Get a grip

Exams are pants.  We can all agree on that.  They've always been horrible but they are a tiny part of education, or they should be.

If you listen to some parents, teachers, schools or the media at the moment you could be forgiven for thinking that the SATs tests that the current year sixes are sitting are everything about school and these children.

I had a couple of days of appointments at the beginning of the week and saw more people than I usually talk to in a month. All the women wanted to talk about SATs. Not the men. The men couldn't care less.
Constant press reports that children taking SATs are suicidal or leaving exam rooms in tears, are just causing more stress.

The one man who did want to talk about these exams said, "It's ridiculous, that stuff in the papers, six year old's can't be stressed." The mums seemed to think differently when I told them his opinion later. 

"Ha! He's never tried to wrestle a buttered-up badger who doesn't want to do a test into a pair of school shoes then?" One suggested. Anyone doing the school run knows that some children get anxious about the day ahead and can be difficult to get to school. They may not be trudging off to the GP and demanding Prozac but their mental health is no less important.  However, the press aren't helping.

"I've suddenly developed an admiration for Peirs Morgan," said my hairdresser, looking quite sheepish at the thought. She hadn't developed a strange crush on potty-mouthed square faced men but was referring to the fact that he had tried to silence his female co-host (his speciality, I believe) when she was on a rant about how the SATs were causing suicide. Her year six son's face had frozen and his eyes widened in shock as she rushed for the off button before Piers saved the day. There is a problem here.  Children could have been wondering if they are 'normal' if they don't feel the needto kill themselves over a few tests. Piers wondered if everyone needed to 'get a grip.'

At another appointment, a women with children the same age as mine complained about her social media timeline.

"It's all about SATs. I just don't get it. And you know who are the worst? Teachers! Teachers who now have children in year six. They were more than happy to put our children through it until it was the turn of their own precious darlings."

I wondered if there were a higher proportion of teachers (and maybe journalists) who were taking the exams this year. 

The government have made an almighty cock-up with this year's tests.  They know it.  We know it.  Even the children know it.  They have tried to make unpopular changes too quickly, ignoring advice they have received from consultation.  They are under pressure and know that their SPaG paper is causing most adults to get that 'exploding brain' feeling.  Muphry's law also makes them very vulnerable.  (Muphry's law: when commenting on someone's spelling or grammar you will make a spelling or gramatical error).  

"I'm a bit of a conspiracy theorist,me."

I was intrigued.

"One leak could be a mistake but two....well."

I had thought much the same myself. If they accidentally on purpose made administrative errors and the results turn out to be as bad as they think they are going to be then they can claim that the test was compromised, rather than admit that they made them too hard or didn't give teachers enough information to accurately prepare their students for the tests. Although, I see no need for that as they had clearly decided what the results would be way back in March when Nicky Morgan said that she could guarantee that only 1% of schools would get lower literacy results.

The government made teachers feel confused and vulnerable by changing their job description but failing to tell them exactly what they expected them to have teach.  They also asked them to teach things they had never learnt themselves. No wonder teachers have been complaining. You try to cram in several years of grammar study to get to a level where you can teach it while playing metaphorical whac-a-mole with a class of thirty,  turning them into numbers 

and inputting the data into a computer with a poxy server. Teacher (and parent) stress is the cause of the anxiety that pupils feel as emotions are a bit like measles. 

"Parents are just so stressy," said another person I met on my day of appointments. "There's a lot of pressure to keep up. My friends' children have been to all the booster classes. She went to the Easter holiday session has been starting at eight every morning but I let her miss the Saturday school because she does dancing. Abigail's mum said, 'what if she doesn't make it? You'll feel like it's all your fault that she's such a failure,' and she could be right."

I bit my tongue so hard I made it bleed. 

"She's not a failure. SATs aren't everything."

"Try telling that to her school."

I adopted a masculine, slouched stance and summoned the spirit of Piers Morgan. "Well your school needs to get a grip then, don't they?"

SATs are not new. They were first introduced in 1991 and have been through several incarnations. Governments agree that they want a reliable measure of how children are doing. They want to be sure that teachers are doing their job properly but they just can't quite decide on the tests. In many ways, this year's tests should have been easier on the children than in previous years. There are no science papers, no writing paper and no level six papers for the more able children, although they have mixed the harder questions in, rather than having them at the end, which will make a difference to lots of children.

