Are you SAT-isfied?

Like hundreds of thousands of parents across the country I have been desperately trying to play down the importance of SATs in our household this week. The Statutory Assessment Tests will be the first set of proper, externally marked exams my ten year old son has ever taken. I’ve tried to explain the deal: the role of SATs is primarily to tell the rest of the world how good a primary school is (or to be more accurate how clever and well-drilled pupils at the school are). Yet like any parent, I want my son to do his best.

He is the epitome of calm. But other parents have related horror stories of highly-stressed 11 year olds buckling under the pressure of meeting their expected Levels in the English and Maths tests all pupils take during this one week in May. Some have reported seeing dejected children weeping in the afternoon playground – no doubt ruing that missed Subordinate Clause or forgotten Number Factor. Heaven knows what they will be like in five years’ time for their GCSEs.

SATs week is the time when all perspective changes in the world of primary education. All notions of the careful long term, steady development of our young children’s minds are suddenly sacrificed at the altar of short term accountability measures. Across the land our beloved places of tender pre-teenage learning are transformed into test factories churning out those longed-for Level 4s.

As a parent you witness some of the unfortunate ill-effects of the SATs obsession. Year 6 sees a sudden lurch from growth mind-set attitudes (every pupil can do well if they make enough effort) to fixed intelligence assumptions (some pupils are just cleverer than others, and must be fast-streamed to revise for higher Levels). As the research tells us,ability grouping, crudely executed, can damage the self-esteem and aspirations of poorer students who are more often than not consigned to lower groupings.

We also know that effective feedback by teachers in the classroom is one of the best bets for improving children’s learning. The key is using tests to diagnose where children are in their learning in order to know what they need to do next. Yet the very moment the tests become summative judgments, their formative value is lost forever.

So now I’ve been through a testing week, what would I change? And more to the point what would be best for all our pupils, whether from poorer or richer homes?

It’s easy to forget the positive impact that primary school tests have had on the education system during the last two decades. We know far more about our children’s progress than our parents ever did about us.  Many more of our children now reach national expectations than they did 20 years ago before the tests were ushered in. Although tragically for a fifth of our primary school children this still remains an elusive target.

As parents we also believe that our son has benefited from SATs. They have given him much needed focus on the basic literacy and numeracy skills that will hold him in good stead for later life. Perhaps that is easier said for a boy from a supportive middle class home. Ironically one of the worries with the looming early secondary school years is the potential educational drift that comes with no tests on the horizon.

One thing we need to ensure is that we do not waste the valuable information SATs provide for children’s future development. All too often ‎the data beyond the top line grade is dumped and not used to hone provision in the next stage of learning. Simply put, secondary schools don’t trust or use the results.

At the same time it feels like the delicate balance of school accountability and pupil assessment in our primary schools is leaning dangerously to the former at the potential expense of the latter. Something needs to counter-balance the ever increasing weight primary school heads place on their SATs results and the prospective league table rankings they produce.

The recent independent report by Lord Bew proposed some sensible reforms including a greater emphasis on pupils’ progress during the school year, and the use of three year rolling averages of annual school results.

It remains to be seen whether the Government’s plans in response to this (including getting rid of Levels) will create a testing regime that gets the balance right.

I will give you my view in two years’ time when it’s my daughter’s turn to experience SATs that no doubt I will be trying to play down once again.