Teachers threaten boycott to kill off primary school tests

TEACHERS have threatened to ‘put a nail in the coffin’ of the Government’s Sats programme by boycotting all primary school testing.

It may mean hundreds of thousands of pupils are stopped from taking the tests, aimed at measuring progress and identifying issues.

A major teaching union voted yesterday in favour of shunning the assessments, over fears they cause ‘suffering’ and ‘stress’ to children.

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers, which has around 200,000 members, wants to join forces with other teaching unions to bring the testing regime to its knees. If successful, it would plunge the Government’s plans for reforms into chaos.

The boycott could come as early as 2019, and would mean all union members in schools would refuse to administer the tests.

However, any boycott would need the support of other unions, and all of them would have to ballot members beforehand.

The move would be a blow to Education Secretary Justine Greening, who last month announced plans to abandon tests for seven-year-olds. She was criticised at the time for ‘giving in’ to demands by the unions. Previous Tory education secretaries have strongly advocated the need for testing at that age.

Under Miss Greening’s plans, testing for 11-year-olds will remain and a ‘baseline’ test for five-yearolds will be introduced so progress can be measured.

But the ATL said she had not gone far enough and demanded an end to all compulsory national tests in primaries.

At the union’s conference in Liverpool, Jean Roberts, a teacher from north-west London, said: ‘The time has come to put the nail in the coffin of testing. Our children deserve better.’

Michael Catty, a delegate from Hertfordshire, added: ‘Education in this country is in a pit and it will get deeper and deeper. It has been dug by the twin evils of testing and league tables. Combine those two together and education doesn’t count.

‘We can’t do anything about league tables. But we can do something about testing. Nobody wants it … Let’s get rid of it.’ Delegates resolved to explore a possible boycott of primary testing.

Sats tests in reading, writing and maths are held in May, and it is understood no national action by the union will take place this year.

For a boycott to be effective, it would need support from the NAHT, the main union for primary school teachers, and the National Union of Teachers (NUT).

The ATL is due to merge with the NUT later this year. Members of the latter are set to vote on a similar boycott motion this weekend. A previous official boycott of Sats, in 2010, affected a quarter of primaries in England, and tens of thousands of pupils.

A Department for Education spokesman said it wanted testing that ‘measures the progress … fairly and accurately, recognises teachers’ professionalism in assessing their pupils, and does not impose a disproportionate burden’.

He added that the department was consulting with teachers on a number of proposals.