The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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Joyless, inaccurate, inequitable?

I recently enjoyed the opportunities provided by some longer than average train journeys and the al fresco possibilities of a sunny garden to catch up on my reading. Indeed, I diligently increased my familiarity with a wide range of books; asked questions to improve my understanding of text; summarised the main ideas drawn from more than one paragraph, and worked out the meaning of new words from context.  In short, I demonstrated the skills in reading required of upper KS2 readers.

Which has left me with rather a bee in my bonnet about last week’s KS2 SATs reading paper and its usefulness as an assessment of these skills.

My first buzzing bee in response to the paper: the quality and range of the texts provided to assess our children’s abilities as confident readers. Rather than a range of engaging writing, offering opportunities to demonstrate skills as joyful interrogators of literature and authorial craft, the test offered three rather leaden texts: two fictional and one non-fiction.  We had Maria and Oliver running off from a garden party at the big house to explore an island, which might hold the clue to the secret of a long-standing upper-class family feud. We had Maxine riding her pet giraffe, Jemmy, in South Africa, having an unfortunate encounter with some warthogs (some ferocious, others bewildered) but fortunately learning a lesson about the consequences of not listening to adults. We finished with the non-fiction text about the demise of the Dodo, a text so oddly structured that it appeared to have, rather like another curious creature, been thrown together by committee. The sun-soaked stillness of our inner-city school hall, last Monday morning, was ruffled by the occasional gentle gusting sighs of 76 children trying hard to engage with such dull texts and do so with purposeful determination ‘because I love books and I love reading and I want to do well, but it wasn’t like proper reading.’

Which brings me on to my second buzzing bee: it was most definitely not, to quote (year 6 standard pupil Shueli), anything like ‘proper reading’ nor, I would suggest, a meaningful way to assess whether our children themselves are ‘proper’ readers, using the DfE’s own interim assessment criteria.

The first four questions of the test focussed solely on vocabulary and words in context. For example, Question 1: ‘Find and copy one word meaning relatives from long ago’. If, like many of our children, you did not know the word ‘ancestor’, the answer for this question was almost impossible to work out from context.  A first mark lost and a tiny dent in the self-esteem of pupils who were hoping for a test of their ability to filter and finesse a text for nuance and meaning rather find ‘words I should have in my head, but didn’t’ (Sayma B). More gusty sighing.

Question 2 continued to dig deeper into the realm of internal word-lists: ‘the struggle had been between two rival families… which word most closely matches the meaning of the word rival? Tick one: equal, neighbouring, important, competing.  If you were not familiar with the word ‘rival’ then the choice of either ‘important’ or ‘neighbouring’ are plausible choices in context. I give you some higher order reading reasoning:  the children were at a party in a big house, clearly from ‘posh’ families – hence ‘important’ was a perfectly sensible choice; rival football teams play in the same league, so are in some way ‘neighbours’.  Both demonstrate a key year 6 reading skill: ‘working out the meaning of new words from context’, a skill our children use routinely but, in this case, cost them a mark and one more cross gained on the examiner’s recording sheet.

Bringing me onto bee no. 3: the test appeared to be designed for ease of marking. Only 2/33 questions on the test required extended ‘3 mark’ answers – allowing extended inferential or evaluative thinking – a mere 6 percent of the paper. The rest were questions requiring – much easier to mark – word or fact retrieval answers.  Our children’s reading SATs scores will reflect this unbalanced diet of question types; resulting in assessments neither accurate nor equitable. Not accurate, because teachers, using the national curriculum and 2015-16  interim assessment framework, assess year 6 readers using a much wider set of criteria – including, for example reading aloud with intonation, confidence and fluency, as well as contributions to discussions around book-talk, none of which can be assessed  by a simple test. And not equitable, because research indicates that the children most likely to under-perform in language/vocabulary biased reading tests are those from the most deprived backgrounds.

The reason for this is that children from lower income, or more socially deprived backgrounds, often come to school with a more limited vocabulary because they begin life being exposed to fewer words than children from more affluent backgrounds.  The gap this discrepancy presents is not insurmountable; the CPRT/IEE dialogic teaching project is one clear example of how putting talk at the heart of our children’s learning can help close such gaps.  However, a national testing system that skews the reading results by which children and schools are judged – and categorised – in favour of such a vocabulary-heavy bias, is simply not fair. Or purposeful.

