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Government says proposed Sats boycott 'unlawful'

The government has declared a proposed boycott of next year's Sats "unlawful" raising the question of a legal challenge if the National Union of Teachers backs the plans at its annual conference in Cardiff tomorrow.

The move escalates tensions between the government and teaching unions. The National Association of Head Teachers will vote on the same proposals next month.

A spokesman for the Department for Children Schools and Families said the boycott would be "irresponsible, unlawful, and out of touch with what parents want". Government lawyers had concluded that headteachers have a statutory duty to administer the tests, he said.

The unions are threatening to bring the system of testing every 11-year-old in England to a halt next year unless ministers have instigated reforms to the system.

The unions say that Sats – and the league tables of results – force schools to teach to the test, narrowing learning and putting teachers and pupils under extreme pressure. But ministers insist that tests at the end of primary school are critical to assessing pupils' progress and holding schools to account.

The NUT today insisted a boycott would be legal. Graham Clayton, a senior solicitor for the union, said: "If there was any serious question about the lawfulness we wouldn't be doing it." A legal challenge against the last teacher boycott of tests in 1993 by Wandsworth council failed.

The motion to be debated tomorrow instructs union officials to campaign for the removal of the tests. "Once all other reasonable avenues have been exhausted, ballot all relevant members for joint action to boycott the key stage one and two statutory tests, for the academic year 2009-10, if the government refuses to remove them." A ballot of the full membership of the union would follow within the year. A separate motion, also due for debate tomorrow, condemns Sats as "unreliable" after studies suggested up to half of English papers taken by 14-year-olds may have been wrongly marked.

The schools secretary, Ed Balls, has said the system is "not set in stone" and ordered a review of alternatives. But he has insisted that some testing at the end of primary school will remain. He has attacked the boycott proposals as "irresponsible" behaviour by teachers.

The unions say they will oversee the tests this year, but not next year, insisting that will allow time for an orderly transition to a new system. But Christine Blower, the acting general secretary of the NUT, yesterday suggested there was room for negotiation. "Our position is not a boycott come what may. It's about saying we genuinely think that Sats are not the way forward. Here is a long period of time, the expert group can report, let's talk about what happens next," she said. Calling on members to back the boycott, the union's outgoing president, Bill Greenshields, said: "We will end this child abuse."

Balls said today: "We aren't going to go back to the old days when there wasn't that information and schools could not be achieving for children and it would not be clear and public. The current testing system is being looked at. We cannot just not comply with the law in this way. That would be the wrong thing to do."

A spokesman for his department added: "The motion proposed by the NUT leadership ... is irresponsible, it is unlawful and it is out of touch with what parents and teachers want. They should think again.

More than 600,000 11-year-olds will sit tests in English, maths and science next month. Last year the marking collapsed under a new firm, ETS, which was subsequently sacked. The crisis led to the decision by the government to scrap tests for 14-year-olds and launch the review. .

Separately, trials are also being conducted into "single level testing", which tests pupils when teachers think they are ready rather than en masse once a year.

Post je objavljen 10.04.2009. u 21:44 sati.