The Tories are that competent, that they could pull that kind of stunt off!!!

Like I said, I don’t hold much credence with the conspiracists but then you read stuff like this….

mefty – Member

If the school is making a big thing of it that is a problem with the school.

Kids aren’t morons, they know when they’re being tested. And it’s not the school making a big thing of these tests is it? They’re responding to the fact that they are a big thing.

What JP Gargan sed ^

s aren’t morons, they know when they’re being tested. And it’s not the school making a big thing of these tests is it? They’re responding to the fact that they are a big thing.

Or it’s the parents whipping the whole thing up into a big thing rather than the teachers, because there’s no parent like an insecure parent…

As above – some kids need a gentle touch, some don’t. For those who do, simply battering them does not help. Surely you must understand this? Or does a public school education beat any sympathy out of you?

The first anyone, other than the teaching staff, knew that the test was taking place was when it started, even afterwards alot of the kids didn’t really appreciate that they had been tested. That is how it should be and it is hardly difficult, my daughter has no idea of her scores because they are unimportant.

Not at all mol – comprehensive approaches to education are flawed IMO

Are you saying she belongs in the lower tier or the upper tier? You’d relegate her at age 7?

But these tests are hardly a battering – unless as mefty, schools approach them badly

She is battering herself. Because the tests exist.

You think your daughter might die if she doesn’t do well in a test at school?

Don’t be stupid. That was a metaphor, as you almost certainly knew.

If she is too stressed by school, she will not learn well, and hence not meet her potential whilst having a miserable childhood. Is that ok with you?

She does not know she is having a government test, they have told the kids it’s a fun quiz.

Or it’s the parents whipping the whole thing up into a big thing rather than the teachers, because there’s no parent like an insecure parent

Except it’s not just the parents, it’s the teachers too. Did you see dazh’s post?

ninfan – maybe it’s just lots of people from across the country that have looked at the new curriculum and tests and decided that, actually, they fundamentally disagree with the premise that’s been used to set them?

Yes, the people who are taking their kids out of school are directly affected but they’re not the only ones who care about how the education system is being turned into a commodity.

my daughter has no idea of her scores because they are unimportant

Why bother then?

Individual scores are unimportant but a bench marking exercise will help in evaluation of the system as children progress. People say they want evidence based policy and then complain about the collection of evidence.

There are othr ways to collect better evidence, single point tests are a poor indicator of student capability. I always did really well at tests, often beating my peers who were actually better, brighter and harder working but found tests outfacing, conversely I was crap at coursework because i was idle, which was perhaps a fairer reflection of what I’d done over the year

a bench marking exercise will help in evaluation of the system

children as a commodity.

schools will teach only in ways that increase their scores.

and yet the curriculum they are teaching is narrow and flawed, the bench-marks being used fail to measure a lot of things that are important and those things will cease to be taught.

ninfan – Member

Or it’s the parents whipping the whole thing up into a big thing rather than the teachers, because there’s no parent like an insecure parent…

It’s a big thing because government policy has made it a big thing, end of. Everything else is a reaction to that.

It’s just a piss poor data collection exercise. Back int’olden days you’d get a grade and an effort score from your teachers in your report, why not just enter that into a database you’d get the benchmarking data you’d want from a more consideed perspective ?

OK, here’s a daring thought. If the tests are causing teachers to “teach to the tests” then they’re evidently bad tests. Likewise “preparing for the tests”- the preparation for the tests is the curriculum. If they’re supposed to gauge progress and attainment then they have to test to the teaching.

+1

Back int’olden days you’d get a grade and an effort score from your teachers in your report

And if my predicted A-level grades were anything to go by, then teachers aren’t that good at judging these things.

From way back on page 1

if schools want to teach solely to pass the tests because of the league tables, well, that’s their problem.

This, to me, is the central issue, and if the kids are being crammed full of literacy and numeracy to meet some tests, at the expense of a more rounded education, that is very much the kids’ problem, isn’t it?

