TTAINMENT gap confirmed,” The TES Scotland headlined on January 25. “A steady performance, but unspectacular,” the article suggested. It was trailed on the front page with “Poverty gap shows in results”. Across the land primary teachers feel disgusted, frustrated and undervalued by such reporting of “performance”. Here we go again - only what can be measured is valued and Glasgow and other deprived areas are not reaching national targets. What a revelation.

The Scottish Executive comment is particularly offensive, that primary 2 data is to be treated with caution as a lot of it is not confirmed by testing.

Teachers with classes “underachieving” are being subjected to enormous pressure in many schools and local authorities to “raise attainment”. How is this to be done? Competent pupils pass the target-setting tests on schedule. The next group in the class are less confident and the great strength of primary education in the past was that the teacher was able to gear the curriculum to meet the needs of these pupils and build their self-esteem.

The educational concept of “readiness” was a guiding principle of teaching, that is, when children are “ready” they grasp the concept much more effectively, rather than constantly shoving the curriculum at them - ready or not, you must pass this test now. So in order to pass a test before you are “ready”, you must practise the test format, rather than grasping concepts and consolidating understanding. Also we must spend more time on language and maths, to the detriment of the expressive arts, which has great power in building self-esteem and motivation in all pupils.

Teachers warned of these dangers before national testing was introduced and it is professionally depressing that all these warnings have come to pass.

Pupils are bound to notice this change of emphasis and cannot ignore the fact they are failing; no matter how much primary teachers try to hide the facts from them. Maintaining motivation and a positive partnership with parents in this situation often becomes impossible.

This feeds social exclusion and that must be recognised in Government thinking. When the discipline task group visited Glasgow last year, a primary 1 teacher spoke about the enormous amount of time invested in socialising the pupils, settling them into school life, encouraging their development in a child-centred way. She felt very strongly that HMI did not seem to recognise and value this work, but was more interested in national test results. In another Glasgow primary, HMI suggested maths homework every night could help raise standards. Now why hadn’t the school thought of that?

Your article notes that younger children are performing better. How could that happen? Could it be the reduction in class sizes? Could it be early intervention strategies? Could attainment be linked to investment? Cynics will say level A is too easy - sorry, not challenging enough.

So we wait in fear and dread of the outcome of the latest action group on assessment for the pre-school and 5-14 stages. Readers may remember a consultation document from a minister called Helen Liddell. What can have happened to that? Well it’s back on the agenda.

I think the new Education Minister would welcome a change. She is really keen on social inclusion, so let us give her some radical solutions. Abolish national testing and increase the sampling of the Assessment of Achievement Programme. The AAP can produce national Scottish reports without branding “failing” authorities in areas of high social exclusion. Teachers will not have to tell pupils at ages seven or eight and their parents about failure either.

This would also be the only acceptable way to consider science performance. National testing in science would be a nightmare; it would destroy primary teachers’ confidence. The expressive arts would also wither, worsening social exclusion.

he 5-14 levels are not lines that pupils cross from one day to the next. Learning is much more complex than that. Assessment goes on all day, every day in schools. It is integral to teaching and learning, but never should be seen as an end in itself. It must no longer be allowed to drive the primary curriculum. The action group must recognise that for nine out of the 11 school years it is considering children spend all of their school time with the same teacher for a year. These teachers have an amazing bank of information in their heads, updated minute by minute. It is when that information becomes dead that it has to be recorded on a thousand individual tick sheets and filed in folders no one ever looks at. What for? Even HMI will only sample a few.

A recommendation from the action group to abolish worthless record-keeping? Now that would be met with universal acclaim. It would also be a welcome recognition of the need for professional priorities in the use of teacher time. Post McCrone, primary teachers only have one and a half hours per week of collegiate time. Surely worthless recording is not how we want to use this. Nor is it how we want to spend our additional McCrone non-contact time in future years.

Of course, assessment information informs reporting to parents and receiving teachers - but please, please, not in the form of 100 tick sheets. So let us see some real action from this action group - less is more.

May Ferries is depute headteacher of Victoria primary in Glasgow.