Parents support teachers - Boycott Sats - Kids' Strike May 3rd

[SuzieAllkins]

I am hoping that parents have heard of the Kids' Strike on May 3rd which has been set up by an anonymous group of parents who say 'Enough is enough'?' Their campaign supports schools in trying to reach the Government with the message that we need to stop national testing and let teachers teach in the way that they know is best. As a former primary school teacher (who used to administer Year 6 SATs) and a parent of two young children I shall be fully supporting this campaign on 3rd May by taking my school aged child out of school for a fun day of learning. I do not want my children to become stressed and develop a negative attitude to learning. Although the school my eldest attends is wonderful in developing the 'whole child', the pressure is on the teachers to 'perform' and submit figures to reach unreachable targets. It is wonderful to see, on the Letthekidsbekids website that so many head teachers and teachers are supporting this campaign and are saying thank you to parents for helping their voice to be heard. Our children are too young to be put under pressure like this - the new curriculum's demands are bewildering to me! Children at the age of 6 and 10 years are expected to know grammatical knowledge which even scholars in the subject can't answer!! These are not skills which will set our children up for life. There are many around the country who are supporting this campaign. If you haven't heard about it, check out the website to see if you'd like to join in on Tuesday!

I'm really not sure what you mean by missing out ...

The school policies I've read refer to interventions and additional support over and above what the class teacher provides - and allocation of this is based on triggers relating to "expected progress".
Of course, if your school doesn't provide these interventions for any pupils, then none of them are missing out.

"As part of our reforms to the national curriculum, the current system of ‘levels’ used to report children’s attainment and progress will be removed from September 2014 and will not be replaced. By removing levels we will allow teachers greater flexibility in the way that they plan and assess pupils’ learning."

Mrz sounded like she was a ta not a teacher. With what she said I don't think a ta would assess children.

Fairenuff there are no national expectations throughout the year only at the end of each Key Stage.

Yes I know. And there is immense pressure on teaching staff to show evidence of progress that will get those children to the level they need to be in order to meet those expectations by the end of year 2. Scrapping SATS won't change that.

Id call withdrawing pupils from the class missing out. We provide support in addition to not as a substitute for good classroom teaching.

Mrz is an extremely experienced teacher, not a TA.

mrz life after levels doesn't seem to have changed practice in many schools, though. There are still regular pupil progress meetings, pupils are still "expected" to make a measurable amount of progress over a period of time, and resources are still deployed based on pupils progress against objective scales.

If it not necessary, and not effective, why haven't HT stopped it in order to lighten the load on their overworked staff?

Is it, as faire suggested, something that schools are pressurised to do, but no longer required in legislation? Can't schools make a stand together and stop doing it? It wouldn't be strike action or need a union motion - it could be coordinated in the same way as the parent action has been planned

We show progress in the work in books

petition.parliament.uk/petitions/111975

Is there likely to be difference between more targeted interventions that address a specific need and 'broader' interventions e.g. ELS?

If schools are mainly using the latter I can see why they might use progress as an indicator. Whether that's the most effective way to run intervention strategies is a different question.

We show progress by having a pre-learning task, then the children work on areas of that subject that they couldn't do well in the pre-learning task. I don't want to say too much that is identifying, but we looked at the Singapore method which many schools in our county have bought into. We felt it was not appropriate with the way the school day is set out compared to a Singapore day. We have taken some aspects such as bar modelling but do not keep the children on the same work at the same pace. They have work aimed at their weaknesses and they work at their own pace, with targeted intervention.

"To be successful, sometimes we need to pare everything back, carry only what is needed, and recognise that some of the things we think are useful are actually a burden. When visiting schools, I often come across systems that have become a burden, that lay siege to the school and influence its running. They require time and resources to manage, and staff need regular training to keep abreast of updates. Teachers wade through the 100-plus reports on offer to find the one bit of data they require; and heads spend holidays and weekends printing graphs, charts and tables, filing them in folders no one will ever look at.

How liberating it would be to triage these systems, to break them up into their parts, lay them out on the hall floor and separate them into three piles: the bits you need, the bits that might be useful, the bits you never use.

Then in true alpine style, we take only the first pile, shedding the excess weight and becoming more responsive as a consequence; recognising that what we don’t have, we can’t use, thus removing the temptation to make use of pointless things just because they are there. We can finally see the wood for the trees and are free to concentrate on more important things.

To paraphrase TES columnist Michael Tidd: “Do more, with less, and better.”

"The following statements all came from the 2015 report from the Commission on Assessment without Levels. They all appeared under the heading “The problems with levels”. Are there any of these issues that don’t also apply in exactly the same way to the new interim teacher assessment frameworks?

