One of my most memorable and surreal moments in education was watching my headteacher being run over by a Year 6 teacher.

The teacher was stressed-out because Ofsted had the affront to tell her that the library should be open at dinner time. The head had gone out to try to get her back in school. As I watched the headteacher slowly roll over the car bonnet and crash on to the black tarmac of the staff car park, I couldn’t help thinking, “I hope I never get so stressed in teaching that I feel the need to run over the headteacher.”

I am sure that if that teacher had been responsible for this year’s cohort of Year 6 she would not have stopped at running the headteacher over, she would have reversed, got out of the car, slammed his head repeatedly into the door, kicked him for good luck and sped off with his wallet.

Sats have been an utter shambles this year, rushed, badly planned, utterly inconsistent, and have turned the important educational relevance of testing into a joke. Armando Iannucci, creator of The Thick of It, could not have done it better: reality, this week, has been more surreal and ridiculous than fiction.

Leaks, tweets and cultural irrelevance

Monday:

What the … ? So is this about our children? Are we proving a point? Is there some sort of ministerial “oneupmanship league” we don’t know about?

UK minister: “Yeah, like. Our key stage 2 Sats are like totally challenging.. like. They say our 11-year olds have to read at the level of like 15-year-olds. It’s like totally minted… like. We are going to rule the world!”

Finland’s minister: “Sorry?”

Children cried, teachers cried, children threw up, teachers threw up on children and headteachers looked up “jobs like headship”.

The big issue for me on Monday was all about “Bagging”. We had some children sitting the test with coloured papers. The guidance was unclear. Do I include these papers in the main bag or do I keep them until the end of the test and bag them altogether? I phoned people, they laughed at me, we phoned the DfE… They were very busy but 90 minutes later they said, “Good question!” 

Thanks! 

We bagged them at the end… They then sent an email out to everyone explaining why we were all very confused… All I thought about is the many people who had already sealed the bag!

Tuesday:

Leak day! I decided to dress up all “rogue”. We were smashing the system on Tuesday!

Oh no… We were just continuing to do what we were told. The test was easy. The children laughed. Apart from the many that cried.

The DfE tweeted about not leaking tests (ha!). Even the tests that had been taken. We were sworn to a secret government pact. Children were told NOT to talk about the tests… To just forget about them. It all felt very Orwellian and stupid.

Wednesday:

All I can think about is house prices… are we selling our young generation hope, subliminally, via the tests? I’d buy those houses! I kept thinking about the nature of the questions… They had certainly got tough but, for me personally, they are not tough enough. Lucky for us the DfE is doing something about it. I managed to get hold of a leaked 2017 Reasoning Paper question (just hang around a government website and you’ll soon find one)… I am going rogue for you all:

If a teacher has a reduced budget due to increased national insurance contributions and the rising cost of living, and vodka is costing £30 a bottle… how many pints of gold top milk could they buy instead? Remembering that inflation is at 2.3 per cent and the King of Jordan has declared that Shakespeare was really born in Russia. We would also like you to take into account a “what if” scenario in which Donald Trump is the president of the United States of America… And Nasa is predicting a comet impact in 2018. 

We would watch the despair of teachers as the children equated the inflation, milk prices and vodka costs in real terms to teachers’ monthly income but missed the Armageddon tax of a comet impact right at the end… Damn, one mark lost. One teacher is likely to jump out of a window because a child didn’t use a recognised method to work out their answer.

We cancelled Friday’s VIP Sats foam party. 

Thursday:

I made my declaration. The DfE tweeted about keeping all the uncollected tests secure… Damn, I thought, why did I leave them on a bench next to the school fire pit? Why didn’t I think about keeping them secure, in a safe, in a locked cupboard somewhere? 

I thanked the helpful DFE tweeter!

Friday:

Children made films, worked clay, laughed, created games, talked gaming strategy, went outside into the sun, ran, sat on ants’ nests, played football, wrote stories, balanced Pringles boxes on their nose and told jokes… If only we could devise a test to measure if any of this was worthwhile and important?

Overall I did love the DfE tweeter this week. I am not sure whether they were supposed to be ironic or serious. I visited the DfE Twitter feed on Wednesday night to read a tweet that said, “Please remove this tweet as the tests are still live.” 

Someone had mentioned a type of thing, you know… That thing that happens in maths to sort things? That maths thing? 

Are the tests still live? 

What’s that red dot climbing up my chest? Is that a laser sight? Oh my GOD! I’ll take it down! I’ll TAKE IT DOWN, for the love of God! 

Noooooo!

Old Primary Head is a headteacher in the West County. He tweets at @Oldprimaryhead1

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