It's not nice as a Headteacher, to see children coming to school having not slept because they are stressed, running to the toilets to be sick, worrying that their results might not be as good as everyone elses. It's soul destroying, seeing teachers' faces drop when a child does not show up for school. They know this means their class SATs results, published for all to see, are already going to be down by over 3% before the papers have even been opened.
There won’t be any surprises in levels of attainment achieved because our teachers already know the childrens levels. They didn’t need a SATs test, badly marked by someone, somewhere in the country, to tell them. (Although to be fair our SATs papers are being marked by someone in Lancashire this year and Lancastrians are amongst the best people!)
If the league tables are still used by the government this year, they won’t give anyone a true picture of our school, or any other for that matter.
For a start there will be 1000`s of children missing from the statistics, who did not sit the SATs.
I’ve worked at schools where children in classes come from 23 different countries and SATs do not show their ability but their understanding of our language.
I’ve worked in schools where half of Year Six had a private tutor. Their SATs results are not just a reflection of the schools but of the money the parents put into 1 to 1 tuition outside school.
How will the league table reflect our SATs week? How will it report on 2 children being absent? They will still be counted in our final scores, as not achieving their results. What about the children born with severe special needs? They also go into the results, as not achieving their results.
Yet let me tell you. ALL the children in our school are achieving well and all are being judged as individuals and not lumped together to compare with the school down the road.
Childrens progress is a partnership between school and home. The sooner these unhelpful tests are gone then the sooner we can celebrate this partnership properly and stop wasting weeks of childrens education, teaching them to pass a test that doesn’t mean anything to them.
Besides which, our children still have 9 weeks of school left before the end of the academic year and a lot of progress is still to be made.
