For an English teacher like me, this is the Holy Grail: if one of my pupils actually enjoys reading, then everything else follows; happiness at school, success in the classroom, and, even if takes time, good exam results. The Summer Reading Challenge website is brilliant because it enables parents, teachers and anyone interested to find librarians who can come into schools or community centres and help get children reading. Most importantly, it’s all about enjoyment and finding books that children like — because they are out there! Good librarians know how to get even the most reluctant readers digging books.

This info from the website: “The national Summer Reading Challenge, coordinated by The Reading Agency, is run in 97% of UK public libraries. With 760,000 children aged 4-11 taking part, the Summer Reading Challenge is the biggest national reading initiative. It runs in libraries throughout the summer holidays, with incentives, activities and events designed to create a real buzz around children’s reading. The challenge is simple – to read six or more library books over the summer.”

Check it out now!

Related posts:

1. Are the school summer holidays just too long?
2. Don’t panic about your child’s schooling!
3. The National Scandal! Teaching Reading — my correspondence with Susan Godsland at the RRF

Help! I’m in a complete panic about schools! I feel that every decision I make about my children’s school is wrong. What should I do?

Firstly, be aware that you’re not alone. Being a school teacher for the last twenty years in various state schools, I’ve noticed that a lot of parents panic about their children’s education and feel like they’re getting it ALL wrong. Invariably, they are not. Ironically, the very fact that they’re worrying indicates that they shouldn’t worry!

Every year, I get my pupils to write a letter to me about their lives in the first lesson I have with them. I can usually predict from these letters how well they will do in their exams and life generally. It’s not rocket science: the children who write positively about their families, who feel like they can talk to their parents when they have problems, who are happy and confident, do well no matter what teachers they have. The research evidence backs up what I’ve observed. Save The Children estimates that 85% of a child’s learning goes on outside the classroom. This isn’t about playing Mozart to them in the womb, or making them learn quadratic equations when they’re tiny or taking them around loads of museums, it’s about paying proper attention to your child, having firm but fair boundaries, and above all, loving them. If you do these things, then your child will do well no matter where they go to school.

I’m totally confused about the different types of schools there are and which school my child should be attending. What type of school should my child go to?

One of the things that really confuses parents – even the most intellectual – are the bewildering array of different types of school there are. Most primary schools are fairly straight forward in that they are non-selective, local schools, but quite a few are “faith” schools which select their intake according to religion. The secondary school system is more complex: there are grammar schools, Academies, specialist schools, faith schools, state boarding schools, City Technology Colleges, and soon there will be “free” schools, schools set up by parents or other groups. To get specific advice about getting your child into these schools, you should look at the Advisory Centre for Education’s website – an organisation dedicated to explaining these intricacies thoroughly. They also have an excellent telephone helpline which addresses specific queries: http://www.ace-ed.org.uk/ or call 0808 800 5793.

Children are, by and large, best off going to the local school. There are some very basic but important reasons for this. Firstly, it means that your child’s friends will all be living nearby and you as a family will feel part of a community – no small thing. Secondly, it’s usually safest: your child will have less distance to travel to and from school. It also means that if there are problems or meetings you have to attend at the school, you can easily pop in yourself.

That’s all very well, but I’ve heard a lot of negative stuff about my local school. What do I do if I really think my child shouldn’t go to it?

Above all, don’t panic! Don’t believe all those rumours and gossip about the school; take time to investigate it yourself. Remember at the last count, Ofsted judged 69% of schools good or outstanding in 2008-2009, with only 4% being unsatisfactory. The chances are that your local school is great. It’s important that you go to the school yourself and talk to the teachers, the pupils and the parents and make up your own mind. I was given lots of dire warnings not to send my child to the local school, but went ahead anyway. He’s really thrived since going there. There are loads of stories like mine. If you don’t believe me, log onto the Local Schools Network, a website dedicated to celebrating and supporting local schools. http://www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk/

I’m very concerned about class sizes. I’m worried that my child will be lost and neglected in a big class and will only get a tiny proportion of the teacher’s attention. What should I do?

This is a big concern for many parents but I feel that they shouldn’t get so worried about it. Contrary to what you might think, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest pupils actually do better in larger classes. I’ve actually conducted lessons with class sizes of nearly a hundred and attained some fabulous results! This is because I was able to impart my expertise on a subject area to a whole year group and able to generate a work ethic amongst all the pupils. There’s a great deal of evidence to suggest that children actually learn most effectively when they are either teaching their peers or being taught by them. In larger classes, this works very well when teachers set up situations which allows this to happen. Class sizes are not the key issue. The most important issue is how effective the teacher is.

What should I do if I’m not happy with the curriculum on offer at my local school? For example, what should I do if I want my child to study a “grammar school” curriculum and study subjects such as Latin and Greek?

Ask your school about this! Contrary to what you might think, most state schools are responsive to parents’ suggestions.

