Parents and teachers of sixth grade students say reading a Sats essay was so difficult that the children cried.
A mother told the BBC that her child, who loves to read, couldn’t finish the newspaper.
A principals’ union said even staff had struggled to understand the questions and this would raise concerns about the paper.
The Department of Education (DfE) said it was working to ensure “all testing is adequate”.
Some parents said on social media that their children were “distraught” after the paper, which is part of a series of national curriculum tests called Sats.
A Cheshire school principal wrote to her MP calling for sats to be scrapped after her primary school pupils were ‘broken’.
Jill Russell, from Cumbria, said her daughter Pashley was “close to tears” when she picked her up from school on Wednesday.
Pashley, who is autistic, loves to read and is her school’s English Ambassador. She had worried about sats, but reading was “the thing she worried about the least”.
“At the end she usually has a lot of time left and she says, ‘I don’t think I got to the end of the essay… I didn’t understand a lot. It did not work.’ Sense,'” said Ms. Russell.
“It definitely made her even more anxious to go back in today [Thursday].”
Ms Russell thinks it’s “kind of a good thing to have some sort of exam before the GCSEs” and thinks Pashley’s school is “amazing” but says schools in general are under too much pressure to do well in the sats.
“It kind of feels like they’re being taught how to pass the test instead of being taught and then the test is an adjunct,” she said.
Sarah Hannafin, policy leader for the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), said the union was “very concerned” about the paper.
“Members have told us that the choice of texts was not amenable to the children’s diverse experiences and backgrounds and that the level of difficulty exceeded previous tests, leading to the children being upset and even the staff having difficulty answering the questions understand,” she said.
She said NAHT will raise its concerns with the Standards and Testing Agency, which carries out assessments, and Ofqual, the English examinations authority.
dr Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said this week’s sats had been “a punishing experience for many students and staff”.
She said children who don’t meet expected outcome standards this year “will take that demotivating label back to their secondary schools.”
“This is not a system that cares about children and their learning. There are better ways to assess students,” she said.
A DfE spokesperson said Key Level 2 assessments “play a critical role in understanding student progress and identifying those who may have fallen behind.”
“Our test development process is extremely rigorous and includes reviews by a large number of education and inclusion experts and professionals, including teachers. Also, we test tests with hundreds of students over a number of years to ensure all tests are appropriate,” he said.
“It’s important that schools encourage students to do their best, but preparing for these exams shouldn’t come at the expense of their well-being.”
Last year, 59% of sixth grade students achieved expected levels in reading, writing and math – down from 65% in 2019.
The national curriculum tests were canceled in 2020 and 2021.
Additional reporting by Vanessa Clarke.
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