Johnson rejects call to end tests for children

Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, has rejected calls for the scrapping of national curriculum tests for two million 7, 11 and 14-year-olds.

Mr Johnson, who was responding to criticism of the Government's testing reg-ime by the General Teaching Council, the independent regulator of the teaching profession, said he believed that ditching the exams would be " profoundly wrong". "Parents don't want to go back to a world where schools were closed institutions, no one knew what was going on in them.

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"Our responsibility is to ensure that our children leave school with a good grounding in English, maths and science," he said.

But the GTC, in a report submitted to the Commons Select Committee on Education, said that too many tests were damaging children's education. It said the average pupil will sit about 70 tests by the time they reach the age of 16 and argued that national tests should be replaced by testing a random sample which would still give ministers an indication of standards in the classroom.

They could also be assessed at each stage of their education when their teachers felt they were ready.

The GTC report was seized on by teachers who want fewer tests.