The Tyranny of Testing – Is the Backlash Coming?

The Tyranny of Testing – Is the Backlash Coming?
By Warwick Mansell, freelance education journalist

    “The system has to change. I don’t really know what the answer is, but I do know we don’t get the best out of our pupils by demoralizing or devaluing their teachers.”

So began a heartfelt blog posting published in March 2014 by a young teacher who has been grappling with what seems to be England’s increasingly suffocating professional-accountability-through-student-assessment regime.

To an outsider such as me  – I am a journalist and parent whose children have yet to go through compulsory education – it seems as if English schools are in the grip of a kind of insanity. A system which has an internal logic, but begins to look more than a little crazy when you stand back.