What should I do if I suspect or know that my child is being bullied?

Your child may beg you not to contact the school after they have confessed that they are being bullied. Ignore their pleas. Contact the school immediately. If there is no one obvious to speak to, speak to Headteacher who will should pass the inquiry down to the relevant person. Remember to keep calm when you explain your child’s problems; try not to jump to conclusions. Read the school’s anti-bullying policy – all schools should have one. Follow its procedures on this in the first instance. A good school will carry out an investigation and report to parents about what they have discovered.

Remember to tell your child that it is not his or her fault. There are a number of techniques for building self-confidence which can easily be taught (see websites below)

If you are not satisfied with the school’s response take your complaint to the governors of the school. If the governors are not able to stop the bullying, go to the police.

Useful links:

http://www.bullying.co.uk/

http://www.childline.org.uk/Explore/Bullying/Pages/Bullying.aspx?gclid=CJPqtOSP6KICFY8A4wodVinarw

http://www.beatbullying.org/?gclid=COvntu2P6KICFQs-lAodTlhnfg

http://www.bullyonline.org/

What do I do if I think my child’s teacher is appalling?

Don’t jump to conclusions that he or she is rubbish and don’t get aggressive. It may be that you haven’t heard their side of the story: remember children are often not reliable sources of information!

If things don’t improve, contact the teacher’s line manager: this is the person directly in charge of that teacher and has specific responsibility for managing them. Often this does the trick.

What do I do if my child hates doing their homework?

You need to talk your child about why they don’t like it, and then talk to their teacher(s).

I’m not sure formal homework really works with young children, except for the obvious things like doing some reading. It’s really at secondary school that the homework should kick in. Even then, it won’t be until GCSEs that it should become a big thing in the evenings.

It’s a good idea to have a designated time and communal place for completing homework. Do some work while your child is working: set a good example.  Monitor the homework diary very carefully if they have one.

What do I do if my child is really struggling to keep up with the work?

If you think your child has a learning difficulty which is hindering their progress at school talk to your child’s teacher or the school’s Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator (SENCO) and ask for them to be assessed. Above all, don’t be ashamed if your child has a Special Educational Need (SEN): a remarkable one in three pupils do!

Should I get a private tutor for my child?

Personally, I would be very wary of this. Your child should be well enough taught and not need a tutor. In my experience, private tutors can be very demotivating for children and can actually hinder their progress by giving them complexes about things they shouldn’t be worried about. They can also teach them the wrong stuff because they’re not actually trained teachers. My advice is, don’t panic, go back to your child’s school and address the problems there.

What do I do if I am worried that my child is becoming obsessed with sex and drugs?

When you think the time is right, talk to your child about your fears. It is important to explain that you are frightened for them, and care for them, but try not to “ban” them from doing things – all the evidence suggests that this approach backfires. Keep your child informed. Tell them the truth!

Use the web to keep up to date with the latest news on these subjects. Parentlineplus is an excellent place to start: http://www.parentlineplus.org.uk/

What do I do if I think my child is mixing with the “wrong sort” of children?

Most importantly, don’t panic and ban them from seeing their friends. The most important thing is to find a time to talk through your “issues” with your child. See if your fears have any basis in reality. If they do, then be honest about your worries.

Related posts:

1. Panic!
2. How to cope with secondary school trauma
3. What secondary school should I choose for my son? The comprehensive, the Academy or the Federated School?

There was an atmosphere of panic among the parents in the sticky assembly hall with all of us secretly worrying: would we find the right school for our children?

Being the parents of Year 5 pupils, aged 10, we’d come to hear about the process of applying for a secondary school, a process which usually begins in Year 6, the last one of primary school.

Even though the atmosphere was tense and some parents complained about not having enough information, we knew that we were the lucky ones. Most parents get no help until September. However, some schools, such as my son’s state primary in Tower Hamlets, East London, prepare parents by giving them some information in late June and July. This can be very useful because it gives parents time to investigate the schools on offer and learn something more about the bewildering process that is known as “secondary transfer”.

Even for an experienced state school teacher such as me, who has written books on the subject, the process is complicated and highly emotional. The notion of your little baby going to a big secondary school full of truculent adolescents is scary. Some parents I’ve spoken to harbour secret nightmares about their children going to the “wrong” school and being bullied there, not learning anything and turning into drug-addicts living on the dole.

The atmosphere of panic is exacerbated by the complexities surrounding the application process. This is because many schools have different “admissions criteria” — the rules by which a school admits a child. Academies, faith schools, voluntary-aided schools, trust schools, community schools and specialist schools pick their pupils according to a variety of criteria and have different application processes. The new coalition Government’s policies will complicate things further because many schools are becoming academies and some new schools look as if they will be set up. It’s not clear what the admissions processes for these schools will be.

