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Jayne Dowle: SATs - Endless exams that aren't worth the paper they're written on
A committee of MPs has discovered what many parents knew all along: SAT tests are of no benefit to our children and achieve little except to grade one school against other schools. It recommends that the current practice of mass testing at seven, 11 and 14 should be reconsidered.
SATs force teachers and children to chase targets instead of enjoying and being inspired by learning, the committee found.
This puts serious pressure on youngsters. It also means that teachers have no choice but to "teach to the test" and must gear all their lessons to readying their pupils for scrutiny.
The result is stressed kids and a narrow curriculum that teaches them little about life. Let us hope that Gordon Brown and his Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls, take notice of this week's panel of experts, and don't disregard their crucial findings in the customary way. Ministers should be warned: we might forget dinner money and PE kits, but we parents won't forget this one.
Frankly, I don't care if either of my children ever sit a SAT
in their lives. I do care that they gain decent grades in their public examinations, and I would like them to go to university, if they have the ability. But I don't want them to spend their childhoods under the cosh.
I dread Jack coming home next year with his first SATs homework. The thought of having to waste all those hours going through endless sums
and spellings when we could be catching tadpoles or playing football or just hanging out, makes my own heart sink. I can't imagine what it will do to his.
My worry though is that if he doesn't get his head around SATs, Jack will be demonised as a no-hoper before he has even had a chance to get going. He talks the talk, his teacher says, but finds writing it all down a chore. How will any test measure his kind of potential?
Some education experts blame SATs for turning kids off learning altogether, and say that obsessive testing alienates pupils so much that they run out of energy by the time they reach GCSEs.
The argument goes that this is why so many of them, especially boys, with their notoriously poor attention spans, leave school with such poor qualifications.
It is a massive irony that a Government which is determined to stamp out grammar schools, because of the "stigma" the 11-plus creates for less-able pupils, is supportive of such an ongoing regime of measurement. Those who campaign against grammar schools say that it is because a child's performance at 11 pre-destines the rest of their life.
But most eight-year-olds sit where they sit in the classroom – top table, bottom or somewhere in the middle –partly because of their performance in SATs. They are singled out and streamed, and the friends they make and the attitudes they develop will shape their lives just as surely as any grammar school badge.
SATs are designed to favour the all-rounder who co-operates with revision. Let's hope that my son and daughter don't take after their mother. I might have just staggered through them at the age of seven, but probably by 11, and certainly by 14, I would have been a failure. I just couldn't apply myself to maths and science but loved reading, writing and history. My O-levels are pitiful, but I specialised in the sixth form and ended up reading English at Oxford.
I was odd, perhaps, but by no means unique. I worry about what is happening to all those other kids like me, feeling sick with fear when those exam papers drop on their desk.
The committee found that the regimented focus of SATs leaves teenagers unprepared for university and employment.
There is only one response to that, and it is to ask then what is the point? I appreciate that pupils should be assessed for ability. But I hope that by the time my children are 13 or 14, their teachers are more guided by professional knowledge and understanding to advise where their strengths lie forthe future.
But sorry, I forget. SATs aren't actually about the individual child, only about the individual child as a tiny cog in the massive wheel of the education system.
A child's performance only really means anything when it is measured against that of all the other children in England, so that ultimately, his or her school can be assigned its place in the league tables.
"Parents don't want to go back to a world where the achievements of schools are hidden from them," says schools minister Jim Knight. I would hope that any half-awake parent could see from walking into a school, looking at the displays on the walls, attending events and talking to the teachers, what the achievements of the place are.
Surely it is better for everyone, pupils, staff and parents, to concentrate on creating this wider sense of pride and progress, instead
of putting all their energy into endless exams which aren't worth the paper they are written on.
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