Excellent, heartfelt and heartbreaking letter to Nicky Morgan about the impact new SATS tests.

Excellent, heartfelt and heartbreaking letter to Nicky Morgan about the impact of these tests by my friend Rachel Coates. Even in the privileged environment of a small village school, SATS are sucking all the joy out of kids learning.

Dear Ms. Morgan

I can only imagine that this will be one of several hundred letters regarding primary school testing that hits your desk today and I’m sure this will be a story you have heard over and over but it is one that needs to be told as it is our job, as adults and parents and educators to protect our children from politics as much as we can.

I am the mother of a ten year old who faces tests in the coming weeks. As well as a prolific reader, she is a wonderfully creative writer, swimmer, singer, dancer and raconteur. She is a demon tree climber and a terrible piano player (but with the gift of being able to laugh at herself). She is a great friend, a lovely sister and charming, interesting company. Of course I would say all of these things, I am her mother, but these are things that your tests don’t cover and these are the skills and talents and charms that she is struggling to count in the face of her SATS.

She wasn’t always this way. In year two she moved from a dry and uninspiring school that was failing her to a wonderful tiny rural primary school. Within weeks of being there she was thriving. She rediscovered the love of books that we’d nurtured since birth but which had been snuffed out by a curriculum so overly phonics based that she became terrified of reading. She discovered that she loved to write stories, learn about history, perform and research projects among many many other things. Her confidence soared and she blossomed as an individual. She has had consistently excellent teaching and has received a level of education that surpasses our expectations time and time again.

So it is desperately sad to see her and her three classmates suddenly gripped by anxiety over the coming tests. They are an extremely able cohort but they are utterly stumped by what they are being asked to learn and they realise that they are being set up to fail, judged on terribly shoddy questions to which they cannot possibly know the answers. I struggle to answer many of the questions (in fact I struggle to even understand many of the questions).

I have actually given my daughter the option to not sit her SATS but she feels that she is part of a small team and to pull out would be to let the rest of her cohort down, a feeling echoed by her classmates – something which I believe speaks more voluminously about their little characters than any test could measure. Yet they feel that in not succeeding they will be letting their school down, not to mention their teacher who they adore. Can you imagine carrying that weight of responsibility at ten? I can’t.

It saddens me terribly to see all of the years that they have put in to becoming unique hungry voracious learners being desiccated into something so uninspiring and terrifying. I want our kids to love their language, not to be frightened of it. I want them to trust that in learning they are being set up to succeed and not to fail. It is my absolute belief that primary school is a place where children should learn to learn and learn to love learning. This is not the environment that you are creating by testing in this way.

Equally hard to tolerate is the school gate bemoaning of excellent dedicated teachers who are following your curriculum and copping the flack for it.

If I was more cynical I might suggest that this is part of a wider and nastier plan to further political and financial agendas, but I’won't, because it would be terribly wrong to use children in this way wouldn’t it ? I will say though, please have a rethink on this for future cohorts of children. Not only is this damaging our children right now, but I fear the damage to their confidence and their love of language and learning may be irreparable.

Yours sincerely
Rachel Coates