I was talking to friends over the weekend about some memories of primary school. Despite us all being more or less the same age and growing up roughly the same area in Scotland, nobody else could remember this particular incident so I’m throwing it open to MN to prove I’m not going mad.
Towards the end of primary school, I assume this would have been P7 but it might have been P6, so we’re talking around 1990, there was a decision to introduce national testing. I remember there being a huge outcry at the time, with many people against the idea so eventually it became (I think) an optional thing as some kind of trial system. My parents insisted that I be tested; my dad in particular was quite old-school and had a real bee in his bonnet about primary school having become a place for fun, whereas he though we should all be sitting silently in rows having the three Rs drummed into us. He was delighted by the idea of me sitting exams and I remember him saying “now you’ll really know what school is all about”. I remember that many parents of friends were horrified that I was being subjected to this and my mum had a lot of arguments with her friends around this time.
There were five of us from my class who had to sit in another room on the test days and sit exams on maths, creative writing, history etc. The exams were not administered/invigilated by our own teachers but people brought in for the purpose. I remember one boy had to switch into our class ahead of the start of the testing schedule because the teacher of his class was boycotting the tests and said she would not allow any pupil in her class to leave the room during normal lessons. I remember the tests being quite hard and I was really stressed about it all at the time, often crying before school those days. We got the results pretty quickly – I don’t think I did too badly in general but in one of the tests we had to write a story from the point of view of an evacuee during WWII. I was very well known in my class/school for being good at creative writing and I had actually won a prize for a story I had written on exactly this subject a few months earlier so I was delighted by the topic and set about recreating my prize-winning story with some details and plot points changed. It came back with a really bad mark, I can’t remember if we got any feedback or not but I remember being utterly devastated. My teacher and even our headteacher was furious at the result and it really knocked my confidence for a very long time.
Surely someone else must remember this or been part of the testing pilot too. I’ve googled and can find nothing. I’d love to know why this was introduced, what the backlash was really about and what the point actually was – I don’t think my results affected the rest of my formal education at all. I remember my neighbour, who was a year younger being terrified that the system was going to be made mandatory by the time she was old enough to take part but I’m pretty sure it ended up scrapped altogether.