Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if he will make an assessment of the effect of testing upon children of primary age; and what steps he is taking to research different methods of measuring achievement that benefits children.

Statutory tests have been an important part of the education system under different governments since the 1990s. They help teachers to identify the areas where children need additional support in order to master the fundamentals of English and mathematics, and in doing so ensure that every child is given the best chance to go on to succeed at secondary school. The core purpose of these tests is not to measure pupils, but rather to enable the Government to hold schools to account for the education they provide, and as such they should not be stressful for the children that take them.

Assessments in primary school also enable the Department to measure education standards over time, for example improvements in children’s reading and a declining attainment gap between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged pupils. Removing tests would risk jeopardising these gains.

As well as being an established feature of the education system in England, testing is also common practice across European and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, with 28 out of 35 countries assessing primary school pupils through national, standardised assessments.

All assessments produced by the Standards and Testing Agency (STA) are developed to a high standard. The test development process is rigorous, and includes trialling with pupils in a classroom setting to ensure they are suitable. The STA’s test handbook sets out this approach in more detail, and can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/2018-national-curriculum-test-handbook.