Testing Times

In its trumpeted concern for the education of Britain's future soldiers, stockbrokers, burger-fetchers and dole queue enhancers, the Government has, as always, kept its priorities straight. Teaching (or testing, in Standard English) is, like health care and public transport, a service whose efficient delivery is to be judged by the profit of private companies, rather than by anything so old-fashioned as the effect on people at the receiving end. Accordingly, the Government has contracted out the overseeing of some of the exams it imposes on eleven- and fourteen-year-olds to a company called ETS Europe, which is, as one would expect, based in the United States. Last summer, up to a hundred thousand pupils did not receive their results on time, and some still have not received them. An inquiry is expected to blame the National Assessment Agency, which is part of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, as well as ETS Europe; and the head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, not being a politician or a policeman, has been persuaded to jump before he is pushed. As is well known, New New Labour dislikes the unpleasantness and acrimony surrounding your average resignation for incompetence; it much prefers to march on regardless, crunching the demands of good government beneath the clodhopping hobnails of party favour; not surprisingly, a "source close to the Schools Secretary, Ed Balls" said that the affair was "not their finest hour". On the other hand, they have had few finer.