The strange case of a primary school teacher who is filled with dread of SATs being Scrapped

Letter sent to the Guardian 19 April 2019 for their consideration:

The article in the Guardian of 18 April (“I am a primary school teacher and Corbyn’s plan to scrap SATs fills me with dread”) makes me wonder whether the writer is indeed a teacher. If Solomon K is for real, then he is, in my opinion, in the wrong job. 

The article is wrong on so many counts, and they need addressing. Here are just some:

1. The title. It is not “Corbyn’s Plan”. He is responding to the wishes of thousands and thousands of parents, grandparents, children, teachers, school support workers, headteachers, mental health workers, and school governors.
2. Relying on teachers’ assessments would leave “our most vulnerable children at the mercy of notoriously unreliable judgments”. This is as much insulting as it is quite inaccurate. Teachers make judgments on a daily, hourly even, basis, and they act on them. And is an external examiner going to know better what inferences to draw from any given situation than the person who cares for a child every day?
3. The “unlucky ones have their work moderated by the local authority”. In what way is a local authority less competent, and evidently so much less competent than a central authority?
4. “SATs contribute far less to teacher workload and stress than teacher assessment.” . What are the after-school booster sessions all about then, what’s it like when you know that music has been cancelled, sometimes for the week, sometimes for the year? And you know that music would actually be better at developing cognitive skills than drilling and redrilling - and when Music and all the Arts actually, does so much more as well. 
5. “No one can be creative in a subject they haven’t mastered. Creativity depends on a secure foundation of knowledge”. This shows a deep misunderstanding of the concept of creativity. See Ken Robinson’s Ted talk for an explanation.
6. “Thousands of terrible, terrible teachers” He has been “personally in far too many bad schools. . “ On this insulting, almost libellous and unsubstantiated statement alone, I suggest that the Guardian should have steered clear of taking this person seriously, and using him as their Devil’s Advocate. 

Victoria Jaquiss, Leeds

(Peripatetic teacher, ex-school-based teacher, NEU representative, co-author of “Addressing SEND in the Curriculum: Music”, re-published Routledge 2018)