I wonder how schools may welcome the current proposals concerning the re-appraisal(?) of SATs at the ages of seven and 11.

For many years I worked in a primary school within the borough and towards the end of my time there noticed how grossly addicted to testing and prescriptive learning the management of such schools had become.

It was appalling: instead of a broad and balanced curriculum the core subjects came to predominate, so much so that in one subject the statutory literacy hour was supplemented by three further hours a week of extended writing.

Something on the timetable had to give and the vulnerable sacrifices could not but be those subjects that did not come into the core category where they might be tested and schools thereby graded in league tables the arts generally, sports etc.

Classroom teaching of music was shortened and there was no longer two "sports" sessions a week (one for games and one for PE), merely one.

The curriculum became narrow and unbalanced. I would think that the local inspectorate chose not to notice this or rather not to act upon it in a way that might upset the management's over-riding concern to perform well in SATs (like dogs through a hoop).

Management allowed itself to be seduced into excuses to explain the fact that a broad and balanced curriculum did not in effect take place.

In theory of course, it did; in practice it did not, at least not during the normal school hours of compulsory learning.

Instead there was that creeping disease, the misuse of after-school clubs wherein those subjects not given their full timetable allowance and decent airing became extras outside the school's official learning day.

On paper it looked wonderful a plethora of clubs for this and that interest and what parent would not be interested in such a milieu for their child?

But this should really be put in the context of a deliberate withering by management of those subjects essential for the intellectual development of all children during a normal school day.

Balance

The current stance by the Government (if it is not simply verbal spin) is to be welcomed. Time and time again it has been pointed out by research and this fully backed by the inspectorate children do better, learn more and discipline is greatly improved where there is a full, broad and balanced curriculum on offer and, more importantly, acted upon, an environment where what often appears as the prescriptive (and alas, boring) endeavours encouraged by the over-rigorous attention to the core subjects is supplemented by the glorious creativity experienced in the foundation subjects. The latter have suffered abysmally in the last few years.

Let me, therefore, look to Dryden and some sort of resurrection: "The dead shall live, the living die and music shall untune the sky."

Name and address supplied

May 30, 2003 16:00