Letter: Government making teacher's job harder

I am concerned about the changes imposed on schools by Government. For over 20 years pupil progress has been monitored in schools by national curriculum levels. This has enabled the results of one school to be compared with another. It has taken years for teaching staff to get to know this assessment system well enough to be able to administer it confidently.

Now schools have been told that they can no longer use national curriculum levels. What is to be put in its place?

Rather than standardisation of pupil testing across schools, each school has to find its own assessment criteria. Schools are given greater responsibility at the same time as support from local authorities is being cut away from under them because of the slashing of council budgets.

When a learning support advisory teacher goes into a school to give advice on their pupils, he or she has to first try to understand the particular school's assessment system.

When pupils go up from a primary to a secondary, the primary schools may all be using a different method of measuring pupil progress. How are the receiving schools to compare different forms of data?

Teaching staff work very hard but the Department of Education seems determined to make their job harder.

Janet Hartin, Bucknell