Baseline testing of four-year-old children is wrong.

I know this both from my experience as a school teacher and as a parent.

The idea that a test taken by a four-year-old in their very first few weeks at school can or should be any prediction of their future success, either individually or as a cohort, it not only wrong but dangerous.

First, there is the question of the test itself and what message it sends to teachers, parents and children that we begin testing aged four.

Throughout their school career, these will be some of the most tested and, according to international surveys, least happy children in the Western world. Now the process will start even earlier.

Our children, and their parents, are already put through unreasonable pressure due to high-stakes testing.

As campaigns like Too Much Too Soon and the Save Childhood Movement have shown, far from supporting children’s development, this is doing significant damage.

Extending this to the very beginning of school helps no-one.

Then there is the broader question of what vision of education underpins the idea that you can test a number of basic skills aged four and use that as a “baseline” to judge the value added by the education process aged seven and 11.

If education were a simple process of transmitting knowledge or acquiring basic skills, there might be some logic to this. But it is not.

Education is a collaborative process between teacher and student by which children grapple with and attempt to understand the world around them, constructing knowledge in a social context as they grow and develop.

This cannot be measured by a “baseline” test and reduced to a set of numerical variables.

The real danger comes if these tests are used to try to predict individual children’s “expected” progress, as has happened with so many other measures of progress and attainment throughout our education system.

As soon as a definition of “expected” progress is developed, those who are judged to be achieving less well at one point are “expected” to do less well later on in their career.

Effectively, we are introducing covert selection within the system by means of adjusting our expectations of individual children.

All the evidence shows that this disproportionately affects economically disadvantaged students, students with English as an additional language, students with special education needs and other vulnerable students who are already disadvantaged within our system.

Of course the government argues that this is not the point of baseline testing at all.

Indeed, it has stated quite openly that this test will not be about individual students’ learning but rather about judging the effectiveness of schools, and presumably teachers.

This presents problems on a number of fronts. First, it is another mechanism by which teachers will be judged — and rewarded or punished — based on unreliable and inaccurate information.

Indeed research from EduDataLab confirms that children do not learn according to predictions and it is therefore inappropriate to use them to hold schools and teachers to account.

But even more importantly, the pressure placed on schools and teachers to “perform” in value-added measures based on the baseline test will quickly filter down to the children and directly affect their experience of education.

This has been the experience of SATs and all other standardised testing.

It leads to a narrowing of the curriculum and an excessive focus on what is measurable, rather than what is important.

Our aim is clear then. We must fight the introduction of the “baseline.”

But that does raise the question of how. In order to ensure that the baseline does not become embedded within our education system as the SATs have, and to begin to open up the very question of standardised testing within schools, we need to work on the broadest possible basis.

That means involving all teachers, not just those who will be directed to carry out the baseline assessment.

This is an integral part of a system that will be used against all teachers and it must be fought by all teachers.

We need to build networks of solidarity that give support to the teachers who will be required to implement this awful test.

These networks of solidarity must extend beyond the staffroom. This is primarily an attack on our children’s education.

There will be pressure on schools to comply from government, Ofsted and a range of other forces.

This needs to be countered with pressure from parents and the wider community.

We need to develop a broad campaign with deep roots — to work together with parents as partners in defending their children’s education.

This is a natural extension of our Stand Up for Education campaign and, as deputy general secretary of the NUT, I want to play a role in building these partnerships and alliances because, at the end of the day, our children’s education matters more than anything else.