I urge you, experienced reader, to stand for a moment in the shoes of Sheuli and Sayma B. I give you a sentence to consider, one which incorporates a word that I learnt from my own recent reading.  ‘A gust of wind rippled through the exam hall, it made me pandiculate and look hopefully at the clock. Q1: In this sentence which word most closely matches the meaning of the word pandiculate? Tick one: ponder, panic, stretch, laugh out loud.

All might seem plausible choices. The experience of the reading SATs last week may have caused our children indeed to ponder, to panic or to laugh out loud in test conditions.  It might even have made them pandiculate in earnest, for the correct answer is, of course, c) to stretch – and typically to yawn when awakening from a dull or sleepy interlude. But surely you knew that? It must be fair to assume that we all share the same internal word list. And if this is not the case (shame on you) could you not demonstrate your ability to work out the meaning of a word from the context?  No?  It cannot be that my test is flawed; it must be you who are a poor reader.  My internal bee is susurrating indeed about the value of a national test that reinforces gaps, rather than one which assesses how well we are closing them.

Sarah Rutty is Head Teacher of Bankside Primary School in Leeds, part-time Adviser for Leeds City Council Children’s Services, a member of CPRT’s Schools Alliance, and Co-ordinator of CPRT’s Leeds/West Yorkshire network. Read her previous blogs here. 

 If you work in or near Leeds and wish to become involved in its CPRT network, contact administrator@cprtrust.org.uk.

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Rigor spagis

Amid the gloom of unsavoury Sats and enforced academisation, comes one delicious moment of joy. Schools minister Nick Gibb doesn’t know his subordinating conjunctions from his prepositions. He can’t answer one of the questions he has set children. Despite this woeful (in his eyes) ignorance – though, tellingly, when his mistake is pointed out he says ‘This isn’t about me’ – he has managed to become and to remain a government minister. Need one say any more about the pointlessness of the Spag test?

At least by this time next week it will all be over. The country’s 10 and 11-year-olds will be free to enjoy their final few weeks at primary school, liberated from the government’s oh so very rigorous key stage 2 tests. Like them, I am tired of fractions, tired of conjunctions, tired, in fact, of being told of the need for ‘rigour’. The Education Secretary and the Chief Inspector need to wake up to the fact that rigour is a nasty little word, suggestive of starch and thin lips. Its lack of humour and humanity makes parents and teachers recoil. Check out its origins in one of those dictionaries you recommend children use.

Hopefully the weight of protest here, echoing many in America, will force some meaningful concessions from the ‘rigour revolutionaries’ in time for next year’s tests. Either that, or everyone with a genuine interest in helping young children learn will stand up and say No.  In the words of CPRT Priority 8, Assessment must ‘enhance learning as well as test it’, ‘support rather than distort the curriculum’ and ‘pursue standards and quality in all areas of learning, not just the core subjects’. The opposite is happening at the moment in the name of rigour. It’s not rigour – but it is deadly.

Of course, the memory of subordinating conjunctions and five-digit subtraction by decomposition will fade for the current Year 6s – and for Nick Gibb – unless they turn out to have failed the tests. Mrs Morgan will decide just how rigorous she wants to be in the summer. Politics will determine where she draws the line between happy and sad children. Politics will decide the proportion she brands as failures at age 11, forced to do the tests again at secondary school.

But still the children have these few carefree weeks where primary school can go back to doing what primary school does best – encouraging enquiry into and enjoyment of the world around us. Well, no. Teachers still have to assess writing. And if my classroom is anything to go by, writing has been sidelined over the past few weeks in the effort to cram a few more scraps of worthless knowledge into young brains yearning to rule the country.

