Local MP Tom Levitt has told High Peak teachers that they are right to raise concerns about the SATs tests which children take towards the end of their primary school education. “I have never believed that you improve children’s performance by testing them for the sake of it and I think SATs at Key Stage 2 have lost their original purpose. The process needs to be thought through again,” he told a meeting organised by the National Union of Teachers in Chapel en le Frith last week.

Mr Levitt, a former teacher, defended the principle of SATs, saying: “We do need to be able to assess how well schools are doing. Governments rightly need to know the impact of their funding and policy initiatives.” But he went on “SATs were intended to be a measure of schools, not of individual children. They have become very child focused as a result of being ‘built up’ by parents and the media, with an undoubted, unwelcome but inevitable element of ‘teaching to the test’.”

He acknowledged that the stress generated amongst teachers and pupils by the tests is significant. “It may be that a good method of assessment has become tainted if not fatally devalued over time”, he said.

The NUT and the National Association of Head Teachers are considering boycotting the tests next spring but the MP says that a decision to go ahead with the boycott now would be premature.

He told the meeting that he would be writing to the Secretary of State for Schools, Ed Balls, to convey High Peak teachers’ views about testing at Key Stage 2. He would also pass on the teachers’ view that Ofsted, the school inspectors, were doing a very good job and could be used better to provide objective measures of how well a school is doing.