Teachers, tested
Should British 11-year-olds be sitting exams?
Labour wants to scrap standardised tests. But it may struggle to find an adequate replacement
NEXT MONTH 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 SATs, and that he would review other primary-school assessments. At the conference of the NASUWT, 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. Unlike GCSEs (taken at 16) and A-levels (at 18), SATs 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. If one part of the country is making good progress, the government can study its success.
Teachers nevertheless complain that they are under too much pressure to squeeze high marks out of their pupils. League tables are based on the percentage of children reaching certain standards, the schools inspectorate uses their results to inform its judgments and some teachers are on performance-related pay. Not all respond well. One head teacher in Leeds dragged a high-performing pupil from their sick bed to take a test, setting a sick bucket beside them.
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”. The result is “intensive, even obsessive, test preparation.”
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. Plans under consultation would mean that poor exam results no longer triggered intervention, which can lead to management changes. Ofsted, meanwhile, is placing more emphasis in its inspections on ensuring that a “broad and balanced” curriculum is taught, as the law requires.
Although tempting to teachers (and some parents), Labour’s promise to abolish SATs raises a question: what would replace them? A popular answer among teachers is to rely on their own assessments. Yet this would be no better than children marking their own homework. What’s more, there is evidence that teachers are biased by pupils’ ethnicity. Mr Corbyn has promised that his alternative system will encourage creativity. It is a quality he will need himself if he is to find a way to keep tabs on how much pupils are learning without using tests.
This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "Teachers, tested" （Apr 27th 2019）
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