Goodness: I really don't like the culture change all the target driven approaches have made.
Neither do. Especially as Finnish pupils have their first formal test at 18, yet regularly achieve higher overall standards than the rest of the world.
The government is partly to blame. But the root cause of the testing madness is the messiness of English spelling. Laugh if u like, but it's true.
For several decades now all English-speaking countries have been desperate to raise overall educational attainment, because none of them have been doing very well in international comparisons. There have also been constant complaints from employers about the poor literacy and numeracy skills of many of their new recruits (ever since 1929, when they complained to the Newbolt commission).
In today's world, literacy is a crucial skill. And at school too: the children who struggle with learning to read and write, who need a very long time for it, invariably end up not learning much during their 11 years of compulsory schooling.
So from the mid 80s onwards there has been growing pressure to drive up literacy standards - by means of more rigorous testing and shaming teachers with SATs results published in League Tables, based on the belief that English literacy standards can be improved by teachers making their pupils work harder.
Yet despite all the testing and the pressure to raise standards, overall attainment hasn't changed. SATs results have gone up and down a bit, but roughly 1 in 5 pupils still start secondary school with poor literacy skills and finish their 11 years of compulsory schooling knowing very little – because the reason why they have trouble learning to read and write remains unaddressed:
the inconsistencies of English spelling.
Learning to read continues to be difficult because of baffling inconsistencies like 'go – do, on – only, once; here – there, were' in 2,000+ very common words. Learning to write takes even longer, because over 4,000 words have tricky letters which need to be learned one by one: men – many, speak – speech, so – show, toe.
With average intelligence or above, and plenty of help, starting from the youngest age possible, children cope. Three quarters to 80% of all pupils can read well by the end of primary school. By the end of secondary, half can spell quite well too. The bottom half never never become good spellers, and roughly 1 in 5 remain functionally illiterate. - The English literacy learning burden is simply too great for them.
We could reduce literacy failure and overall underachievement by modernising English spelling and making learning to read and write easier, as all other European countries have done, to varying degrees, over the past 200 years. Here we have lots of tests instead.
Masha Bell