Children are our future, as the saying we have heard retold and paraphrased a countless number of times. However, kids these days need to show some improvement if ever they want to live up to this huge responsibility. This is because less and less kids in England are meeting the standards set for primary school students.
According to a report from BBC News, just over half of English 11-year olds meet the set standard in the subjects reading, writing, and mathematics, at 53%. This means that a whopping 47% of students do not make the grade in these three subjects by the end of their time as primary students.
Last year, a considerably larger 80% of students made the cut in the three subjects. However, the difference between the tests this year and the last is that the ones from last year were dropped and replaced with considerably more demanding ones this year. This proved to be quite a drastic change as a result of the 27% drop in the passing rate.
England's Department of Education has released the official results of this year's tests. According to them, 66% of the students achieved what is considered as the standard in reading and 70% did so in mathematics. Furthermore, 72% of the students made the grade in grammar, punctuation, and spelling, whilst 74% of them passed in terms of their teacher-assessed writing.
The 53% figure comes from the number of students who were deemed to have met the standards in a mixture of reading, writing, and mathematics. "The government has decided that nearly half of pupils have failed at the end of their primary education. This is not representative of the quality of their education, nor of the hard work that students have put in this year," says Russell Hobby, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers.
