Workers' Liberty

The Cambridge Primary Review - arguably the most important review since Plowden in 1967 - calls for an end to national testing and a complete re-think of current primary practice.

At the turn of the year Labour announced a significant change to school-testing arrangements for students aged 11 and 14. But will the scheme solve the problem of the old tests for students and teachers — stress and demotivation and lessons which are designed to “teach to the test”?

The thing with school league tables is that no matter how unfair, counter-productive and downright reactionary you think they are, you still immediately look up where your kids' school ranked. So today's news is ... My kids go to Brook Community Primary School, the fifth worst primary school in the whole of London, the fourth worst in Hackney. It's a good job I do think that league tables are unfair, counter-productive and downright reactionary, otherwise I could feel quite demoralised.

It’s 2.30pm on Friday - just half an hour before the end of a tiring week - and Year Ten are predictably restive. You need to move the lesson on but all attempts to settle the class have failed. Detentions are issued, individuals spoken to and you even attempt the trick of starting to explain from the board in the hope that they’ll all realise what you want them to do. Nothing works. You’ve got one last trick up your sleeve (literally): the ‘Hand Signal TM’.

As predicted well in advance, A-level pass rates rose this year, continuing the trend of the last 23 years. To read some of the right-wing newspaper coverage, you'd be forgiven for thinking everyone had passed with four A grades; in fact, the proportion of entries resulting in a pass grade (A-E) rose just 0.2% from 96%, with only 2% of pupils gaining 3 or more A grades.

By Liam Conway

In 1976 James Callaghan made a famous speech attacking schools for their failure to deliver a workforce suited to the needs of the economy. Callaghan was talking nonsense of course — schools had nothing to do with the failure of British capitalism to meet the crisis generated by the massive oil price hike of the early 70s. Still teachers and schools proved a useful scapegoat, along with lazy workers and militant trade unions.

By Patrick Yarker, Norwich and District NUT

How best to take forward the campaign to end over-testing in English state-schools? 'Research, alternatives, action!' was how the strategy was summed up at the second anti-SATs Conference on 12 June, when teachers, parents, governors and academics met to consider activity after the NUT's abortive boycott-call.

By Patrick Yarker, Norwich and District NUT

2003 ended with a setback for teachers, parents and students campaigning to abolish the restrictive, unreliable and overly-stressful national testing system in English state schools.

By Patrick Yarker

All NUT members should by now have received a copy of the union's survey of members' attitudes to SATs.

The survey is due to be followed by a boycott ballot, so ensuring as large as possible a return of the survey can be seen by activists as a dummy-run for the vital boycott-ballot itself. Now is the time to touch base with school-based reps or isolated members, to check that everyone has received their survey, to chase up the survey's return and to make contact with the broad-based National Anti-SATS Alliance which is campaigning across the country for an end to the wasteful and damaging national testing regime.

Stop the testing torture!

By Patrick Yarker

Conference against SATs
11.30-3.30, Saturday 28 June
South Camden Community School, Charrington Road, London.
Nearest Tube: King’s Cross/Euston

By Liam Conway

Charles Clarke stumbles from one cock-up to another. But, clearly, the Government has no plans to take the funding crisis seriously, otherwise it wouldn’t have set up a committee led by Two Jags Prescott to investigate what happened to the £500 million Clarke says has been siphoned off from schools’ budgets.

Education Secretary Charles Clarke faced an audience of concerned and angry parents in his local constituency, Norwich, on 9 May, as he attempted to defend the Government's policy on testing and targets in schools.