Commenting on this week’s SATs, Dr Mary Bousted, Joint General Secretary of the National Education Union, said:
"This week's Key Stage 2 SATs have been a punishing experience for many pupils and staff. In the words of one member, ‘as a teacher, it’s the most stressed I have ever felt.’ Children, even if they're confident readers, have struggled to complete papers.
"The problems of SATs are not confined to a single week. For months, sport, the arts, the humanities and the sciences have been squeezed from timetables for English, Maths and practice papers. Soon, SATs results will tell hundreds of thousands of pupils that they have not met the expected standard and they will take this demotivating label with them into their secondary schools.
"This is not a system that is concerned about children and their learning. There are better ways of assessing pupils. There are better forms of school accountability. It is about time the government started looking at them."