The Observer this weekend reported on the Lib Dems’ latest attempts to push for more equal treatment of citizens from different ethnic backgrounds:
Ministers are seeking to introduce “blind marking” of pupils’ schoolwork by teachers as part of a push to tackle a history of underachievement among black and ethnic minority groups, while banks will be required to carry out ethnic monitoring of people to whom they lend money. Under the proposals, the identities of pupils would not be a factor when teachers mark work, and banks could be held accountable for the racial profile of their customers. The controversial plans are part of a package of policies being examined as part of the government’s integration strategy, designed to reduce inequalities between races.
The article continues:
It is understood that the Liberal Democrat communities minister, Andrew Stunell, with support from Clegg, wants to introduce a series of radical policies in the coming months, despite the opposition of some of their government partners. … As a first step, Liberal Democrat ministers will give prominent support to two reports set to be published this summer. Last November, speaking at the Scarman memorial lecture, Clegg announced that Stunell would lead a government inquiry into the barriers preventing black and ethnic minority groups from accessing loans and other financial services.
While an increase in ethnic monitoring by banks is likely to face a backlash from groups concerned about privacy, it is now seen as a crucial step. Recent evidence from the Black Training and Enterprise Group suggests black Caribbean and African people are much more likely to consider starting a business, yet only 6% are self-employed or own their own business, compared with 15% of white people. Stunell is set to endorse proposals in a report to be published soon by Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Meral Hussein-Ece on race, including the introduction of anonymous marking across all student assessments.
A study by Ofsted in 1999 showed that students with a typically African or Asian-sounding name were likely to be given up to 12% lower marks in institutions where anonymous marking was not in place. However, Leeds University found that after changing its system to introduce anonymous marking, the scores of black minority ethnic students and women rose by up to 12%.
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33 Comments
I have to say I’m eager to embrace the idea of anonymous marking; but the idea of “ethnic monitoring”, let alone the name, fills me with a cold instinctive dread.
very much agreed with Tim Oliver.
negative freedom baby, and this is a significant intrusion upon that!
We need to see what the final report says, not just one small aspect leaked by Adrew Stunnll’s aide to boost his chances of keeping the race and equalities portfolio come the great reshuffle.
The test will be whether it is just another sop to the establishment to attempt to show we think BME people matter, or whether it recommends real,radical and positve acton to tackle the increasing discrimination and racism in austerity Britain.
But its masonic-like secrecy and snubbing key party bodies like EMLD does not bode well.
Difficult to believe that we are really going to propose that all school marking is done ‘blind’ at it would obviously a) be impossible b) be a bureacratic nightmare. If these proposals go ahead can we have some evidence that there actually is discrimination in marking ?
Any can we have the evidence that there is discrimination by banks in lending ?
What does ethnic monitoring mean? In employment recruiting, my understanding is that it just means a company has to keep records of the ethnicity of all the people they interview, etc, in the form of anonymous aggregate statistics. So it doesn’t mean monitoring the individuals, it means getting an overview of what the company is doing, so that any strong racial discrimination by them would show up. Sounds fairly unexceptionable to me.
Aren’t most exam papers marked by the same people who do the teaching though? If so that would suggest a bigger problem.
@Simon – There is evidence above. Its surely not that hard to introduce. When I did O/A levels we had a student number which we put on our script along with name etc. It would be easy just to do away with the name box and track papers by student number.
Very interesting that Leeds university found that women’s grades rose by 12% with anonymous marking.
This may explain the lack of women scientists. In one science department at my old university, the number of women PhD students was 50% , but the academic staff were only 4% women.
Papers should be marked anonymously wherever possible.
We should also find out where there is course assessment and blind marking whether there is a good correlation between the two marks. If one bme or gender does worse when the person is known then yes, action is needed. It’s about justice.
Surely marked schoolwork (and it is specifically schoolwork the Observer refers to ) is all about enabling teachers to assess pupils’ progress and assist them acordingly. So either the Observer has got this wrong or this proposal is completely misguided.
Whatever happened to liberals’ traditional aspiration for a smaller and less intrusive state where things are devolved as far as possible? This sounds like yet another well-intentioned centrally-directed Labour style initiative which we can’t actually afford.