This means that doing your researching now will be hugely beneficial because you’ll be much better prepared when the “school hunting season” begins in earnest in September. I believe setting aside a few hours to surf the internet could save parents of prospective secondary pupils a lot of stress in the long run. (See the steps below.) “There’s a real value in parents looking at prospective secondary schools at this time,” says Sam Murray, of the Advisory Centre for Education, a charity that helps parents nationwide with this process. “The September open evenings can be very formal, but if parents go now to things such as the schools’ summer fairs, or just look around, they can get more of a feel for a school. We get calls from parents every year who weren’t prepared and end up disappointed as a result.”

Key things to do now Log on to the schools finder and see what the choices are in your area (schoolsfinder.direct.gov.uk/). Just type your postcode into the school finder website, click on schools near you for the “school profile” and “Ofsted information” sections.

Recent Ofsted reports will tell you how school inspectors have graded such things as teaching and learning, behaviour and exam results, etc. Read the report carefully, but you should visit the school, talk to parents, pupils and teachers and make your own judgment.

Look at your preferred schools’ “admissions criteria”. If you can’t fulfil their criteria, your child won’t get in and it’s not worth wasting your time. Some school and local authority websites show their “catchment area”, or the areas where the pupils have come from: this is very useful information if the school primarily picks pupils by geographical distance. Don’t panic! Don’t believe the myths you hear about schools — visit them first. E-mail them and fix an appointment now to visit while lessons are going on.

Contact the Advisory Centre For Education (www.ace-ed.org.uk; 0808 8005793) if you have further questions. Its experts know what they’re talking about and they are free. Remember that overwhelmingly it’s parental support that determines how well children succeed. The best research (education.gov.uk/research/data/uploadfiles/RR433.pdf) shows that if parents talk regularly to their child, have high expectations, discuss things constructively with the child’s teachers, and are generally positive then he or she will flourish no matter where they go to school.

Related posts:

1. What secondary school should I choose for my son? The comprehensive, the Academy or the Federated School?
2. How you can win your school appeal
3. School choice – an overrated concept

The agony of waiting is over. Yesterday was national offer day, when parents learnt if their children had got into their favoured secondary schools. Unfortunately, as many as 100,000 children and their families have been bitterly disappointed.

As a teacher who has taught at various comprehensives for 20 years, I know that means a lot of tears and pain. I have seen parents who hit the bottle and come raging on to the school premises, demanding that the school takes their child; parents who do nothing but pester the school secretaries on the phone or by email; and parents who have just given up in despair, despite the fact that they have good grounds to appeal.

The main things parents should remember is not to descend into a great panic, and to review their situation dispassionately. What many don’t grasp is that if they fail to meet the admissions criteria of a school, children won’t get in, no matter how wonderful. The government has a strict admissions code that means schools have little room for manoeuvre: they can no longer just pick pupils they like the look of.

Parents are often confused by the wildly different criteria of various schools. Grammars can select pupils based on 11-plus exams, faith schools can choose from the relevant religious backgrounds, and specialist schools can select 10% of their intake according to a child’s aptitude in that specialism. To make things more complicated, some boroughs have banding and lottery systems whereby pupils are either selected by ability “band”, or randomly allocated one of the schools in the pot.

I’ve only really scratched the surface here: parents thinking of appealing should contact an expert. But don’t waste money on lawyers. The Advisory Centre for Education provides an excellent free service; and many boroughs have advisers who can help. Ultimately, however, only a quarter of appeals are successful, with the vast majority of parents having to accept that their child will not go to their favoured school.

True choice is a myth. All parents want are good local schools, but it appears no political party is interested in delivering them. Both Conservatives and Labour seem obsessed with in effect privatising the system by persuading companies, religious organisations and charities to run the show. The US has been doing this for two decades, and the most significant research shows that it doesn’t work: on average, children at state-run schools do significantly better than their counterparts at taxpayer-funded but privately run schools.

Perhaps even more worryingly, the concept of school choice has led to deep societal fractures, as the biggest ever study of charter schools in 16 states by Stanford’s Centre for Research on Education Outcomes found last year. Not only were many of these schools failing their pupils, it was proving difficult to shut them down on the grounds of poor academic performance. Nonetheless, Michael Gove, the Conservative education spokesman, is intent upon a mass privatisation of our schools, and Labour is hot on his heels. Last week Gordon Brown announced that he wants to give parents the power to vote headteachers out of their jobs and hire in private companies to run failing schools.

Yet the evidence shows that parents are tremendously supportive of schools, even when they are failing, as Charles Desforges established in a thorough research review conducted in 2003. His findings should reassure parents who were disappointed yesterday. They showed that if a parent talks regularly to their child, has high expectations and believes in the value of education, then that child will succeed – even in a school with a poor reputation.

