Bethan Marshall: Tests should be less of a primary concern

There was a time when I really fancied being a primary-school teacher. I envied their integrated school day; their chance to carry on working on a project that had engaged the enthusiasm of their pupils without the regimen bells and exam syllabuses. Above all, I loved the way the best of them could turn their classroom into an ancient Roman forum or recreate a Brazilian rainforest in a clapped-out hut.

In the Beezus and Ramona stories (albeit they are set in America), I wanted to be the teacher who turned desks and chairs into a jumbo jet and took his class on a trip to China, complete with recreated passports and travel brochures that told of China past and present. When they "landed", he greeted them off the plane in Chinese and littered the classroom with Chinese characters.

The children sampled the food, dressed up in the clothes and visited virtual temples. The teacher inspired curiosity in the world around his pupils through their active imaginations and real-life artefacts. What a fabulous way to learn; reading, writing, talk, language awareness, geography and history all rolled into one.

That is the best of primary practice as it was. Of course, not everything was that good. In another children's novel, Thunder and Lightnings by Jan Mark, we get the worst of what the school project entailed. A new boy turning up at the school is asked to do a project. An old hand at the game advises him to follow his lead and do "fish". Fish, he tells the newcomer, are the ideal because you do not have to be able to draw very well and they cover a multitude of sins. They can be used in English – tales by the river bank; science – different types of fish; and geography – the environment. As teachers pay little attention to the actual product, the world-weary child adds, very little recycling between each project is needed.

Indeed, it was this kind of sharp practice that spelt the demise of the project in many a school. Critics raised the spectre of children spending hours colouring in pictures of dinosaurs or getting very sticky with lots of glue. Where, they argued, was the serious stuff of the three Rs going on in this meandering and meaningless activity?

Enter the national curriculum, tests, literacy and numeracy hours. But now, it seems, the pendulum has swung too far the other way. According to a recent report commissioned by the NUT and carried out by researchers at Cambridge University, primary-school pupils are getting an unremitting diet of test preparation, tests and more tests with a hefty dose of literacy and numeracy thrown in.

Yet instead of throwing up their hands in horror and saying that we may have got the balance wrong, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority published advice for primary teachers a couple of weeks later that more or less accepted the status quo. The document argued that while the Rs were vital, and should be taught daily, and that PE should be taught once a week, the arts and humanities were only really important once a term.

Now I know that fitting everything in is not easy, and there may well be something to be said for dedicating a block of time to a history topic rather than spreading it out in half-hour slots. But this does not seem to be what is being suggested. There is no hint that the curriculum should be suspended so that pupils can re-live Victorian England for a fortnight; no sense that they will be boarding that imaginary jumbo to visit foreign climes. Rather, it seems that the arts and humanities will be rotated on a termly basis so that children will receive a fleeting glimpse of the ancient Greeks and gain a passing acquaintance with what it means to live in a town or village.

As for art or music, who knows? With an English curriculum potentially starved of its creativity in the arid wastes of the literacy hour, where is the space in the primary curriculum for pupils to be children?

The writer is lecturer in education at King's College London

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