A committee of MPs has issued a report critical of the outcomes produced by the current programme of national testing on the 'core curriculum' of English, Maths and Science. The committee says that an initial goal of using SATs to measure pupils' progress has been over-ridden by counter-productive consequences such as schools 'teaching to the test' in order to make their own statistics look good, and that the results have been bad for theeducation of the children themselves.
There is direct evidence that SATs are not materially helpful in improving outcomes. One problem is that if an able pupil "over-achieves" on SATs in the early years, the school can, bluntly, afford to ignore that child in the knowledge that their over-all result statistics will not suffer as a consequence. The result is that there is then no year-on-year improvement, and a child who has initially performed at a level in advance of actual age can 'coast' - still scoring acceptably on SATs from the school's perspective, but not acquiring basic learning skills which will be vital in later stages. The school may note that the child "appears not to try very hard", but as long as they are not actively disruptive in class, nothing is likely to happen.
The real problem in this case is when the child has some specific learning difficulty - masked by innate ability and not revealed through the relatively blunt instrument of SATs. In that case, any underlying problem may go un-noticed and therefore un-addressed for years... at which point it's either too late, or requires an inordinate amount of remedial work.
Do the SATs results deliver greater accountability on the part of the school? Absolutely not. The parents can't go to them and say "you are failing this child", because the school will simply point at SATs results which are still average or above. Do they make it possible to exercise parental choice? Absolutely not. If the parents move the child to another school, they will face exactly the same problem.
Broken As Designed.
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