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A WHILE ago I went back to my old school, Bruton Girls in Somerset, to give a careers talk. I told them that one of the things I loved most about being a journalist was writing on deadline: it was just like taking exams, I told them.
The gasps were audible. Rightly so. Only a minority of sad types like me are teacher's pets by nature, the sort who actually look forward to spelling tests. So why do we have a school system which pretends that children are all swotty little Groskops?
This week, in the wake of the test-marking fiasco, Ed Balls scrapped SATs for 14-year-olds but kept them in place for primary pupils. This is a terrible mix-up. Keeping SATs for 10-year-olds merely serves to encourage the view shared by a vocal minority of pushy parents that hothousing from primary age is a good thing. From experience, I don't believe it is.
I often wonder if I didn't ruin my own childhood with my Little Miss Top Marks act. It took me into private school I got a full scholarship after begging my parents to let me take the entrance exam but it certainly didn't make me into a nicer person.
I was quite a stressed-out, anxious child not something I would wish on my own children. Most primary school pupils, thankfully, are not at all like I was: they do not want to be tested, pushed and prodded. They want to be left to learn in a relaxed, pressure-free environment. And they will be all the more rounded and well-balanced for it.
So it's depressing to see the Schools Secretary pandering to the "helicopter parent" types who constantly demand proof, results and statistics. These people are extreme. I have witnessed the parents of toddlers perk up whenever Oxbridge comes up in conversation: their child is barely three but they already hope it's an option. And I know several parents with very young children who have swapped the state system for private education because they want them to have extra homework at age four.
If they want to pay for it, that's their prerogative. But we don't need this attitude in the primary state system. For young children primary school is enough of a trial without formal national tests. They need less pressure not more to find their own passions in life.
In any case, the best kind of motivation and desire for learning comes not from the parents but from the child. It's one thing to be ambitious for yourself take it from me, the twitchy 10-year-old over-achiever but it's quite another to foist that ambition onto others. I can only pray that by the time my four-year-old son is 10, SATs will have been scrapped completely.
Or, if not, perhaps they will let me take them on his behalf as a special treat. Please, Miss?
Whisper goodbye to Guy
WHAT a bad advert for whisper therapy Madonna and Guy have turned out to be. Only weeks ago they were said to be circling each other in the kitchen while mouthing words like "macho" and "goddess" at each other in an attempt to forge intimacy. Now comes the news that they are to divorce. My only shock is that alpha mockney Guy has lasted this long. He always looked like he was only staying the course to win a bet with his mates.
But at least he has been doing the world a favour up until now by curbing Madonna's maternal appetites. Word has it they broke up because of disagreements over adoption: Madonna wants more, Guy doesn't. Now, with him out of the way, there's no stopping her. People of Africa: lock up your children.
Watch your tracks, Gordon
ALL the conversation at the school gates this week is about the new must-have middle-class accessory: a tracker mortgage.
A lot of young families where I live in Teddington bought expensive property with flexible mortgages in the past five years. Not because they wanted to get rich quick from rising house prices or as an investment but just to have somewhere nice to live. Imagine that!
Now with many people's fixed-rate mortgage terms coming to an end (including ours early next year eek!), the jitters are starting. Forget short-term crisis management: the ability to remortgage affordably will be the iron test for Labour in the coming months. Keep a beady eye on those interest rates, Gordon, or you will feel the wrath of south-west London and beyond.
Reader views (3)
viv,
are you really as pretty as your thumbnail picture ? if so will you marry me ?
- Peter Killick, Hartlepool United Kingdom
Excellent article re SATS, Viv! The UK and the USA are the only English-speaking countries that bother with sats, with the result that both countries have a blinding array of statistics about kids at school and a semi-literate populace compared with Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other former colonies. As the former head of a prestigious school said a few years ago, "wieighing pigs frequently doesn't fatten them".
When I trained as a teacher, it was drummed into us trainees that testing children without using the test findings almost immediately to improve children's performance is futile.
The government drive to measure children constantly and then use the results, not to help children but to beat parents, schools and teachers is not only counterproductive it completely misses the point of testing. Both sats and League tables should go - the only sensible measure of children at school should be the 'value added'.
- Kiwi Expat, London, UK
I don't agree with at all. Life is not about an easy ride, sometimes, in fact most of the time we have to do things we might not want to do, but its work and part of life. You need to be able to understand this at an early age if you ever want to grow and be a successful person.
This country is filled with little brats who think they know it all, and its people like you who encourage their actions, constantly acting as if they are victims then when your back is turned they go and stab somebody because 'tryin 2 ern me stripes innit!'.
I hope somebody stops you from writing anymore articles on what kids need in this country, because the truth is they just need a good kick up the bottom.
- Matt, London
