My View: The tests that fail to convince parents that they're worthwhile

Teaching unions the NUT and NAHT are against the externally-marked tests for 10 and 11- year-olds saying they encouraged schools to teach a narrow curriculum designed towards passing the exams rather than a broad subject base and put unnecessary stress on young children.

The Government claims the tests are necessary to assess the child's progress compared to children born in the same month and to ensure school standards.

But little attention seems to be paid to the key stage one tests being sat by seven-year-olds this week.

While I can see some reason to assess the attainment of 11-year-olds before they start secondary school I am rather at a loss to see why we need to test seven year-olds.

Surely if the teachers are doing their jobs properly then they will know how well the children in their care are doing? My seven-year-old is currently going through SATs although you wouldn't know it. The school ensures that the children have no idea they are being tested, but I fear that is not the case in every school.

For instance, I have friends who send their children to an independent school and they have been revising for the SATs for months. The children are all too aware that they are being tested and this leads to increased stress on children at the very formative stages of their education. If the point of SATs is to compare children's attainment against their peers then there needs to be a level playing field, or what is the point? Is it just another bureaucratic way for central government to interfere with the head teacher's running of their school and to put another tick in the box for the league tables?

My child may not be aware that she is being assessed, but her teacher is. She is trying exceptionally hard not to alert the children to the fact they are being tested when they are, but also aware that she is being tested herself.

At seven, children can easily have off-days. One day they read fluently and the next they stumble on the most simple of words. Surely it is time to let the teacher get on with what they are trained to do, teach and continually assess the children as they go along.

If your child is falling behind where they should be I would hope that the teacher would be aware of that fact and should not need a test during the last term of year two to tell them that.

Apparently the Government is phasing out SATS for seven-year-olds, which makes this year's testing even more pointless. My other concern is that once the children have been tested, if parents are to be informed of the results, then they must be explained properly and not offered another list of confusing edu-babble.