Thousands of pupils go on strike in tests furore
THOUSANDS of children across England downed pencils yesterday and missed school in protest at controversial assessment tests.
The Let Our Kids Be Kids campaign staged the “strike”, saying children are “overtested and over-worked”.
The protest, thought to have involved a few thousand pupils, came as more than 40,000 people signed a petition backing a teachers’ boycott of Standard Assessment Tests (SATs) for six and seven-year-olds.
Campaigners say the system puts “more importance on test results and league tables than children’s happiness and joy of learning”.
Struggling
But Schools Minister Nick Gibb said: “The tests are vital in helping to ensure children are learning to read, write and add up well.
“If they don’t master literacy and numeracy early on, they risk struggling for the rest of their lives.”
Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said any short-term stress was worth it if children left school with better results.
But children’s laureate Chris Riddell and his predecessor Michael Rosen warned youngsters are tested on complicated grammar that risks crushing a love of learning. In an open letter to Education Secretary Nicky Morgan, Mr Rosen wrote: “One ex-headteacher wrote to tell me of ‘six to seven-year-old pupils who, during testing period, were crying, shaking and waking up at 4am’.” The tests are taken in Year Two by children aged six or seven, then again in Year Six, aged 10 or 11, and in Year Nine, aged 13 or 14. Mr Riddell joined a protest in Brighton, where educational activities were staged – as children carried placards challenging Ms Morgan over the tests.
Mr Riddell said: “There should be more trust in teachers to assess children rather than through testing.”
Ben Ramalingam, from Brighton, kept his five-yearold son off school. He said: “Our kids are being left disengaged and stressed. Kids who previously loved school are refusing to go.
“They are being pushed towards rote-based learning. It is like something out of Charles Dickens.”
TV adventurer and fatherof-two Ben Fogle said: “Our children face constant assessment by a system obsessed with box-ticking. They are merely tiny cogs in the Government machine.”
WE DON’T yet know the exact number of parents who decided yesterday that making a political point was more important than their children’s education but it was certainly in the thousands.
I’m referring to the parents’ “strike” against the new Key Stage 1 tests. The tests – formerly known as SATs – are a very basic assessment of pupils’ performance taken at the end of infant and junior school. They’re an objective measure rather than relying purely on teachers’ opinions.
They’re really very basic. Over a week, six and sevenyear-olds take two reading papers and two maths papers – the spelling and grammar tests were scrapped after being published by mistake.
The questions simply test if children are at the standard anyone would expect of a properly educated seven-yearold such as what is 86 + 10, or what is the difference between an adverb, an adjective, a verb and a noun? And that’s it.
But for the 40,000 parents who have signed a petition organised by a group called Let Our Kids Be Kids, the tests are so appalling that they have to be boycotted. They are of course entitled to their view. What they are not entitled to do – what no parent is entitled to do by law – is ruin their children’s education.
AND make no mistake, these parents are playing politics with their children’s education – and other children’s because when they disrupt lessons the entire schedule has to change. They are a disgrace.
Under the law children are only allowed to be taken out of school in exceptional circumstances and there’s a fine of £120 per child for those who flout the law. Every one of those parents who took their child out of school yesterday should be fined. And they should be fined every day they do it.
These parents, who like to make out that they are behaving in some sort of superior fashion to everyone else, are in fact the very worst kind of parents and exactly the sort for whom the law was introduced.
On one radio programme yesterday I heard a mother saying how stressed her sixyear-old was by the prospect of the tests. Maybe he was, although I doubt it. But you can bet your life that if he was it was because his mother has been droning on incessantly about how awful the tests will be. And what a message that sends about school: that it is inherently stressful. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.
On the BBC yesterday a father informed us that: “They are being made to learn stuff at the behest of the Government.” How shocking! The Government has introduced tests in the 3Rs! Whatever next!
The fact is that testing is necessary and academic evidence confirms that it is far more reliable than teacher assessment. Work by Simon Burgess, professor of economics at Bristol, shows that it is the poorest and least able children who are best served by testing.
As he put it: “[When they were tested] poor pupils systematically and significantly outperformed what their teachers thought they would achieve... Groups doing well in a test at a national level tend to be over-assessed by teachers and equivalently groups doing badly nationally tend to be under-assessed.”
Part of the problem with teacher assessment is that, however unconsciously, they are biased in their marking. As Prof Burgess writes: “Like everyone else, all the time they use stereotypes to help make decisions... Tests allow pupils to show what they can do independently of someone’s opinion of them.”
However wrong the Let Our Kids Be Kids brigade are, it will make no difference to them. In their smug, middle-class idiocy they think they are brighter and more clued in to their children than anyone else.
But they are merely the latest in a long line of supposedly “progressive” influences in British education. It’s these people who have got us into the educational mess that we are still trying to clear up.
From the 1950s the idea began to take hold that traditional education – learning things as taught by a teacher – was stifling and damaging. Coupled with the Left’s desire to use schools for social engineering that meant from the 1960s there was a quite intentional destruction of good schools (such as the grammar schools that gave poor children a first-class education) to be replaced with comprehensives.
IT WAS in effect a form of unilateral educational disarmament. And we are still suffering from the consequences.
Reforms introduced under Tony Blair and then turbocharged by Michael Gove as education secretary have helped dramatically. But the teaching unions remain stuck in that “progressive” mindset, as do many on the Left.
That’s where yesterday’s strike comes in. It is significant that none of the organisers will reveal their identity. Their website is overtly political. One of the anonymous organisers, who claim to be “just a group of five parents who are juggling having children and work”, is reported to have admitted that they work “very closely behind the scenes” with the teaching unions.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the parents, who for all their idiocy are doubtless sincere, are being used by the teaching unions.
Yesterday was not a strike. It was a display of self-righteous ignorance in pursuit of a wholly destructive goal.
‘Desire to use schools for social engineering’