Times tables tests for every 11-year-old

Primary school children will be given an official times tables exam for the first time. The first tests for 11-yearolds would take place in summer 2019, Nick Gibb, the schools minister, said at an education select committee hearing yesterday. “We think times tables are a very important part of mathematical knowledge,” he said. “An educated person is someone who has knowledge in his long-term or her long-term memory”.

PRIMARY school children will be given an official times tables exam for the first time, it has been confirmed.

The first tests for 11-year-olds will take place in summer 2019, Nick Gibb, the schools minister, revealed at an education select committee hearing in the Commons yesterday.

He told the committee: “It is my view that there should be a multiplication check. It was in our manifesto in 2015 that there would be. We think times tables are a very important part of mathematical knowledge.”

Mr Gibb added that tests would be in place by 2018-19.

Proposals to test 11-year-olds in England on their times tables from this year were first announced by then education secretary Nicky Morgan in January last year. However, the move was put on hold after Justine Greening, the current Education Secretary, said that there would be no new national tests or assessments introduced before the 2018-19 academic year.

Mr Gibb told the select committee: “An educated person is someone who has knowledge in his long-term or her long-term memory”.

Automaticity – the ability to automatically respond to a question out of habit – is “very important in terms of mathematics”, he added.

Mr Gibb went on to say that if a youngster is trying to perform long multiplication or long division they need to know their times tables.

John Howson, a professor at Oxford University’s Department of Education said this was a “significant shift” in policy.

“There has never been a standardised times tables test for children, at least since the Education Act of 1944,” he said.

“Prior to that, inspectors may have tested children on their times tables when they went round schools in the nineteenth century, but I don’t imagine it was very common in the twentieth century.”

Prof Alan Smithers, director of the centre for education at Buckingham University, said: “For children in the Fifties, there was an expectation that they should know their times tables.

“This was cast aside in the Sixties – but then we found that we were well behind other countries as international comparisons grew in importance. Now we have gone back, we have come in a full circle really.”

Teaching unions said they were “extremely disappointed” at the announcement. Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said the tests were “unnecessary and uncosted and won’t tell teachers or parents anything that they don’t already know”.

During the same hearing, a senior official from Ofqual, the exams watchdog, told MPs that security breaches which affected last summer’s primary school tests were unlikely to have been spotted.

Dr Michelle Meadows, Ofqual’s executive director for strategy risk and research, said: “We asked ourselves this very question, if we had been monitoring delivery more closely, would we have spotted what were essentially human errors? And we came to the conclusion that we probably wouldn’t have.

“Would we have spotted occasional human error, if you take it in the context of the annual cycle of assessment that’s year on year for the whole cohort? We suspect not.”