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Tuesday 3 May 2016

The chaos of politics in education.

The events of today are a real conundrum for me.  I oppose children being taken out of school during the school term, to the extent that I would not strike to prevent a child from accessing education even for one day. However, parents seem to be keeping their children off school today in protest at the upcoming SATs tests and various campaign groups have chipped in with their two penny worth.  My view is that the parents have a point and that SATs are all about political point scoring.  It is alleged by ministers that SATs show progress and improvement.  But in fact, it makes no measurable difference to the individual child.  After all, where is the empirical evidence that an individual child has benefited in any way from being tested at the age of six?

Education Minister Nick Gibb says that tests improve standards.  How? The other Nicky, Morgan, says that raising standards will improve  creativity.  How? The fact is so much pressure is put on schools to produce 'results' and show improvement year after year that teaching creatively is abandoned to teaching to tests.  No wonder children are actually saying that they can't cope.  Even Chris McGivern of the Campaign for Real Education has jumped on the bandwagon by saying that British children are three years behind the Chinese at the age of fifteen.  My question to the Campaign for Real Education is "So what?".

The important question is how British children succeed compared with Chinese students after that time.  We do not produce drones that follow party policy but innovative individuals.  The British have and continue to develop inspiring technological and cultural creativity, as opposed to cloning other people's ideas.

It is the time that teachers be allowed to use their judgement and personal knowledge of the child to determine where that child should be set upon the transition from primary to secondary education, and secondary teachers should be more proactive in moving those children between sets as required.

Perhaps the answer is to get the politicians and think-tanks out of education.

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