celebrity news: Creative writing tests limit creativity, Sats review finds ...

Friday, June 24, 2011

Creative writing tests limit creativity, Sats review finds ...

Team of headteachers led by peer recommends teachers assess writing throughout year, instead of in single test

A writing test taken by 11-year-olds in England should be scrapped because it stops children being creative, a government review has found.

Ministers asked Lord Bew, a crossbench peer, to review Sats ? tests in maths and English taken by 600,000 pupils every May ? after a quarter of primary schools boycotted the exams last year.

Bew?s team of headteachers found that the writing test does not allow children to demonstrate their imagination because it looks for formulaic answers.

Children?s authors, including Michael Rosen, Roger McGough and Darren Shan, warned in April last year that Sats were killing children?s creativity.

The Bew review recommends that teachers assess creative writing throughout the school year, instead of in a single test.

The creative writing test contains ?no element of creativity? and just teaches children how to start sentences in a formulaic way, said Greg Wallace, the executive principal of four schools and one of the headteachers on the review panel.

Pupils currently take a creative writing test and a separate spelling test, which also assesses punctuation and grammar.

Bew?s review has called for the spelling test to continue, but for it to give greater weight to punctuation, vocabulary and grammar.

The review team also urged the government to ensure that schools are judged over three years of results rather than one and given a rolling average in league tables.

Pupils who change schools mid-year should not be counted in schools? Sats results, the review said.

The maths, reading, spelling, vocabulary and punctuation tests should continue to be externally assessed, while the speaking and listening elements should still be marked internally, Bew said.

A small proportion of pupils, 5%, should continue to sit a science test to monitor standards. The review said the government should publish a wider range of data, in addition to Sats results, so that parents could put the test scores in context and secondary school teachers had a better understanding of pupils? achievements.

Sats results go towards school league tables and unions say this forces teachers to spend the final year of primary school cramming pupils for the tests, rather than providing a rounded education.

Where tests are assessed by teachers, rather than by external markers, the results still appear in league tables. But teachers say that if they assess their pupils throughout the year, they are more likely to show what they are actually capable of.

The National Association of Head Teachers ?cautiously welcomed? Bew?s report.

Russell Hobby, general secretary of the NAHT, said teacher assessment for writing would ?reduce drilling and give both parents and secondary schools a far more accurate picture of pupils? achievement?.

But the NASUWT union said the review had ?come up with a fudge?.

Bew said: ?Teacher assessment should always make up the larger part of assessment.

?This overcomes the dangers of teaching to the test.?

The government will respond to the review next month.