SATs don’t help our
education – they harm it.
In SATs years valuable time
is wasted practising and studying for the tests instead of
giving us the opportunity to find out more about a wide
range of subjects.
SATs put us under
unnecessary stress.
Too much money goes into
running the SATs. New Labour spend almost as much on
testing as they do on recruiting and keeping teachers.
SATs results are used to
decide what level we get taught at. Streaming at a young
age can affect the rest of your education.
SATs aren’t there to
benefit us. They are used to make schools compete against
each other in league tables because the government won’t
fund all schools properly.
What can you do to build the campaign?
What you can do if you’re due to take
SATs in 2004:
Boycott the tests. If
everyone does it they just won’t happen!!
Talk to people in your
class about the campaign. Get other school students
involved in organising a campaign in your school and with
other schools in your local area. To let people know you
could put up notices around your school advertising a
meeting place or hand around some notices
Get your friends, family,
school year group and teachers to fill in the petition
calling for the abolition of SATs
Hand out copies of this
leaflet in your school or local town centre (get in touch
if you would like more copies to be sent to you or if you
would like a member of ISR to come and help you on 020
8558 7947)
Talk to your parents about
why you oppose SATs and ask for their support
Find out who the NUT
representative is in your school and ask them to work with
your student campaign
See the ISR guide to
campaigning in schools and colleges on our website
www.anticapitalism.org.uk
. . . and if you’re not: -
If you’ve already taken your
SATs or you know people who have - you’ll know how stressful
and wasteful they are. It’s important that everyone gets
involved in building this campaign as it is an important part
of the fight against cuts in education. Here are some things
you could do to help:
If you are in school get in
contact with the students who are due to take their SATs
next year. Let them know about the plans and help them to
campaign in the school
If you are working or in
higher education you could pass the petition round and
build support in your union or link it up with the
campaign against fees in the universities. See if a
student or / and an NUT rep could speak at a lunchtime
meeting in your workplace / FE college / university.
A decent education should be
a right not a privilege
The SATs are tests which
limit what we learn and how we learn it. New Labour used the
slogan "Education Education Education" for their election
campaign in 1997. In reality it has been "tests tests tests"
and "cuts cuts cuts".
Eton has class sizes as
small as 10 students where every student can get loads of
individual attention. Most state schools are facing
significant numbers of redundancies amongst both teachers
and teaching assistants.
Students at the posh
private schools do not have to take SATs. If these were
tests that helped us don’t you think Eton would ensure
their students had access to them?
Privatisation and cuts to
state schools means that there is one high quality education
for the rich and the service for the rest of us gets worse and
worse. Tony Blair and his pro-big business party have no
interest in improving the living standards of ordinary people.
They want the education system to produce workers who do not
expect to have a say in how things are run and who will accept
the appalling conditions without protest.
What kind of organisation is
ISR and what does it fight for?
International Socialist
Resistance is a youth organisation that is run by and for
young people. Many of our members are school students who are
organising to build the anti-SATs campaign in their area. ISR
initiated the idea of school and college student strikes
against the war and helped to organise many of them. These
strikes proved that we are not apathetic but are in fact very
angry about the way the world is run and want to be actively
involved in changing it.
Capitalism means poverty,
war and disease. This is because capitalism is a system that
is run on the basis of huge profits for a tiny rich elite –
not on the basis of the needs of the millions. Under
capitalism education is used to prolong this inequality. ISR
fights to change the way the world is run, for "system
change", for socialism. We fight for a socialist society which
is run democratically on the basis of the needs of the whole
population and not for the profits of the rich few. This
includes fighting for education to be based on young people’s
needs – not the needs of big business.
International Socialist
Resistance fights
Against SATs and the
testing regime that limits education to intensive training
for tests
Against cuts in education
which means a two-tier education system
No to teacher redundancies
and staff shortages
No to education for profit
and commercialization of education
For free quality education
for all from nursery to university
For the right of students
to be organised into democratic school student unions
For the abolition of fees.
For the introduction of a living grant available to all
from the age of 16
For extra investment so
schools can cater for children with special needs