Related posts:

1. Should parents pay for solicitors to help them get the school of their choice?
2. How to cope with secondary school trauma
3. How you can win your school appeal

For some parents, this time of year is the culmination of years of blood, sweat and toil: Oxbridge is the ultimate educational goal that they’ve set for their children, it is their pedagogical holy grail. They’ve spent thousands of pounds paying school fees and private tutors to give their offspring a crack at Oxbridge. Such parents, reading last week’s headlines, might be feeling very confident: recent research carried out for the The Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC), a body that represents the best-known fee-paying schools, suggests that independent pupils are “five times as likely to get into Oxford and Cambridge as those from the state sector”.

The HMC research is a classic example of bad statistics. Its calculations involved all state school and independent school applicants, rather than those who get three A grades at A-level, which is the actual pool from which Oxbridge draws its students. In fact, bright children at state schools are as successful as their privately educated counterparts, something the universities are keen to promote.

“We’re working hard to shed our elitist image,” Dr Geoff Parks, Director of Admissions at the University of Cambridge, says. “It is simply not a reflection of the reality: the majority of our students are from state schools and come from a real mix of backgrounds. We have developed an extensive range of programmes to encourage and support applicants. Every part of the country is linked with one of our colleges and we run specific projects for some under-represented groups. Through these we offer masterclasses, visits, residentials, open days and mentoring schemes.”

Andrew Munroe’s experience is similar to thousands of state school pupils who have received extra attention because they have applied for Oxbridge. The former comprehensive pupil, who is about to embark upon his second year as a medic at King’s College, Cambridge, was inspired to apply after going on a trip to Oxford and Cambridge funded by his local authority. “After that, my school, St Leonard’s RC comprehensive, Durham, was supportive,” he says, “arranging for me to take mock entrance tests, and setting up mock interviews.”

Typically, state school students who get into Oxbridge will have received the support of a diligent parent or teacher, who will have encouraged them through all the stages of the admissions process, but this isn’t always the case. For instance, both Ella Jones and Samir Hamdoud were successful applicants, although neither their schools nor their parents were particularly “on the ball” about Oxbridge.

Jones loved her London comprehensive but could see its failings clearly. “We were taught by six different English teachers for A level but, in the end, it didn’t stop me from getting into Oxbridge,” she says.

Hamdoud attended one of the worst schools in Milton Keynes and did not attain the grades that most Oxbridge candidates get in their GCSEs, but he benefited from Oxford’s rigorous admissions process and his passion for history shone through in his interview. “For the first time,” he says, “I felt that I was discussing history in depth, getting the kind of attention that even the best teachers at my state school weren’t giving me simply because they were too pressed for time.”

Of course, it still pays for parents to be proactive, particularly if they feel their child’s state school is not knowledgeable about Oxbridge. The case of one mother illustrates this. “My son’s school told me that he shouldn’t apply to Oxbridge because he was too lazy and didn’t have a chance,” she says. “However, I decided to do some research of my own and saw that the degree he wanted to apply for was not nearly as difficult to get on as some of the others such as law, with one in three applicants getting a place. I phoned Oxford, got the necessary information and insisted to the school that he applied. To the school’s astonishment, but not mine, he got in.”

The application statistics for Oxbridge, which are published online, make interesting reading. For example, according to last year’s stats, more than one applicant in two for Classics got into Cambridge, whereas only one in five were admitted for English. Public school pupils now predominate on courses such as Classics and theology, but state school students needn’t be put off from applying. “It’s not widely appreciated that you do not actually require an A level in Latin or Greek to study Classics at Cambridge,” Parks says. “Our four-year Classics course has been designed specifically for bright students who have not had the opportunity to study these languages at school. What many parents don’t realise is that these lesser-known and less-popular subjects are wonderful courses and provide an excellent preparation for many careers. Nearly half of our graduates who become lawyers have not done a first degree in law.”

Of course, certain degrees do demand certain Oxbridge A levels: physics, says Parks, is a prerequisite of the university’s engineering course, and further maths will make students “more competitive” for several courses. But the bottom line is that Oxbridge wants the best students, not the students with the best connections.

Working the System by Francis Gilbert is published by Short Books. www.francisgilbert.co.uk

How to prepare for the Oxbridge interview

1. Download the detailed Interview Guides produced by both universities: last week Oxford updated its guide to include sample questions.

Oxford University: see here
Cambridge University: see here

2. Think of all the obvious questions that might come up such as why you want to study at Oxbridge and why you want to study your subject. Do not prepare set-piece answers except to the predictable warm-up questions. Many applicants make the mistake of trying to shoehorn prepared set pieces into responses and this always comes across as false and sometimes bizarre.

3. Read widely around your subject, looking at newspaper articles, websites, journals and books.

4. Think out of the box about your subject, seeing all sides to an argument.

5. Reread your personal statement.

6. Do a mock interview. This could be with a teacher or someone else who is familiar with his or her subject, but preferably not someone you know well. This will help you to get more experience of talking about yourself and your work in an unfamiliar environment.

