If SATs were replaced by teachers' own assessments, it would be like children marking their own homework
11-year-olds will sit a series of short tests in maths and English—a fact that causes much unhappiness among England’s teachers. At the National Education Union’s recent conference, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s leader, announced to hearty applause that he would scrap these tests, which are known as, another teachers’ union, an official made headlines when he revealed that lots of schools were calling pupils in to prep for the tests over Easter, sometimes with rewards of fun activities or fast food.
The attention serves as a reminder of the strength of feeling generated by testing young children. Unlikes hold little sway over a pupil’s future. At most, they will help determine which academic stream the child enters in their first year at secondary school. Their chief purpose is to measure teachers and schools. If children are making good progress in their sums but not their reading, a school can devote more resources to English lessons.
Another worry is that the emphasis on results has led to a narrowing of the curriculum as schools focus on maths and English, the only subjects tested. Two-thirds of primary schools spend less than two hours a week teaching science, which was dropped from the tests in 2009. A fifth spend less than 60 minutes on it. Amanda Spielman, head of Ofsted, the schools inspectorate, has warned that some schools are “mistaking ‘badges and stickers’ for learning and substance”.
Both problems arise from the way in which schools respond to the tests, rather than from the tests themselves. Transmitting pressure to pupils “can be a symptom of bad teaching”, says Natalie Perera of the Education Policy Institute, a think-tank. Plenty of schools sail through the exams. One remedy to the problem of narrow curriculums might be to dictate the time spent on each subject, as is the case in Finland. Instead, the government is planning tweaks that will ease the pressure on schools.
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