[They] required aggregating a wide variety of data into a single number
Too often levels became viewed as thresholds
Teaching became focused on getting pupils across the next threshold instead of ensuring they were secure in the knowledge and understanding
In reality, the difference between pupils on either side of a boundary might have been very slight, while the difference between pupils within the same level might have been very different
Although levels were intended to define common standards of attainment, the level descriptors were open to interpretation
Different teachers could make different judgements
The information secondary schools received from primary schools was sometimes felt to be unreliable or unhelpful.
Teachers planned lessons which would allow pupils to learn or demonstrate the requirements for specific levels
The drive for progress across levels also led teachers to focus their attention disproportionately on pupils just below level boundaries
Pupils compared themselves to others and often labelled themselves according to the level they were at
The disconnect between levels and the content of the national curriculum also meant that telling a parent his or her child was level 4b, did not provide meaningful information about what that child knew and understood or needed to know to progress.
The expectation to collect data in efforts to track pupils’ progress towards target levels considerably increased teachers’ workload.

It’s also worth noting that when Mr Gove first made the announcement, the webpage that explained it said:

We believe this system is complicated and difficult to understand, especially for parents."

Today there is a report in the Times of the general Sec of the Head Teachers' Union.
He is in favour of:

1. testing on entry to primary school - ie baseline testing. Logical - how else can you assess the value added by the school?
2. annual testing thereafter Again logical, how else can you measure and compare schools?

But children are assessed all the time at school. Why does it have to be an external form, based on often inappropriate content, at too high a level for many, and results based on just one day/week.

Little children need informal, regular, continuous progress type assessments done by the teachers who know them best.

I bet every teacher can tell you what each child they teach is capable of and what they need to work on. Teachers don't need to put children through exam condition tests one week a year to do that.

I bet every teacher can tell you what each child they teach is capable of and what they need to work on.

Assuming the teachers are given appropriate CPD and moderation, yes.
But sadly, not all teachers are led by effective HT, so that doesn't always happen. My DD was failed badly by her primary school due to weak teaching, poor leadership and inexperienced governance. A culture of cover up and disengagement was exposed.

Until the teaching profession takes steps to address that from within, there will always have to be some form of external scrutiny, to ensure that DCs are not being let down.

Russell Hobby is also reported as saying that HT should "be in the classroom, not the boardroom",

Is he encouraging HT to decline their optional position on their schools Gov Boards?

Says it all really Mrz

The whole system is over complicated and bogged down with information and initiatives that do not make a positive difference to children.

I know my DDs strengths and I know what she needs to work on. I do not need lots of graphs, charts and colour coded target and KPI reports. There is so much data and it just becomes overwhelming.

I know my DD has lists of her targets. I know she hates writing because she feels under pressure to try to include so many elements in each piece of writing in order to hit her targets and KPIs. I know that she gets disheartened when great idea or story does not get a tick in the target box because she has failed to use some of these elements.

I know that this isn't helpful or encouraging. How have we come to a point where we use tools from the corporate world to micromanage little children.

I bet every teacher can tell you what each child they teach is capable of and what they need to work on.

Yes they can but that's not good enough. It's not enough to know what the child can do, the teacher has to have really good reasons to explain why the child cannot do better. And that's where the pressure on teachers comes in.

It's not enough to know what the child can do, the teacher has to have really good reasons to explain why the child cannot do better.

Rather than spending hours every week documenting and plotting on a graph what my DD can and cannot do, I would rather a teacher spent the time actually teaching my child. Maybe even listening to her read a bit more often.

Rather than spending hours every week documenting and plotting on a graph what my DD can and cannot do, I would rather a teacher spent the time actually teaching my child. Maybe even listening to her read a bit more often.

That's what my DCs teachers did. It was only when they did their KS2 SATS that it was discovered that the teachers had no idea that the pupils in her class hadn't made any progress and were more than a year behind their peers in other schools. Very few of them could access the secondary curriculum - which has caused long term problems for them.

The school was lovely, the pupils confident and happy - but they weren't being challenged or stretched, they were being taught, but they weren't learning.

Imagine how every teacher in the country feels ...not knowing exactly what is expected of our pupils because the government haven't told us yet (possibly because they haven't decided yet)

It is those in government that decide what is expected of children, those also responsible for the new curriculum that cause me most concern.

So because your school failed the children, then you think the system needs to e changed for all schools, Time? That's quite different from saying there's a problem with the system.

Wouldn't it have been better to just deal with your school and get them to put something more effective into place?

In theory if the inspection process valued progress and schools demonstrating progress and monitoring then it could follow that schools could be incentivised to change to more effective procedures, and preferably less work heavy ones. Of course we may need a more supportive and less punitive inspection system in order to allow that to fully flourish.

Wouldn't it have been better to just deal with your school and get them to put something more effective into place?

But schools don't listen to parents on subjects like that. How many parents have you seen complaining on here that there school isn't teaching phonics properly? Do such schools take parents' complaints seriously? I certainly haven't heard of any that have. Stuart Lock, a secondary head in Cambridgeshire, has tried to find a local school for his daughter that teaches phonics, but failed - they won't listen to him either. The evaluative reports on phonics show that between one third and two thirds of all schools aren't teaching phonics properly. Some of them are even spending pupil premium money on Reading Recovery.