7. Revise what’s been covered in Year 12: learning should be for life, not just exams.

8. In the interview, don’t feel pressured into blurting out the first thing that enters your head. Interviewers are much more interested in the quality of your thinking than your speed of response. It can be very helpful to the interviewers to describe your thinking as you ponder a question. If you think silently for 30 seconds and then just give an answer, you are likely to be asked how you reached that conclusion.

9. Don’t panic. Part of what is being assessed at interview is how well you assimilate and use new information to move an argument or the analysis of a situation/problem on. Questions will have been designed with this in mind. Most successful applicants assume their interviews were a disaster because the interviewer “had to” prompt them, whereas in reality the interviewer prompted everyone and what mattered was how well they responded.

10. You will not be assessed on your dress sense, your haircut or your accent, so just be yourself in the interview.

11. You will be given the opportunity to ask questions of the interviewers. If there are things you genuinely want to know do ask, but don’t feel obliged to do so. Asking something that could be answered by reading the prospectus does not create a good impression.

12. Make sure you also review the options available on your chosen subject. A really bad answer to the question “Which courses do you think you might do in the first year if we admit you?” is “What are the options?”

Advice for next year’s propective candidates

1. Work hard!

2. Explore all the options of what’s available, particularly if you’re not sure about what subject to take: read prospectuses, go on open days, look for taster courses, etc

3. Identify the right courses: subject choice should precede university choice not the other way round.

4. Explore your chosen subject by reading widely and going to relevant museums, galleries and institutions.

5. Do remember that going to an academic university is not the be-all and end-all. Some of the universities with the most employable graduates are the newer ones that specialise in vocational degrees such as golf course management. Also, remember that some of our most successful citizens such as Lord Sugar and Sir Richard Branson left school at 16.

Related posts:

1. Training teachers at college is better than on the job
2. BBC Radio 5 Live Debate On Universities
3. Turned Away At The School Gates

Related posts:

1. Should parents pay for solicitors to help them get the school of their choice?
2. The terrible names parents give their children
3. Interesting article on a parents who set up their own state school

Related posts:

1. School choice – an overrated concept
2. Should parents take their children out of school during school time?
3. How you can win your school appeal

The news that a mother rewards her 13-year-old daughter with cigarettes when she behaves has confirmed what I’ve been thinking for a while – rewards are, at best, ineffectual and, at worst, positively damaging.

A jobless single mother, Tracy Holt, 43, of Gosport, Hampshire, is so despairing of her daughter, Sam, that she now gives her some of her own fags on the rare occasions when Sam is pleasant. Ms Holt insists that the reward “works”.

Philosophically, she’s not alone: last week, Ofsted produced a detailed report on promoting good behaviour in schools and advocated rewards such as trips to the cinema to stop disruptive pupils from being unruly.

Having taught some pretty rowdy children like Sam during my 16 years as a comprehensive teacher, I’ve tried every bribe in the school book – commendations, certificates, stickers, stars, books, popular movies, trendy music, games, colouring in, melting ice-creams, teddy bears, toys, computer games, shortened lessons, trips to leisure parks, to the sweet shop, and to the lavatory. While these are generally healthier than dishing out tobacco, they are nonetheless fraught with dangers.

The central problem is this: teachers are rarely consistent. For some – the generous, soft-hearted teachers – simply being quiet merits prizes; for others, usually the mean or the forgetful, even a PhD thesis doesn’t deserve a bean. As a young teacher, I was trigger-happy about giving out rewards. Just making an interesting comment deserved a sticker, while something difficult, such as reading a book, deserved a slew of chocolate buttons. This led to an older, sterner teacher castigating me for “reward inflation”. He wisely said: “Give them a lollipop and next they’ll want your wallet.”

I ignored his warning until a fateful lesson on the last day of term when my pupils surged in a giggling mass towards the large box of chocolates on my desk – and my bribes to avert the riot that had already happened vanished before the lesson began.

This experience, together with my reading of Kant’s moral philosophy, made me realise that rewards are ridiculous: learning and good behaviour should be ends in themselves and not a means to an end.

Bribing children to behave merely teaches them that it’s necessary to misbehave to gain a fillip for their aberrant good behaviour. It’s time the British stopped corrupting their children. Perhaps the sad example of Ms Holt and her daughter will make us all rethink rewards: as with the Holt family fags, it’s time to give them up.

Related posts:

1. Give children rewards and they’ll soon fleece you
2. The terrible names parents give their children
3. Can computer games help children to learn to read?

The decision by the Children’s Secretary, Ed Balls, to kill off the Sats exams for 14-year-olds is arguably the most momentous decision taken by a politician since Gordon Brown became Prime Minister. Dramatic as it may sound, I believe the scrapping of these wretched exams will have far greater long-term repercussions than the bailing out of the banks.

