I got to spend last week, as I do most years, with outstanding teachers, emotionally intelligent support staff and brilliant children as they did their KS2 SATs papers. It’s equal parts humbling and infuriating to witness the stress this week causes for everyone. It’s a bit like waiting for a holiday to go see your least favourite aunt, where you know you’re going to be force-fed overcooked vegetables, have to sleep in itchy bed linen and told to shut up and be grateful. You wait in anticipation for the whole year, preparing yourself for the worst and never really sure what’s going to happen when you get there. Perhaps she’ll have bought new bedding this year, perhaps someone got her a Jamie Oliver cookbook for Christmas, perhaps she got a personality transplant and suddenly likes it when children laugh and smile. We live in hope.
We do our best to prepare the kids for the week. We teach them to be resilient and confident in their knowledge, we tell them the tests aren’t a judgement on them, we make sure they’ve all had breakfast and plenty of access to high quality intervention if they need it, and we ask them to do what they believe is their best. And then you get a Maths paper like the 2024 Reasoning Paper 2 and you wonder what on earth was going through the minds of the people who wrote it. Perhaps they care more about newspaper headlines & rants on Twitter (or whatever it’s called these days) than they do the wellbeing of the children sitting the test.
But here’s where I get to every year… We need leaders. People who are willing to see sense and find ways to put children first, rather than numbers on a conveyor belt, fattening them up across key stages. Instead we have politicians.
So here’s my request to the Education System, my request to teachers and school leaders. Find out what it is about school that you love and please go pursue it with fervour. Out there somewhere is a collection of educators who see a solution to this madness we experience every year but they’re so busy teaching that their idea isn’t getting anywhere. And why do I believe this? Firstly, because I am one. Morphise was born from finding out what I love about education and then pursuing it with fervour. Second, because I’ve heard the ideas as I sit in staff rooms. They’re brilliant ideas that might make a popular Tweet, but never get any actual traction. I used to feel isolated in school for having such radical opinions about putting the kid’s needs ahead of a statutory exam, but the more time I spend in different schools, the more I realise, I’m really not the only one. I’m over here waiting for teachers who want to find out what personal contribution they get to make to children’s lives. I’ve got a step-by-step guide for you on how to achieve it.
In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a rant I wrote back in 2020 about SATs. I dug it out to see if I still agree with it and it turns out, for the most-part, I do…
When introducing the replacement KS1 SATs tests (that’s right, assessments at 6-7 years old), Paul Whiteman (NAHT General Secretary) said, “It’s hugely important that we understand how much progress primary schools help their pupils make.”
Who chooses what’s good enough?
Let’s assume for a moment that quality assurance renders that statement true. Who is the ‘we’ in understanding the levels of progress? Parents, teachers, head teachers, the NAHT or government? Let’s propose the argument that the government is paying for a child’s education so deserves to track the progress of that investment, the money for education comes from the taxes that we pay to fund our children’s education, so the deciding factor about children’s wellbeing is (and should be) with the people who know them best: Their parents, guardians, carers, teachers and social workers should be the judge at the end of each school day, rather than a number at the end of the school year. A number in a database is not, nor has it ever been, a suitable measurement of well-rounded growth. Personal progress is not quantitative, and when you reduce it to such you create a damaging environment not only for the supposed ‘losers’ in the league table but for everyone involved in the journey.
Every May, year after year, I speak to teachers and teaching assistants who have just joined their year 2 and 6 children in the SATs, some of whom have sat for hours at a time watching children struggle, getting frustrated and disengaged from education, unable to do anything about it. I am yet to find a single adult who agrees with this annual tradition of objective assessment in primary education. It would appear that at any age less than 16 the justification for nationwide testing is to check that the teacher is doing their job and not neglecting their educational duties. As such a child is just as likely to suffer damage from an over-expectant teacher who is petrified of how they’ll be judged, as they are from a negligent teacher who’s not being assessed at all and lets them run around all day doing nothing.
For all we know we’ve got just as many neurotic over-achieving teachers who project their fears onto their classes, as we have negligent ones. And the outcome? Kids with a fear of failure and of being judged, with a dislike of learning because at the end of it they have to sit an exam to prove they made any progress. Which leads to adults who struggle to switch off from work, have a distorted idea of what success looks like and then pass those same ideals onto the next generation.
The SATs Effect, a new report commissioned by More Than a Score, led to Daniel Kebede (General Secretary of the National Education Union) saying, “because of SATs, teachers feel forced to prioritise test preparation over everything else. With whole lessons spent answering practice questions and every day starting with a maths paper, Year 6 is no longer the exciting, celebratory year in primary school it should be. Other curriculum subjects, such as art, PSHE and PE, are being squeezed out from the school day as early as January so more time can be devoted to tested subjects. This situation is even worse for schools in deprived areas, desperate to meet the demands of our punitive accountability system.”
