I’ve heard it all now: Nick Gibb has claimed that it is teachers’ fault that primary school children are becoming stressed and anxious about the Sats. He said this (and failed to answer correctly a question designed for 11-year-olds) live on air on 3 May - the day of the kids’ strike.

The schools minister’s position is untenable. There are good reasons for the stress in primary schools now. This week a ComRes survey of 10- and 11-year-olds for the BBC’s Newsround found that in the run-up to the tests 59 per cent of children were nervous, 39 per cent were worried and 27 per cent felt stressed.

Ministers would do well to recognise that it is not just the children who are stressed. Teachers and school leaders, whose jobs are hard enough without having to cope with government incompetence, have had their working lives made immeasurably worse because of the chaotic arrangements for Sats this year. Today’s announcement that the answers to the key stage 2 spelling, punctuation and grammar (Spag) test had been published online, follows hard on the heels of the pre-publication of the KS1 Spag test, which was found, by a teacher, on the Standard and Testing Agency’s (STA) website for teachers and parents to download and use for test practice.

Delay and disorder

Every aspect of the government’s implementation of the new Sats tests has been characterised by delay and disorder. One needs only to look at the incompetent management of the KS2 guidance for teacher assessment of writing. After the STA’s first set of guidance was pulled because it was unworkable, the second set of guidance arrived, late, in February. This guidance was, similarly, unworkable. Since February there have been no fewer than five “clarifications” of the guidance issued. A further 13 updated documents were released on 24 March - the last day of term, 16 days after the previous STA “clarification” of its earlier guidance.

But it is not just the administration of the Sats that is creating stressed school leaders and teachers, it is also their content. Not only are the English Spag tests ridiculously difficult, requiring six-year-olds to recognise, and name, nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, noun phrases, past/present tense, progressive form, statements and commands, but they also fail to improve pupils’ ability to write well. The evidence for this statement is contained in a 2012 Department for Education paper written by its own education, standards and research team, which concludes that grammar teaching is effective only when put into context, which according to the DfE means:

• Grammatical constructions and terminology are introduced at a point that is relevant to the focus of learning.
• The emphasis is on effects and constructing meanings, not on the feature or terminology itself.
• The learning objective is to open up a “repertoire of possibilities”, not to teach about correct ways of writing.

Have ministers accessed and read their own department’s research summaries and guidance for teachers? And if they have, why are they presiding over a nation’s children working to name language parts, rather than developing their writing abilities through wide reading and regular opportunities to write for a range of purposes and audiences?

Maths tests don’t add up

The maths Sats are equally misguided and inappropriate. The Association of Teachers of Mathematics wrote to me recently, saying: “To be mathematically competent, people need to be able to approach tasks with flexibility, selecting methods that are appropriate and efficient for the task. The curriculum allows many methods to be developed for flexible use. However, contrary to this, the tests are constructed in a way that emphasises particular methods. The nature of the tests will encourage teachers and schools to focus on written methods rather than developing mental and flexible problem-solving. The requirement to learn times tables up to 12 is archaic (and is contrary to the advice given to the DfE by professional and learned organisations.”

The only conclusion that can be drawn is that these are badly designed tests. They serve only to narrow and constrain a curriculum that takes no account of, nor responds to, children’s developing understanding of concepts and their growing ability to adapt and shape the knowledge they are acquiring for their own ends (which is the essence of thought).

It’s not what you know

English schools come top of the international league tables for knowledge memorisation. This will not make us (to use, for the first and possibly only time in my life, a football metaphor) the Leicester City of international education systems. Because, as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development points out, the ability to simply acquire facts and more facts will no longer be enough to enable our children to face the challenges of the future. This is the key argument made recently by Andreas Schleicher, the international education expert, and the force behind the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) education league tables, who has written:

“The demands on learners, and thus on education systems, are evolving quickly. In the past, education was primarily about teaching people something; now, it’s about making sure that students develop a reliable compass and the navigation skills to find their own way through an increasingly uncertain, volatile and ambiguous world.

“A generation ago, teachers could expect that what they taught would equip their students with the skills needed for the rest of their lives. Today, teachers need to prepare students for more rapid economic and social change than ever before, for jobs that have not yet been created, to use technologies that have not yet been invented, and to solve social problems that haven’t arisen before. Put simply, the world no longer rewards people just for what they know - Google knows more every day - but for what they can do with what they know.”

Which leaves Mr Gibb, that Gradgrind champion of knowledge acquisition and memorisation, with a bit of dilemma, doesn’t it?

Dr Mary Bousted is general secretary of the ATL teaching union. She tweets as @MaryBoustedATL

Want to keep up with the latest education news and opinion? Follow TES on Twitter and like TES on Facebook