Commenting on the passing of Motion 37 at the Annual Conference of the National Education Union, Dr Mary Bousted, Joint General Secretary of the National Education Union, said:
"NEU members in the post-16 sector are concerned at the plethora of value-added performance measures used in colleges. These measures are meant to show how students from disadvantaged backgrounds improve relative to their peers. Their assumption is that variations in measured student progress, as reflected by exam results at different points in their school and college careers, are explicable by teacher performance. NEU members believe that the measures used are unfair and arbitrary, varying from college to college, course to course. They are based on a wilful failure to recognise what exam results can and cannot be used for.
"As exam boards have made clear, qualifications are designed only for certificating student achievement. They are, by definition, not designed to measure school, college, teacher or lecturer performance - yet this is what they are being used to do.
"No single set of data can ever take full account of the context of every student, school or college. For this reason, the practice of using examination results to attempt to reach conclusions about teacher, lecturer, school or college performance, pay and progression must end."
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2023-066-NEU