Like Emma Brockes, I have been trying to help my 10-year‑old granddaughter prepare for her Sats, and I feel deeply saddened, and frankly horrified, by what she faces in these papers (My kids are taking their first big exams – and revealing my own anxieties about AI and long division, 7 May).
As a former primary school teacher, I could not believe the English curriculum for 10- and 11-year-olds. I remember being introduced to the subjunctive when I was 18 years old and studying French. I did not have to understand noun clauses, fronted adverbials, modal verbs and passive and active changes. Who has put this material together? I cannot believe that former teachers have been involved in devising it.
The maths curriculum is no better. I was a supply teacher for 10 years, sometimes teaching year 9 pupils, yet I didn’t have to cover some of the areas that year 6s are being expected to deal with now.
Presumably, educationists with expert knowledge and experience of child development and language teaching were consulted when devising these curriculums and the Sats tests. But, as someone from a working-class background (and an 11-plus “reject”), I can’t help feeling that there are people who have no experience of state education who have been given too much say in devising the curriculum.
I feel for the teachers having to deliver the syllabus, and for the parents with no relevant experience who are tearing their hair out trying to support their children, and most of all the children themselves. I fear that my grandson, who will be faced with Sats next year, will not be able to cope as all the technical grammatical terms burst around him like shrapnel.
The fallout from all this will be teachers leaving the profession because the job isn’t doable and children will disengage from their education. We are told that the number of non-attenders is rising and the number of children suffering from stress and mental ill health these days is alarming.
Let’s see some tactics to bring joy back to our children and grandchildren, and let them see that education can be a pleasure, not a punishment.
Margaret Ogden
Chester-le-Street, County Durham
• While I empathise with Emma Brockes, perhaps I can offer some hope. I have recently taken on the role as an invigilator for the current exam period at a large comprehensive school in Edinburgh. I’ve been both amazed and gladdened by the efforts to help students who might otherwise struggle to cope with the stress of sitting a test.
Children have all kinds of needs and issues – some may need to be given time in a room on their own, or a scribe, or extra time. From the outside, this may be open to accusations of mollycoddling – but it gives a chance to those who, when I was at school, were shoved to the back of the class and written off before they were teenagers.
Alex Dickie
Edinburgh
• Years ago, on a visit abroad as a school inspector, I asked a Danish colleague what he thought about England’s obsession with testing primary‑aged children. He described it as a form of institutional child abuse. Now I realise from Emma Brockes’s superb, heart-rending article that it is also a parallel form of mistreatment for parents who are “helping” their children to prepare for exams that “don’t matter”.
Prof Colin Richards
Former HM inspector of schools
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