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It’s time to end tests
• I AM a teacher and a parent of two school-age children, including one due to sit his SATs next year. I and many of my colleagues are determined to make this the last year our children are forced to take useless tests. They merely enable the government to produce its league tables, which at best tell parents nothing and at worst mislead them.
Teachers aren’t against assessing children – they do it all the time to inform their teaching. What we are against is national testing which tells teachers and parents nothing useful but damages our children by stressing and labelling many of them as failures.
Next week, Islington teachers will be launching locally the national campaign, supported by the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and the National Association of Headteachers (NAHT), to make this summer’s SATs tests the last our children will be forced to sit.
We believe SATs are stressful for children, parents and teachers, and an unreliable way of assessing pupils’ progress. They are inaccurate – teacher assessment has been proved to be more reliable – and can narrow what is taught at primary school, squeezing out time for creative subjects and sports. They encourage “teaching to the test” and undermine the morale of too many children. They provide unreliable data, used to judge unfairly school performance, putting teachers’ and school leaders’ jobs at risk and are used to create league tables of schools which do little more than reflect the wealth of the families whose children they educate.
The local campaign will begin when teachers and parents set up a stall by Angel shopping centre from 11am on Saturday, June 20, from which they will be leafleting and petitioning parents to call on the government to end national SATs testing.
The campaign will continue after the summer school holidays when well-known children’s writer, broadcaster and former children’s poet laureate Mike Rosen will be headlining a platform of speakers at a meeting at Islington Central Library in Fieldway Crescent, at 7.30am on Thursday, October 15.
KEN MULLER
Assistant secretary of Islington NUT
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