As a middle-aged teacher who has taught for nearly two decades in state schools, I have had my life transformed. For 16 years, I have been penned up in sweaty classrooms drilling bored teenagers through the pointless complexities of the English Sats papers. I have watched some pupils bow their heads and scribble dutifully over them, while others turn them into paper aeroplanes. I have gone home every day worrying about how I might improve my results in this year’s test. In my most depressed moments, my life itself has felt like one long, sad Sats test.

When the Education Act of 1988 introduced the concept of Standard Attainment Tests – Sats, also known as Key Stage tests – I, as a young teacher, cheered. In common with most of my colleagues, I support the notion of testing our children in a regular and organised way. In theory, Sats appeared eminently sensible: Key Stage 1 and 2 tests would assess seven- and 11-year-olds mainly in reading, writing and arithmetic, while Key Stage 3 tests would have equal components of testing in English, maths and science. Children would be assigned levels from 1-7, which were standardised across the whole age range, and therefore parents, pupils and teachers could see clearly whether students were progressing at the expected rate; if a pupil did not move up at least one or two levels between each stage then alarm bells would ring.

In practice, however, these tests have proved to be nightmarish failures. The Sats have not only led to a marked decline in standards, they have broken children’s zeal for learning. They have alienated pupils, teachers and parents alike without making schools properly accountable. The root of the problem is this: the Sats have made children better at passing abstruse exams but in so doing have bludgeoned out all enthusiasm for learning, leaving them lacking in initiative, floundering when confronted with unexpected challenges, unable to construct sustained arguments and powerless to think imaginatively. At a stage in their education when pupils could be reading great literature in English, exploring the wonder of numbers in maths, understanding the forces of the universe in science, they have instead been plodding through tedious practice papers and learning the wording of the relevant mark schemes. They have not been educated; they have been trained simply to jump through the hoops of the exams.

How differently I felt in 1991. During that first dawn of Sats I was pleased, because previously there hadn’t been any clear targets to work towards and no way of knowing what pupils had achieved before they came to you.

But as the Key Stage tests were phased in, it became increasingly obvious that they were failing to assess the essentials and, more disturbingly, were putting children off school. The KS1 and 2 tests were supposed to give accurate information about pupils’ proficiency in the three Rs. However, as an English teacher who was expected to use the KS1 and 2 English scores to inform his teaching, I soon noticed that the levels the pupils were arriving with from their primary schools were inaccurate. More worryingly, the method of “teaching to the test” seemed to have sapped the confidence and passion of children as young as 11. I can vividly remember, five years ago, my new Year 7 pupils groaning when they saw that they would be reading a novel with me at the beginning of the year. “Do we have to read books?” a blond-haired boy named Liam asked me during the first week of term. I had never encountered such resistance to learning before. But then I reflected that he was one of the first pupils who had known nothing but Sats teaching since he was six years old. The effect was shocking: 11-year-old children, who had in previous years been full of eagerness, were now jaded and moaning about the work, fighting and giggling in class, writing only short answers and struggling to read anything that wasn’t on a test paper. It was only when I set them a mock test that they shut up and got on with some work: it was the only form of education they understood.

Having been drilled to answer questions on little bites of text, too many children were unable to read longer books independently. Moreover, they seemed utterly disillusioned by the prospect of studying English. Liam sneered at everything put before him until he brought in his own crime novel from home. In desperation, I allowed him to read it even though it wasn’t on the syllabus. Although he was articulate, he was not cut out for taking these exams and achieved a shockingly low level in his KS3 test; in fact, he had regressed academically since primary school. The effect of the tests on him had been hugely damaging, demoralising him to such an extent that he felt there was no point ever trying at school. If they had been better structured, the story would have been very different; he could have written reviews of his beloved crime novels.

I felt I had failed: I had managed to foster a love of reading but this had been at the cost of his failing exams. Ultimately, Liam perceived that his new-found love of reading was disconnected from everything he did in school. Maths teachers report more or less the same problem: overtested and demotivated children are not ready for secondary maths in the way they were before the tests were introduced.

The Key Stage 1 and 2 tests are to be retained. Yet most teachers know that this is where the rot starts: primary schools are obliged to brainwash their charges with test papers in order to keep their school’s position high on the league tables.

This is not to say that schoolteachers have an easy life, handing out test papers and asking the pupils to get on with the work in silence. Teaching to the Sats can be extremely difficult. Recently, the tests at all levels have become even more fiddly – and boring.

Overtested and demotivated children are not ready for secondary maths in the way they were before Sats were introduced

The English Key Stage 3 test, for which I have prepared pupils, follows a very set format: a reading paper, a writing paper and a Shakespeare paper. In maths and science, there is a similarly rigid rubric. At a glance, the English Key Stage 3 test looks quite easy to teach. With Shakespeare, for instance, it benefits the teacher not to read the whole play, because only two scenes are tested; it is far more effective to show pupils the film and then drill them into understanding the two scenes set for the exam.

