Do SATs need an overhaul?
This week, Year 6 children in England will be doing their SATs (Standard Assessment Tests).
My youngest daughter is 11 years old and taking her SATs end of Key Stage 2 assessments this week. They are high stake tests for schools because schools are judged on these outcomes and they, understandably, work incredibly hard to prepare their children to do well in them.?It puts a lot of pressure on teachers and school leaders, not to mention the children, but is it the right way to conclude a child’s time in primary school? Having experienced them over 25 years as a teacher and headteacher, I am not so sure.
I am all for assessment in guiding and informing children’s progress in their learning and, of course, in terms of end of Year 6 SATs, no-one would argue that we don’t want our children to be confident in their reading, writing and maths by the time they head on to secondary school, where they will be reassessed on arrival.?But I have real concerns about the value of the current system, even the damage it does to a love of learning.
My first concern is the impact the constant revision for the tests has on the more creative aspects of children’s learning and their well-being.?As SATs draw closer, practising past papers, additional pre or post school ‘booster’ groups, extra homework in areas of concern for a particular child all increase. This year’s diet of homework for my daughter every week has been CGP published practice books for reading comprehension, grammar and maths.?She hasn’t done anything, but these exercises since September. It is a pretty uninspiring diet of learning and, not surprisingly, she has started to say how much she dislikes school and the way she learns.
Last week, she was revising determiners.?It is one of many word types, forms of punctuation, sentence structures and tenses she has to learn.?She still doesn’t remember what a determiner is, and I wonder how many of you reading this will know the term.?For information, a determiner is simply a word such as ‘this’, ‘an’ or ‘her’ that goes before a noun.
Whilst it is important to know how to write well, if you spend your time rote learning terms like this again and again, it can quickly take the joy out of writing.?It can become a stress as you try and remember all these terms, what they mean and how to use them.?More than that, the work is all out of context.?It’s a series of repeated stand-alone exercises, disconnected and meaningless.
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As a class teacher, I would introduce grammar and punctuation to enhance a specific genre of writing. It can be fun to think of adjectives to describe a person in a story or a creature in a poem. If you are teaching about subordinate clauses, the best way to make it memorable is to make it a feature of what you are writing about, to highlight it in a text and then get children to apply it to their own work.? They then know why they are learning it. It has a purpose and it’s enjoyable.?
My second concern with SATs is that when learning is constantly in a textbook and a classroom, children only see learning in this way when so much of the best learning is beyond the classroom, lived out in the world.?As a simple example, my daughter had to do a maths exercise last week, converting measurements. She asked me how long a metre was, and I asked her to show me.?Her hands came out and she showed me a length of 30-40cm.?She really didn’t have a clue because she hadn’t ever taken the learning out onto the playground or field to measure a metre as part of an activity that brought the measurement to life. It was a head-based concept, not an experienced one.
It’s the same with weights.?One of the best ways to learn weight is to weigh different fruits or vegetables.?Children may have no idea what an apple weighs at the start of a lesson, but if they have a bowl of apples in front of them, ideally outside, and they estimate and then weigh each one, they will get pretty good at weighing by the end of the session.?The more learning can be applied, the better.? If it stays in a book as an academic exercise, it will only be learnt in one dimension and not properly understood.?
So, Year 6, I wish you all the best for SATs.?You will certainly have worked hard to prepare for them, as will your teachers, support staff and many parents.?More than that though, I hope that education considers how these high stakes assessments can be adapted to something that has greater relevance for children, rather than to simply judge the rote learning culture of a school.?Good assessment is an important part of the learning process, but if assessment exercises dominate what schools do as I see has been the case for my daughter in her final year at primary school, then learning can quickly become drudgery and that is the last thing education should be.
#SATs #educationtoday #teacherchat #teachthefuture
Head Teacher at St. Ebbes Primary School. The purpose of St. Ebbes is to nurture wise, compassionate citizens with the power to make a difference, driven by our three core values: Curiosity. Courage. Connection.
6 个月Thank you for this insightful and clear description of what is happening in our schools. The grammar terminology is simply a waste of the children’s (and staffs’) time as well as irrelevant and dull. The impact on the teaching and learning of mental maths has been devastating as we prepare children to answer 37 questions in 30 minutes using formal written methods, when mental calculation should be the focus for many of the questions. Much of the maths in the reasoning paper today was hidden deep in abstract and twisted questions that I am convinced only a small minority of adults would be able to confidently answer. Prior to 2014, the SATs were far more child-friendly and relevant. This is nuts.
My son is also taking his SATs this week. For me it's good exam prep for later on in life. That's it. Most secondary schools have their own methods to stream kids. They also look at various other data, assess them over the first half-term and take into consideration the thoughts of the feeder primary school. We have helped my son prep but I'm not preoccupied by the results.
Sustainability Graduate, Educator, Researcher, Project Manager and Administrator
6 个月I started teaching in 2014, when the new grammar curriculum came in. I had never come across fronted adverbials before and had to learn what they were. I was in my mid 40s and had an English degree. He terminology they use in primary school is not developed in secondary school (as I understand it), and so the learning is pointless. These tests are not about learning or creativity, they are about testing. They suck the joy out of learning and teaching - not just in year 6 either, which is why I left teaching. With experiential learning, you get to facilitate a learning environment that champions exploration, experimentation, creativity, team work and a love of learning - for all children. And gives teachers joyful insights into children's fabulous minds.
Climate Change Education Pioneer
6 个月I once gave the SPG SAT to my A Level English Language class. It was about the right level for them in terms of terminology and knowledge, but without any prompting from me they immediately questioned the point of any 11 year old having this knowledge. They were actually quite outraged that time was being wasted making children remember terms they cannot possibly have any use for until they become more sophisticated writers. One student who also studied Spanish said that one of the grammatical terms in the test was common in Spanish by is only used in one construction in English.