ICT raises standards

It's official. ICT really does raise standards. A good range of ICT facilities which are well used across the curriculum are worth half a grade at GCSE. Do you find yourself impressed by this statistic or are you, like most people, a little nonplussed? You might even comment, with some justification, that switching the television off half an hour earlier each evening might have the same effect.

What we should all remember however, when interpreting this finding is that it was a very necessary statistic. The treasury has poured millions of pounds into ICT in schools and it was essential to show that this investment had made a measurable difference. Apart from anything else, if the difference had not been measurable - or worse, if it had been negative - the Treasury might have decided not to spend any more money on ICT in our schools. And that would be a tragedy because ICT really does make a difference.

The problem, of course, is that education is notoriously difficult to measure - and ICT in education is no different. An advisory teacher was once overheard saying, "I've long believed that anything really valuable in education cannot actually be measured," and one has to admit that he has a point. How could you put a number on creativity, independence, a love of learning, entrepreneurship, etc? The list could go on.

Half a grade at GCSE is certainly a rather uninspiring improvement for a technology which has been likened to steam in its potential to alter the course of human life on this planet. Steam power led to the Industrial Revolution and we are told that ICT is changing the world by causing an Information Revolution. So how can this profound technology only muster half a grade at GCSE? Indeed, might it not even be possible that ICT is not raising standards at all? It might sound like heresy, even muttered under the  breath, but half a grade is so small an improvement that it might even turn out to have been a statistical anomaly. One would not be surprised to read next year that the trend had apparently reversed and that ICT had led to a drop of half a grade at GCSE!

The problem is not whether ICT is worth having in schools; it's how you measure its impact. There is no doubt that the use of ICT in schools transforms learning. It changes the way teachers teach and it changes the way pupils learn. In fact, it alters the very relationship between teacher and pupil and it enables pupil-centred learning in a way that could only be dreamt of in the past. The problem is how you measure any of this.

Traditionally, education has been measured by tests. GCSEs were created to measure the outcome of a curriculum that was designed in the nineteenth century to provide a literate workforce for the factories created by the industrial revolution. They really aren't likely to be successful measures of the effect ICT is having in schools today. It might be better to take a new approach and devise a method of measuring how different a school is now from the popular image of what a school was.

The vast treasure trove of the Pathé News film archive, which is now available for all children to access in the Regional Broadband Consortia, can show interesting comparisons. One film from 1969 shows a new comprehensive school in which the girls are doing needlework and the boys work at lathes. The girls, we are told, are being prepared for life as housewives. The teachers stand at the front pointing at blackboards - this is the traditional "handing knowledge down from above" method of teaching.

An ICT-rich school will look very different. The children - both sexes - will be preparing for life in a "knowledge economy" and their learning will be customised to their ability, interests and learning style. Much of it will be created by them rather than received passively. The measure of success will be whether the children grow into creative, flexible people who are able to solve problems and think "outside the box".

For the moment, ICT is still being measured using old criteria and it was more by luck than anything else that the result was positive, even if it is only half a grade. But the real effect is already happening - there just aren't any numbers to measure it with. ICT really is transforming learning. It is transforming the way we teach and it is transforming the way children learn.

Take a look at Imagine Logo, for instance. The program is currently being supplied with a free copy of the excellent Imagine Logo Workbook. You won't find the activities it contains listed in any traditional book of sums but just let your children loose on them and you will quickly see excitement, challenge, collaboration and advanced thinking skills that will surprise and delight you.

These things are difficult to measure, and they tend not to show up in GCSE results, but they are self-evidently essential for preparing children for life in the knowledge economy.