I don’t know, some schools are better than others, some teachers are better than others but if I had kids at primary age*, I’d be taking an active interest in what they were doing at school**. If it was always literacy and numeracy, with art and history not seeming to get much of a look in, I’d maybe be asking the school about that***. Anecdotally I hear that that is the case in some schools. I’m sure it’s not in others.

To me, the danger in all this is not that kids are overly tested, stressed by it, labelled as failures (as many have said, it’s the schools not the kids that are judged by SATS scores)but that the education they receive suffers as a result because teachers make the wrong decisions, for the wrong reasons, about what to teach ’em.

*which I do
**which I do
***they’re not, so I don’t need to

People say they want evidence based policy and then complain about the collection of evidence.

Therein, for me, lies a big problem – people want more say on everything but they’re not qualified to have that say.

Individual scores are unimportant

Hang on – if that’s the case, how will the tests help an individual from having a failed life due to inability to recognise a subjunctive (and hence being forced to become a Tory minister)??

Therein, for me, lies a big problem – people want more say on everything but they’re not qualified to have that say.

I assume you’re referring to the government?

“It’s just a piss poor data collection exercise. Back int’olden days you’d get a grade and an effort score from your teachers in your report, why not just enter that into a database”

In many ways that would be better, but it relies on Teachers not being smart enough to realise that giving every kid duff marks for the first benchmark will make them look great at the next data point.

In contrast a test can go to a moderator…

I assume you’re referring to the government?

In that particular instance, no, but generally speaking, yes. Id need to have a look into it to be sure, but I’ll warrant that we largely have league tables because parents wanted them, we have these new SATS because we have league table data to compile, therefore this has to a degree been self-inflicted. As massive as massive over-simplifications get but, you know.

The government absolutely brings about a lot of misery and unhappiness not only to itself but also the electorate through a mixture of cackhandidness and self-interest.

In many ways that would be better, but it relies on Teachers not being smart enough to realise that giving every kid duff marks for the first benchmark will make them look great at the next data point.

So – teachers are not smart enough to cheat? Or teachers have too much integrity to cheat?

Seems to me this is a problem of league tables and pushy parents.

35-40 years ago I was tested at primary school most years, and we had a huge multi day test session in the final year which the secondary school used to base their expectations on. School didn’t coach us for them or apply pressure, parents said nothing more than “Do your best”

Between them, our two kids have now had 3 rounds of Sats, and again, the school put no real pressure on them and we didn’t either.

I suspect that all this pressure on the kids comes from wannabe Superheads and the chattering middle classes concerned at their Facebook friends may find out that Tarquin and Arabella are not child prodigies after all, just normal kids with **** up parents.

Given how articulate striking children were on CH4 news and how well written and designed their posters were, they will sail through their tests – very impressive level of knowledge and expertise being demonstrated by such young ones. Almost GCSE standard….

Far smarter than in my day.

Minister in failed test shocker
Great example – minister gets the grammer question wrong. Key thing is, what difference does it make if an eleven year old can correctly identify a subordinating conjunction, as long as they use them properly?

Well they may as well get used to puerile box ticking now because that what is awaiting them at work. Apparently as long as my PD is imaginative it doesn’t really matter how good I am at the job I’m apparently paid to do.

why are schools even telling them they are doing a test, ours didn’t, it is a bench marking exercise it has no significance to the children at all. If the school is making a big thing of it that is a problem with the school.

I suspect its because thats how schools are judged and with performance management thats how teachers are judged for pay progression.

…a bench marking exercise will help in evaluation of the system as children progress. People say they want evidence based policy and then complain about the collection of evidence.

So presumably this benchmark is required because currently if a 16/17 year old does well in an English or Maths exam then we have no evidence that this was due to the stuff they learnt in school?

Therefore we need to test them to make sure they don’t already know this stuff at six.

Makes sense.

