I fear that Ed Balls – or whichever buffoon it was who decided to outsource the £156m contract to mark the Sats of British schoolchildren to a New Jersey-based company called Educational Testing Service (ETS) – does not read the NS. If he (or whoever was responsible) did, they would know that the whole system of Sats that Britain copied from the US in 1991 is an increasingly discredited shambles here; and that ETS, which marks US SATs and had a turnover of $1.1bn last year, leaves teachers, schoolchildren and parents shrugging their shoulders in despair. Nobody should be remotely surprised, therefore, that the exam results of 1.2 million UK schoolchildren are in turmoil this summer.
What is so symbolic about awarding such an important task in British education to a US company, though, is the degree to which new Labour is bewitched by all things American. Whether it is Jack Straw’s obsession with introducing a British “Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” based on America’s 1791 Bill of Rights, the British government’s willingness to allow US defence companies to fund the Queen’s garden party in Washington, or the new-found enthus iasm to introduce US-style electoral primaries and caucuses in the UK, all these would-be initiatives share one glaring factor in common: British ministers become enthused by them just as it is becoming clear to anybody who lives on this side of the Atlantic that the institutions or policies are failing in the US.
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