Professor Mick Waters should appreciate that the most important thing about any assessment is the use to which test results are put (“Academic backs Tory plan to shift national tests to Year 7”, July 24).

At the moment, rightly or wrongly, primary and secondary schools are held to account on the results of externally marked tests for which the children are well prepared by their teachers. It would seem that primary schools must now be judged on the results of testing by their secondary colleagues while there is no proposal to ask tutors to help hold secondaries to account by testing pupils in their first year of tertiary education. What is it about primary teachers that Professor Waters and the Tories find so untrustworthy?

Elizabeth Clover, Headteacher, Trafford.