I scarcely know where to begin in summing up the packed and crazy year that we have all been through. I keep reassuring staff that this is not the norm and that in 28 years of teaching I have never known anything like it. 

We had previously complained that under successive administrations the pace of change in education was ridiculous and ill-thought-out. The past year has made all previous change look pedestrian and positively sedate in implementation.

First we got on with implementing our shiny and rather huge new school improvement plan, which contained the many changes we were to oversee, including how to assess all subjects with no levels, grade descriptors or any guidance other than a quick instructional video by Tim Oates [of Cambridge Assessment] that would explain everything; a bit like the safety briefing on an aeroplane - sketchy in detail, alarming if you stopped to think about it, and best ignored while you concentrate on the journey ahead. In the vacuum of guidance on assessment, we managed to devise a set of assessment criteria which was: rigorous, appropriate for our children and which teachers understood.

We started to wrestle with the testing regime in foundation stage with the implementation of the new baseline tests. We had been given three suppliers to choose from - a system that during national consultation had been predicted to result in inconsistent data that would produce an incoherent national picture.

They took two weeks to carry out, damaged relationships and impeded progress. They produced data that was released much later in the term, telling us what by that time we already knew. When assimilated nationally, they produced results that were too inconsistent and incoherent to be of any use. The Department for Education told us that this information would not be used but we should try again next year; how and with what they were not yet sure.

The testing and assessment debacle continued in a similarly bewildering vein throughout the year, with change after change drip fed through, culminating in the publication of the interim assessment frameworks. The reality of the implications of the inclusion of the small word “all” began to dawn on practitioners; that in proving the writing ability of each pupil against “all” of the descriptors in only three months’ time, they would have to make up to 1,500 judgements per class with evidence to support.

The atmosphere in classrooms changed, as children were forced to complete contrived and formulaic writing tasks in order to provide a sufficient evidence base. The reality that imperfect handwriting and specific spelling problems would prevent children from working at age-appropriate levels, regardless of content and grammar, created further pressure in classrooms.

Teachers at the point of exhaustion

Staff became increasingly panicked by their children’s inability to understand the subjunctive form or to spot a fronted adverbial or the difference between a coordinating or a subordinating conjunction. The children were drilled more and more on Spag: practice test materials became part of their daily diet. The calculation paper, with speedy practice of the four rules of number to an incredibly high computational level, joined this dry diet and our teachers drove themselves to the point of exhaustion to try to make all of this part of a rich and engaging learning experience.

The public became more aware of the issues, leading to an unprecedented parent and children’s strike on the 3 May. As children became increasingly confused, stressed and bored, and teachers began their anti-depressant treatments, the country began a new game of “Could you pass a Sats paper?” On social media, in newspapers, on the BBC’s Question Time and even in Prime Minister’s Questions, parents, celebrities, the prime minister and the education ministers got questions wrong, had a good giggle about it and got on with their everyday lives; instead of stopping and reminding themselves that these tests were not to be taken by adult graduate MPs or journalists, but by ordinary 10 and 11-year-old children across the country.

As headteacher, I watched this oncoming car crash in horror, listening to the former education minister assuring us that she made no apologies for raising standards and that negative teachers needed to stop moaning and making themselves unhappy and just get on with doing what we had been told to do.

Sure enough, during Sats the administration of the tests was awful. Spag tests were published online before they were taken, resulting in key stage 1 Spag tests being cancelled and KS2 being discredited. In both key stages children and staff looked bemused at reading content that bore no relation to the sample materials they had seen. One panicked six-year-old looked up at her teacher with eyes like plates and when the teacher mouthed, “I’m sorry” at her, gave her teacher a hug and got on with bravely trying her best; all of her many achievements from the year to be discarded in a simple judgement that says: “Not at expected levels.”

In KS2, some children were blindly confident, crashing through their papers with swift assurance whilst failing spectacularly. Others gave up, shook and cried, some put their heads on desks, and teachers patrolled the room, rubbing children’s backs and encouraging them on to greater efforts. Teachers cried in the staffroom and at home, storms of protest grew on social media and everybody waited for the results.

When the results came, the scale of the chaos was starkly obvious - 53 per cent of the country was working at expected levels, a drop of over 20 percentage points from the previous year and below the national floor level of 55 per cent.

Further insult was added to injury when it became clear that the marking was wildly inconsistent, resulting in hours of time being taken on checking papers and resubmitting them for re-marking. We have just sent our children’s reports home with test results included and a bewildering range of grading produced by the DfE that we can only hope will cause enough confusion that children will not realise that it means they have failed to meet the expected standard, just as they begin difficult school transitions. 

And so the year ends. We will go on holidays, lick our wounds and write a new school improvement plan, whilst wondering what next year will bring.

We have a change of guard at the Department for Education and a changing national and political landscape evolving around us: can Nicky Morgan’s successor learn from the mistakes of past administrations? Each year I say it can’t get any worse - last year it did.

Siobhan Collingwood is the headteacher of Morecambe Bay Community Primary School​

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