From Workers' Liberty Teachers NUT conference bulletin 2007
Heard the one about how the government are going to scrap SATs?
Alan Johnson (Secretary of State for Education) and Ken Boston (Head of QCA) have been spinning this line since the turn of the year and the publication of a DfES document, ‘Making Good Progress’. This outlines the plans for a new assessment system. Ending SATs is dangled as a possibility, but in their place will come more tests, more often, along with payment by results.
The government want students to ‘ascend’ two NC levels per Key Stage. To ensure teachers are pushing students onward and upward at fast-enough rates, testing to see if a student has ‘passed’ the next NC Level will be implemented twice in each year. Students can be entered ‘when ready’, rather than as currently all at once at the end of each Key Stage.
Schools which meet their targets for the number of students ‘passing’ the new tests will receive extra funding. Such a reform will ensure even more than is currently the case that every single school year will be an exam-year for students. It will embed a sense of failure even deeper among students who, for whatever reasons, fail to move ‘up’ at the requisite rate. It will maintain the anti-educational bias of the system by entrenching teaching-to-the-test (money will depend directly on results) and restricting the curriculum-offer made. It will prevent rather than enable ‘assessment for learning’ because it regards ‘AfL’ as merely a process of diagnosing what a student did wrong on their previous summative test and putting that right.
It is predicated on the reactionary and discredited view of learning as linear and of student ‘ability’ as fixed. The NUT should maintain its call for the ending of targets, tests and League Tables. Instead of this new system of annual testing, the government should pilot the system now established in Wales, which is based on a proper and more progressive version of AfL, the use of truly diagnostic testing and moderated teacher assessment, and the abandonment of league tables. Don’t fall for the spin! Scrap SATs and annual testing! Let teachers assess: it’s part of our job. The NUT has to re-consider the question of a SATs boycott as soon as possible.
Pat Yarker