“I’ve spent years copying this off the board and it makes me feel like a robot. Copy this, copy that. Do this, do that”

But the truth is that, while the examined texts are facile and unrewarding, the actual teaching is a complicated affair. This is because guidelines require that teachers teach every lesson to “learning objectives”. At the beginning of each lesson the teacher writes at least one learning objective on the board, requiring pupils to copy it down in their books and focus on that particular concept throughout the lesson. The response of one of my recent pupils, Leroy, sums up the attitude of many children. “I’ve spent years copying this off the board and it makes me feel like a robot,” he told me. “Copy this, copy that. Do this, do that. When are we ever going to do something we want to do?”

Leroy was a clever boy, but he messed around a lot during my Year 9 classes. In consequence, he achieved only an average Level 5 Sat, setting him up to achieve similarly undistinguished GCSEs. He should have gone on to do A-levels but didn’t because he disliked school so much. The exam system was entirely to blame for his dropping out.

Another pupil, Nicole, who was aged 13, once looked up at me at the end of the lesson and said that her hand was hurting from so much writing. “This is all I do in every lesson, just fill in worksheets, but I never quite know what’s important about any of this. Will I need any of this when I go to work?” she asked with sad resignation.

Nicole was a dutiful student and attained top marks in her Sats, but told me that she forgot everything she had learned a few weeks after the tests. It was an exaggeration, but it illustrated another problem with the tests: pupils didn’t see that any of the skills they learned could be transferred to any other sphere. The Sats foster the belief among our students that school is abstracted from the world beyond the classroom, existing in its own tortuous bubble.

Why then, if I hate them so much, do I feel apprehensive about the demise of the Key Stage 3 tests? In truth, these tests are all I’ve known since I started teaching in the 1990s; they have provided a structure, a crutch, an easy if very mundane regime to impose on my pupils. Like many teachers, I perceive that we need a way of assessing schools’ performances so that failing institutions are identified. But this should be done separately from assessing pupils’ individual performances.

Needless to say, the scrapping of the Sats for 14-year-olds does not mean the scrapping of league tables or the measures that make teachers accountable for their pupils’ results. While much is uncertain, it may be that teachers are scrutinised even more closely. The Department for Children, Schools and Families is piloting “stage not age” tests, which are rather like music exams – tests that are taken when the pupil is ready to take them. It seems certain that these exams will assess pupils’ knowledge and understanding of the new National Curriculum, which, worryingly, looks even worse than its predecessor in its use of ambiguous jargon. Will the government never learn? What pupils and teachers need are clear, concise guidelines that give them freedom to teach as well as definite goals to work towards.

The government’s refusal to countenance chang ing the format of the remaining Sats suggests that the system will continue to fail our children. All the Sats should be abolished now and replaced with simple, sensible tests. If something isn’t done, and soon, we will produce another generation of dispirited and ill-educated children. We’re putting the next generation at a disadvantage, not unlike trying to make them use computers with dial-up connections when their foreign counterparts are using high-end, mobile broadband powered hardware.

Francis Gilbert’s “Parent Power: the Complete Guide to Getting the Best Education for Your Child” is published by Piatkus (£9.99)

A short history of British examinations

The Higher School Certificate was introduced in 1918 for school leavers, and was usually taken at the age of 18.

The eleven-plus was created as part of the Butler Education Act 1944; it tests verbal and non-verbal reasoning, mathematics and writing in order to see which 11-year-olds should go to grammar school.

O-levels (Ordinary levels) were introduced in the 1950s as subject-based qualifications under a General Certificate of Education, testing 16-year-olds on academic knowledge. The Certificate of Secondary Education (CSE) was the school-leaving qualification awarded between 1965 and 1987 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland to the majority of pupils who did not take GCE O-levels. O-levels and CSEs were replaced in 1986 by GCSEs (the General Certificate of Secondary Education).

A-levels were introduced in 1951, replacing the Higher School Certificate, testing students in academic subjects at the end of the sixth form. In 2000, A-levels were reformed and AS-levels were created, testing students at the end of their first year in the sixth form. A2-levels tested pupils at the end of the sixth form. All A-levels became “modular”: each A-level consisted of six modules, tested either by coursework or by examination, enabling pupils to retake modules if necessary. A-levels were reformed again this year, the number of modules being cut from six to four.

Key Stage tests and school league tables based on their results were introduced in the 1990s. KS1 tests for seven-year-olds are in reading, writing and maths, and also offer teacher assessments in science. KS2 tests (11-year-olds) cover English, maths and science, as did the old tests for 14-year-olds. In October, the government announced the end of testing for 14-year-olds, to be replaced by teacher assessments.

Related posts:

1. One Long Sats test
2. Why boycotting SATS for 11-year-olds is not a good idea
3. PISA versus SATs — which assess reading the best?

