I voted to boycott SATs just before Labour sided with teachers like me – these tests are ruining education

I want my students to be equipped with the knowledge and skills to help them to navigate and ultimately transform the world we live in today. Agonising over rigorous testing won’t help them

Trade union conferences rarely feel like rock concerts. Yet as Jeremy Corbyn arrived at the National Education Union’s inaugural conference in Liverpool on Tuesday afternoon, he was greeted with rapturous applause from the 1,500 education professionals assembled there, and the infamous Corbyn chant thundered out from across the packed conference floor.

Given the parlous state of schools in England today, it may be some surprise that teachers have anything to cheer about at all. As a young teacher and first-time union conference delegate, I have spent the last few days discussing how schools are at breaking point following 30 years of neoliberal policies inflicted on schools by successive Conservative and Labour governments.

These “reforms” have been characterised by covert privatisation, obsessive testing, a narrowed curriculum and an accountability regime that is driving teachers out of the classroom faster than they can be recruited. The savage cuts to school funding since 2015 has only made a broken system even more challenging to teach in.

Yet for so many teachers like me, Labour under Corbyn offers a transformational vision for education that ruptures with this neoliberal status quo. Corbyn’s speech on Tuesday began by reiterating his commitment to building a National Education Service, founded on the idea that education is a public good with intrinsic value, not a commodity to be measured, bartered and hoarded for private profit or gain.

The announcement that a Labour government would scrap standardised assessment tests (SATs) was a vital step towards fleshing out this vision. Since 1990, SATs have been sat by primary school children in year two and year six, and are one of the most universally reviled aspects of the neoliberal testing and accountability regime.

Numerous parent campaign groups such as More Than A Score and Let Our Kids Be Kids have repeatedly demonstrated the damaging effect that SATs have on their young children to policy-makers who have often refused to listen.

Delegates at the NEU conference on Monday voted overwhelmingly to ballot its members for a boycott of the SATs in 2020, hardly surprising given a YouGov poll of headteachers earlier this year showed a staggering 98 per cent believe the SATs put unnecessary pressure on teachers, with 96 per cent also saying SATs have a negative impact on children’s wellbeing.

Not only that, but three-quarters of school leaders surveyed don’t even think the tests are reliable. As a secondary school teacher, I never cease to be amazed by how wildly inaccurate the SATs data we receive from primary schools for our new year seven classes appears to be.

Yet when primary school leaders are treated like football managers who can be disposed of if their children “underperform” in the SATs, grade distortion is hardly surprising. Primary school teacher pay is also linked to their students’ SATs results, and given reports of teachers using food banks and sleeping in their cars because they can’t afford rent, teachers are forced to teach to the test and “game” the system just to survive.

The fact is that high stakes assessments are never going to be a valid indicator of a child’s abilities. They can never capture all of the qualities I value in the children I teach, such as creativity, emotional literacy and a moral commitment to transforming our unjust society. We must never underestimate the importance of children leaving primary school appropriately fluent in literacy, maths and science. But education should be about so much more than this.

Labour’s announcement is so exciting because it opens up the space to debate what a good education really looks like. The government’s SATs system cost £44m in 2017, half of which went to Pearson Education, a private, profit-making company. If SATs were scrapped, a Labour government could reinvest that funding into giving teachers the time and space to design a far more imaginative system of teacher assessment.

Unlike so many previous governments, Corbyn’s Labour will not simply impose its vision for education. Labour has shown they are serious about listening to teachers in their unions, parents and educational researchers about what an ambitious education system that allows all children to flourish will look like. The recent student climate strikes show that young people themselves must also be part of this important conversation about the future of their education.

I know that I want my students to be equipped with the knowledge and skills to help them to navigate – and ultimately transform – the increasingly complicated, troubled world we live in today. SATs will never be able to measure such an important goal for education. It’s time now to abolish them.