Childhood stress linked to over-testing - ATL

20 March 2008

The rise in mental health problems among children is linked to over-testing, according to Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL).
 
Speaking at ATL’s annual conference in Torquay on 20 March Mary Bousted will say:  “The rise in children’s mental health problems cannot be divorced from their status as the most tested in the world.  The tests label young people as failures, and this leads to one of the lowest rates for staying on post 16 of any industrialised country.
 
“The tests are not valid either – they do not measure key concepts and skills in the subject – because what can be tested by pencil and paper is too narrow.  They are a waste of effort, time, money and the newspaper print expended in publishing league tables based on inaccurate results.”
 
Mary Bousted will say ATL has scored a triumph in getting the Government to capitulate and abandon SATs.  But she warned the Government against moving to single level tests and expecting every student to progress by two national curriculum levels in each key stage.  “Lower achieving students make less progress at each key stage.  Schools with disadvantaged pupils will be penalised because their students will not make the same progress as those who don’t have the same disadvantages.”
 
And because key stage 3 is a year shorter than key stage 2 the number of pupils progressing two levels at key stage 3 falls.  Mary Bousted will also outline another major problem with single level testing “there is every danger that assessment for learning would be degraded into assessment for covering teachers’ backs.”
 
She will say ATL is implacably opposed to school funding being based on their success in getting each child up two national curriculum levels in every key stage.  “Eventually even the Victorians realised education was not well served by a system of payment by results.  We don’t want a reward system which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing important any more than the Victorians did.”
 
Talking about the amount of Government control over what is taught Mary Bousted will say:  “Teachers and lecturers should have control of the methods they choose to impart knowledge.  They should have far more control over the subject matter they teach – our national curriculum should be far more focussed on the development of life skills and ways of working than whether or not they teach the Battle of Hastings.”
 
She will say:  “Teachers and lecturers feel driven, measured against unrealistic and unremitting targets, harried into producing data for bureaucratic rather than professional reasons.  In too many schools and local authorities teachers and lecturers are in the ludicrous situation of spending more time engaged in providing records for others of their planning and assessment of their pupils, rather than doing the most valuable job – teaching.”
 
Mary Bousted will add that the main cause of the lack of trust in teachers is the current accountability regime led by Ofsted which induces a wholly unacceptable level of fear in school leaders which they pass onto their staff.  “Some leadership teams now spend virtually their whole time observing and monitoring their teaching colleagues.  Rather than leading they follow teachers round, filling in endless observation slips, giving teachers grades which are inaccurate and meaningless.”
 
She will add:  “School self-assessment must cease to be school self-inspection.  We want teachers to be accountable, but not in ways which make them fearful of trying something new, scared of being a bit different.”
 
Talking about pay, Mary Bousted will say that although “the 2.45 per cent rise was better than we expected that doesn’t mean that it is as much as teachers deserve or as much as the profession needs to maintain recruitment and retention.  The teaching profession cannot afford to go back to the recruitment crises of the 1990s, and ATL will not let it do so.”
 
She will conclude:  “ATL is in partnership with the Government – but we are not in bed.  I have no intention of getting into bed with Jim Knight.  We work closely and in a spirit of compromise on workforce issues – but when it comes to education policy we must be free to tell it how our members see it.”