So just what is the key to success at GCSE? As a teacher in various state schools for the past two decades, I still chew over the issue virtually every day! Just recently, I was talking late into the night at a Year 11 Parents’ evening. The parents of these sixteen-year-olds were desperate to know how their children could improve their English scores — the subject I teach at mixed comprehensive in the outskirts of London. In particular, one parent, Mrs Smith, was pulling her hair out because her sixteen-year-old son, Josh, is clearly a clever boy but is absolutely bombing in his exams, scoring the lowest grades. In his Key Stage 3 English test, he only managed a Level 3 and in his mock English GCSE he got an ‘F’ grade. I replied that I thought he had a ‘special educational need’ (SEN); I felt he had ‘dysgraphia’ — the inability to express himself while writing by hand. She was initially very reluctant to have him assessed for this, worrying that being labelled as SEN would make things worse for him, but when I explained how such an assessment could help him, she agreed to have him tested. A specialist from the Local Authority assessed him as having mild dyspraxia (hand-eye issues) and ‘dsygraphia’. The assessment meant Josh was given a clear plan of action for improvement and received a laptop to use in his lessons and exams. Since then, his grades in class have leapt from F and G grades to D and C grades; the transformation is remarkable. He is now on course to achieve C grades in most of his GCSEs.

What was incredible is that Josh’s ‘learning difficulties’ were not picked up much sooner. Really by the time he was eight, it should have been clear to his teachers that he had some difficulties with his handwriting which were severely hampering his progress. Instead he had been labelled as ‘slow’ and ‘unintelligent’, and, as a result, frustrated by his lack of progress, he had become a big behavioural problem; ripping up his books, getting into fights and backchatting his teachers. No one had thought to give him a thorough assessment for SEN. I have come across children who have had had far milder learning difficulties who have been diagnosed SEN; but, by and large, these have been the children of pushy parents anxious to get the maximum resources for their child. These were parents who were ‘keyed in’ to the system, who knew that to have your child labelled as ‘SEN’ is actually not harmful but extremely useful because it means targeted help.

However, parents like Josh’s mum — from more deprived backgrounds — don’t know how to support their children fully. She hadn’t been pushy at his primary school and had not demanded that they gave Josh a clear plan of action for improvement. Instead, he had drifted from year to year feeling more and more demoralised.

Josh’s case is very important because it illustrates two vital factors in the success of a child at school; the importance of early assessment and parental input. Josh is one of the lucky ones; he is naturally bright and so with a laptop he is able to pass most exams. However, many children who come from deprived backgrounds enter primary school far more inarticulate than Josh; at five years old they can barely speak more than a few sentences. Studies have shown that children whose parents are living on benefits are not exposed to the language that the children of affluent parents are. A fascinating study in the US a few years ago showed that on average, when in the company of their parent, a ‘middle class’ child listens and responds to a thousand more words per hour than a child living with a single parent on welfare; by the age of three it was estimated that a middle class child would have been exposed to 35 million words, while a child on welfare had only listened to 10 million.

Linguistic impoverishment plays a huge factor in the child’s attainment at school. Many schools are simply not equipped to cope with children who cannot communicate coherently; the Key Stage tests at seven do not adequately diagnose what is wrong with them and the curriculum is not designed to give these children the intensive language training they need. However, studies in the US and the UK show when children are given intensive ‘communication’ catch-up programmes very early on in their school career — in reception and Year 1 — the impact has been huge. They have gone on to achieve well as teenagers.

Josh’s problem was not severe because he was articulate; so when he was given the tools to express himself in writing, he was able to shine. However, I have taught many pupils who have had multiple special needs: dyslexia (difficulties with reading and spelling), dyspraxia (perceptual difficulties with hand-eye co-ordination) and various communication disorders. Many of them had not been diagnosed as SEN or, if they were, the programme of action they were on did not help them. What most of them needed was intensive communication training in their primary schools. Since that had not happened, the children had entered the secondary school where I taught unable to cope with the curriculum; unable to discuss things in a sustained fashion or understand what was going on. With little or no support at home and teachers’ hands tied by a restrictive National Curriculum which doesn’t allow enough time to give extra ‘communication’ lessons, they all failed to gain the five A*-C grades at GCSE that the government expects all pupils to achieve.

Ultimately, this mess isn’t teachers’ or parents’ fault; it is actually this incompetent government’s. Study after study has shown there needs to be a radical overhaul of our assessment regime and our curriculum. The system for assessing pupils, which the Labour party has presided over, is laughably out of date; the Key Stage tests do not identify the ‘learning difficulties’ that many pupils have. Instead, the testing regime obliges teachers to ram a boring curriculum down pupils’ throats — which they hate.

Is it any wonder that fewer than half the pupils in the South West of England attain 5 good GCSEs? Instead of threatening to close schools with poor results and lock up parents of truanting pupils, the government needs to help teachers identify under-achievers at much earlier age and give teachers the freedom and time to help them properly.

Related posts:

1. How To Make Your Child Succeed At GCSE
2. Social Contexts and Child Language Acquisition
3. Don’t panic about your child’s schooling!