SATs: Labour’s plan to ditch school tests will hit the poorest

Most anxiety at the prospect of a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party getting into government is expressed through criticism of their economic policies. However, as the education reforms introduced by the Conservatives and New Labour begin to bear fruit, we should fear their plans for education too.

The latest example is the announcement that Labour will abolish primary school SATs for 7 and 11 year olds as well scrapping baseline assessments. Unsurprisingly, this was cheered to the rafters by National Education Union (NEU) members who will never miss a chance to support a regressive policy. A wannabe Prime Minister pandering to producer interests will be music to their ears.

Both Wales and Scotland phased out testing only to reintroduce it again. Wales got rid of SATs by 2005 but brought back testing for 7-11 year olds in 2013, though they’re now called National Tests. Scotland abolished compulsory national testing at primary in 2003 but standardised testing was brought back in 2015 in the form of Scottish National Standardised Assessments.

Never mind too that in the final year that science was assessed by a SATs test 88% of pupils reached the expected level and this fell to 23% overall and 9% for pupils on free school meals after it became teacher assessed. Baseline assessment is sensible because it shows teachers what a pupil knows and what they don’t, thereby showing them what targets to set and where to focus their attention.

This isn’t about evidence or outcomes, it’s about ideology. There is plenty of room for further reform and evolution in the education system, including of SATs, but Labour are determined to rip it all up and wind the clock back, to the detriment of us all but especially the poor kids they purportedly care about the most.

Displaying his usual brand of banality, Corbyn said: “we need to prepare children for life, not just for exams”, a meaningless statement bound to get people clapping like seals. He went on to spread a complete falsehood in his denouncement of England’s high-stakes testing culture, complaining that children in England’s schools are among the most tested in the world. This simply overstates the case.

Hong Kong, Singapore, China and the USA have far more testing in their primary systems. Finland, a country often cited by the Left as being more progressive and relaxed has much more testing in primary schools than England, and why not? Tests are an important way of assessing schools and measuring the progress of pupils as well as being integral to the learning process.

Are Labour really telling parents that they have no right to know what quality of education their children are receiving in primary school? Poor pupils begin education roughly 18 months behind their better off classmates. It’s difficult to think of a more retrograde step then to stop measuring their progress and finding out how they are doing by the end of primary.

Regular testing is a good thing. The common argument is that they are stressful to children, but this needn’t be the case. Finland has a high level of testing but effort is made to prevent test anxiety amongst children. In England, where testing makes up an important of the assessment of schools, the pressure placed on a school to perform well is in some cases conveyed from the school to the pupil. If anything, this is an argument for changing the way in which we use the outcomes of tests and how they are handled in schools.

Therein lies the real solution – evolution not revolution. Reform the system, don’t blow it up. Scrapping SATs and replacing them with teacher assessment based on specious reasoning and an idealistic view of teachers is a bad idea on numerous levels.

Teacher assessment is incredibly burdensome, far more so than SATs, so Labour’s reform is bound to increase teacher workload. You can guarantee that they would end up replacing testing with a mess of tick lists and piles of evidence portfolios that put a huge strain on teachers and are about as reliable as Soviet state produced statistics.

Teacher assessment is deeply flawed and unreliable because of inherent bias that is near impossible to account for or prevent because it’s simply down to human nature. There is a body of research that shows they lead to disadvantaged groups being under graded, further disadvantaging them.

The research (summed up well in this video from Rob Coe) shows that teacher assessment as opposed to standardised testing is biased against pupils with SEN, those with challenging behaviour, and those who have personality that differs from their teachers. They also find that teacher assessment reinforces stereotypes based on the teacher’s preconceptions. Testing is fairer and their abolition will have the opposite to the intended effect.

It might get a good round of applause saying “let teachers teach”, but this ignores the reality. My wife is a teacher, as was my mother and my uncle and numerous family friends, and none of them wear such rose-tinted glasses. There are thousands of inadequate teachers and bad schools out there – scrapping standardised testing would put the education of thousands of children at risk.

That is not to say that SATs and the wider system should not be reformed in any way. An enormous amount of pressure is put on schools as SATs are a measure of their performance. This has led to teachers and schools cheating the system which is making the performance data unreliable and creates problems for secondary school. The extent of the cheating is impossible to know, but what we do know is that it is far too easy to cheat and that it is taking place.

I have spoken to teachers who have reported examples of teachers telling their pupils what to write and helping pupils who are stuck. Clearly there is not enough monitoring and change is needed to clamp down on this. Other ideas could be explored, such as assessing at the beginning of secondary school to lessen “teaching to the test” and decrease the cumulative pressure of schools and pupils.

Ultimately though, Labour is wrong about the SATs and wrong about testing in general. The SATs are not the much hated 11+. They are primarily a measure of school performance and help to show pupil progress. They do not decide a child’s future.

Tests helps pupils by reinforcing learning via revision and retrieval and by giving them much needed feedback on what they have done well and where they need practice. They help teachers establish a baseline for pupils entering school and discern whether they have reading difficulties or other weaknesses, showing them where to focus and allowing them to track their progress. They also help parents by showing them how their child is performing and whether the school is improving.

Testing is a vital part of the education system. If assessments are integrated seamlessly into the normal teaching and learning process throughout schooling, regular testing will not lead to stress and anxiety in children.