Exams are always a tough and stressful time, no matter how old you are and at what point in your life they find themselves cropping up.
But for one Year 6 class, the pressure to succeed in their exams was so much that they felt the need to write an open letter to the Secretary of State for Education, Nicky Morgan.
The ten and eleven year olds from Andoversford Primary School in Cheltenham wrote a heartfelt letter to the Conservative MP after a particularly stressful SATs exam left them feeling “deeply disappointed” and “traumatised”.
As well as stating their dislike of the “especially dull” and “uninspiring” texts, the children felt that some of the material would have been better suited to pupils five years older than themselves, and called for the future SATs papers to be reviewed in order to better assess next year’s students.
“To realise that however hard we tried, we could not achieve our goal is simply unfair and makes all our hard work seem pointless,” they wrote on the blog post.
“After this harsh test, we felt our self-belief melting away … we hope your department takes our advice seriously so next year’s Year Sixes will not have to suffer in the same way that we did.”
The class of skilled writers were unhappy about the subject matter, “limited complex punctuation” and old fashion language used within the test. They also noted that although classes across the country have been working towards these assessments for months, the difficult exam would leave lots of children upset when they got their results due to the fact that only a fifth of them managed to complete the paper within the allocated time frame.
A spokesman for the Department of Education spoke to The Huffington Post UK, thanking the children for their letter and assuring parents and pupils that the exams are in place to ensure that teachers are following the curriculum, stating: “They certainly should not be a cause of stress for pupils - they are there to help teachers make sure children are mastering key skills, and we know many schools manage them well.”
Read the full letter here.
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