Testing

Civitas, 15 June 2007

Yet more trials for testing and tests this week. The General Teaching Council has called for the standard assessment tests (Sats) taken by pupils at ages 7, 11 and 14 years old, to be scrapped. The teaching standards watchdog argues that the tests are doing nothing for standards, simply stressing out pupils and teachers.

What has the reaction been – are we likely to see an end to the Sats tests? The people that matter – those either in power or ever likely to be – have dismissed the GTC’s proposals. Education secretary Alan Johnson argued that these tests aid transparency and accountability: “Parents don’t want to go back to a world where schools were closed institutions, no-one knew what was going on in them.”
The Tories’ shadow education secretary, David Willetts, also championed the benefits of testing: “National tests are crucial for improving standards. If it weren’t for testing we would not know that 40% of 11-year-olds leave primary schools without reaching the expected standard in reading, writing and arithmetic.”Only the Liberal Democrats’ education spokesperson, Sarah Teather, welcomed the idea of scrapping the tests: “The government’s obsession with testing continues to be questioned by those who know most about how to teach our children… The Lib Dems have called for tests to be scrapped for years.”
So who’s right? To a degree, all of them.
The issue with our primary and Key Stage 3 tests is the sinister background lurking behind them. Were it just a question of pupils’ learning being tested three times between their entrance in primary school and entrance in secondary school, this debate probably wouldn’t even be being had. Thinking back to the spelling and times tables tests I used to give my Year 2 class as a primary teacher, pupils used to actually look forward to them; getting to write down what you knew (or in some cases guess what you didn’t!) was exciting. But that’s because the stakes involved were low and the tests didn’t involve endless prior coaching: the reverse of today’s Key Stage 1, 2 and 3 Sats.
A disastrous combination of Government-set targets and over-regulation of teachers has turned testing into an anti-learning exercise where pupils are crammed and made to repeat the same work over and over in attempts to boost their results. The Government’s desire to ensure that pupils reach test targets (or at least come within some proximity to them), coupled with their desire to control everything which teachers and schools do, has led to a disastrous set of side-effects, from teaching to the test to the narrowing of the curriculum. All with the effect of presenting us with often highly artificial gauges of their capabilities and much more worryingly, leaving gaping holes in pupils’ learning.
As a result, what we actually don’t know is whether the 60% who David Willetts refers to as having reached the expected standards in the 3Rs, really do know how to read, write and count.