Schools 'forced to behave like supermarkets'

The UK has moved to value added reporting of secondary school outcomes. What the author seems to mean with the title of the piece is that the pressure to "play the game" will encourage secondary schools to push students to take more challenging exams and provide less support to their feeder primary schools. If the primary schools do relatively worse, the secondary school will be shown to be adding even more value.

This is exactly the soft of perverse incentive structure that opponents of value-added measures fear.

Chris