Government to backtrack on SATs
Education Secretary Charles Clarke is to disclose important changes to the format of nationwide Standard Assessment Tests for primary school children.
The anticipated radical overhaul of primary school education will be unveiled in the DoE document ‘Excellence and Enjoyment: A Strategy for Primary Schools.’
It is thought Mr. Clarke, who predecessor was Estelle Morris, will announce a less formal approach to testing seven-year-olds, granting a degree of subjective assessment by teachers within each school.
It is thought the DoE will break its pledge to guarantee that 85 per cent of 11-year-olds achieved national standards in English and mathematics by 2004.
In an interview with the Times today, Mr. Clarke said: ‘Heads raised a lots of concerns about being set targets which were essentially unrealistic for their schools. If you have target regimes that are seen as unrealistic, they don’t motivate and drive forward in the way that you want them to.
‘We want them to be possessed and owned by the individual primary school and the teachers within it, a bottom-up process. This is a significant change but doesn’t undermine in any way the idea we have that testing and target-setting drive standards upwards.’
Some experts have suggested that setting SATs at an early age places unnecessary stress on youngsters, which could lead to ill health in later life.
Mr. Clarke is also expected to promote the teaching of foreign languages, music, art, drama and sport in primary schools in England and Wales.
He told the Daily Mirror: ‘Teachers and schools will have greater ownership of tests and targets, rather than feeling they are imposed on them.’
But John Bangs of teaching union the NUT said the concession did not go far enough.
He said the reforms would be piecemeal and ineffective: ‘It has recognised the logic of the argument against the tests but lacks the courage to abandon them.
‘Any suggestion that the restructured tests are a valid assessment of pupils or teachers is a nonsense.’
