Who can blame parents for boycotting Sats?
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Loading... - Angie.Morgan
- 17 Apr 2021
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The past few years have seen a glut of parents proclaiming they are going to boycott year 6 Sats, the government’s national primary tests. Instead of sending their child in to school for exam week, they will “educate them elsewhere”, in a park or a museum, to get around the school absence rules. This year is no exception. If enough parents followed the trend, would it ever finish off Sats, which have become increasingly unpopular?
In the US, parental protest contributed to several states abandoning the Obama administration’s plan for a national curriculum, known as the “common core”, against which all children would be tested. And states that continued still face protests. Just last year, in Long Island, New York, almost 80,000 children boycotted their maths exams.
Here in England, our boycotting bark is worse than its bite. In 2016, more than 45,000 people signed a petition supporting parents keeping their children at home on Sats day. But when test day came, only a few schools reported big absences.
Yet there are some compelling reasons to remove children from the exams. Teachers are under serious pressure to get great results. Performance-related pay means their salary can be pegged to children’s scores and, if overall results are low, the school can be labelled as failing or “coasting”, enabling the government to remove the school’s management (which it is not afraid to do).
Add this pressure on to a fragile teacher – maybe he or she is new, maybe this year the class has a few more struggling kids – and suddenly the pressure becomes too much. Now, their stress transfers to the pupils, and it’s only a matter of time until your 11-year-old comes home crying because she overheard her teacher saying it’ll ruin his life if the class don’t get great scores.
It was this sort of pressure that led Jill Wood, the headteacher of Little London primary school in Leeds, to go and physically get a child out of bed on test day and put him in an exam hall with a sick bucket on standby.
Last year she was the first headteacher to have her entire school boycott Sats, after she swore never again to put her children through the pressure for something she felt was so meaningless.
But rebellion never comes free. Parents about to mark their calendars to keep their children home need to know that the tests can be taken at any time up to a week after the original date. To keep your child from being scored in maths or English, this year you would need to keep them home for at least six days.
Secondly, most secondary schools use Sats scores to set children by ability, particularly in maths. Having no score on their report card can mean they are simply lumped into a middle-ability set. Even if the school does its own tests, it can often take at least a term for inaccuracies to be corrected.
Without Sats, it would be difficult for the government to track, for example, if poorer children were falling behind in some schools more than in others. The tests may not be super reliable, but no data will make inequalities even harder to tackle.
One alternative would be a “sample” test, given to a group of selected children across the country, without relaying the individual data back to schools, thus diminishing the stress on teachers and reducing the relentless drilling most 11-year-olds endure in the months leading up to the tests .
The government should consider this option, but so far it seems dead set against doing so.
If you are planning to keep your child at home for six days next month, perhaps one of their educational activities could be writing to the minister to advocate for some better ideas.
