SATS: Testing skills for school not for life

Year 6 SATSToday marks the start of SATS week for my son, his friends and thousands of other 11-year-olds across the UK.  It’s an enormously pressured occasion for all of the children, but for my son, in particular, the tests will be particularly arduous as he is dyslexic.

Perhaps if my son wasn’t 2.5 years behind his peers already I might not worry so much about how he will make it through the week, but there are a number of other reasons why I disagree with the way schools and the government handle the Year 6 SATS.

What really bothers me is the fact my son has spent every night since September desperately trying to answer mock papers, crying when he gets the answers wrong because he can’t remember what phrases such as subordinating conjunction, synonym and adverbial mean. He’s not alone; my Facebook page went wild with parents complaining their children also couldn’t do the papers, and worse still they didn’t know how to help because the questions were utterly baffling.

Perhaps worse than that – because when he’s at home I can at least manage the tears and disappointment – is the fact his entire Year 6 curriculum has been based around the looming SATS.  Day in and day out the school has been ‘preparing’ the children for these tests which, in the long run, do nothing to benefit the child and everything to benefit the school.

This means lessons aren’t fun, and rather than learning how to write creative pieces of text, they’re learning ridiculous phrases such as present progressive, relative pronoun and preposition.

And what I really, really, take insult to is that on my son’s first parent’s evening of the year we were effectively told (after a deep sigh from his teacher) that because he had no hope of passing the SATS due to his dyslexia, he was pretty much a failure.  So, no SATS results means you’re no good.  Never mind the fact my son is a technical whizz kid, has the inventing skills of Thomas Edison and the artistic skills of Pablo Picasso (alright that might be the proud parent talking, but you get my gist). No, because my son probably won’t pass his SATS this year, according to his teacher, and probably the government, he’s no good.

What really bugs me is that writing, learning and going to school should be FUN.  And this year has not been fun.  For any child, surely the most important thing is that by the time they leave school they are able to write a grammatically correct piece of text, understand when and where to use punctuation, and be able to decipher the meaning of a piece of writing?  Is that not all the average adult does day to day?

Which got me thinking.  I write for a living, and have done so for 17 years, so how would I do when faced with the Year 6 grammar test?  I’ve been helping my son revise for the past six months, I don’t have dyslexia, and I’m pretty darn good at my job, so I should pass with flying colours – right?

Wrong!

I sourced a SATS test online and answered 10 minutes of questions similar to the following:

Q: Which sentence uses the past progressive?

  1. After Ali finished his homework, he went out to play
  2. Gemma was doing her science homework
  3. Jamie learnt his spellings every night
  4. Anna found her history homework difficult

Q: In this sentence, is the word after being used as a subordinate conjunction or as a preposition?

  • I went to the cinema after I had eaten my dinner

Q: Which sentence is written in the active voice?

  1. The book was returned to the library yesterday
  2. The assembly was held in the hall
  3. The bad weather led to the cancellation
  4. The floods were caused by the heavy rain

I got 40%!

I then decided to put my colleagues to the test, surely one of us would fare better?  We’re all of different ages, but between us have a collective 50 years of writing professionally – if anyone should be able to pass the SATS grammar tests, it should be us?

But no!

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Only two members of the 72Point creative team (and I’m sure age is on their side) managed to get over 40%! I should find this shocking, but having seen the homework my son has endured every night this year, I don’t.  I for one have never had to remember what a main clause, subordinate clause or antonym is when carrying out my day job, OR when conducting normal life admin.

To quote two teacher friends of mine, both of whom shall remain anonymous for obvious reasons:

“To think how good you are at English, just shows how completely pointless this is – plus it has only been in the curriculum for 2 years – I hate the fact I have to teach grammar just to enable children to pass this test”

“I got 50% and I’m a teacher!  Good job I’m teaching Year 1 where we stop at nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, prefixes and suffixes.  It is so depressing seeing what the children are expected to know by the end of primary now.”

Even teachers are frustrated with the constraints of the current curriculum – my son’s school has been amazing since the day he joined but the teacher’s hands are tied and bound by the government’s obsession with testing children instead of teaching them the skills they’ll need for real life.  There are so many other wonderful things which could and should be covered by the school curriculum – a bigger emphasis on science, technology, engineering, art and cooking for example.

So what does this prove?  To me, it demonstrates that the Year 6 SATS tests are complete and utter nonsense which serve no purpose other than to strip young children of their childhood and ruin the last precious year of primary school.

And what will my boy take away from this experience?  Well, I guess that’s very much down to our parenting, and how my husband and I handle the whole situation.  We have encouraged our son to revise every night, not because we care how he does in the tests but to encourage hard work, dedication and good behaviour.

We have promised him we will NOT be looking at his results – because we firmly believe that all children should be celebrated for how hard they try and not what they achieve – and that as long as he can walk out of that exam room on Friday knowing he tried his best then we’ll be the proudest parents walking the planet.

I wish all the children sitting the SATS this week the very best of luck – each and every one is doing something this week that the majority of 72Point, and probably everyone else in our industry cannot do; however pointless this will be in the long run.

If you want to take the test, please visit http://www.sats2016.co.uk/think-youd-pass-your-sats-in-2016/