Why the SATS debacle raises huge questions about state education in this country

And so, a week after finding out that private school fees have rocketed, we continue with the SATs debacle. Is it really any any surprise at all that so many parents would be keen to leave the state sector if only they could afford it? Private schools, after all, can choose not to send their national curriculum tests to be externally marked and have largely escaped the whole depressing experience. The rest of us can only worry that our children are being marked wrongly, and that it will be difficult to properly measure their progression. If we care about the bigger picture (which hopefully many of us do), then our children's schools may also be wrongly penalised in league tables.

Just to add to the whole experience, we're now told that millions of 11-year-olds may end up sitting new tests when they start secondary school. Many headteachers are apparently so unwilling to trust the current system of testing, they think they have to find out for themselves.

Where does this leave us? Firstly - and most straightforwardly - it shows us that ETS (the firm marking the tests) should be removed. Secondly it leaves a huge, huge mess, with so many re-marks inevitably demanded, that an already shaky system can only collapse further. Thirdly, it seems to leave us, after all that stress and pressure, with tests that are of little use. But there are other knock-on effects too, and in some ways they are more serious.

They affect us, the parents and our children. Once in secondary school, children take exam after exam. Surely this fiasco can't have helped their confidence and faith in the examination system? Think about what they've learnt from this unhappy experience - that despite you putting in the work, results don't come when expected, and that when they do, they may be completely wrong.

But above all, I think this leaves parents depressed, disappointed and lacking in confidence. At the end of another school year, it's not just SATs that are at stake - it's the whole state school system. 

People talk about going back to basics. Why don't we? Let's work out what tests we need and why. Then perhaps the Government should try to figure out whether the current system is working - if it's helping or hindering teachers and parents in their quest to give millions of children the best education possible. This whole saga is not just about some tests being marked late. It may have seemed that way at the beginning, but now that's definitely not true. State school education should not be seen as second rate, but it's increasingly looking that way. And all this from a government who seemed to genuinely want to make education a real priority.

(picture from dcjohn on flickr.com)

Comments

[Drew]

Relying on an American company to asses kids in the UK. Well, that was bound to succeed! Well, rather doomed to failure. Also, they areslowly going out of favour with the "system" in the US.

That being said, I do believe there was nothing wrong with the "old" system where the "O" levels sorted people out into university track or "other" (where other means preparing people for apprenticeships and the workforce). After all, only about 30% of high school kids ever go to university (and less than that succeed there), and the kids that aren't going to university need to feel they have some value, some useful skills etc. It's all about valuing education and what it can do for you regardless of where you end up!

[JC]

And if the SATs results don't materialize, the whole system will collapse? I don't think so. Teachers will assess the way they do on a daily basis and form judgments for setting etc. accordingly. The SATs are a poltical tool to con the public that the government is 'doing something' about standards. I've said from the beginning that you can't weigh a pig fat. The more you test, the less time and motivation there is to be educated.
I left UK education in 99 after years of politicians' tinkering and now work in the international school sector. No-one tells us what to do, our children are keen, polyglot and high achievers. We do not select on ability but look at parental attitude and the child's general behaviour. We avoid pushy parents and children who clearly have not been helped by their upbringing to understand normal boundaries of behaviour. We limit class sizes to 20, with 2 teachers per class in the Early Years as most of our students come with little or no English (29 different nationalties make up the school community at present).
This means that school is a stress-free place to learn, parents supportive but not intrusive and teachers highly motivated.
I know it sounds like utopia, but we are in the fortunate position of having no politicians to force us into being social engineers. We just try to get the biggest range of cultures, languages and abilities possible so that the school is has a rich variety, but that each child is an individual.
They then go on to take the IB Diploma, speak a minimum of 3 languages and take the world of work by storm.
SATs? Waste of time and money. Get the basics right (including parenting)and children will flourish.
I've been doing it for 25 years and it's not rocket science....

[Arthur Van Der Lae]

I agree with Dottoressa.

Sadly education is a tool for the Government to play games with our children's lives.

Their sole aim (the politicians) is to remain in power for another term and they couldn't careless about the children who suffer stress becuase of it.

[I. M. A. Ryecatcher Esq.]

Your recent reports on all types of flaws in the state school system give me a feeling of vindication, but it is bitter fruit.
I was a teacher for 7 years. It was a toxic experience. It was all about 'watching your back' and producing the right statistics. Pupils are merely trained to take tests, and almost tested to destruction.
The children get through it somehow, usually in spite of and not because of what the System does to them.
The ethos seems to be find out what people can't do, and root it out, rather than find out and celebrate what people can do and value them for it. ( I use 'people'- pupils and teachers both suffer the tyranny of constant 'Assessment'
and 'Performance Management'.) There is no policy or will whatsoever to spend time developing childrens' precious emotional or intuitive qualities and no attempt at all to guide them along paths that enrich understanding of civilisation and their own place in it or nourish a concept of their own 'inner life'.
At the end of it all students do indeed attain their 'Target' (loathsome word) of 9 GCSEs- yet barely know how to open a door and walk into a room properly.
To voice one's opposistion to the whole fiasco was seen as sedition, and to care about the children, mutiny.
Dissenters were constructively, slowly, but surely, airbrushed out of the picture; a bit like Stalin's out-of-favour old friends.
There certainly is 'something
rotten in the state of' Education,
but at least the poor little beggars get one hour a week
of 'Culture', so that's alright then, isn't it?

[John Gregory Flinn]

"People talk about going back to basics. Why don't we?"

SATs tests and others are a method for grading pupils' abilities previously condemned when called the 11+.
Formal or informal they are necessary.
Private schools (except Summerhill in Suffolk) use entrance exams and often award scholarships, so it goes on there as well.

'Going back to basics' should recognize the need to ascertain these abilities, how they change/develop, and comcomitantly, how to avoid the 'one size fits all' polemic that appears to be the mantra for state comprehensive education. That is; return to a non-comprehensive system that acknowledges the need for grammar, technical, foundation etc., schools within society.

Grammar Schools were not a vehicle for the middle classes to avoid working class 'oiks' because many such 'oiks' benefitted from the education there and became middle class themselves! Its called social progression and very necessary in a successful community.

Parents seek to choose within, or leave the state sector because they fear the declining quality of the catchment for the local school.
Curiously, this motivation is a variant on the 'middle-class desire to avoid working class oiks', but hardly, if ever expressed because instead of 'working class oiks' it means ethnic/moslem 'oiks'.
The same arguments could be used to counter the motivation if this truth were ever faced.

[Dottoressa]

All schools should be free from state interference. And no school should do SATS. My children's (independent) school does not do them, and the children are happy; our local, vastly over-subscribed, state school does, and a significant number of the children are on medication for stress and anxiety (the school wants to maintain its top-dog position in the league tables). If we could not afford independent fees (which we couldn't at secondary level), I would be home educating, to my horror!