School test critics hold meeting

AN outspoken critic of the regime which “turns schools into test factories” will be among the guests at a public meeting in Oldham.

Award-winning children’s author and teacher Alan Gibbons will speak at the Sats Must Go meeting at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on February 25.

He will be joined by Anti Sats Alliance organiser Jon Berry, a senior lecturer at Hertfordshire University, and Nye Goodwin, head teacher of Stanley Road Primary School, Oldham.

The event runs from 7 to 9pm and is sponsored by the Oldham branch of the National Union of Teachers (NUT).

It follows last year’s marking fiasco when hundreds of thousands of pupils’ results in the national curriculum Sats tests were delayed.

The head of the exams watchdog resigned and national tests for 14-year-olds have been scrapped. But tests for 11-year-olds, used in league tables, and seven-year-olds remain.

Bryan Beckingham, joint branch secretary of Oldham NUT, said: “SATs are the main mechanism that have driven school league tables and produced testing factories instead of education. As teachers we have always opposed the destruction that SATs has led to.

“We now have Ofsted (the school’s watchdog) complaining that teachers teach to the test, but it is Ofsted inspecting for the government that has driven the target agenda and Sats to the fore in schools.”

Mr Gibbons is a winner of the Blue Peter Book Award and organiser of both Authors Against the Sats and the Campaign for Book, which opposes the erosion of the library services.

He said: “The entire project of Sats and over-prescriptive tracking and testing is in meltdown. Although the government has correctly abolished Sats for 14-year-olds, it has not taken the logical decision to end the tests for seven and 11-year-olds.

“The Sats are misconceived and unworkable. They transform schools into test factories and destroy children’s engagement in learning. It is time for complete abolition and to put our energies into a more exciting, creative curriculum.”