Bloody Sats threads

[MurphyBrown]

A short rant!
I am so fed up of seeing parents complaining on here about Sats pressure and schools focussing on the tests.
Can people really not join the dots and see that this is caused by league tables? I bet anything that these same people were angsting over good or outstanding schools 7 years ago and would be the first to complain if Ofsted didn't like the data and popped the school into a category.
You can't have it both ways!

Totally agree that league tables are a cause of much stress for teachers. They should not be used by teachers as excuse for causing children distress through poor teaching practice though. Nor should parents of 3 year olds be expected to know, when picking a school, that a school has achieved outstanding results through implementation of inappropriate teaching techniques. Perhaps if teachers told parents at the open day that their results were achieved by making 7 year olds cry, they would choose the good school round the corner...

I’ll moan about sats if I want to.

I’ve never once looked at a league table for dc school, although obviously I know the ofsted rating. We live in a village and they go to the village school same as all the other kids in the area. And then they feed into the secondary in town. Along with 99% of the other kids.

Not everyone irl agonises over which school to send their dc to.

Indeed. It's more the self-righteousness that gets to me. My DS did them last year and found them fine.

I think people try to shelter their kids too much when they complain about stress.

And all the talk about 'just doing SATs' and other subjects losing out, well, tbh, I don't think things such as History, Science etc. are covered very well in the other years of primary school, so I don't see how getting rid of SATs would make Year 6 any different from the previous years. I'd much prefer my kids get the basics drilled into them at school and we/DC can get on with learning about the fun stuff together outside of it.

Never looked at the league tables picking schools. Started them at the local school and saw how they were pressurising and just reducing the curriculum to how to pass tests... moved the kids out of there as it was at beyond bonkers level, well beyond any form of sane or normal test preparation.

Since I moved mine I've heard of Y1 kids in tears being put under pressure over the Y1 phonics screen for pity's sake! So very much like mysecretunicornrocks says - you get shown the Foundation Stage area, make dutiful "mmm" noises at the ICT suite... but it's only when you're actually inside a school that you sometimes get to see how they're actually generating the results and by then for lots it's really a bit too late, daunting, logistically difficult, or everywhere's just full to change things. I just got very lucky in spaces falling available elsewhere for an option.

No issue in test preparation so kids are familiar with the format, working to the time limits etc - but the way this school goes about it is bloody ruthless and the idea they're dealing with kids gets totally lost sometimes (I strongly suspect the Head is one who doesn't like children making spreadsheets of data look untidy sometimes and parents are just bloody inconvenient too!)