Disruptive influence outside classrooms

THOSE worried about the overreliance on testing in the education system will have more to chew on soon. It’s reported that by 2020 what’s been nicknamed the “tantrum test” for four-year-olds will be universal, the rationale being that the ability of a child to regulate his or her emotions is a strong predictor of academic performance further down the line.

As well as testing vocabulary and basic counting, the “baseline tests” are expected to address issues such as “Most days will lose temper”; “Wanders around aimlessly”; “Not able to sit still” and “Disrupts the play of other children”. (I have the pushy parent’s quiet confidence that my boy will get top marks in all these disciplines and end up Foreign Secretary.) No question, these things are worth noticing. But you’d rather hope that primary and nursery teachers are doing that, informally, anyway — and adjusting their teaching styles accordingly.

What’s the betting, though, that making it into a universal, standardised cross-cohort dataset has some unintended consequences? Once you get that sort of metric, in that sort of form, centralgovernment fingers tend to get itchy. It’s not the kids whose self-control I’m worried about, in other words.