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I'm talking about changes over the last 25 years Sundae. The National Curriculum was introduced when we were at school.
And that's kind of the point I was making anyway: you fix one problem and another problem springs up. It was absolutely necessary to get a grip on what schools were doing, and ensure that there was parity across the system, so that kids in a particular school, or town weren't disadvantaged: particularly important given the lack of choice at that time. It was and is necessary to be able to form some sort of picture of individual children'sprogress and learning journeys, and likewise to have some kind of measurable standards on which to judge the performance of teachers and schools.
But there is a price to increased monitoring, particularly when so much else gets tied into those achievement levels. The SATs in particular seem to have changed primary education, putting enormous pressure on teachers and schools to teach to the test instead of more generalised learning skills.
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