ope springs eternal. The government was this week pressed to cancel school examinations for a second year in a row. One in six state secondary schools are not fully open, and thousands of pupils are being excluded under quarantine measures – even those who are well. So the government should ease the exam burden and let schools catch up. As the Sheffield educationist Sir Chris Husbands puts it, “Let schools teach and children learn … learning is more important than assessment.” This plea has been met with blank incomprehension by the education secretary, Gavin Williamson. To Whitehall, learning is assessing, and education is about exams, testing, data collation and league tables. How else would teachers know what to teach? When this spring it was clear that exams would fall victim to coronavirus, a panic-stricken government grasped for quantifiable data – past records, mocks, guesses, predictions – to feed their voracious algorithms. The predictable shambles resulted in another of Boris Johnson’s climb-downs. Now the exam abolitionists are emboldened. The National Education Union’s Kevin Courtney is demanding that primary schools be liberated for ever from exams as “absolutely pointless” league table fodder. The same applies to GCSEs, costing each school thousands of pounds a year. As for A-levels, they have long cursed secondary education in England, Wales and Northern Ireland with over-specialism at the bidding of universities. This year the universities had to find other means of judging applicants than an ability to recall facts and write in longhand. They turned to teacher assessment, which a survey from King’s College London in 2019 showed to be a perfectly robust alternative. It seems likely to be used again next year – so why not for ever? It would mean teachers and universities together judging a student’s prospects without reference to the fake objectivity of exam results and all that they involve. As an alumnus of London’s Institute of Education, I still read a lot about the education system’s fixation on measurement. Books on both sides of the Atlantic carry such titles such The Tyranny of Metrics (Jerry Muller), Education by Numbers (Warwick Mansell) and The Test (Anya Kamenetz). Testing has not delivered more egalitarian schools. If anything, it has done the reverse. Tests demoralise pupils, and demean and disempower teachers. Many are howling for less testing. Two years ago the former civil service head Gus O’Donnell savaged the government’s “exam addiction … fuelling stress, anxiety and failure”. Ofsted’s chief inspector, Amanda Spielman, has attacked schools that “game the system” to win higher league places, choosing exams that are easier to pass, narrowing the curriculum and “putting their own interests ahead of pupils’”. What does she expect? They are dancing to Ofsted’s tune. Testing has clearly widened the attainment gap at 16, with almost 50,000 under-performing pupils now “vanishing” during secondary education, lest they depressed a school’s rating. British teachers spend just a third of their week on “teaching and learning with pupils,” with the rest of their time administering and setting, marking and reporting on tests – beyond all comparison with European counterparts. Ever since Charles Dickens satirised his school “commissioners” in Hard Times, tests have been used by the central government to intervene in the classroom and diminish trust and personal responsibility in teachers. As education secretary, Michael Gove sought testing throughout the school experience, starting at age four. He tried to introduce exam performance-related pay for teachers (he did not suggest performance-related pay also be introduced for ministers). Pressure on teachers, parents and children became intense. Emergency admissions for teenagers with psychiatric conditions rose. So too did the dominance of rote learning and multiple-choice tests, at the expense of sport, art and any practical preparation for life. I know that exams are seen as ritual markers in a child’s path through life. Some teachers regard the resulting mental stress as itself an education. But how well a child does at a school should be a matter between the school and its teachers, and parents, as it is in the private sector. If they want help from outside examiners, that is their business. The task of assessing a pupil’s aptitude and ability and relating them to his or her future must be the most sacred trust invested in a school. It is like the GP and a patient. Teachers may err, but then so can any system. A friend who entered teaching 30 years ago tells me he simply does not feel like a professional educator at all, just an examination drudge. Teaching exam materials has bred the costly absurdity of parents spending a staggering £6bn a year on private tutors, a shadow industry created entirely by the tyranny of exams. It’s more than 30 years since corporal punishment was banned in British state schools. The practice was considered “degrading and humiliating”, leading to trauma and mental stress. But ministers did not give up on discipline, replacing the cane with exams and league tables. There is now an opportunity to abolish these for good. If parents want to know how well their child is doing, they should ask the school, not the government.