The law of unintended consequences shows no mercy towards any innovation, so even though successive governments have done little to indicate that they should be given the benefit of the doubt, especially on education, we must assume that the current state of KS2 testing is not what was originally intended.
Although KS2 is ostensibly a way of checking up on schools and ensuring that they’re doing as expected (the implications of which can be discussed at another time), the reality is a long way from this. As primary schools are judged harshly on their results, it naturally becomes essential for them to get the best results possible in this particular benchmarking test, under threat of aggressive Ofsteds, sackings and even forced academisation, effectively punishing the entire school for the academic performance of a particular cohort of children. Sadly, this focus doesn’t mean a better education for the children (although politicians who only care about simplistic stats may disagree), but more teaching to this particular test, often with resources diverted away from other year groups.
It’s easy to get used to these things or accept them as the way things are, so pause for a moment and reflect on that: In the “relentless drive to improve standards”, we have a system which encourages – indeed, practically forces – schools to spend enormous amounts of time and effort preparing children for a specific test that will have no bearing on their future prospects at all. Talk to any parent whose child has passed through Y6 recently, and you’ll hear of a “lost year” of nothing but repetition and cramming in an effort to scrape as many children as possible up to the desired level, followed by collapse as the pressure is finally eased in the summer and the children have nothing left in the tank. As incentives go, they don’t get much more perverse.
In this context, it’s no surprise that KS2 boycotts have been discussed, although to date, we’ve been very wary of them. That’s caused a lot of debate, so here are our reasons for caution. While it would surely be of benefit for an individual child to have a year of proper teaching, rather than hothousing for a meaningless test, the practicalities are more complex. If the rest of the class are due to take KS2, and being prepared accordingly with jobs likely to be on the line, anyone who thinks this single child would be given something different to do in class is living in a fantasy world. The only difference would be that having wasted a year on preparing for a test, they would not ultimately take that test – a distinctly Pyrrhic victory.
The target of any boycott would also be in question. Although the problem stems from government, the most obvious impact (possibly the only impact) would be felt by the school. A single form intake is volatile enough as a means of measuring a school’s performance. Imagine if several children – possibly some of the brighter ones – were withdrawn from consideration. The school would be highly vulnerable to random fluctuations, and no one at the DfE or Ofsted would be interested in detailed analysis of the reasons if results were considered to be poor. This could also have the disastrous consequence of pitting teachers and parents against each other, with jobs and the school’s future weighed against each child’s interests. Good schools would be caught between top-down bureaucracy and children’s needs, while the true villains busy themselves with spreadsheets, never needing to engage with context or the human cost.
The system needs to be challenged, and that calls for bold action. But for any boycott to be successful, it would need to be a significant mass movement across the country, to protect individual schools from reprisals. That could be a catalyst for change, although it may also favour the kind of school that would think nothing of cajoling and threatening parents into decisions that would only benefit the school. If “difficult” children can disappear for exams and Ofsted visits, it would be child’s play to stack the deck for SATs under cover of a genuine campaign. There’s also a real concern about how many parents would choose to boycott, and how this could be organised in the absence of any existing body to coordinate it.
So rightly or wrongly, it appears that removing children from KS2 tests, though appealing, is fraught with problems. But today, we think the equation’s shifted dramatically in favour of a boycott, with the Tories’ latest announcement that children would be forced to resit KS2 in Y7 if they “failed” first time around. This sounds like the sort of policy idea that tends to be floated in friendly papers so that the real policy, marginally less absurd, is almost greeted with relief when it comes out. On the other hand, is that really a viable tactic in the middle of an election campaign? It’s hard to do justice to the madness of this idea, but here are a few reasons why it’s utterly ridiculous.
Bait and Switch – These SATs were always meant to be a means of benchmarking schools, not a pass/fail test and not a test of individual children. This proposal shows at best a lack of clarity and a lack of understanding about what is being tested and why.
Futility – KS2 performance, for better or worse, is a diagnostic matter of fact. The exam isn’t something you need to have passed, any more than you need to have perfect marks on every weekly spelling test. Teaching children to “pass” the test, rather than addressing the reasons why they struggled, is mistaking the picture for the person.
Inconsistency – For years, Tory rhetoric has been about how resits make everything too easy, and policy has shifted accordingly. Now, possibly because some DfE wonk wants a nice quotable stat about literacy and numeracy standards for political motives, resits are not just allowed, they’re mandatory!
Incoherence – It appears that any children who “fail” will be “given two additional chances” in Y7. And what happens if they still haven’t met the arbitrary target? How can it be essential to force a child to resit the test twice, but pointless to do it more than that? Once again, it looks suspiciously like political expediency is the only consideration.
Stigma – There are many practical objections, but really, this should be the beginning and the end of all discussion. The Tories claim to believe in opportunity for all (or at least they’re embarrassed about openly promoting selection), but this policy would send a significant proportion of children to secondary school with a label that says “failure”. Some would carry that for life, if their “additional chances” also fall short of the level expected. And all this as a stark black and white interpretation of a test that (so we’re told, even if the children don’t believe it) is only about a school’s performance.
Tories don’t like to hear it, because it doesn’t fit their dogma, but some children won’t reach a level that would be considered a “pass” at KS2 until well after Y7. They’d be condemned to a demoralising process of being dragged through repeated failures in meaningless tests. Conversely, there are children who are at risk of stalling completely in Y6, because they just aren’t stretched as schools focus on the marginal cases. The system’s clearly broken, but at least the bright ones only get bored, not cruelly labelled.
If this policy is ever enacted (and we fervently hope it isn’t), it might change everything. Who wouldn’t want to protect their child from the possibility, however small, of starting a new school with a metaphorical dunce’s cap and the requirement to waste time on the same test again? The brighter the child and the smaller the chance of them being deemed to have failed, the more ridiculously damaging to their development it would be if they were forced to revise and resit this test, which – let’s remember – has no value for the child at all. Why take the chance?
The day this policy is enacted will be the day we start a national campaign calling on all parents to withdraw children from these tests. We’ll see you on the barricades.
Parents 4 Education 