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Last weekend’s homework for my sixth-grade daughter included questions about the subjunctive, past progressives, modal verbs, and a few other nonsense, almost useless grammatical terms.
She is a pupil at the small rural primary school in Cumbria where I am head. And yes, her teacher is absolutely right to start preparing her for the Sats tests she will take next school year, but damn it, our national curriculum and assessment systems are chock full of completely useless nonsense.
We are not teaching skills for the future – we are teaching a Victorian curriculum when we are no longer living in the Victorian era. I am beyond tired of the challenges we face and what is being imposed on us, so I am happy to speak out, but I don’t think we should fight the system.
Take the exam system for example. The second year Sats are now optional and have been replaced by basic tests at the end of reception. We have dropped the Year Two Sats as soon as possible because we do not agree with subjecting children to such strict testing conditions at the age of six. They produce sad reports that tell us nothing.
In the first year there is the Phonics Screening Check test, where children are asked what nonsense words are and what are real words – it’s bizarre. We only have just over 100 children in the whole school, and we know the children better than a test result – as do all the teachers in all the schools.
In the fourth year, the children are given an online multiplication test. Again, that doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know; most children pass it. However, it is not a paper test. I am grateful that some aspects of our education system are catching up with the modern world.
Then there are the Year Six Sats, which stand for standard assessment tests, but they are not tests. It is an exam, one of many, that children have to take in a classroom under exam conditions: no display, no talking, no help and no use whatsoever – for the children and not for us as a school.
As a director I don’t attach any value to it. The high schools around here aren’t exactly using them for student streaming, and because we downplay them, the kids and their families aren’t too interested. But we start working on the format around this time of year because ultimately we are being held to account by the government and by Ofsted. By the time our Year 6 children leave us, they will be confident, articulate, independent children with a brilliant range of digital skills, initiative and a work ethic: so much more important than whatever Sats labels them.
I’m certainly not against testing; at my school we test the kids all the time in different ways. But the national curriculum is woefully overcrowded and totally unfit for purpose. And the picture of education in this country is so bleak.
For example, a third of children in this country fail exams and final exams. Those exams test things they may never need to know, but are nevertheless a path to higher education.
What we teach in high schools does not meet the needs of business or our economy. Someone has to connect the dots. Alternative routes must be created, which can also include exams. I have a child who is about to enter secondary school and who is a very practical and brilliant child; I’m not saying they shouldn’t do GCSEs, but they should also be given the opportunity to learn more actively. It’s not that it wouldn’t be useful – if you can find a decent builder or electrician here in Cumbria you’ll have done very well – and they charge £50 an hour. They earn more than me.
At my school we enrich the national curriculum, which fits with what we offer. We teach digital skills; we employ someone who comes every week to teach computer lessons – working with robots, different software and generative AI.
We integrate digital skills and competences into the curriculum and children in years five and six work with and train other students in the UK, other countries (such as Norway, where we were featured on national television) and Initial Teacher Training (ITT) . students. We do a huge amount of outdoor work, much of it linked to our farm and polytunnels, and this year our year six children will be submitting their work to the Princes’ Trust, which has made us the first primary school in the country to offer an Ofqual-approved diploma.
Active learning promotes retention, so we focus on learning through play. Our year five/six classroom has comfortable chairs and beautiful oak tables – the children take care of it and they are calmer too. The work they produce has also improved in the new environment. We wouldn’t expect adults to sit on hard plastic chairs for five to six hours a day; most wouldn’t be able to do that. Why on earth do we expect this from children?
Our last Ofsted inspection was in January 2023. The inspectors loved us; they could see that the children were performing well in areas such as digital skills, but they could not fully report on this because it is not part of the national curriculum. They loved the farm we have, the animals and the way the children took care of it, but they couldn’t tell us anything about that either.
I am certainly not in the camp of abolishing Ofsted – there has to be some accountability – but I have no doubt that dramatic reforms are needed. My small, rural school is inspected under the same framework as my friend and colleagues’ school in Fleetwood, which has significant disadvantage and very different challenges to those we face. It should not be the case that the same framework is used to inspect such different settings.
Britain spends just 3.9 percent of its GDP on education spending, and it shows. Over the past year we advertised full-time positions for two teaching assistants, but not one person applied. It’s not uncommon: the pay is terrible. Why would they come and work as a teaching assistant for 32 hours a week at minimum wage when they can get more than that and more hours at the local shop?
We can’t get afternoon supervisors because they get paid even less. Teachers across the country are leaving in droves because the pressure is terrible and the workload is enormous. Leaders leave as early as they can and no one wants to replace them because the job is a killer.
In recent years, especially last year, recruitment targets have been missed dramatically. We are now at a stage where we can no longer staff our schools, and the government is burying its head in the sand: they are offering a 1.5 percent pay increase this year. And yet where we are, an hour south of Scotland, teachers earn about 15 percent more. How can you justify that?
In Singapore they don’t have a dedicated education department as we know it, but anyone who works in Singapore’s equivalent must have worked in a school so that they understand education. In Estonia they start teaching digital skills in kindergarten. In Finland there are no formal exams in schools, but by the time they take the Pisa exams at 16, they blow us out of the water – and we have a much happier childhood. In Britain, seven million adults – one in six – are illiterate. They have been failed by our education system. As a province we are a disgrace.
And you’re not talking about a small problem here: the entire education system is dying. There are 1.5 million children who are continuously absent from school and approximately 150,000 children are homeschooled. It scares the hell out of me, the insane number of people who actually say the education system isn’t right for them.
We have to sit back and wonder what’s going on. Why do we teach kids facts and figures when they can Google something and get the answer right away? Instead, we should teach them the skills to find and reference those facts and figures. We need to teach about AI biases and build personalized pathways.
Of course, the basic building blocks need to be learned, but checking for the subjunctive mood? Can all adults do that? And did it stop them? I’m not saying we need to learn how to use the decimal system – it’s essential to money; But who uses physical money anymore? We should teach children about cryptocurrency, bitcoin, blockchain, data management and decision making.
Truly, I despair. I’m the head of a fantastic school that has won national awards and been rated ‘Outstanding’, whatever that really means – it doesn’t count for anything to me. I have a 10 year old and a 12 year old and I’m wondering if I want them to go to regular school. I couldn’t tell a monkey about Sats; I want children to leave my school confident and independent. I don’t think I’m the norm. But is there anything more important than a relevant education?
As told to Lucy Denyer
Matthew Jessop is headteacher at Crosthwaite Primary School