@Liberal Eye – are you prioritising your desire for a ‘smaller less intrusive state’ over the need for fairness when it comes to race in education?
I wonder if people have thought about how – with all the homework teachers have to mark this would work?
@hywel – that isnt evidence. The OFSTED report isnt on their website and google turns up nothing on the Leeds study. Interestingly the NUS briefing on the campaign for blind marking does not mention a Leeds study (and the evidence they do mention is pretty weak .
One can only hope this proposal is limited to assessed work that will influence examination grades. But if so it would be a good idea to make that clear asap, so that it doesn’t sound like a completely impractical proposal from politicians who have utterly lost touch with reality.
@ Lester Holloway
I would never been dogmatic about the size of the state but we do need to be realistic about what it can and can’t do. Getting into the classroom and interposing itself between teacher and pupil is firmly in the ‘can’t do’ camp.
I see no objection to blind marking at all. People can be prejudiced without knowing it, and without malice. Blind marlking can help make the system fairer, and make it seen to be fairer. It creates no extra work since submissions have to be marked anyway, and may reduce the work needed to address parental complainst of bias..
Even better, what about blind marking by someone who is not the person who taught the material ? This could free the teacher to provide support that is not complicated by a simultaneous, cold judgmental role. It would demonstrate to everyone that the syllabus is not something that has been arbitrarily chosen by the teacher. An exam is a test of a teacher’s performance in getting the material across, and this kind of blind marking can reduce the self-assessment aspect of the exercise and be relevant to annual appraisals.
Is it juts schools and banks that have this problem? What about everyone else?
With regards to the blind-marking of school work by teachers, I agree entirely with Liberal Eye’s comments on the principle and especially the practice. I appreciate the value of blind-marking for exams, but it seems an unnecessary, impractical, damaging and frankly ridiculous intrusion into the pupil-teacher relationship.
I hope that the policies that Stunell and Clegg eventually propose will be better than this.
@Richard Dean
“People can be prejudiced without knowing it, and without malice.” Sad but true, though I suspect that this will have more of an impact on teaching and interacting with children than it would in marking their work.
“blind marking by someone who is not the person who taught the material” The requirements for teaching and learning are entirely different from those for simply assessing in an exam. It is important for a teacher to know how individual pupils are performing and where their weaknesses are. Spelling, handwriting, presentation, writing-style, care taken, consistency with the pupil’s usual work, plagiarism, wider understanding of the taught material, deficiencies in the teaching, etc. are all things that a good teacher would be considering even if not directly related to the mark assigned to the work being assessed.
“Is it juts schools and banks that have this problem? What about everyone else?” Indeed. I think that there are many areas where action could be usefully taken (banking might be one, employment in general almost certainly is), just not this blind-marking of school work.
There seems to be an assumption in the proposals that blind-marking by teachers will lead to better marks for female and minority-group pupils and that this will lead to better performance in external exams. The law of unintended consequences could lead to the opposite outcome with those pupils working less hard and approaching exams with a poorer attitude, or all students performing worse as good teachers are made less effective.
I also fear that this will be used to make a case for getting rid of teacher marking and continuous assessment in GCSEs in order to support a return to all-or-nothing end of course exams which reward exam-technique over understanding and subject knowledge.
Blind marking of exams is an obvious step to take, the pupil numbers have been in place for a while now. Clearly you can’t go blind marking the normal day-to-day school work as how else will the teacher relate bac to the pupil and give them the individual help they need.
There have been experiments with blind job application forms for the same reasons.. it is the way to go.
“There seems to be an assumption in the proposals that blind-marking by teachers will lead to better marks for female and minority-group pupils … The law of unintended consequences could lead to the opposite outcome”
No, there is a lot of very sobering evidence to the effect that when you get an identical essay marked and you change the name at the top of it from Jane to John, you get a really big increase in the average mark. Given that evidence, public exams really should be blind marked (though not internal schoolwork, where of course it matters for teachers to know and help develop each individual).
@David Allen
“Given that evidence, public exams really should be blind marked (though not internal schoolwork, where of course it matters for teachers to know and help develop each individual).”
I agree entirely. What worries me about the article is that it states, “Ministers are seeking to introduce ‘blind marking’ of pupils’ schoolwork by teachers”, and associates Lib Dems with what I think is a ridiculous idea.
