Tories to end Sats tests for 11-year-olds
THE hated national Sats tests taken by children in their last year of primary school will be scrapped under a Tory government, they pledged yesterday.
They will be replaced with teacher assessments as pupils begin at secondary school.
That would free up time for broader teaching instead of “drilling” for Sats tests, according to Shadow Schools Secretary Michael Gove.
The Government claimed the move would deny parents vital information and remove a way to hold primary schools to account.
Mr Gove said his proposal for English schools would replace the “increasingly discredited”, externally-marked Sats tests at 11 with a system that better served children as well as providing a “more rigorous, more transparent” picture of how well primaries were doing their job.
Speaking on BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show, he said: “We want a system of testing which allows us to accurately measure how well individual children are doing and also to accurately measure how schools are doing.
“When they arrive at secondary school we find out how well they have been taught, how effectively they can read, how gifted they are at maths.”
It would also end “duplication” of tests, he said, since the best comprehensive schools already ran their own tests on new entrants because they “don’t trust” primary school results.
Conservatives would not scrap the controversial league tables of primary schools, however. They will still be scored on how well their former pupils did in the secondary school tests.
Schools Minister Vernon Coaker called the proposals “half-baked” and said tests marked by secondary school teachers would be “less reliable, less accurate and less effective”.
Transport Secretary Lord Adonis, a former education minister and chief architect of Tony Blair’s reforms, said he was “amazed” at Tory policy.
He said he did not think it possible to make the new tests an accurate measure of primary school quality.
If the new tests were marked by teachers, not external assessors, “they won’t have any credibility”, he added.
Sats tests have stirred up a storm of protest. NUT union members are threatening to boycott them next year because they produce “teaching to test” instead of a broader education.
Schools Secretary Ed Balls has scrapped them for 14-year-olds and accepted a recommendation that science tests for 11-year-olds be replaced by teacher assessment next year but maths and English Sats would stay.
