National exams: effects on schools, students and families

Abstract

Over the last years, a kind of performance empire has taken hold among us, moving political decision-makers, school managers, teachers and families themselves. The model’s success seems to be based on the exam being presented as the ultimate exponent of school grammar, the one that guarantees objectivity and rigour, in the words of its advocates. This paper takes up the discussion of some data collected as part of a doctoral thesis (Gouveia, 2017 ) that sought to find out about the strategies developed in Portugal within schools (also driven by families) to improve their chances of success in a context marked by the assessment agenda on various scales (local, national and international). In this way, we mobilised multiple points of view and different perspectives of analysis from the main players in our multiple case study: the students (Study 1 - questionnaire surveys, n=691); the directors of the Agrupamento de Escolas ⁸ /private schools (Study 2 - interviews, n=10); and the directors of the tutoring centres ⁹ (Study 3 - interviews, n=4). The main results showed that: i) national exams occupy a central place in the concerns of schools, students and their families; ii) they feed a parallel tutoring market which often leads to students not attending the pedagogical support offered by schools; iii) the existence of national exams has an influence on the way pedagogical work is organised and on the actions of teachers.