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SCHOOLS risk becoming “exam factories” under Tory plans to bring back standardised exams for seven-year-olds, unions warned yesterday.
Education secretary Nicky Morgan raised teachers’ eyebrows with plans for a “national teaching service” and a new target for nine in 10 secondary pupils to sit GCSEs in so-called “core” subjects.
A review of Key Stage 1 tests is likely to see assessments in reception classes followed by externally marked tests at the end of Year 2.
Ms Morgan insisted that it was parents’ responsibility to make sure their kids didn’t feel under pressure and to “manage” expectations.
“They are not exams, they are tests. There are ways for schools and parents to manage that,” she told an audience at right-wing think tank Policy Exchange.
“When my son did his Key Stage 1 tests he didn’t know he’d taken them until afterwards.”
But National Union of Teachers deputy general secretary Kevin Courtney branded the blueprint “educationally harmful, unreliable, costly and damaging to children.”
Britain “already has the most excessively tested children in the whole of Europe,” he said. “Children and young people urgently need the formal assessment burden on them reduced.”
Fellow teaching union NASUWT said that Ms Morgan’s plans demonstrated muddled thinking.
“Today’s announcement on testing and the promised review and consultation staggeringly seems set to sideline the views of those who actually teach the pupils in favour of simply taking a management perspective,” said NASUWT leader Chris Keates.
Ms Morgan’s planned teaching service would aim to recruit 1,500 of the “brightest and best” teachers by 2020 to work in the toughest schools — with a potential cash boon offered as an incentive.
She said that schools should raise the number of kids sitting the English baccalaureate subjects of English, maths, science, history or geography and a language from 39 per cent to 90 per cent.
“I don’t care if young people choose to watch Gogglebox and the X-Factor or if they’re entranced and absorbed by YouTube and Buzzfeed,” she smarmed.
“But I do care if they’ve never been given the chance to read Shakespeare or study Darwin, to perform on a stage or to fiddle with a Raspberry Pi.”
