Do keep up, Minister!
The invariably idiotic Commons Schools Select Committee says school tests at 7, 11 and 14 (SATs) are damaging children’s education. As the Telegraph reported, apparently the SATs have meant that not only are teachers ‘teaching to the test’ by focusing on SATs at the expense of education but, according to evidence to the committee from educationists, they make children feel so inadequate they destroy pupils' self-esteem, cause them to drop out of school and become mentally ill.
Oh for heaven’s sake -- what an insult to the intelligence. We’re talking here about bog-standard tests to ensure that pupils have achieved the rudimentary basics of education, and we’re being told they are the equivalent of child abuse. If teachers are ‘teaching to the test’, all that shows is that they are rotten, incompetent teachers.
But that of course is precisely the point. The SATs were only introduced in the first place because standards in schools were atrocious due to the gross incompetence of so many teachers, resulting from the ideological malignity of the educationists who teach them — the very same teachers and educationists who from the get-go whined that the SATs would cause schools to ‘teach to the test’ and have campaigned for them to be abolished ever since. On the Today programme (0817) this morning, the fundamental point of the SATs eluded not only their critic, the general secretary of the head teachers' union Mick Brookes, but also the Schools Minister Jim Knight who was supposed to be defending them. Brookes moaned that the SATs didn’t accurately assess the progress of each individual child; Knight, the silly chump, responded that the SATs were useful in preparing children for GCSEs and A-levels. How pathetic is that?!
Homework assignment for Schools Minister: write out twenty times, The SATs are not a test for pupils. Their sole purpose is to test the teachers. We must try harder.
Do keep up, Minister!