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Next month 11-year-olds will sit a series of short tests (SATs) in maths and English — a fact that causes much unhappiness among England ’ s teachers. At the National Education Union ’ s (NEU) recent conference, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour ’ s leader, announced to hearty applause that he would scrap these tests and that he would review other primary-school assessments. The attention serves as a reminder of the strength of feeling generated by testing young children. Unlike GCSE (taken at 16) and A-levels (at 18), SATs hold little sway over a pupil ’ s future. At most, they will help determine which academic stream the child enters in their first year at secondary school. Their chief purpose is to measure teachers and schools. If children are making good progress in their sums but not their reading, a school can devote more resources to English lessons. Nevertheless, teachers complain that they are under too much pressure to squeeze high marks out of their pupils. League tables are based on the percentage of children reaching certain standards, the schools inspectorate uses their results to inform its judgments and some teachers are on performance-related pay. Not all respond well. One head teacher in Leeds dragged a high-performing pupil from their sick bed to take a test.