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Called on to do long division, how would you fare? I had no illusions going in. I couldn’t do it the first time round and, four decades later, it seemed unlikely the situation had improved. (For a split second I thought AI might help, but it was like listening to street directions, only worse.) And so, while parents of 11-year-olds offer sympathy and support for their children ahead of year 6 Sats exams next week, let’s not lose sight of the real victims here, which is us parents who have been forced to revisit multi-stage maths problems when we had made large and deliberate life choices to avoid them.
Of course, Sats “don’t matter”, or if you’re a more liberal parent, exams as a whole don’t matter – a statement that, if it was a consoling lie at one time, seems to be becoming ever more true. Arguments around the value of testing have been going on for ever, but as AI eviscerates the entry-level job market and university degrees become increasingly expensive and at odds with the skills young people may actually need, you have to wonder whether the old systems of education are still fit for purpose – and if they’re not, what exactly should replace them?
It’s a question to join all the existing doubts we have about what it is that tests actually test, and whether being exam-smart, with its narrow definition of intelligence, should be the singular determinant of a child’s likely future success. The pendulum on this swings back and forth; when I was at school, course work was a big thing, then Michael Gove came along and wrenched us back to the 1950s, and now here I am, on a Tuesday night, helping my kid with a test prep question about the “past progressive tense” and crying, “I’m literally a writer and I don’t know what this means!” (Don’t imagine overuse of the word “literally” makes me feel better about this.)
I would, needless to say, rather not be doing this, and yet alternative systems of assessment always seem to fall short. My kids did most of their primary school education in New York during those final years of enthusiasm for gentle parenting and “prizes for all”, so that, despite being in one of the most competitive cities in the world, they sat two consecutive years of state tests for which there was no upper time limit. (One of them took this rule at face value and returned to her exam paper after a leisurely lunch, only relinquishing it when her fourth-grade teacher howled, “You’re killing me here,” and forced her to hand it over.)
Irrespective of what’s being tested, meeting a deadline under pressure seems to me a useful skill to learn early. So, too, learning to move on if you don’t get the grade that you need, or that, correctly channelled, adrenaline has uses. I’m too lazy to be a tiger mom, but equally, I’ve never loved the approach that seeks entirely to neutralise pressure around children. Now, gentle parenting is on the wane, and we’re back to what seems to me a more usefully robust assessment of what kids can and can’t stand. If nothing else, Sats serve a ritualistic purpose that marks the end of something and the start of something new.
Obviously, this makes a case for exams more as life experience than learning tool, in the same way that a university education these days seems to offer best value as a very expensive developmental stage that may not be met by plunging straight into work. I think of that quote by the American novelist Don DeLillo, who when he left advertising, argued that what he needed most in life was a moment “to smoke cigarettes, drink coffee and look at the world”. Financially, if it makes more sense for kids to eschew training systems built for a world becoming rapidly obsolete, what else will afford them the time to grow and think and look at the world?
None of which is helping me with this KS2 maths sheet where, oh god, we’ve reached the multi-stage questions about sweets in bags. I’m trying to set a good example by concentrating and holding on to my temper, but we’re only a few moments in when, like a man arguing that he didn’t get lost, the map is wrong, I find myself crying once again, “This literally doesn’t make sense.” Which, to look on the bright side, may provide a life lesson of its own – in the limitations of the adult emotional range relative to the occasionally bottomless maturity of children. My child pats my arm: “It’s OK.”
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Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
