Working-class boys 'are victims of school tests'

Tests taken by children in their final year of primary school risk causing a new 11-plus effect by making pupils who do not make the grade believe they are failures, the Education Select Committee was told yesterday.

Working-class boys, in partic-ular, had become the unwitting "casualties" of the Government's testing regime after picking up the message that they were educational failures, said David Taylor, director of inspection at Ofsted.

Critics of the 11-plus, used to select pupils for grammar schools, have long argued that children who did not pass the test and went to secondary moderns could become disillusioned with education.

Mr Taylor told the all-party committee of MPs that the 40 per cent of children who currently failed to reach the expected standard for their age in the national curriculum tests taken by 600,000 11-year-olds each May "lose motivation, become disaffected" and caused trouble in the classroom because they felt inadequate.

Mr Taylor said there was a strong link between being identified as "a failure" at primary school and becoming disaffected and badly behaved at secondary school. "Obviously there is a link between the testing regime and the effect ... [it has] on those who do not do well," he said. "This testing regime can have casualties and I think we have to recognise that."

David Bell, Ofsted's chief inspector, defended the publication of test results. Mr Bell recently said that excessive targets could demotivate teachers but he told the committee yesterday parents needed the information that the publication supplied.

Asked whether he would support the abolition of primary school tests on 11-year-olds, he said: "I would not be satisfied at all. I believe the combination of ... results made public and Ofsted have given greater transparency to the education system in this country than has ever been the case, so I would be opposed to no longer publishing test results or having tests."

Children had to reach the required standard at 11 for them to be able to make "an effective start to secondary school", he added.