Teaching union calls for boycott of school tests
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Your support makes all the difference.The National Union of Teachers (NUT) will today back a boycott of National Curriculum tests for nearly two million seven- , 11- and 14-year-old pupils.
Left-wingers will press for the boycott to start immediately after the Easter break. The union leadership, which will argue that it should take place next year, agrees that there is now growing evidence that the nation's seven million state schoolchildren are over-tested and stressed to the point that they are switched off by schooling.
Tests for seven-year-olds have already been abolished by the Welsh Assembly whose members claim it is too early an age to put children through the rigours of formal testing.
The NUT will approach parents' organisations and school governors after this week's conference in Harrogate to see if they can mount a joint campaign to persuade ministers to abandon the tests. If, as is likely, they fail to do so, the union leadership wants a ballot on a boycott early enough in the next school year to stop any preparatory work on the tests.
Lesley Auger, president of the NUT and a primary school teacher in Salford, told the conference yesterday: "By working together, we must be able to bring this invidious regime to an end. We're concerned about the narrowing of the curriculum, the stifling of creativity, the teaching to the tests.''
Earlier in the week, the Assocation of Teachers and Lecturers – the most moderate of the three big teachers' unions – launched its own campaign to get rid of the tests, claiming UK school children were the most tested in the western world. John Dunford, general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, has estimated that a youngster going through state schooling today will have taken 105 tests by the time they leave school, if they stay on to take A-levels.
The ATL's new general secretary Dr Mary Bousted, in her maiden speech, called on David Miliband, the school standards minister, to instruct his officials to abandon the current testing regime and move towards a system based on international assessment of pupils abilities. This, she said, would allow time for more creativity in the curriculum.
Mr Miliband stressed that there had been "major, major changes'' in literacy and numeracy standards under the present testing arrangements "after 40 to 45 years of stagnation''.
Ms Auger also called for an end to selective education in her address to the conference, revealing that she had been an 11-plus failure. "Selective education is repugnant to those of us who cherish ideals of equality of opportunity,'' she added. "Too many of this nation's children have been consigned to the scrap heap unjustly, unfairly and to the detriment of this country.''
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