the erstwhile cobra farmers released the snakes, causing a bigger problem than they had started with.

Recent research from the Sutton Trust suggests the top five hundred UK secondary schools take in half as many disadvantaged pupils as the average comprehensive. Really, who would have imagined that a high-stakes system of league tables and OfSTED ratings – determining everything from school funding and house prices in catchment areas to headteachers’ job security – could possibly result in prioritising results over care and inclusion? Not, it seems, the DfE since the early 1990s.

And yet we keep tinkering with a system based on snapshot judgement and inter-organisation competition rather than genuine improvement, which penalises deprivation and need, creating perverse incentives that favour school metrics over children’s need.

There are other ways of bringing about school improvement, for example peer review, which are based on actual improvement rather than judgement. To summarise starkly, under this system there could be a culture of openness and support; under the current one there is a culture of concealment and verdict.

If results and target-driven improvement data are the primary motivators and measure for schools, the needs of children are going to suffer. How much they do is a balancing act. There doesn’t seem to be much official will to deal structurally with a crisis in education and a growing number of marginalised schoolchildren, but sooner or later these chickens will come home to roost – much like those apocryphal cobras.