So how do we teachers judge good writing? Sadly, that’s an irrelevant question. Don’t bother drawing up a mental list of, for example, exciting plot, imaginative setting, inventive language, mastery of different genres. No, teachers must assess using Mrs Morgan’s leaden criteria, criteria that would never cross the mind of a Man Booker prize judge. Marlon James, last year’s Booker winner and a teacher of creative writing, was praised for a story that ‘traverses strange landscapes and shady characters, as motivations are examined – and questions asked’. No one commented on James’s ability to ‘use a range of cohesive devices, including adverbials, within and across sentences and paragraphs’.

The dead hand of rigour decrees that we judge children’s ability to employ ‘passive and modal verbs mostly appropriately’. We have to check that they use ‘adverbs, preposition phrases and expanded noun phrases effectively to add detail, qualification and precision’. (Never mind thrilling, moving or frightening, I do love a story to be detailed, precise and qualified.) We forget to read what the children have actually written in the hunt for ‘inverted commas, commas for clarity, and punctuation for parenthesis [used] mostly correctly, and some correct use of semi-colons, dashes, colons and hyphens’. Finally, it goes without saying that young children must ‘spell most words correctly’.

There are eight criteria in the Government’s interim framework for writing at the ‘expected standard’ – expected by whom, one is tempted to ask. Only one of the eight relates to the point of putting pen to paper in the first place. Aside from ‘the pupil can create atmosphere, and integrate dialogue to convey character and advance the action’, the writing criteria spring entirely from the Government’s obsession with grammar, punctuation and spelling. I fear it is only too easy to meet the ‘expected standard’ with writing that is as lifeless, uninspiring and rigorous as the criteria themselves.

If writing is not to entertain and inform, then why bother? In the old days of levels, teachers had to tussle with Assessment of Pupil Performance Grids – a similar attempt to standardise the marking of a creative activity. But at least the APP grids acknowledged that good writing should make an impact. Texts should be ‘imaginative, interesting and thoughtful’. Sentence clauses and vocabulary should be varied not to tick a grammar checklist box but to have an ‘effect’ on the reader.

So now we have to knuckle down and make sure children’s writing satisfies the small-minded rigour revolutionaries. Can we slip in a semi-colon and a couple of brackets without spoiling the flow of a youthful reworking of an Arthurian legend? How many times can we persuade our young authors to write out their stories in order to ensure ‘most’ words are spelt correctly. And what to do about those blank looks when we suggest that they repeat a phrase from one paragraph to the next to ensure they have achieved ‘cohesion’?

Mrs Morgan claims the ‘tough’ new curriculum will foster a love of literature. This is a mad, topsy-turvy world that includes too many ‘strange landscapes and shady characters’. It is good, at last, that ‘motivations are examined – and questions asked’. Keep up the good work, everyone. We can stop the rigour revolutionaries.

Stephanie Northen is a primary teacher and journalist and one of our regular bloggers. She contributed to the Cambridge Primary Review final report and is a member of the Board of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust.

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Boycott the Sats

Schools are scrambling to prepare children for the new Sats tests to be taken in May. Teachers who have never before ‘taught to the test’ are gloomily conceding that the Government has left them no other option. Children are being drilled in the mechanics of adverbial clauses and long division, forced to spell vital words such as ‘pronunciation’ and ‘hindrance’, and helped to write stories showing their mastery of the passive voice and modal verbs. Headteachers shake their heads sorrowfully. Advisers grimace and say ‘nothing to do with us’. None of this should be happening – and finally there is just a possibility that the madness will stop.

First, came the suggestion of a boycott of baseline testing. Now, at last, there is a call to cancel the KS2 Sats. I watch the signatures grow daily (hourly) hoping they represent the moment when the classroom worms such as myself finally turned and said no.

The only word on the spelling list that Year 6s should learn is ‘sacrifice’ as this will enable them to write to the Education Secretary pointing out that their learning is being sacrificed to a mean-spirited and regressive assessment system.

The new tests and assessments have been designed, not to discover and celebrate what children can do, but to catch them out. Here are just a few examples. It is essential, says the Government, that KS1 children are taught maths using concrete and visual aids such as Numicon and number squares.  So which callous wretch decreed that the same children must be deprived of these props when taking their Sats? In my school, children wept because they could see the number squares but were not allowed to use them.

