Testing time

Parents will be rightly concerned at the results of yesterday's ballots of teachers and headteachers which mean next month's Sats tests for 600,000 11-year-olds will be boycotted by staff. Unions argue that the tests are bad for children and education generally as they campaign to get school league tables abolished – and the result certainly shows the depth of feeling among staff. Where it leaves children and their parents, however, is another matter.

A boycott tackles one problem – the heaping of stress on to very young children – and replaces it with another: the prospect of education policy being dictated by unelected industrial activists. It is worth looking again at the purpose of Sats but this is not the way to do it.

Parents should be given some means of finding out how their children are doing, as well as judging which schools are succeeding, but the alternative to the current system seems to offer little merit. The proposal by teachers' leaders, for a sampling system for maths and English in which a selection of schools sit tests to give a national picture of achievement, but without identifying individual schools or children, looks like confused back-of-the-envelope thinking.

The boycott is likely to begin two days before the General Election so the action will be among the first problems faced by the new government. How it responds will set the tone for education policy affecting millions of pupils for years to come.