The ‘winners’ and ‘losers’
For every child who excels under this model of assessment there is a child who fails, and what baffles me is that there’s no differentiation available. Especially if the purpose is to “test the range of ability”, according to Nick Gibb in 2023 when he was asked to look into the reading paper which made children cry (and I can vouch for personally consoling one of my tearful tutees when she couldn’t finish that paper). I have worked and continue to work with year 6 children who cannot yet access the full curriculum but they have to sit the same papers as everyone else. By the time they reach GCSE level we recognise that progress doesn’t happen at the same rate for all pupils and they can enter into a foundation paper or a short course so that they can sit the exam with their peers but study a paper they can access. Why don’t we offer the same in the SATs? If a child is still working below their expected age and we know that, why isn’t there a differentiated paper, so they can feel confident in their ability to work through the majority of it, rather than what currently happens which is to attempt the first third and then spend the rest of their time confused and disheartened, telling themselves and their teachers that they hate school (because it makes them feel stupid). At the very least, if we are going to continue to put children through this nonsense for the sake of the data, some resilience training, or whatever counter reason I expect to hear as responses to this blog post, all children should still be able to get a sense of achievement.
I’m asking whether you believe education should offer equal opportunities or not? Something which is further complicated by the presence of Grammar Schools and parents taking the place of the pushy teacher I mentioned earlier. If they live in the area containing a selective school and have ambitions for their children to go there, you end up with:
- Extra tutoring for those who can afford it
- The financial burden of tutoring on parents who can’t afford it but want to give their child the best possible education.
- Leading to pressure on an 11 year old’s shoulders that a test paper could define the rest of their life
- The social inequity in the classroom between those children discussing the 11+ and those who aren’t being put forward for it.
- And other schools in the area contending with a culture of ‘failed kids’. Where the common mindset is a belief that intelligence has a capacity.
It must be bad teaching then
The first place to hang the hat of blame is on the head of teachers, we’ve been doing it for decades because it’s the easy scapegoat. So you increase quality assurance in the form of progress reports, formal and informal timely assessments, lesson observations, moderation, Ofsted… I could go on…
But guess what, we introduced all that stuff and nothing got better! Might it therefore be possible that the system behind the quality assurance needs to be considered, rather than the machine operators? Teachers know their kids and teachers know how to educate. They also know that teaching towards a test is counter-productive to raising education standards, but they’re caught between a rock and hard place – train children to pass a standardised test or risk further judgement on their ability to teach and run a good school.
If you fail to acknowledge teachers’ professional judgement you create an environment of mis-trust and that is what educators are fed up with, being under-valued and micro-managed. Of course there are some who need more training and more watchful eyes because they’re struggling, but how about rather than having Ofsted inspectors with a checklist, you train nationally funded experts to go into schools and support leadership teams, or train struggling teachers. Trust that head teachers and senior leaders know who those staff are, create a means for SLT to reach out for help, rather than casting judgement. Properly fund the intervention they need the same way we should properly fund the intervention some children need.
So why aren’t we already doing this?
I think culturally we just prefer to judge and blame than to support. Think about how many times in the workplace someone makes a mistake and we spend more time talking about that person than finding out what went wrong, how it happened and how we can prevent it in future. I’m not saying that the people running education in the UK aren’t reviewing their practices, I’m saying that we’re looking in the wrong places and now have exceptional professionals working with a system of education they fundamentally disagree with.
The mindset with which we judge other people is the same one we’ve acquired through expecting to be judged. Why do you think X Factor is so popular? We get pleasure from it. All I’m asking is whether education should be exempt from this practice for the sake of children’s wellbeing, curiosity, creativity and love of learning. There’s a reason not every outstanding singer chooses to go on X Factor, and occasionally we celebrate a youngster willing to put themselves through the ordeal of the panel, but we intrinsically recognise that it has taken courage, a lot of support and some emotional maturity to get there. But not every child has a fanfare backing them as they go into an exam, and the awareness of that fact can be just as damaging as the result itself. Equally, expecting a child to develop courage and resilience through repeated testing is like expecting a chimpanzee to learn to talk by listening to humans. You don’t just absorb these things by putting an arbitrary barrier in front of someone – the task has to be relevant and personal for a love of learning to take place.
Why do schools care so much?
Because they’re answerable to Governors, whose job it is to promote the school within their community as the best one parents could send their kid to. Websites like ‘School Guide’ make a living off scared parents wanting to get the best for their child in an uncertain environment, or ‘Rate My Teacher’ as a means of moaning about staff online. Hiding behind ‘our right’ to access concise measurement data are the advertising and subscription revenues playing on people’s fears that children’s educational experiences aren’t equal, and the reality is that if you can’t afford to send your child to an independent school or live in a Grammar school catchment area, they’re the sacrifices and decisions that you make. I’m not against data analysis and measuring progress – science has a very important place in society and we have to make decisions based on data – I’m asking for us to consider the value of standardised testing before the age of 16 and to seriously think again about why we have formal measurements in an education setting when it’s clear that they are more damaging than they are useful.
