All the talk over the past few weeks has been about the new expectations for Sats. We keep hearing of the new terminology that’s too difficult for education ministers and the difficulty levels that bamboozle the man on the street.

But as our Year 6 pupils sit down for their tests this week, what we’ve heard far less about is the loss of knowledge we face with the shift to the new national curriculum.

It seems sad to think that no longer will Year 6 children be introduced to the life and work of Evelyn Glennie. True, too many of them ended up thinking that she removed her shoes during performances so that she could dance, or keep her feet cool, rather than feeling the music, but at least they knew who she was. That knowledge, now, is at risk of being lost.

There’s the loss of the earthship, too. Might our budding scientists of the future miss out because they’ve not been able to find out about this wondrous futuristic building?

OK, so maybe it looked a bit like a greenhouse, and maybe some of the children took the name rather literally - ”Why is the word ship used for this new type of house? Because it’s a ship” - but it has to be better than the wretched letters to Norman in his treehouse.

Forgotten heroes

That’s not to say that all of the past reading papers will be mourned. I’ve yet to see anyone tearful over the loss of “Caves and Caving in Daveley Dale” - although it was always amusing to be asked if we’d really spent £2 on the tatty booklet come mock test time.

There’ll also be few people now old enough to recall the Further Adventures of Souperkid [sic] or the experiences of Sharon Brown, the lorry driver delivering tennis balls across Europe.

And these latest losses only add to the passing of previous greats in the field of writing tests.

If there was ever a secret society of Year 6 teachers - unlikely as that might seem - then surely part of the initiation ceremony would have been the requirement to take care of a miptor for a week. They might, too, be asked to report on a new pair of trainers, which presumably they’d be able to keep in their “Pack-it-in bag”. And, of course, the patron of this marvellous organisation would have to be the late, great Pip Davenport.

These are all big losses to education. In their absence we strive instead to find ways of squeezing another preposition phrase into a dreary text filled with punctuation.

Perhaps one or two old tasks should be brought back to life? A play script about not wanting to go to bed may ensure the inclusion of multiple colons but it makes for an incredibly tedious read. I know, I marked 300 of them.

Michael Tidd is deputy head of Edgewood Primary in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire. He writes weekly for TES and tweets at @MichaelT1979

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