Results expose primary lesson

There are those who contend that the modest one per cent increase is testament to the measures put in place by the last Labour government. Others says the results are an irrelevance because one quarter of primary schools boycotted the Sats tests. And, to complicate matters still further, the introduction of new teacher assessments diminishes the merit of like-for-like comparisons.

Yet these arguments are superfluous. For, irrespective of how the data is interpreted, far too many pupils are leaving primary school with a woefully inadequate grasp of basic skills. Even worse, Yorkshire remains the worst-performing region in the country – despite Labour's record investment in education.

This is not a new phenomenon; these results, regrettably, highlight a trend that has become even more pronounced in recent years. The disappointment is that Ministers and LEAs have not responded adequately to previous results and put in place robust measures to improve standards – one of the perennial, and justifiable, criticisms of the teaching unions.

One reason is that Labour were pre-occupied with the structure of secondary schools, an approach that Education Secretary Michael Gove is repeating with his hasty move to set up a network of academies free from local authority control.

What Mr Gove, or his predecessors for that matter, fail to grasp is that youngsters will always struggle at GCSE level – irrespective of whether it is a comprehensive school or new-fangled academy – if they cannot read or write properly when they complete their primary education. They simply become more disheartened, or less inclined to learn, because they cannot keep up with their peers.

This will not change until a greater emphasis is placed on the

importance of primary education. The proposed pupil premium may help, but the reality is that the biggest stumbling block is class sizes that are too large, and the fact that so many parents show so little

interest in their children's learning. No statistic can mask this challenging reality.