Teachers snubbing SATs - BBC opinion

At the beginning of year 9 my science teacher would not shut up about OMG sats you must pass these, they are the single most important exam you will sit. They were literally a religious thing to her. She just did not stop.

Got to a few weeks before the exams. My mum told me she heard on the radio that they'd been cancelled. I walked into my science class with the biggest grin on my face I've possibly ever had. :D

But yeah. My parents disagree with them. I didn't mind them passed with flying colours in year 6 ones and like I said, the year 9 ones never happened. Thinking back though; some of the mock SAT papers seemed harder than some of the mock GCSE papers I am sitting now.. I would much rather that we got to learn instead of taking pointless exams that make the school look good. Unfortunately my school is all about that. They care more about personal appearance than manners FFS. :mad:
 
In my old job, Year 9 SATs proved to be invaluable when taking on Young Apprentices.
We found that an average score of below 15 would always result in a child not completing the YA so the minimum requirement is now 15.
SATs worked for us.
 
We did the 11+ as the entrance exam to the grammar school, same thing happens today. I passed, went to the grammar school, uni and in a very well paid job, those who didn't pass are invariably still living in the same town doing dead end jobs.

Was it worth the stress? Damn right.

Is it fair to judge childrens destiny at 11 (I did mine aged 10), I don't know, but I'm yet to see a sensible alternative.
 
Syph said:
SATs are used as a measure for our own performance - along with other financial indicators and the GCSEs results. Whilst it doesn't make the raw GCSE results any better, our CVA score would be more comparable (and often better) than schools with higher GCSE results.
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Ah, that's interesting thank you, I hadn't realised until now that they weren't just taken in isolation. I'd need to look into it properly to see how much fairer that makes it but at least it seems there is some form of weighting given.
 
"We do better with the kids we get". However, I don't think parents or papers see beyond the raw GCSE mark unfortunately.
 
You can reform the education system all you want, but if the same changes are not followed through for a child when they go home, it will all be futile.

Maybe it doesn't apply to every school in the country, but certainly for inner city schools, the biggest obstacle to learning is still bad behaviour and the hugely inadequate systems put in place to deal with it.

No matter how good you are at teaching and classroom management, there's only so much you can do when it comes to certain pupils. The worst thing is that, it's only a small number of pupils that spoil it for the rest, take them out of the classroom and you're pretty much guaranteed to see academic performance shoot right up. How you take them 'out of the classroom' though is whole new matter and requires rethinking of more than just the education system.
 
Dolph said:
The whole education system needs massive reform, the trouble is most teachers don't actually want the sort of changes that would bring us up to a world class education system.
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Its not the teachers which are the problem though Dolph, its the sheer amount of red tape and document ammendments which get made weekly and sent to the headmasters forcing the teaching route down a certain path. Someone linked statistics to what I'm talking about in a thread on a possible teaching strike a few weeks ago with a comparison of england vs sweden if I remember rightly. The teachers basically get left to do their jobs instead of an insane amount of rubbish being put in the way from the powers that be.

Personally I have nothing against the SATS and I know for a fact my secondary school used the information to form classes based on performance, which then later changed with yearly grades from coursework/class work etc. I wasn't stressed nor was I concerned and did well in both sets of tests. I can understand a teachers viewpoint of "well we only teach the children the stuff they need to pass the tests, not what they need for the proper level", which to me should see a change of what the SATS actually measure and try to gauge "skill wise" from the respective age groups.
 
hurfdurf said:
External testing is needed to keep teachers in check. Surprise surprise teachers wanting less supervision so they can get away with more. Some teachers are great but others are terrible and they need to be kept in check

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/apr/04/sats-marking-race-stereotypes
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All im reading in this article is an overview of a "robust" (direct quote) study into the inequalities in marking but then theres absolutely no evidence presented to back it up lol. If it presented figures which had a set percentage variation so you could actually see real physical proof of it, then fair enough. Until that time though I'm calling BS on it.
 
SATs need to go. We don't need a nationwide test of every single 11 and 14 year old child in the country.

