Original paper headline: KS2 `failure’It was sad to see the misleading headlines attached to other newspapers’ reporting of the KS2 national test results last week, such as “20 per cent of 11-year-olds fail English”.
Where is this notion of children “failing” located? Children at the end of Year 6 are tested in certain limited aspects of the curriculum. There is no “pass” mark; the Government has arbitrarily invented a national target that encourages schools to regard level 4 as the “standard”. If the Government was not being allowed to bully schools into conforming to this one-dimensional view of standards, we would have less reportage of “failure” and more celebration of children being supported to success.
- Professor Bill Boyle, Chair of Educational Assessment, School of Education, Manchester University.
