Pre SAT anxiety

SATs. A primary teacher’s least favourite acronym. Of all the pointless education based acronyms which have come and gone in their fads over the years, this is one which has stuck! During my first year of teaching in Year 6 I can only describe my relationship with SATs as an obsessions – and not a healthy one. Everyday I would find a way to remind my class that everything we were doing was to prepare for SATs, I would drum home to children how important these tests were and what implications they would have on their time at secondary school, and god forbid someone dared to mention that they weren’t that important… I remember a girl who came in one day and told me that her mum said there was no reason to worry because “sats don’t really matter anyway, they’re just for the school to be judged on..!!” Like a red rag to a bull will suffice in explaining my response. 

Thankfully, I have now hold (and demonstrate) a high-contrasting viewpoint. I now realise the error of my ways and the needless pressure and expectations I placed on myself and the poor children, having often found myself comparing my view of SATs back then to the much more objective approach I now foster, I found myself asking why – why was I that SAt robot who saw these assessment as a genuine measure of my own competence. I truly believe the reason lay in moderation process, be that Ofsted, Local Authority, Cluster moderations, any form of moderation was – I believe – a large factor behind the reason I was determined to dot ever I and cross every T. 

How does that picture look now? I still have children in tears, crying over a poor score in their practise papers, feeling rubbish about themselves because of a number written on the cover of the SPaG, Spelling, Reasoning, Reading or Arithmetic assessment. I recently had a conversation with a colleague about such an incident and explained how it feels like we are torturing these poor children, evaluating their intelligence in 5 areas of their brain – I would like to point out, I think my school has a wonderful approach to SATs prep and we certainly do not forced feed children papers and scrutinise each individual child’s score. Yes, we take scores in to ensure progress but we never make children feel bad about a poor score. No matter which way we, as teachers, play it to our children, assessment will always have one fundamental aim: to judge how well you are able to remember something which you have been taught. Not how well you can apply it, not how secure that understanding is or to what extent you can use it in everyday life, but how well your memory works on the day of the paper. 

The bottom line is that children are not stupid, no matter how much we try to hide it or to put on a front, they know how important the SATs are for us as teachers, and as a result they shoulder a large percentage of that burden, as admirable as it is, it is no way for an 11 year old child to spend their last few months at primary school. Until the day comes that success is widely measured across a range of attributes, these pre SAT anxiety posts will continue to be pertinent. As Albert Einstein once pointed out, ” everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by it’s ability to climb a tree, it will spend it’s whole life thinking it is stupid..”