Teachers, headteachers and the Department for Education appear to have collectively lost sight of the purpose of Sats: to educate and nurture children (Sats exams ‘designed to be challenging’, DfE tells aggrieved parents and teachers, 12 May).
Sats are designed to be a quick test that takes place on one day in year 6 to assess the teaching standards of the school. The theory is that the children are not being examined, that they should not think or feel that they are being examined, and that they should be unaware of their “result” and feel no stress from the situation. It is the school’s job to educate children and the DfE’s to assess the school. It is not a child’s role to provide emotional support to these adult‑run institutions.
It seems that much of the anxiety and pressure that schools and the DfE feel about standards has been placed squarely on the shoulders of children. My children have gone, and will go, through the ritual. The entirety of their time in year 6 until the day of the test in May is devoted to Sats revision. Almost no education outside these narrow terms takes place. Children feel immense pressure over a nebulous goal.
As a GP, I see daily evidence of the mental health challenges that children face. A recent report found fear of failure a major factor in giving UK children the lowest happiness levels in Europe. There is no evidence that Sats improve the education of children. On their own terms they are a catastrophic educational, social and moral failure, and should be scrapped.
Tom Templeton
Beckley, Oxfordshire
• I felt so angry when I read about the Sats exams that left children upset. What a way to encourage the joy of learning, of achievement. I got even more enraged by the pompous response that they are “designed to be challenging”. There is an easy way to assess children without making them feel like failures.
You set a piece of text, you grade the questions. You start with easy ones that most pupils can answer and you make them more and more difficult so that pupils with above-average ability can be challenged.
Impossible Sats, no allowances made for children whose education has been affected by Covid, Ofsted inspections that leave decent teachers wretched and quitting, as well as long-term underinvestment in schools that leave them crumbling and short of teachers – this is the Tory response to a dire situation of their making.
Schools should be places of joy, escape and ladders to the future. Children deserve so much more.
Margot Roberts
Weymouth, Dorset
• While there may be legitimate concerns about the alleged difficulty of Sats, there is another aspect that should not be ignored. As a secondary school governor, I am acutely aware of the concerns that some secondary teachers have about the standards of numeracy and literacy demonstrated by year 6 leavers entering key stage 3 education in year 7.
Surely, there needs to be a clear understanding on the part of the government and schools as to what those standards should be if they are to provide an effective springboard into secondary education; and Sats should be an accurate measure of those standards. No more and no less.
If they are an accurate measure and they are perceived to be too hard, then the answer is not to make them easier but to look long and hard at how key stage 2 is being taught.
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