I suspect that it is just a poorly written article: it conflates banking and school marking, provides no source for the claim, vaguely mentions an Ofsted report without providing a proper reference, etc. Work-experience journalist?
@David Allen “No, there is a lot of very sobering evidence to the effect that when you get an identical essay marked and you change the name at the top of it from Jane to John, you get a really big increase in the average mark”
Could you share some of the evidence with us please ?
David – in that case aren’t the biases of teachers something which is a real problem in teaching as well as just exam marking?
Simon, I confess this was just something I read a while back and don’t have a record of. In my defence, this isn’t a big axe-grinding exercise on my part, I just read the article, which did contain figures, and thought “blimey, that’s a much bigger bias than I’d ever have expected”. You could try googling to prove / disprove all this, sorry…
Hywel, yes I’m sure you’re right, but of course you can’t keep the pupil anonymous from the teacher all the time! At least you can deal with bias in public exams via blind marking.
This could work in public or Uni exams. Obviously nonsense for schoolwork.
There’s nothing nonsensical about it for schoolwork at all.
I don’t think I am right! But the logical extension of anonymous marking improving the grades of BAME students (or those with obvious BAME names) is that teachers are institutionally racially prejudiced. I’ve never seen any evidence suggesting this was the case.
In ten years time I guarantee that people will be shouting and screaming about banks selling loans to black people who can not pay them back. And not one of those people will remember that it was them that forced the banks to make those loans in the first place.
@David Allen – fair enough
These columns always seem disproportionately full of those who want to put down any attempt to assist victims of racial discrimination. And to repeat he most blatant tales of sterotyping.
The response of most human beings who see others in need of help through no fault of their own is to offer a helping hand. However, not those trying to hide their own inadequacies by a reaction of ‘pull up the ladder, Jack, I’m all right’.
The comment by Ad, whoever this sad person may be, beats them all. What evidence is there that black people are more likely to default on loans from banks or anyone else? Indeed, such figures as exist on BME success in business show a much higher than average success rate.
But that, of course, may be that they need to be so much better than the white norm to get any funds or meaningful help in the first place,
It’s one thing to be keen to start your own business. It;s quite another to have a credible plan. Indeed, in the present economic climate you probably need an incredible one! Has anyone looked at whether there are correlations between ethnicity and business risk?
And why is it that some groups appear to have a larger proportion of people wanting to start their own business? Are those groups driven to it by discrimination in employee hiring? Or are the other groups somehow positively discouraged through some kind of cultural difference?
@Richard
re: correlations between ethnicity and business startup
I suspect that there is much to be mined from the data collected by Businesslink on people attending their business startup workshops.
But then they probably don’t publish it as they know the data is highly subjective and open to (mis)interpretation.
Blind marking sounds like a good idea. I have no doubt that there are a small number of teachers who are prejudiced in different ways. Why should their prejudices be allowed to blight the results of a child?
@Liberal Eye – if the size of the state matters more than the state doing something about addressing race inequality, don’t complain when BAME communities don’t vote for us , just keep on focussing on purist ideology.
The idea that teachers should mark their own students work ‘blind’ can only have been dreamt up by someone who has never been a teacher. A teacher knows his/her pupils’ handwriting for a start, and it would be a massive mistake to drive students prematurely into doing evcerything on keyboard, considering the major problem we already have with students’ fingers having apparently lost the art of writing. Apart from anything else we need students to be able to hand write their work to avoid the dangers of plagiarism.
Apart from the handwriting, a teacher who has taught someone for years would recognise their individual style in many cases. Thirdly it is highly offensive to suggest that teachers are not capable of being reasonably objective ijn marking work. We are none of us entirely objective, since we are human, but an idea like this if put into effect would be one more bruise on the teachers’ psyches that is currently the last thing they need.
It would also be interesting to know how this process would be undergone in those schools where almost all the students are from ethnic minorities or would they be spared this humiliation! If you are genuinely a Liberal, remember that your concern for the teacher is as important as your concern for the student.
Finally, having set and marked Advanced Level English papers over nearly forty years, I can assure you that this initiative is badly misjudged and a total waste of time.