All primary school testing should be scrapped, according to a former teacher who has travelled the world to explore different education systems.
Alex Beard, who worked for a number of years in a London comprehensive, would also abolish England’s GCSE exams – which he described as having a “really negative effect” on education – and all single-sex schools.
Beard, who was speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Tuesday evening, recalled how his view of education in his own country was shaped by visiting South Korea, Finland and California for his book Natural Born Learners.
He said: “I would reform the exams system – I don’t think we need to have any tests at all during primary school. If we got rid of Sats I think that would give teachers the autonomy to set their own means of evaluating how their kids are getting on.”
Beard argued that both Sats and GCSEs “exercise a really negative effect on our education system – I know as a teacher I could teach my students to succeed in their GCSE exam and, when I reflect on that, I realise I wasn’t equipping them with real, long-term abilities, knowledge and skills that they could apply in the future”.
He added that “it really haunts me” to know that students whom he had helped to get a C pass at GCSE English might nevertheless be among one in five adults in the UK who have low levels of literacy. He reflected that the long hours of “careful training in exam technique left me feeling like I had failed them”.
“We should scrap GCSEs, just get rid of them completely – they have the most negative effect on our system, more than anything else,” he said.
Beard, who is a director in the Teach For All international education network, stressed that he sees positives in the English school system, particularly in the final school years.
He said: “We have quite a good national curriculum in England, we have good A levels, I think, but a GCSE exam you can learn by rote or do really well on without ever learning to think – you’re just like a sort of an exam-taking automaton.”
Beard was also unequivocal in his criticism of single-sex schools, and spoke from experience having attended one himself.
He said: “Kids tend to do better academically at single-sex schools, often, but I would get rid of them. I just think that you’re learning a strange thing about what the world is…and you can risk developing strange attitudes about gender. It accentuates the difference between girls and boys, when I think that we should be diminishing the differences today.”
Of the three countries he visited for his book, Finland struck him as having the most attractive education system, and he recalled that one of the country’s most highly regarded teachers told him “we have to delete this idea of competition in education”.
