On Wednesday, the education select committee is due to hear oral evidence on primary assessment. It launched its inquiry earlier this term, and within a few weeks had received just short of 400 written responses: more than twice the number received for the more general “purpose of education” inquiry launched last autumn. Many of the responses came from individual schools and teachers. Clearly, assessment in primary schools is a matter of great importance.

However, one of the first areas that should be addressed is the very general use of the word “assessment”. Inevitably, in responding to the parliamentary inquiry, much of the focus has been on the use of key stage tests to hold schools to account. After all, that is the main involvement government has. But we must make sure to separate that from assessment more widely. Assessment goes on in our classrooms every single day, and that work is a vital part of the job. We ought not to let the tyranny of accountability undermine that.

Often, people presume the solution is either very simple, or very complex. The first group like to presume that if we simply scrapped tests and league tables and government involvement, that all the problems would vanish and schools would excel. The truth is, though, that government has a role in holding schools to account. With no common framework, it is hard to identify those that are falling short, and even harder to tackle them. The government would never be willing to return to such a state of affairs, and nor should we want them to.

At the other extreme, there are those who are concerned that test data don’t show the whole picture. Of course, they’re right - but the solution is not to add ever increasing layers of complexity.

Complicating the issue

Replacing tests with teacher assessment doesn’t solve the problem. Adding further judgements about wellbeing or creativity doesn’t solve the problem. Trying to account for family context or social deprivation in the results doesn’t solve the problem. They all just complicate the issue.

Let us instead embrace the idea that the data from statutory assessments is only part of the picture. Instead of arguing to get rid of it, or temper it, we should be welcoming the collection of data centrally. Yes, it is flawed data, but that will be the case whatever we do. Teacher assessment is flawed. Contextual value-added data is flawed. For every step we take to try to make the data fairer, we end up giving the data an undeserved credibility.

Instead, we should be pushing to move in the opposite direction. Let’s keep statutory assessment to a minimum. I’d be happy with a baseline assessment at the start of primary school, and a set of tests at the end of key stage 2. It’s perfectly fine that we only collect national data on a very small section of the work schools do, so long as government and others recognise exactly that.

Inspection teams should raise questions based on the narrow data, but they should also be sufficiently knowledgeable to recognise the limitations of it.

The DfE should expect children to achieve, but should also be capable of understanding that achievement does not always mean rising test results.

The solution to the limitations of the accountability system is not to try to defeat them, but to admit to them - and find intelligent ways of using the data to provide an excellent education.

Michael Tidd is deputy head at Edgewood Primary School in Nottinghamshire