Do we really have to test our youngsters to destruction?

Testing our schoolchildren has become a bit of a national obsession in recent years.

Whether it's Standard Assessment Tests in Primary Schools, Key Stage Tests and GCSE in Secondary Schools, not forgetting A and AS Levels, BTEC and NVQs, according to successive governments, we couldn't get enough of them - until recently. Now groups of concerned parents have reacted by withdrawing their offspring from recent SATs and some people have finally woken up to the fact that grades at GCSE in particular just cannot keep rising exponentially. We have a saying in Lincolnshire that you don't increase the weight of a pig by just weighing it. Many teachers will tell you that 'teaching to the test' can take a great deal of enjoyment out of the job, both for themselves and the recipients of their expertise.

When I was at school nobody made much of a fuss when the annual exam results were announced. The media, or what passed for it back then, didn't show hoards of excited photogenic students ecstatically grasping slips of paper and hugging each other. If you went to a grammar school it was assumed that you would pick up a few O levels and, for those who stayed on in the 6th Form, a few A Levels before many, but not all, progressed to university or Teacher Training College. For the rest, if they were lucky, there were 'City and Guilds' qualifications.

Scroll forward some 50 years and what a change greets us. Not only do nearly 50% of the school population undertake some kind of degree course compared with around 10% in my day; but it is expected that well over two thirds of all students should achieve at least five 'good' GCSEs, which replaced O Levels, which were designed to be taken by the 'top' 20% of students only, and CSE, which theoretically accounted for the rest, in most state schools in 1988/89. At all ages our children are now almost tested to destruction in the name of educational standards, and arguably at the expense of more creative enjoyment for many. I sometimes wonder for whose benefit this incessant testing regime is really designed. Could it be the stick with which to beat so called 'failing' or now 'coasting' schools'? Using similar criteria for the education of young people as for building, for example, a motor car might appeal to the hardnosed business types and entrepreneurs who appear currently to be calling the shots at Westminster, where it is usually demonstrable results that count and every penny spent has to be justified; but children are not motor cars!

Of course I'm not against testing. Ours is a competitive world and is unlikely to change soon. However, do we really have to place so much emphasis on it? Most youngsters in Europe don't even start formal education until they turn seven, so why do we insist on our children starting formal education at four and start testing them soon afterwards? The only reason, in my opinion, to test them at primary school at all should be for diagnostic reasons. Clearly, if a student hasn't achieved a reasonable standard of numeracy and literacy by the time they are old enough to move from primary to secondary education, they will struggle, so we need to know this before it's too late. You could even make a case for holding a youngster back until they have reached a satisfactory level, a tradition that, I believe, is still practised in many European countries.

If we really want to prepare our youngsters for adult life, why do we still seem to emphasise the academic at the expense of the vocational in most of our secondary schools? If we really do want to start to make more things again, we could start by dusting off the 2004 Tomlinson Report into 14 to 19 Education, which was kicked into the long grass by the Blair government. Amongst several recommendations, it advocated raising the status of vocational qualifications, reducing the amount of assessment and the number of exams and introducing a 14 to 19 Diploma to replace the plethora of post 16 qualifications.

If we want an education service worthy of its name, it's time to stop trying to reinvent the wheel and to bring a little sanity back into an area that has suffered too long from incessant meddling by people who really do not understand the damage they are causing.

Cllr John Marriott

21.5.2016