Let's stop testing children and educate them instead

Education ministers must be longing for the release of A-level results this week. Whatever the story of Alevels is, it will divert attention from the chaos that has surrounded the marking of Sats this summer. Which will be a pity. Because the Sats debacle isn't some isolated problem with a marking firm that can't cope. It's a stark illustration of just how an overloaded and pointless testing system is finally collapsing under its own weight.

English children now sit more national tests than any others in the western world. That's the result of New Labour's belief that imposing a rigorous and public testing regime would be an effective way to raise educational standards in schools - a view reiterated yesterday by Schools Secretary Ed Balls. Unfortunately, he's wrong.

This summer we've seen for ourselves just how overloaded the system is, and how arbitrary the results. Newspapers have published English scripts where illiterate answers get higher marks than beautifully constructed sentences. Primary schools have been astonished to find that children with special needs who can barely cope with the curriculum have been randomly awarded level four passes, far beyond their real skills.

At the other extreme, some secondary teachers are reporting that the number of higher passes in their year has arbitrarily dropped by two-thirds or that practically every Shakespeare paper in the year has been awarded an identical mark. And of course some schools have had whole batches of papers not marked at all, because the marking company, ETS, has lost them.

This year's mistakes have been spectacular, and the number of appeals against results is expected to be four times higher than last. But the sad fact is that every year the Sats tests are essentially a waste of time.

At least a third of the levels awarded bear no relation to children's actual abilities, either because what's being measured is so limited, or because schools pull out all the stops to shove children through the tests. For the past decade, ministers have steadfastly ignored the criticisms of this regime. When I started writing about this issue six years ago, appalled by my children's experience of being endlessly drilled for tests in their London primaries, a minister told me that mine must be the only school where this kind of thing went on.

Even when employers and universities started complaining about the unsatisfactory skills of school leavers, ministers maintained that rising exam passes proved that standards had never been so high.

This year that defence has stopped being remotely plausible. Three major reviews have comprehensively demolished the fiction that testing children is the same as educating them.

Last week a survey by think-tank Civitas found that 90 per cent of teachers believed that the Sats scores children achieved at primaries couldn't be trusted, because so many had simply been heavily coached. A major Cambridge University study this spring was equally scathing. It found that standards have not risen, and the overall quality of primary education has actually declined because so much time is spent on test practice and so little on engaging children. As one quote said, "It is difficult to avoid a sense of children in flight from an experience of learning that they found unsatisfactory, unmotivating and uncomfortable."

That was certainly my daughter's experience. At 10, she had been in a class with an inspired teacher who refused to teach the national literacy or numeracy hours because he thought they were an entirely sterile approach. "I'm about to retire, so what can they do - sack me?" he asked. Instead the class read and acted and painted sets for Macbeth, wrote stories in the style of Raymond Chandler, and created dramas after hearing The Turn of the Screw. "He made you feel that the world was an exciting place and anything was possible," says my daughter now. Even the class wild child, known for rolling under the table and biting classmates' legs when he was angry, became a different, calmer, happier boy.

In Year 6, however, the class's young teacher had one mission only: high marks in that year's Sats. From Christmas to May there was Sats practice every day. There was no imagination, no learning, and in the entire year, just one lesson in art. School became drudgery, the wild child became completely unmanageable, and my academic child would sometimes come home in tears.

Indeed it is the widespread phenomenon of teaching to the test which most devalues Sats and demotivates children. That finding was at the heart of the Schools Select Committee'smerciless judgment on the failure of the system this May. So, for example, my daughter's best friend in Year 6 was in a class which was told to write three stock stories with six stock characters to prepare for their Sats, to save them the trouble of being creative. The school simply couldn't run the risk of their not getting it right.

The committee concluded that although England needed some system of national testing, the one the Government had constructed was positively damaging. Shallow learning had replaced deep understanding, test techniques had become more important than genuine education. And yet there was no evidence whatever that standards had gone up.

The Government's response to the avalanche of criticism has been remarkable. The Department for Children, Schools and Families has simply brushed aside the evidence, declaring that it won't reform the system, that coaching doesn't distort education, and that standards have never been higher. At the very top, it seems that ministers and civil servants are screwing their eyes tight shut and putting their fingers in their ears to avoid uncomfortable facts.

The reason, of course, is political. So much has gone so badly wrong for the Government that the educational statistics of the past decade are one of the few achievements they've got left. They can't afford to admit that this was a mirage.

It appears there's only one thing that may bring the Sats edifice crashing down and that's the fact that this year's debacle may leave the Government with no company willing to take the tests on. It seems that ETS is likely to be sacked, and two of the three remaining exam companies have said they would refuse to bid. It would be deeply ironic if Sats disappeared not because ministers accepted the arguments against them, but because the market pulled the rug out from under their feet.