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NIL SATis - Nothing is enough Why are we testing children so much? It is time once again for SATs and by now these children have already been subjected to Baseline assessment, Phonic Screening, Key Stage 1 SATs, Multiplication Tables Check, and some might be doing the 11 plus. Who are all these tests for? There have often been reports from secondary schools suggesting that SATs testing in primary schools is inaccurate and unhelpful in creating a profile for an individual child which they are then required to use to project a child's outcomes at 16. Do they enhance children's opportunities to learn and what do they tell us about children? A test is simply a snapshot at a particular moment in a child's life. This will only tell you about one small aspect of a child's development and growth and can't show how far knowledge and skill are embedded in the individual whic...

OFSTED OR BUST? You do not have to look very far on Google or indeed (if you have time) speak to your colleagues to conclude that Ofsted needs to change radically. The National Education Union’s recent webpage headline is ‘Replace Ofsted’.  Old news? The elephant in the room? Those lucky readers who work in schools know that this organisation is going badly wrong confirmed by the recent headlines in the press and social media. How many suicides, reported heart attacks and mental breakdowns do our colleagues have to endure before we all quit? The link between the reducing teaching workforce numbers, at all levels, is interesting. Ofsted seems to think that teachers ‘are fleeing to better paid jobs’. That may be true but with the stress of teaching AND Ofsted (the elephant) it certainly does require much better renumeration and free psychotherapist ses...

DfE drops its academisation goal for 2030   The news (reported on 24 February 2023 in https://schoolsweek.co.uk) that the DfE is ditching its key goal for all schools to be academised by 2030 reminds us of the fickle nature of the political world, accentuated in recent years, by the high turnover of education ministers. The current Secretary of State for Education, Gillian Keegan, is the fifth in just four months, an extraordinary catalogue of changing personnel at the top! This about-turn in policy is welcome, nevertheless, because it should, at least in theory, enable the remaining 61% of primary schools, which are not academies, to make their own judgements about whether to go down the academisation route. In practice, the context of under-funding from central government to the local authorities, has made it increasingly difficult to provide local services at the level they...

We are being told by the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, that more pupils by the age of 18 must have a greater understanding and application in maths so give future citizens more ‘confidence’ in the subject. What about the humanities, arts and all the creative areas of the curriculum? I fear that greater attention to the mathematics curriculum could be top-ended loaded. That is, what happens at 18 influences what is taught in primary schools. Still, the general election is not far away and it will take more than two years to implement. Two years is a long time in politics....

Trick or Treat? I imagine that that will be the cry that goes up when the spectre who haunted the corridors of the DfE for so many years, holding back the progress of English education for so long that Wales abandoned all hope and developed their own curriculum, returns to sacrifice children on the altar of assessment statistics. What more appropriate time for an old face to appear at the portals of Sanctuary Buildings than when the number of ministerial heads that have rolled, jumped, or been pushed is now uncountable. I'm sure that you'll be relieved to see that despite closure of nurseries in Hillingdon, scrapping the school transport scheme for disabled children in Hampshire, closing nine libraries in Wirral and £80 million of budget cuts in Birmingham, the estimated hundreds of thousands in severance pay for the five iterations of the the department which have ta...