Angry parents are at the forefront of a SATs uprising, and we’re convinced we’ll win
We all know that parents, carers and guardians have power, but it has taken a remarkably long time for them to feel it
At last month’s Headteachers’ Roundtable Summit, the deputy editor of the New Statesman, Helen Lewis, was asked which single group in the education world was most feared by politicians. The answer: angry parents.
We all know that parents have power, but it has taken a remarkably long time for parents to feel it.
We have had 30 years of education policy imposed on children without the slightest attempt to ask their carers what they think. Many of those have been detrimental to education – particularly in the last six years.
Enough is enough. We have opinions, and now we want to be heard.
That’s why parents have come together with professionals to form More Than a Score. We are made up of 16 organisations, ranging from teachers to child mental health experts, from academics to parents.
Two of the founding groups are Rescue Our Schools and Let Our Kids Be Kids, both formed by parents last year. The former, which I helped set up, was a response to the white paper on forced academisation. Meanwhile, the Let Our Kids Be Kids children’s strike was an inspired protest against SATs.
The groups were formed before the dehumanising experience that was Y6 SATs week in May 2016, when nearly half of all 11-year-olds ‘failed’ the tests. In my own children’s primary school, 15 out of 60 of the Y6 children were in tears during the reading paper.
I sense that many families are starting to feel that something has gone very wrong. They see their children, some as young as five, becoming anxious and stressed, and pigeon-holed as inadequate in various narrow and ‘testable’ areas of learning.
Schools, understandably, are often reluctant to talk about the negative aspects of the primary curriculum, and feel obliged to make the best of it.
And so the same educational carnage is on the horizon this coming May. For More Than a Score, the priority is to tell parents that it doesn’t have to be this way.
We are keen to inform people of the many alternatives to the profoundly damaging system we have now. We still want assessment and, where appropriate, testing, but we want a system that genuinely helps our children to learn, instead of boring them and writing them off.
This is why it is so important that parents – backed by professionals – lead the resistance to test-mad policies. We need to give teachers hope, support and reassurance that we too are critical of the educational assumptions imposed by politicians.
Put simply, we feel that what really counts is what you can’t count. Imagination, creativity, being able to fail confidently and try again, – these are all qualities that we rate, alongside having a key body of knowledge. Why? Because it is these skills that will matter in an increasingly challenging employment market.
One of our most important goals is breaking the link between assessment and judging schools. Under the current system, our children are in effect being politicised, because their scores could be used to justify a possible downgrading by Ofsted, thus allowing schools to be removed from local control.
Meanwhile, we plan to keep making films about our campaign. Our launch film is about a school that’s doing things differently. Bealings School in Suffolk does as little SATs-driven work as possible, yet it gets some of the best results.
We know it will take time to challenge an entrenched educational orthodoxy, but we know we will win. We have evidence, emotion and empathy on our side. More to the point, there are 13.8 million households in England with dependent children. That’s a lot of voters.
We are inspired by the More Than a Score movement in America, where education is more beholden to standardised tests than anywhere in the world. Surely the limitations of the US system bear some responsibility for its recent electoral choices. If we can’t make a strong argument now for a questioning, humanist vision of education, I don’t know when we ever will.
Madeleine Holt is a founding member of More Than a Score, where she represents Rescue Our Schools and Slow Education. Contact Madeleine via morethanascore.co.uk.
