The general secretary of the NUT teachers’ union has threatened to “break” the primary assessment system if the government does not listen to its concerns about testing.

Speaking on the final day of the union’s annual conference in Cardiff, Kevin Courtney said that if politicians refused to listen to concerns raised about primary testing, “we must find a way to break the current failing system”.

“We want a new system of assessment.  We have the plans for it.  We want politicians to support it.  But we will have to break the current one if they won’t support it,” he added.

Boycott of ‘failing tests’

He said the union would “redouble efforts to build a boycott of the current failing tests”.

Speaking an hour after the Prime Minister Theresa May announced her intention to call a general election on 8 June, Mr Courtney said the NUT would seek to “make school funding the centre of this election campaign”. 

He called on members to “demand that every candidate in every constituency” pledges “no cuts to schools in their constituency or elsewhere”.

He said it “would be an absolute and total disgrace” if the government’s response to its consultation on the national funding formula was not made public before the election, because “parents deserve to know what they are voting for”.

Commenting on the Conservative Party’s plans to expand grammar schools, Mr Courtney said the election would decide whether England would see “the return to a system that rejects hundreds of thousands of children, condemning them to secondary modern education”.

He said he believed the prime minister had been “very nervous of using a legislative route” to expand selection because the policy did not appear in the Conservatives’ 2015 election manifesto and therefore faced opposition in the House of Lords.

“She has no electoral mandate but she is seeking one now,” he said.

He said the NUT needed to “popularise” its arguments against grammars “quickly” in the election campaign to head off the policy.

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