I write at the end of a week when I have felt despair at the assessment system; an assessment system that I feel has set my child up to fail rather than to succeed.
Let’s start with the hard data from the week preceding, and the week of, the SATs: my ten-year-old child lost 18 hours of sleep, suffered four migraines and one panic attack. That’s the calculable cost of an outdated assessment model. I dread to think of the incalculable cost.
My child is autistic. He is highly sensory and prone to bouts of anxiety. The two interplay, causing sensory overload which leads to him simply not coping. He is an expert masker and so we often don’t know he isn’t coping until it is too late. You may be asking why I simply didn’t talk with the school and withdraw him from the SATs. This was an option. I thought long and hard about it as I lay awake with him at 2.30am on Tuesday morning when I could see he was broken. I made the call to pick him back up and encourage him to sit his SATs as I realised that there is no alternative to assessment at KS4 and he was going to have to learn to deal with exams, no matter how anxious he gets. It felt like a lose/lose situation.