I blame the publication of the results. If the government want to stop the pressure they could just keep the results private. They would still know how schools are doing and be able to send help (if Ofsted can ever be called help) to struggling schools but schools, teachers and parents won't be able to compare. If there is no competition then everyone can go back to doing what is best for the children. 

 

What do you know?

There's a quiz doing the rounds on Facebook of the current SATs grammar test. I got 60%; all good guesses. http://www.sats2016.co.uk/think-youd-pass-your-sats-in-2016/

Grammar is something that hasn't actively been taught in schools since comprehensive schools were introduced and so only a few linguistically interested adults will be able to do well on this test. Most of us don't know our subjective clause from our adverb but luckily are still able to tell our arse from our elbow.

 Normally these quizzes set parents against each other. Some say, "These poor f-ing kids. I only got two right. Give them back their childhood." While others say, "What? How can you be proud that you only got two right? Only a thicko would be happy with that. What are our teachers doing? All children should know this stuff. How will they cope in life if they don't?" 

This is proving to be different. Most adults finally agree on something. If you can use a preposition phrase do you really need to be able to label it as such? I remember a similar conversation between my friends after we'd watched a new sex education film to be shown to our children. A parent was very cross about the idea of her 8 year old being introduced to the word clitoris.

"Why? Why does she need to know that at eight?" she shouted at the teacher.

"It will save confusion if she ever needs to go to the doctors about a problem with it," the teacher replied matter of 

factly. 

I mentally ran through my not-so-exhaustive knowledge of clitoral disorders and decided that if I had any of them I would still probably say, "I've got a problem down there." I might even just mouth 'down there' while pointing. 

The poor teacher might not have been happy with eight year olds suddenly calling each other 'Clitorises' in her class either but teachers don't choose the content of education; that's the job of the government. Teachers who never learnt the grammar rules and labels themselves as as a child are now required to instill a message of their importance into the children they are teaching. This is going to be a tough sell. 

When I watch 'clever celebrities' on TV, such as Richard Osman or Steven Fry, I am always struck by how much trivia they seem to know. I wonder if they can define all the determiners in a sentence and then I wonder if it really matters and I start to get philosophical about the point of education in the first place. I used to tell my school-reluctant son that he had to go to school to try out lots of different things in order to find the one that he'd like to spend the rest of his life doing but I'm not sure the Government would agree with me. 

In the school where I work (not teaching grammar, you will be relieved to hear), there are six year olds who know more facts about dinosaurs, or birds, or Romans, or snakes, or flags than I could ever know. Actually, not flags because that was my six year old self's specialist subject. Some of these children will never be clever according to standardised tests because the Government isn't interested that you know that a velociraptor had thirty teeth.

Schools work really hard to teach children some of the things they think are just as important: being polite, eating with a knife and fork, playing outside without getting mud everywhere, queueing (a very important British skill learnt in Primary school), riding a bike, swimming, life saving, building an igloo and dodging snowballs (if we ever get any snow).  They do this while trying to cram the test facts into those little heads. 

This week the oldest children in our school were learning life saving skills in the hall. The music room can only be accessed through the hall, so every class had a glimpse of their future. They were all fascinated. They knew they were missing out on something, even if they weren't quite sure what. Trying to engage children to learn about the pentatonic scale and ostinato patterns was tough. 

In a quiet moment a child said, "They're doing sex in there."

"No, they're not!!! Lifesaving! They're doing lifesaving."

"Oh, that's what she told me," he said grumpily nudging the little girl next to him.

"I said sex education. I thought it was," she protested rolling her eyes at me.

"No. Lifesaving."

Loud music started: Staying Alive by the Bee Gees.

The temptation was too great not to go and look through the glass door. He bounced up and I followed him to encourage him to sit back down.

"See, I told you!"

Fifteen children were leaning over dummies, kissing them and bouncing up and down in time to the music. 

I suddenly saw the Government's point. I would have been less embarrassed if the children in the hall had been learning how to avoid a dangling participial.