What could be good imo is continual marking of pupils (not nationally, but done internally by the school itself) and use that to grade them. In France for instance (where SATs don't exist) all work returned by pupils is graded and a weighted average of all subjects is taken (weighted in that results in Maths and French are more important than other subjects, for instance), leaving the pupil with a grade at the end of every term. No exam stress (since there is no exam) yet no slacking either, since you need to perform all year round to pass.
 
Something which has only been mentioned once in the thread is the Northern Ireland "11 Plus" exam, which took place at the end of Primary 7 and forged your path into Secondary School.

Do people agree with this? I believe it's actually been abolished since I did it, but I personally think it was very worthwhile and DID actually frame your future.

For example, those who did well (like myself) might make it into a Grammar School, while those who did badly a community college or secondary school.

While we weren't routinely tested as these SATs seem to be, we WERE geared up at that point to expect testing in the form of GCSEs and A-Levels at only 10/11 years old. Is that a bad thing? I don't think so.
 
Killerkebab said:
SATs need to go. We don't need a nationwide test of every single 11 and 14 year old child in the country.

What could be good imo is continual marking of pupils (not nationally, but done internally by the school itself) and use that to grade them.
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See this is what annoys me sometimes. People outside teaching are not aware of what is actually happening in schools.

Y9 SATs at 14 have not existed for over a year now. They were scrapped, in part, because a lot of students start GCSE courses in Y9.

APP - assessing pupil progress, is all about continually assessing students on work in class - in English, Maths, Science and ICT. This should be used in all schools now or by 2012.
 
Pestilence said:
Something which has only been mentioned once in the thread is the Northern Ireland "11 Plus" exam, which took place at the end of Primary 7 and forged your path into Secondary School.

Do people agree with this? I believe it's actually been abolished since I did it, but I personally think it was very worthwhile and DID actually frame your future.

For example, those who did well (like myself) might make it into a Grammar School, while those who did badly a community college or secondary school.

While we weren't routinely tested as these SATs seem to be, we WERE geared up at that point to expect testing in the form of GCSEs and A-Levels at only 10/11 years old. Is that a bad thing? I don't think so.
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I actually did mine in Lincolnshire where there still exists a very good grammar school system today.
 
James J said:
Its not the teachers which are the problem though Dolph, its the sheer amount of red tape and document ammendments which get made weekly and sent to the headmasters forcing the teaching route down a certain path. Someone linked statistics to what I'm talking about in a thread on a possible teaching strike a few weeks ago with a comparison of england vs sweden if I remember rightly. The teachers basically get left to do their jobs instead of an insane amount of rubbish being put in the way from the powers that be.

Personally I have nothing against the SATS and I know for a fact my secondary school used the information to form classes based on performance, which then later changed with yearly grades from coursework/class work etc. I wasn't stressed nor was I concerned and did well in both sets of tests. I can understand a teachers viewpoint of "well we only teach the children the stuff they need to pass the tests, not what they need for the proper level", which to me should see a change of what the SATS actually measure and try to gauge "skill wise" from the respective age groups.
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The sheer amount of red tape that has developed is because of a flawed operating structure, getting rid of red tape and pointless exercises is all well and good, but the reason why those things came in (and the reasons some of them could only be replaced, not discontinued) lie in the discredited structure of massive state control.
 
Our school didnt even tell us we had exams, just a had a day of firing through a few of them then everything went back to normal, we asked the head about the results etc and he just said 'dont worry, there just something you have to tick off doing'.


it wasnt until much later i realised 'oh that was one of them sats then' no one knew or cared as no fuss had been made over them.
 
dalin80 said:
Our school didnt even tell us we had exams, just a had a day of firing through a few of them then everything went back to normal, we asked the head about the results etc and he just said 'dont worry, there just something you have to tick off doing'.


it wasnt until much later i realised 'oh that was one of them sats then' no one knew or cared as no fuss had been made over them.
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That's exactly how they should be, not a focus of everything the schools are doing.
 
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