Qualifications and regulations are important though. How else are we supposed to measure progress?
It’s not KS 4 & 5 exams that I’m challenging. There are valid reasons for young people at 16+ sitting exams: they are more mature, therefore likely to cope with the psychological demands; having focus, determination and time management in the build-up to exams are good skills to develop; qualifications and regulating outcomes are suitable for progression into future fields of study or employment; memorising stuff is good for brain development; and it does give a government the ability to measure the success of its education system. The problem is whether education until that point has already done significant damage to one’s self esteem and love of learning. How many young people go into the year 11 exams already hating the pressure and overwhelm because they’ve been repeating those emotions annually since they were 6, 7, 10 or 11?
One study shows that we can in fact trust teachers’ judgements, from primary school all the way up to moderating GCSE results. “Teachers can reliably and validly monitor students’ progress, abilities and inclinations,” leading to the article explicitly calling for exams to be replaced by teacher judgement. What’s worse is the findings that “high‐stakes exams may shift educational experience away from learning towards exam performance,” meaning that children actually spend less time learning because they’re too busy practising to pass exams – and that’s without considering the time it takes away from actually being a child and enjoying that small window before adulthood. I’ve seen schools spend over 2 weeks of learning, in both year 5 and 6, sitting mock assessments to get kids ready for that one week in May.
I’m not suggesting to do away with exams altogether – that’s also dangerous because teachers are fallible humans and can be manipulated or coerced to over or under-estimate a person’s ability based on whether their personalities mesh, behaviour and expectations of the child, and favouritism etc. There must be a balanced view when it comes to qualifications, much as there are in any rigorous workplace competence measurement. I’m saying that we only need them in one area of a child’s formal educational life – towards the end of it, when they have the emotional maturity to cope and the genuine need for external verification.
Grades for transition
It’s important that Secondary schools have sufficient data on their incoming year 7 cohorts – attendance, learning needs, teacher reports and assessments – so that they can offer meaningful support and decide how to set for subjects like Maths and English. However, not all Secondary schools trust the data that comes up from Primary because they sometimes assume that teachers inflate progress to make themselves and their school look good, but also children (particularly the less affluent) do forget some of their prior knowledge over the summer holiday. So what happens to an already overwhelmed year 7 as they arrive at ‘big school’? You guessed it, they get tested again so that year group leaders can have more faith in the data provided or measure something altogether different. Furthermore, they often miss out on an entire week of schooling at the end of each year for more in-house tests (creating a mountain of marking for teachers) to ‘prepare them for their GCSEs’. There’s a difference here between assessment and testing and I’d have less of an issue with the process at KS3 & 4 if we were being more sensible about KS1 & 2.
Next Steps
The problems SATs and 11+ tests cause in the UK far out-reach the benefits they provide and the lasting damage is wide-reaching in terms of the social stigma of Grammar School ‘failures’ and self esteem in general. Not to mention the unnecessary pressure on teachers and the distraction from actual learning. Imagine what year 6 could look like if the oldest children weren’t distracted for most of the year practising for SATs. The benefits they could bring to the rest of the school, the emotional preparatory work they could do to get ready for year 7, the introduction to citizenship and voluntary roles. Children at the age of 10 & 11 are desperate to explore their role within social groups and understand their place, yet we have them stuck behind a desk working out multiple choice answers on repeat.
Whilst I am calling for policy and education leaders to reassess their decisions on standardised tests in favour of supporting school leaders rather than judging them, I’m aware that such bold decisions take time. I’d love to hear from people who have other solutions worth considering, but the more immediate concern is the impact standardised tests have on our little ones in year 2 and 6
Lastly, it’s been difficult to ignore the annual articles and reports post-SATs and post-GCSE about whether the papers were harder or easier, and what the online comments were from teachers and school leaders. I’ve tried to make this post about the themes I’ve witnessed in education over the last 15+ years, rather than a reactionary response to headlines of the day, but you don’t need to look too far to find articles from the last few years to support the things I’m saying here. Ultimately, the profession says the same thing year after year – that we need to re-examine our national examinations.
I’d be curious to see the support for the idea to scrap standardised tests before the age of 16 and would love it if you’d consider casting your vote. I’d also love to hear from people in favour of them, to know more about the benefits they see for all their students, not just those who are capable of accessing the tests.
There’s a future for these kids that we’re waiting to build and what it will take is more teachers having clarity about how we get there. As ever, if you’re a teacher or school leader and want to know how you (and your staff) can create personally aligned, clear, long-lasting goals for professional and personal development, I’d love to hear from you.
In the meantime, I’m hosting a series of webinars about how our teenagers can move from fear to fulfilment. Check out the dates here, register, and I look forward to seeing you soon.