Parents join teachers’ SATs mutiny
PRIMARY schools now look certain to be in a head-on collision with the Government this summer over the hated SATs tests for seven-year-olds.
The country’s largest teaching union has demanded not just a boycott of the exam, but abolition of Labour’s performance league tables which they help to inform.
Industrial action looks more and more likely, and for once parents are happy at the prospect of disruption.
Chris Keates, general secretary of the National Association of School-masters Union of Women Teachers, said: “Calls by some unions for a boycott on SATs are distracting.
“The real issue is the dire need for the abolition of the performance league tables into which the SATs results are fed.
“Teachers need more than gesture politics; they need a comprehensive review of testing and assessment that results in the curriculum being genuinely freed up. This revised system must enable teachers to exercise their professional judgment to test pupils at the stage they are ready and must reduce workload and bureaucracy.”
In recent weeks the National Association of Head Teachers has called for the end to SATs.
The support from England’s head teachers makes the prospect of industrial action likely.
Margaret Morrissey, founder of Parents’ Outloud, said: “Teachers are not talking about stopping teaching our children. They are saying they’re not going to march them in to do these pointless exams.
“League tables are for football teams, not our children.
“Alan Steer, the education expert, was paid God knows what for a report this week saying that behaviour in schools was better.
“What planet is he on? These reports are the Government’s answer to all the problems in schools, when if they just left
teachers free to teach, improvement would come with it as a matter of course.”
