Should SATs be scrapped?
In the UK SATs are a hotly debated topic mainly because of the young ages that these tests are taken at.
Year 6 SATs can be useful because when they arrive at secondary school teachers can sort them into sets reasonably quickly, however year 2 SATs don't do this job and many of the children taking SATs in year 2 can get very stressed whilst taking them.
One subject that is taken in the year 6 SATs is SPAG (Spelling, punctuation and grammar) is extremely difficult (GCSE Level, the tests that are taken when a child is 16 and on the verge of adulthood). This means that schools have to teach children SPAG more than they have to teach them other, more important subjects such as English and Maths. From my son Jack's experiences SPAG isn't a very interesting thing to learn about. And, the strange thing is, when I was a child we hardly ever learnt about grammar.
Although, the pressure put on children to pass there SATs is immense, if the results are poor then they could lose their jobs. Therefore, when a child sees that their teacher (who could be a great role model to them) is stressed then this could affect their stress levels. Also, stress is a major cause of the aging process speeding up, therefore a childs life expectancy could be reduced slightly and a teacher who teaches SATs year after year could have their life expectancy shortened more. Although, this won't shorten a child's life for years on it's own, in the modern world fast food and ready meals count for a lot of the average child's diet. So this will all add up.
Recently the UK Government scrapped level 6 maths and all science tests. The scrapping of the year 6 maths test was very annoying and frustrating for my son Jack because he was doing level 6 maths with a specialist maths teacher and was being challenged. But, when year 6 SATs were scrapped, the Headteacher the school decided to stop challenging the children of higher ability and focus on getting some of the year 3 students with a lower ability more lessons with this specialist maths teacher.
In conclusion, I believe that SATs should be scrapped because it is a very stressful experience for some students and a very dull one for others. Also, teachers are put under extreme pressure to make kids perform well in their SATs which often results in extreme testing and kids being drilled on things that commonly appear in SATs.