THE Education Secretary faced a chorus of demands from teachers’ unions yesterday for the abolition of all national tests and league tables after he announced sweeping reforms in primary schools.

Charles Clarke intends to downgrade tests for seven-year-olds in English and mathematics so that they form only a minor part of an overall “teacher judgment” about their progress during the year.

Primary school head teachers will be given the power to set their own targets for improvement by pupils in English and mathematics, instead of having to meet ones set by central and local government.

Mr Clarke also abandoned a national target for 85 per cent of pupils to reach set standards in English and mathematics by next year. Schools will be asked to hit the target as soon as possible, preferably by 2006, as part of a new “excellence and enjoyment” strategy.

League tables of test results for 11-year-olds could also be modified to include judgments from Ofsted about the overall quality of education offered by a school.

Teachers’ leaders welcomed the changes but said they did not go far enough. The National Union of Teachers said that Mr Clarke should have copied the Welsh Assembly and abolished the tests at seven.

Doug McAvoy, the NUT general secretary, said: “Teachers will be bewildered that he has not taken such an obvious step. Nor will they understand why tests for 11 and 14-year-olds have not been scrapped. They do little for learning, distress young people and undermine the curriculum.”

David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said that there was no case for continuing to test children at seven. “We support teacher assessment as the only proper route by which the achievement of seven-year-olds should be measured and reported.”

John Dunford, general secretary of the Secondary Heads’ Association, called on Mr Clarke to put greater trust in teachers’ judgments of standards achieved by pupils at 14 and in GCSE and AS and A-level exams.

“I predict that league tables will disappear within five years as the Government increasingly recognises their negative effect.”

Mr Clarke made clear that he would resist any pressure to reduce testing at 11, or Key Stage 2. He said that they were a moral necessity to ensure that children achieved the standards needed to succeed in secondary school and later life.

He told a meeting of head teachers in London yesterday that it was a scandal that seven million adults had problems with basic English and maths. “All of those adults went to primary schools and I cannot and will not allow that scandal to be repeated,” he said. “There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that good achievement at Key Stage 2 is critically important to their success later in life. I am certainly not going to go back to a state of affairs where there wasn’t a testing regime at Key Stage 2.” Mr Clarke was told by the headmistress of an infants’ school in Cornwall that she was having to make two teachers and two support staff redundant because of this year’s funding crisis.

Debbie Snookes, head of Torpoint infant school, said: “What does that do for excellence and enjoyment for the future? I have an excellent team who have all been distressed by this process. I am glad you have a new primary strategy coming through but I feel funding is the issue.”

Damian Green, the Shadow Education Secretary, said that Mr Clarke’s announcement was a cynical exercise in disguising failure. The Government had missed its targets for literacy and numeracy in 2002 and was now admitting that it would fail to meet those set for 2004 as well.

Eamonn O’Kane, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers, said he regretted that Mr Clarke had not reviewed the future of league tables, “whose existence has placed so many schools under unfair pressure”.

Gwen Evans, joint acting general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said that Mr Clarke appeared not to trust teachers of older primary children to form professional judgments about them. “We feel that the minor changes made to the assessment system do not go far enough,” she said.

“What is needed is a fundamental re-think about the purpose of primary education.”

David Bell, Chief Inspector of Schools in England, who said this year that targets were now seen “more as a threat than a motivator” for teachers, welcomed Mr Clarke’s decision to relax them. “I am pleased to see that Ofsted’s evidence and inspection findings are helping to shape and inform Government policy,” he said.

One in the ear for old 'FA Cup'

AS IF Charles Clarke had not already endured an earful over the years, a mischievous boy yesterday provided a new reason for him to regret his protruding ears.

Ryan Hassan, 10, was asked to pose for a photograph as Mr Clarke opened his primary schools strategy at Rotherfield Primary School, in Islington, North London. He could not have known that as he took the mickey out of the Education Secretary with a pair of bunny ears that he was continuing a tradition dating back to Mr Clarke’s own school days.

Friends have recalled how Mr Clarke was nicknamed “The FA Cup” by unkind fellow pupils during his school days. Earlier this year his ears were criticised by the television presenter Carol Vorderman, who said: “He has appalling ears that are far too large and stick out.”

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