Teachers today backed moves to boycott next year's Sats in a major escalation of their campaign to force the government to drop the tests.
The National Union of Teachers (NUT), the biggest school union, will now ballot members to take industrial action and refuse to administer the Sats in England in 2010, defying government warnings that to do so would be unlawful.
It sets the NUT, and possibly the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), which is due to vote on an identical motion next month, on a collision course with ministers who have accused them of acting irresponsibly. The boycott would halt next year's national tests in primary schools and the league tables they feed into.
The NUT president, Martin Reed, told the union's conference in Cardiff today: "The government will have to understand one obvious fact: because of our boycott carried out with the NAHT there will be no national curriculum testing forced on our schools; not in 2010 nor in any year after that."
The unions say that the Sats and the league tables are damaging to children's education, having the effect of narrowing learning in primary schools as teachers are forced to focus on literacy, numeracy and science to improve their results. Their campaign has been fuelled by the scrapping of tests for 14-year-olds which were removed after the collapse of the marking system by the private American firm ETS last year.
The union's leaders say that by planning the boycott for next year they have allowed plenty of time for ministers to make arrangements to replace the tests.
The schools secretary, Ed Balls, has said the current system of tests is not set in stone, but he insists that some form of end of primary test is crucial to track children's learning, monitor progress across the system and hold schools that are under-performing to account.
Balls's department, the Department for Children, Schools and Families, yesterday said its legal advice was that a boycott would be unlawful because headteachers have a statutory duty to carry out the tests. The National Governors Association has also warned that headteachers face disciplinary action if they boycott the Sats.
However, the only time the law has been challenged was during the last boycott, in 1993, when the NASUWT teaching union defeated a legal bid by Wandsworth council to halt the action.
The high court ruled in that case that the teachers were within their rights to take the action because the tests increased their workload and so they could refuse to take on the extra work.
A Department for Children, Schools and Families spokesman said yesterday: "The motion proposed by the NUT leadership calling for a boycott of next year's statutory tests is irresponsible, it is unlawful and it is out of touch with what parents and teachers want. They should think again.
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