Crunch-time looms in battle to cut school tests
Monday, 12 May 2008
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Evidence has been given both to the Panorama team and the select committee that children are bored of being "taught to the test"
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Calls for the Government to scrap or relax its testing regime for more than a million children a year will reach a decisive point this week.
A highly critical report calling for more creativity and fun on the school timetable will be published by the Labour-dominated Commons Select Committee on Children, Schools and Families tomorrow.
It will coincide with the screening of a BBC Panorama programme in which several academics and educationists argue that pupils face "testing to destruction". Influential writers who have attacked "over-testing" include the author Philip Pullman.
Later, in a week when 600,000 11-year-olds sit their national curriculum tests (SATs), leaders of Britain's biggest headteachers' organisation will launch a campaign to end the current testing regime.
The National Association of Head Teachers will place a full-page newspaper advertisement saying: "SATs week is over – let's make this the last one."
Mick Brookes, the NAHT general secretary, said: "It's time to get learning back on the curriculum."
Evidence has been given both to the Panorama team and the select committee that children are bored of being "taught to the test".
During the Commons hearings, Barry Sheerman, the chairman of the select committee, told MPs the system had squeezed out creativity and imagination.
The Cambridge-based inquiry into primary education, headed by Professor Robin Alexander, claimed UK youngsters were the most tested in the Western world. The inquiry is the biggest review of primary education in 40 years.
Even groups deemed friendly to the Government have criticised the system. Professor David Hargreaves, associate director of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, argued that assessment in schools was in a "fine mess".
The Government argues that it has overseen the biggest rise in school standards since the Second World War. The percentage of pupils reaching the required standard in English and maths at age 11 has risen from around 60 per cent to 80 per cent since 1997. It has already made tests for seven-year-olds more flexible – giving more weight to teachers' assessments and allowing pupils to sit the tests when they are ready for them.
