Press Release

PAT STATEMENT ON TESTING AND PUPIL HELP

08 January 2007

The Professional Association of Teachers (PAT) has given its reaction to proposals to help struggling pupils and to change the testing regime.

PAT General Secretary Philip Parkin said: “Making available one-to-one tuition would be an excellent way to bring on pupils who need extra help. It would create a more level playing field between state and private education and be a real boost to disadvantaged children.

“These pupils would also benefit from the proposed more flexible testing regime as their individual development would be taken into account, instead of an inflexible system trying to shoe-horn them into taking tests.

“However, I would be interested to see how, at a time of teacher shortages in certain subjects and geographical areas, the Government proposes to recruit and pay for the extra teachers that would be needed.

“The Government needs to think carefully about how ideas such as tuition out of school hours or at home would work in practice and be funded.” 

Commenting on the pilot scheme on testing at 11 and 14, Philip Parkin said: “PAT welcomes the pilot scheme and is pleased that the Government seems to be listening to professional educators and their representatives.

“Our pupils are currently over-tested. Teachers should be allowed to use their professional judgement more in this way. Such a system would be take education away from teaching to tests and allow more accurate measures of individual pupils’ performance.

“However, we would not want to see pupils being ‘hot-housed’ into taking tests in individual subjects at too early a stage to the exclusion of access to a broad curriculum.

“We would not like to see more tests or more school targets as these would fly in the face of the more common sense measures being proposed. 

“We hope that these proposals will not add to staff workload, and that the necessary resources, in terms of funding and personnel, will also be provided.

“We are also disappointed that it seems that league tables won’t be scrapped. League tables are a crude indicator of a school’s performance. They give a limited view and fail to give credit to the wider progress individual children have made. We remain convinced that league tables have no place in recording the performance of a school and should be scrapped.”