Though I’m not sure that rules out the possibility of them learning stuff from sources outside of the school environment? Perhaps compulsory Boarding Schools and minimal outside contact would be the best scientific approach.

Incidentally I’d be interested to hear how people fair on this sample test:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2016/05/03/can-you-pass-this-grammar-test-meant-for-11-year-olds/

(I’m a degree-educated 41-year-old: I only got eight out of ten and that was with a fair bit of guesswork).

6/10 all guesses though, didnt have a scooby

7.

Damn 9 – 50/50 on past progressive

At least 4 educated guesses though. 😯 could easily have been 6 or 7

No wonder the kids posters were so well written. Better than the junior doctors’ versions 😉

But these aren’t the tests at the centre of today’s storm minor news are they?

Was dey all like

‘Exam format academic assessment is an anachronistic preoccupation of the Tory right’

An’ shit?

9. **** adverb/adjective. 😡

I got 8 (decided not to guess, what’s the point of that?) No idea what the past progressive is. I got the active voice thing right just because Word used to shout at me for using the passive voice, I just don’t care is all. No idea what a subordinating conjunction or preposition is.

My colleague’s an english literature graduate, she’d know all this stuff. But tbf I think knowing it still makes no difference at all to her life, except that she likes to use it to look down on people for not knowing how to correctly deploy an ellipsis… Which to me, is a bit like slagging people because they don’t know how to triforce, or they can’t correctly identify a particular world war 2 tank. I have an MA and the highest uk school english qualification, so it’s a bit of a surprise that I need to resit P6. Absurd really.

It’s a shame the Nick Gibb story has ended up just being a way to make fun of him; the real point is that it doesn’t matter if he got the answer right or not- and it doesn’t matter for us either. So why does it matter for primary kids? So they can do well in the test, is the only answer I can see.

Footballers’ curse DD (and snooker judging by this weekend’s commentary)

I suspect its because thats how schools are judged and with performance management thats how teachers are judged for pay progression.

Whilst performance pay is not a bad thing in my view, if teachers are projecting the importance of the tests onto pupils because it is financially important to them, that is.

So presumably this benchmark is required because currently if a 16/17 year old does well in an English or Maths exam then we have no evidence that this was due to the stuff they learnt in school?

I imagine data that shows pupils’s progession over time is far more valuable than just data showing their ultimate achievements. Many good schools don’t do well in league tables because they don’t have the intake. Tests like these, which show development over time should – and it is dependent upon them not being gamed – give a better idea of who the really good educators are, rather than recruiters.

All 10 yay!

I didn’t understand the questions at first!

My English education was appalling to be fair.

Something I’m working on.

I imagine data that shows pupils’s progession over time is far more valuable than just data showing their ultimate achievements.

So let’s say, for instance, that we take this data over 12 years and we discover that kids who knew their 13 times table at six years old were more likely to pass Calculus at 18 than those who didn’t.

Ignoring the fact that the curriculum had probably changed several times in that 12 years, what does that result actually tell us?

Does it mean we should make teaching the multiplication tables a priority? Does it suggest that some kids are naturally good at maths? If no one in the school passed the test at six and then no one passed Calculus at 18 does that mean it is a bad school or perhaps just one in a difficult area?

Ultimately I am for evidence-based policy, but I don’t think you can underestimate how badly a government can misinterpret and misuse that evidence.

6 year old daughter loved reception year, but hasn’t enjoyed the years one and two. She is now worried about the “special test” she is having to do. Sure, some kids couldn’t care less about them, but my daughter feels under pressure to do well and is certainly aware of what’s going on. A six year with exam stress, not sure where the benefit is coming from, but we
now have a child that hates school.

I don’t think you can underestimate how badly a government can misinterpret and misuse that evidence

Step up Hunt and the ‘a 7 day NHS will save lives’ line 🙁

back on topic:

This gains zero marks. Who here had ever hyphenated written numbers?