Not secondary school ready? How does this prepare our year 7 children??!

This year’s SATs results show that more than a third of eleven-year-olds ‘failed’ the tests: they will be told by next week that they are ‘not secondary school ready’. In what sense are we raising standards, as the schools minister Nick Gibb so predictably claimed? And what do the scores tell us anyway, except that the curriculum is becoming horribly narrowed and students and teachers often horribly stressed. Time to ditch SATs for good. They are damaging and pointless. Read the Independent article here.

The press might well be reporting on rising standards, as in this BBC News article, but we feel that eleven is too young for any child to feel a failure.

“At a time when their minds could have been stimulated and their knowledge expanded, their education has been sacrificed to a system which is in thrall to league tables”

Madeleine Holt, of More Than A Score and Rescue Our Schools.