Last week the Liberal Democrats proposed dropping primary testing at their party conference - and in light of the damaging distortions entrenched in the SATs, how right they are.
What matters about the government's attempt to bury his year's SATs results is not the deception, but it’s longer-term significance: the enormous importance they've attached to primary targets. Blair's government set off on a highly ambitious democratising agenda for education, but its targets - ironically to demonstrate its success - have come to pervert that agenda.
The reality is there's very little educational purpose in trying to quantify learning in the early years. The impetus to do so is political rather than pedagogical. The result of this attempt to standardise pupil and learning together with unrealistic expectations about the outcome has sabotaged the government's equalising project. Target chasing is now jeopardising the potential of education for the very pupils New Labour's education reforms promised to target - the pupils whose life chances depend on schooling more than anyone else.
But far worse, it is actually setting many of these pupils back. Those schools failing to reach centrally determined targets "naturally" tend to be those with more deprived intakes. Through the government's pledges to rapidly raise achievement in schools, inner city LEAs in particular have come under enormous pressure to reach targets through cramming. Cramming meaning not additional pressure on pupils at test time, but turning the "snapshot" of learning which children are tested on in the SATs into the sum of their learning throughout the year.
The risk therefore, is that as the government moves ever closer to reaching its targets, pupils are moving further away from learning. Research keeps confirming this with evidence that SATs results all too frequently reflect preparation for that year's test, not learning levels. This means good results - a short-term boon for the government - but at the expense of learning. Scrapping primary school targets should remedy this; the trouble is that where there is testing target setting seems to be irresistible. So let's not wait until the Lib Dems get into power to scrap primary tests altogether.