Children are being stripped of their human rights to a well-rounded education, a U.K. teachers’ leader has said.
Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), said that constant testing of children was in breach of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child—which states children have a right to a broad education.
In particular, national tests for 10-and 11-year-olds—formerly known as SATs—risk reducing children into “little bundles of measurable outputs,” she told the NUT’s annual conference in Liverpool on Tuesday.
“Some of the articles are about basic human rights, these include the right to a name, the right to be safe, and the right to be educated in the round, not only to pass exams,” she said in her speech.
“I think that’s a pretty high authority on which to rely when we say the SAT regime is wrong and it must go.”
The NUT, together with the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) is halfway through a ballot of its members as to whether to boycott this year’s tests—which begin the week beginning May 10.
Blower told the conference that the boycott would be an “industrial action with no downside.”
“Children will be taught, teachers will feel less stressed on behalf of themselves and those whom they teach, parents, and carers will be told how their children have done for the whole of this year across a whole range of subjects,” she said, and crucially, no one will be reduced to a level by the tests.
“Children will be praised and made to feel confident about what they can do, not made a failure for what they can’t,” she added.
While Conservative and Labor parties have said that they would keep SATs following the general election, Schools Secretary Ed Balls has floated the idea that they could be replaced with teacher assessments if they prove “robust” enough.
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