Tom Levitt, Labour MP for High Peak as told teachers that they are right to raise concerns about the SATs tests which children take towards the end of their primary school education. “I have never believed that you improve children’s performance by testing them for the sake of it and I think SATs at Key Stage 2 have lost their original purpose. The process needs to be thought through again,” he told a meeting organised by the National Union of Teachers in Chapel en le Frith last week.
Mr Levitt, a former teacher, defended the principle of SATs, saying: “We do need to be able to assess how well schools are doing. Governments rightly need to know the impact of their funding and policy initiatives.” But he went on “SATs were intended to be a measure of schools, not of individual children. They have become very child focused as a result of being ‘built up’ by parents and the media, with an undoubted, unwelcome but inevitable element of ‘teaching to the test’.”
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