To the children sitting SATs this week, I know you can do it – but I've no idea why this government is making you
I'm not prepared to accept a generation of young people denied a love of learning for its own sake – and I’m certainly not prepared to tolerate the harm these pointless exams are doing to their wellbeing
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Your support makes all the difference.This week more than 600,000 Year 6 pupils will take their Key Stage 2 SATs. Two spelling, punctuation and grammar tests on Monday; reading comprehension on Tuesday; two maths exams on Wednesday and a third on Thursday.
Why? For what purpose?
Now, I’m a bit of a geek. I loved tests as a kid and when I was a teacher I set a lot of them. They help you gauge where your class is at, and how well they are learning. Are they picking up the skills and knowledge you’re teaching them? Do they need extra support?
Yet according to the government, SATs are different. Apparently they’re not about testing children at all. “Just to be really clear,” said Roger Taylor, chair of the examination regulator Ofqual, “the purpose here is not to assess the children.” So, then, pupils and parents shouldn’t be worried. “There is absolutely no reason why any school should put pressure on young children,” said schools minister Nick Gibb. “Pupils only need to treat SATs in the same way that they treat other work like a spelling or times table test,” said the education secretary, Damian Hinds.
Say that again?
Say that to the children who have missed out on playtimes, or on a well-rounded curriculum, because of the relentless focus on English and maths in Year 6. Say it to the 11-year-olds being set extra homework, sent to revision classes and handed past papers to complete. Tell them that the tests aren’t about them – because that’s not how they feel.
This isn’t a problem limited to just a smattering of schools. A YouGov survey in March found that more than four in five primary heads had been contacted to by parents who were concerned that SATs were making their child stressed and anxious. More than nine in 10 said that English and Maths were being prioritised over other subjects.
Both parents and teachers know that no 18-year-old is going to be asked at a job interview what score they got in their “Maths 2” paper seven years ago. So why, then, are our children feeling so anxious? It's because of what SATs really are about: testing teachers. And when teachers are stressed, it cascades down the whole school. Pressure on heads means pressure on teachers; pressure on teachers means pressure on pupils.
The stakes of SATs are simply too high: a primary school’s success or failure in exam season has such stark consequences. Go to the government’s website and look at the school league tables. Just seven statistics are published for each school and all of them relate to a child’s performance in Key Stage 2 SATs or the writing exercise that accompanies it. Seven years of a child’s time at primary school reduced to seven numbers based on seven tests. Surely that should not be the total sum of what parents want from a school.
Ofsted fares little better. As one of its four inspection criteria is pupil outcomes, it also relies too heavily on achievement and progress data to make its own judgements about schools and teaching standards.
It’s for this reason that pupils feel under pressure. When your job potentially depends on your league table position or the one or two words at the top of the Ofsted report, teachers need their pupils to do well.
The high-stakes testing culture has gone too far. Liberal Democrats are demanding a better alternative for our children. We must lower the stakes.
League tables, in their current form, need to go. But the solution is also more transparency, not less. Why not gather reviews from teachers at nearby schools and survey feedback from parents, so that people get a feel for a school’s ethos, pastoral care and curriculum breadth, as well as the exam performance of its pupils?
Ofsted also deserves the axe. It has lost the confidence of the teaching profession. It could be replaced with a new inspectorate that supports schools to succeed rather than punishing poor attainment.
But this alone still won’t be enough. We need to scrap SATs. I’m not prepared to accept the impact on teaching quality they are having. Nor am I prepared to accept a generation of children denied a love of learning – and I’m certainly not prepared to accept harm to their wellbeing.
So to the 600,000 pupils who will be sitting their SATs next week, I say this. I’m sorry that they’ve got in the way of your education this last year. I’m sorry if they’ve caused you stress. You don’t deserve it. It wasn’t necessary. I hope you’ll be the last pupils who will have to take them.
Your tests will be OK. You can do this. But I don’t know why on earth the government is making you.