Early Years Foundation Stage (Miscellaneous Amendments) and Childcare Fees (Amendment) Regulations 2021

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Tuesday 13th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I support my noble friend’s regret Motion but, like other noble Lords, I go further and say that never is the right time to introduce these absurd baseline tests for four year-olds. They should be allowed to wither on the vine. But this is all on a par with Michael Gove’s introduction of rigid exam systems, built on by Nick Gibb’s rote learning and testing, rather than the development of skills that would be useful to pupils in later lives and work, and actually stimulating during their school years.

I recall Ed Balls deciding there was too much testing in education and withdrawing the SATs for key stage 3—for 13-year-olds. They were pointless and have not been missed. We are all aware that SATs increase stress for the pupils who undertake them and the staff who run them, and we are aware of the perverse incentives they give to head teachers. In what way does this improve the education of young people? As the More Than a Score campaign group has put it,

“statutory tests have been cancelled for two years now with zero negative impact on pupils’ education or on school performance. Paradoxically, while their absence has barely registered, their presence creates unwarranted stress on young children and schools, narrows the curriculum, and generates a fear of failure within the whole school community”,

and, as I said, they lead to perverse behaviour by head teachers under pressure.

Has anyone heard from parents, staff or children a cry of, “Oh no, we didn’t have year 2 or year 6 SATs?” No, because they are pointless. It is interesting that private schools do not have to do SATs. In 2018 it was calculated that only 18% of them do so. Schools that have the choice do not generally use them; state schools do not get that choice. Yet the Government now want to introduce the additional test for children starting school at the age of four—and they seem to think that September, after 18 months of Covid restrictions, which have had a big negative impact on the development of children, is the right time to implement this.

Looking at Covid, we know that childcare settings and support have been closed or limited and that parents are under intense pressure and often less able to devote time to the development of their preschool children because of the pressure to support the education of school-age children. We know that half of parents questioned said that their child was not spending time playing with friends in their home, meaning that they were missing out on vital socialising skills. How on earth could the Government think that this is the right time to introduce such a deeply flawed approach to education? Why would anyone want schools across the country to devote time to these baseline assessments rather than support young children often worse prepared for formal education than their predecessors?

The Government have said that each child will need to be assessed by a teacher for 20 to 30 minutes to collect data for the Minister’s department. This data will not benefit the child in any way. For a class of 30 children, that is a minimum of 10 hours’ learning time in the first weeks of school. It could be 15 hours. The data will not be used to support children. As we have heard, it will be used by the DfE to judge the school. The data will be collected by teachers at just the time when they should be settling young children into the school environment, not wasting their time testing them.

We know that there are serious questions about the reliability of these tests based on pilot testing. My noble friend Lord Knight speaks with great authority on that. We have already heard about the educational experts who have written to the Government about the RBA, saying that it was pointless and damaging. I know that this Government distrust experts, because they want to hear only prejudice. Is it not time, however, that they listened to the evidence and began to trust teachers and head teachers?

Kevin Courtney, joint general-secretary of the NEU said:

“In yet another end-of-term announcement, the government is confronting schools with new, unnecessary and harmful policies.”


What do the Government have against our teachers? I hope the Minister will be able to respond.

One advantage of home education during Covid is that parents have seen what a restricted and tedious curriculum this Government have forced into primary schools. As one parent put it:

“The curriculum is joyless, both to teach and to learn. In some parts it is developmentally inappropriate. For example, too little time is spent on the foundations of maths.”


Another commented:

“I was shocked and dismayed by the content of the English curriculum. It appeared that children were learning how to classify language to satisfy testing requirements and nothing more.”


How damning that is about the wretched education system this Government are putting on to our children.

I hope the Minister will listen to what is said tonight. This baseline testing really goes to the heart of the dreadful education system that the Government are putting on our children, which is having such a negative impact on their development.