I’d also like to meet the sour-faced creators of the sample grammar test who asked Year 6 children to add suffixes to nouns to create adjectives (clearly a life skill) and then decided that getting five out of six right merited no marks. Likewise I’d love to shake hands with the generous soul who recently decreed nul points for any child misplacing a comma when separating numbers in the thousands in their KS2 maths Sats. Similarly, there’s no mercy for the left-handed child who struggles to join up his handwriting or for the fast-thinking kid who writes brilliantly but forgets her full stops.

Assessment should, as CPRT recommends, ‘enhance learning as well as test it’ and ‘support rather than distort the curriculum.’

Assessment in the CPRT spirit ensures that the children in my class are set a range of appropriate challenges every day. As a consequence, they are all generally making cheerful progress, though some more rapidly than others and some have greater strengths in one area of learning than another. Yes, I’m sorry to say, they are inconsistent: they have been known to go backwards and they even make mistakes. In other words, they are human beings.

The new tests have not been designed with humans in mind, let alone small humans. Rather they have been created by cyborgs for baby cyborgs. If you don’t believe me, watch the bizarre 2016 KS2 assessment webinar from the Standards and Testing Agency.

The STA cyborgs explain why it was necessary to ditch the ‘best fit’ model of levels where teachers, heaven forbid, used their professional judgement to decide if a child had ticked enough boxes to be awarded a level 3c. According to the cyborgs, parents were confused by their 3c kid being able to do, or not do, things that their mate’s 3c kid could or couldn’t do. Clearly in cyborg land, parents had nothing better to do than check that all children assessed at the same level had exactly the same set of skills and knowledge. This is just so ridiculous as to be laughable were it not for what is currently happening in the nation’s classrooms.

In terms of teacher assessment, best fit has been replaced by perfect fit. Now we have to tick all the boxes in order to judge children to be working at the ‘expected standard’. If just one box cannot be ticked, children are classified as ‘working towards’. However, it doesn’t end there. If a child doesn’t tick all those boxes, they will cascade back down the (not) levels potentially all the way to Year 1. Take writing as an example. One of the best young writers I have taught would not qualify even as ‘working towards’ because she didn’t join up her handwriting. Likewise imaginative but dyslexic 10-year-olds will slip down and down because they can’t spell words supposedly appropriate for eight-year-olds such as ‘occasionally’, ‘reign’ or ‘possession’. And, according to the STA cyborgian webinar, there is ‘no flexibility’ on this.

Yet not only is it inflexible, mean spirited and regressive, it is also just not fair. The current Year 6 has only had two years at most to prepare for this newly punitive world of harder work and pitiless mark schemes. And make that only three months in terms of writing where standards have been wrenched up from a level 4b to a 5c. Parents do not know what harsh judgements await their children this summer. If they did, chances are they would support a boycott. As Warwick Mansell, writing in a CPRT blog back in 2014, wisely commented:

The single ‘working at national standard’ – or not – verdict, where it is to be offered, also seems to invite a simple ‘pass/fail’ judgement. This, it is hard to avoid thinking, will set up the view among many children that they are failures at an early age.

And not only the children. Teachers are under tremendous pressure to ensure their pupils reach the new standards in reading, maths, grammar and writing – irrespective of individual strengths or weaknesses. Yet we are supposed to achieve this without allowing these standards ‘to guide individual programmes of study, classroom practice or methodology’ as the STA disingenuously insists. Sometimes I wonder if I’m stupid or perhaps was asleep when a new era of Orwellian doublethink dawned. How on earth do children learn to ‘use passive and modal verbs mostly appropriately’ if I don’t explicitly teach them? How do they learn to add, subtract or multiply fractions without that being a programme of study? Perhaps in some Utopian classroom there is a lesson plan – presumably in something tasteful like quilting – that miraculously transfers this knowledge to children in such a form that they can pass their Sats and meet the ‘expected standard’.

But until someone lends me that plan, I’d rather we all just said no.

Stephanie Northen is a primary teacher and journalist. She contributed to the Cambridge Primary Review final report and is a member of the Board of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust.

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Cambridge Primary Review Trust - Email: administrator@cprtrust.org.uk