THE most creative thing we can do with the tests is to stop them and save everyone involved a lot of time, energy and money.
The massive edifice of testing, with all its associated outcomes of loss of teaching and learning time, increase in stress, the separation of children into successes and failures, will eventually crumble. This is because the foundations of high-stakes testing, based upon accountability and the use of children as political pawns, are pedagogically unsound and socially divisive.
Just as the Berlin Wall fell, so will tests. I just hope the latter don’t last as long as the former.
Mike Ollerton Tenter End Docker, Cumbria
