Interesting Facts

Hundreds of parents in the UK are expected to keep their children out of school today in protest over too stressful tests. (The first ever "kids' strike" in the UK is in protest at what parents claim is "over-testing" at the expense of children’s happiness.  Key Stage 1 testing (SATS) for six and seven-year-olds, have been made tougher this year in an attempt to drive up standards, but the Let Our Kids Be Kids campaign, which is coordinating the kids’ strike, says that nearly 40,000 people have signed up in support of the action, and has written to Education Secretary Nicky Morgan calling for an "end to SATs now". The letter says: "Please take a long, hard look at this. "Do you want your legacy to be the confident cancellation of unneeded and unnecessary SATS, showing you are listening to your electorate and the teachers you claim to support ... or the overseeing of a shambolic testing regime desperately unwanted by millions of peop...

According to research carried out by Oxford University Press, British children are struggling to write “simple, everyday words”. (They are failing to spot the difference between words like “their” and “there” or “cloths” and “clothes”, to pick out silent letters or spot the difference between a single or double letter word. The top spelling error was "accidentally", closely followed by "practising", “frantically” "definitely" and "believe". Other common misspellings included words such as “surprise”, "excitement", "weird", "doesn't" and "minute”. I can see I'm going to have to add some more spelling tests to the site.)

According to a report published by Renaissance Learning, pupils in the UK struggle to understand GCSE exam papers. (Their reading skills are so poor at the end of secondary education due to a lack of time spent practising how to read.  This is so sad.) Source