Justine Greening has just announced a series of changes to primary assessment in a statement to Parliament.
Here is what we know…
1. The government will not impose maths and reading resits on children’s arrival in year 7
The government has said it will instead focus on the steps needed to ensure a child “catches up on lost ground”. Re-sit papers will be available for teachers to use it if they wish.
2. The key stage 1 spelling, punctuation and grammar test will remain non-statutory this year
This was made non-statutory in the last academic year after the paper was leaked online. This continues the policy of allowing teachers to choose if they will use or not for one more year.
3. There will be no more new tests or national assessments before 2018
This is said to be for the purpose of bringing “greater stability”
4. The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) will remain in place for 2017/18
Schools Week already reported that this was put in place for 2016.
5. There will be a consultation on primary assessment in the new year
It will also look at the implications for accountability.
6. The Rochford Review report will be published today
It is much delayed, after originally being due to publish in December 2015.
All ok for now but probably buying time to get it right I hope! Hey ask the teachers- we kind of know what’s going on!
Has Greening done enough to ward off a SAT boycott in 2017? Possibly not. http://www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk/2016/10/greening-says-shes-listened-to-teachers-but-is-it-enough-to-ward-off-a-primary-test-boycott-next-year
For many years all political parties seem to have increasingly ignored the emotional aspect of teaching in favour of measuring intellectual targets. If the teachers have to be over concerned with meeting targets, there is little room for fun and excitement in the classroom.
Something has gone very wrong with the approach to education in our country and we are overlooking the way that children become lifelong learners who enjoy exploring things, challenging ideas and developing their skills. This is not achieved by exhausting them with too much work, but by inspiring them and giving them an environment where they feel safe to develop in their individual ways and at their own pace. This is a far cry from feeling anxious about whether they are reaching preordained levels.
Surely educational policies that regress into turning our children into Dickensian ‘little vessels’ to be ‘filled with knowledge’, ignore the fact that any important advances in wisdom, particularly in the field of science, stem from accepting that current thinking may turn out to be incorrect.
It would be good if Teaching Unions could fight to put the children back at the centre of educational policies, rather than the syllabus.
Not enough love sorry you really don’t get what is going on in primary schools do you. Teachers want more than anything else to raise the attainment of children but this is not the way to do it. We need resources to help those struggling children. Giving us more hoops for children to jump through with the fear factor of Ofsted in the background simply means we get the able children to do this whether of not it is the developmentally right thing for them to do at this age. To do this the children who struggle ahve to be simply abandoned in the process… We do not live in the 1950s and neither do our children so why impose an archaic system of learning and testing on our children…
I do not support the introduction of more grammar schools although I went to one and came from a poor family bombed out in the last war – but times have changed and now the well-to-do go to great lengths to get their children into grammar schools. We need more resources at primary
level and more technical colleges up and down the country as technology
races forward engineers, scientists, computer experts etc.
And what happened to prison education to give people a second chance?