News

Statements on SATs marking problems

28/07/08

Alison Johnston, Principal Officer (Education), said: "There has been little confidence in ETS given the debacle we’ve had this year.

"Huge numbers of people have been let down, particularly students, their teachers and parents."

Philip Parkin, General Secretary, said: "We would like to see a complete review of the testing system. Schools have to be accountable, but the current system is too big, too expensive, too unwieldy, too difficult to control and too inaccurate – as the current marking fiasco has demonstrated.

"We need to move education away from teaching to tests. The Government should take the opportunity provided by this debacle and review the whole system in order to produce something smaller in scale which is school-based and centred on the expert knowledge of school professionals, and which does not have the distorting effect on the curriculum that is currently so evident.

"The money saved would be better used to finance the government’s personalization and intervention agendas."

 30/07/08

In his speech to the Voice Annual Conference 2008, General Secretary Philip Parkin said: "After the debacle of this year’s marking processes, which suggests, apart from anything else, that the whole exercise is too big, too expensive, too difficult to control, too inaccurate and so pointless that the opportunity should be taken to rapidly re-evaluate the whole programme and scrap it, I’m sure that the money saved could be far better used to finance some of the government’s personalization and intervention agendas.

"Many people are questioning the value of KS3 testing and there is now increasing evidence that the results of KS2 testing are not providing the information which secondary schools want or trust. Some would argue that the case for public accountability and testing is incontrovertible. That may be the case, but the current format of industrial testing is not the way to do it.

"A few weeks ago I was talking to a Director of Education from one of the Welsh local authorities who told me of what he saw as a transformation for the better in Year 6 following the demise of KS2 testing. It will be interesting in coming years to observe and compare standards in schools in Wales and England if SATs remain in place here."

ends

pressoffice@voicetheunion.org.uk