In 2019 Paul Whiteman, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, stated, “In reality, SATs do not tell teachers or parents anything they didn’t already know about their child or school, but have the negative unintended consequences of distracting from teaching and learning.”
However, we have continued to see standardised testing in British schools.
Thankfully, it appears as though the tide may be turning. Last month, Cressida Cowell, author of How to Train your Dragon, wrote an open letter to the Government criticising the curriculum’s focus on testing grammar, spelling, and punctuation, rather than fostering a love of reading and writing. This follows the announcement that a number of top US universities, including Harvard, have done away with test-based entry requirements, citing bias in the favour of privileged students, as well as the detrimental effects of high-stakes exams on students’ mental health as two of the primary motivating factors for doing so.
It is all well and good to remove standardised testing for students leaving school for higher education, but inequalities inherent in this kind of testing, as well as the anxiety, frustration, and upset they can elicit, are sewn into the fabric of children’s lives from the moment they enter the classroom. This is particularly true of the UK, where children of four years old are required to take the Reception Baseline Assessment (RBA) within their first year of school.
How are children negatively affected by standardised testing?
Standardised testing has been pushed by the government in order to reach numeracy and literacy goals, and whilst there has been some success in this, it has been achieved at the expense of narrowing the curriculum. When teachers ‘teach the test’ they prevent their pupils from accessing a more holistic and rounded education that could spark interests or open avenues left unprobed by the set curriculum.
By implementing tests in primary schools we instil the concept of success, and thus ‘failure’, at an age when children should simply want to experience and try out everything they can without the underlying worry that they might ‘fail’ at it. This concept of failure and the anxiety it can produce is particularly affecting for children with special educational needs (SEN), such as dyslexia. In her letter, Cowell states that, “It’s really easy to think you are not very clever if you are constantly being examined, and that can easily turn into an attitudinal problem. Nearly 75 percent of people in prisons have a learning difficulty or were excluded from schools. Gangs become an easier alternative to class.” It seems that with standardised testing, we are setting those children who need extra support up for a life of poor-adjustment, rather than nurturing them and making them believe in their own ability.