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BOYCOTT OF KS3 ENGLISH SATs URGENT Dear Heads of English There has been increasing anger about the revised KS3 English SATs since November and there have been many calls for a boycott. The fact that the current Shakespeare paper has now been abandoned in its present form for 2004 makes the preparation for this year's discredited tests a completely unacceptable addition to teachers' workload. The NUT National Executive is meeting on 27th March to consider a ballot to boycott SATs at all key stages. There is a NATE Council meeting on Saturday 22nd March at which the issue of action against the KS3 English SATs will be raised. LATE is urging all secondary English teachers to write immediately to Doug McAvoy,
General Secretary and John Johnson,
Chair NATE, arguing strongly for a boycott. Please copy the letter below or write your own version and post it first class by Thursday 20th March in order to ensure your views are considered. If possible get all members of your dept. to sign it. To help us get a sense of the strength of feeling please e-mail johngwilks@hotmail.com with your name, position, school and education authority and "We support the boycott" in the subject line. (NUT members might also like to send a similar e-mail to Bernard Regan, NUT Inner London National Executive member, at wta@clara.co.uk) Best wishes John Wilks (LATE
General Secretary) Dear We fully support the call by Thomas Tallis English Dept. in the TES on Friday 28th February for a boycott of the revised KS3 English SATs. We are very concerned at the content of the SATs sample papers and mark schemes. They do not reflect the views of English teachers during the consultation period. We are dismayed that the tests represent a model of assessment that is at odds with that in use at GCSE and beyond. The mark scheme for the reading component is reductive; nuances of meaning are disregarded in favour of shallow "naming of parts"; the questions are as much designed to test the students' knowledge of critical and grammatical terminology as their understanding of the text itself. The writing mark scheme is atomistic, with a higher proportion of marks awarded for surface features than for composition and effect. We do not see the changes as being at all helpful in developing confident, competent readers and writers. There is an over-emphasis on a knowledge of linguistic terminology and a destructively fragmented approach to assessing pupils' reading and writing. The tests are a wholly inadequate way of summing up three years of attainment. They do not assess the National Curriculum since there is no assessment of Speaking and Listening, drama, or ICT and appear to be driven by the KS3 Framework for English which is non-statutory. Furthermore, the status given to these tests in terms of league tables and targets is creating an enormous pressure to teach to the test. The changes to these SATs impose unnecessary stress and workload on English teachers who are already having to cope with AS/A2 syllabus changes and assessment problems, new GCSE specifications for this year's Year 10 classes (some of which have been amended as late as November 2002) and the introduction of the English Strand of the Key Stage 3 National Strategy into this year's Year 9. The late arrival of the revised KS3 English SATs sample exam papers and mark schemes (most departments did not receive them until November, i.e. after the beginning of the academic year in which pupils will sit the new tests) has created an extra burden at a time of already considerable change. We are not willing to limit our pupils' achievements in English by wasting time training them in narrow test skills. We urge you to support our request for a boycott. Yours sincerely Go
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