IT’S good to see that 95 per cent of trainee teachers who took the numeracy test passed it. My calculator tells me 5 per cent didn’t.
The extra expense, the extra work, and the universal irritation which the numeracy tests have caused were, surely, all worth it to have identified that minority of new teachers from which our schools have now been saved.
But what next? Will the powers-that-be conclude the tests were too easy, making them successively harder to prove a point? Or too difficult, amending them to claim next year (when only 4.9 per cent fail) that standards are rising?
Mike Newby
Chair, Universities Council for the Education of Teachers
58 Gordon Square, London WC1
