My goddaughter hasn’t had an easy September. School is making her stressed, tearful and disheartened. The work pressures are piling up; the homework has increased threefold and the prospect of failure, of not making the grade, is constantly preying on her mind. She’s 10.

“I really don’t know what to do with her,” her mum told me. “She’s always loved going to school, but this year is so different.” The thing is, it really shouldn’t be different.

My goddaughter, like so many children, is a model student: bright, hardworking, impeccably behaved. She receives glowing reports from teachers and has always enjoyed school. Until this year.

“What don’t you like about Year 6?” I asked her.

“It’s Sats,” she told me. “Our teacher keeps telling us if we don’t pull our socks up and work harder we’re not going to meet the standard. She says this is a really important year for us because we have to pass Sats and get ready for secondary school; I’m really scared that I’ll fail and a secondary school won’t have me.”

Early onset Sats syndrome

Both she and her teacher seem to be suffering from early onset Sats syndrome. Faced with the seemingly impossible task of hauling a class of 10-year-olds from their baseline positions up to the lofty peaks of modal verbs and mastery, the teacher has let her panic spill out into the classroom: naturally, it has skimmed over the heads of the children who are of most concern and dropped heavily on to the shoulders of others.

The stress is even starting to put my goddaughter off reading. Since the class were told to read for a minimum of 100 minutes a week (and log their start and stop times each night), reading has become a chore, something to be ticked off.

“She struggles to even choose a new book,” her mum told me. “She says she can’t think what she likes and gets me to choose for her so she can start her minute timer. I’m pretty sure that what she reads isn’t sinking in.”

Clearly, this school’s method of tackling key stage 2 assessment isn’t working for all of its pupils, but if the tests weren’t so onerous, they wouldn’t need a method at all.

There’s no getting away from the fact that Sats weigh heavily upon Year 6. If children sail happily through them with confidence undented, it isn’t because the tests aren’t onerous but because their school is busting a gut to actively protect them from the feelings of stress and failure. Their teacher may appear to be relaxed and smiling but below the surface they will be living a frenetic, highly caffeinated existence and waking at 4am from dreams of spreadsheets and the past progressive.

In theory, Year 6 should pose no more problems for teachers or pupils than any other year group (if you define assessment as merely an organic part of education: a tool for checking on learning and measuring levels of achievement).

Sadly, if you believe that’s the system we’ve actually got, you are living in Cloud Cuckoo Land - or the Department for Education.

Jo Brighouse is a primary school teacher in the Midlands