Yesterday I wrote about the fun of learning the times-tables, and how important I believe fun is.
The sad part of this story is that Emily didn’t do great in her time-tables at school.
She did worse than she was doing at home.
Why?
Because being tested wasn’t fun. Being tested was stressful.
None of us, especially children, perform well when we are stressed.
So why do we test our children so much?
Does someone think it’s good for them?
Why can’t we make the testing part of the fun?
This year is going to be an especially test ridden one because it’s SATS. Having seen one child through it already it would appear, from a parents perspective, that for this whole year education is set aside so that the children can learn how to pass a test. The doubly-sad thing is that this test is all about the school looking good in league tables and has absolutely no value to the child.
The SATS themselves are only supposed to take a few hours, but that doesn’t stop them dominating the whole year.
Discover more from Graham Chastney
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Graham Chastney 
Graham, having seen my daughter go through her first set of SATS last year I can only agree.
Some tests are needed, but the majority are not. There is way too much pressure placed on the children for SATS, because as you correctly say, they are ratings for the School and the Teachers and have nothing to do with the children.
Some of this I feel is driven by the demand by parent to be able to rate the best schools, which is maybe understandable, but this in itself only puts higher demand on the better performing schools, which inevitably getter a better grade of pupils, making the SATS better and the demand greater, and so on. Leaving the poorer performing schools performing worse.
Would it not be a better idea to have children go to their nearest school, over time, the abilities will balance out, school runs will decrease and it will be a less stressful situation.
That’s my thoughts anyway.
LikeLike
Thanks for the comments Martin. I’m not sure I know what the answer is but I do that the current situation is not a good one.
I spoke to a teacher friend at the weekend who was very stressed – because the inspectors were coming…
LikeLike