Testing, testing, 1 2 3: the drive for more tests and school league tables is sweeping the world. Education is being turned into an industry …

New Internationalist, August, 1999

A NUM KHAN was seven when she died in a fire started by arsonists at her home; her older brother was also killed when he went into the burning house to try to save her. Her death plunged two communities that she belonged to into shock: the Muslim community in East Oxford and our school. The weeks that followed taught me that schools at their best are not just places where children learn facts, skills or patterns of behaviour; they are both a vital part of the community they serve and places that nurture the whole child - hearts and spirits, as well as minds.

Instead of noting Anum's death with sadness and then simply moving on with business, as might have been expected, headteacher Tony Eaude and the staff recognized that they had an important role to play in helping children to understand and cope with the loss of a friend - and in helping Anum's family in their grief.

Children were encouraged to think about what Anum had meant to them - they wrote their own messages to her in a special book that was kept open for a whole term before being given to her family; they wrote poems and drew pictures in her honour that remained on display throughout that school year. There was a memorial assembly in her honour to which many members of her wider family came. This could easily have been an awkward affair, consumed by mawkishness or, worse, full of Muslim toes being trodden on by heavy Christian feet. Instead it was beautifully handled and deeply felt, as moving a tribute to the memory of this young girl as any memorial service for one of the great and the good in Westminster Abbey.

This was, for me, the best kind of spiritual education. I have no particular religious faith myself and am, to be honest, still slightly bemused at having succeeded the local vicar as chair of governors of a Church of England school (almost exactly a third of British state schools are still, bizarrely, overseen by the Anglican or Catholic churches; the first state Islamic school was approved in London last year). My position would be impossible in most other church schools but the fact that a third of the children are Muslim (and probably another third are agnostic or atheist) has made it essential for this particular school to develop a sensitive, multicultural language. It is not just that the key festivals of Islam and Judaism are acknowledged, but that children are taught about the importance of the inner life in a way that all can understand - cultivating a sense of wonder or concentrating on a candle flame in silence, for example, rather than through scriptural assertions that Jesus was the son of God.

Triple threat

Yet the ability of the school to look after the wider needs of the whole child - and by that I mean not just this spiritual area, but also things like an appreciation of art and music, a moral and critical understanding of the world they live in - is now under threat. The threat comes from triple obsessions which are currently sweeping through the entire Western world: standardized testing of children; judging schools by their place in exam league tables; and a back-to-basics drive on numeracy and literacy.

An eight-year-old boy I know well wet his bed every night last week, for the first time in years. This was mystifying until his parents realized that it coincided with the week in which he was doing standardized tests. There is nothing riding on these particular tests, yet he had become convinced that somehow they would determine his whole future, would place him in the `bottom' or `top' group at his next school.

Up and down the country anecdotal evidence abounds of huge tranches of classroom time being given over to preparation for tests. Even teachers who tell children not to worry contribute to the sense of crisis by making it clear that their school will be judged by the results - as indeed it will be in the current climate. Testing can be a useful diagnostic tool; one piece of information that can be used alongside teacher assessments and regular course work to track children's progress. But it has become an omnipotent obsession.

Consider also my five-year-old daughter who came home from school last week and explained in fairly precise terms to her bemused English-graduate parents what was meant by a `homophone' and an `ellipsis'. This will be an experience shared in all quarters of Britain, since it is a product of the new National Literacy Strategy under which all children of primary age have to be taught literacy for a full hour every day.

To be fair, standards of literacy are giving legitimate cause for concern right across the English-speaking world. And when English teachers can report (as my partner did last week) that their most able students have managed to make it through the education system to the age of 18 without knowing what nouns, verbs and adjectives are, then it is clear that the drive in the post-1960s period to get away from rigid grammar drills was maybe just a tad too successful.

But the absurdity of expecting children just out of playschool to learn technical grammatical terms will be evident to everyone but the Government ministers who imposed the scheme - and that's without taking into account the bewilderment of those of my daughter's classmates who, speaking only Bengali or Pashto, are required to learn that a word is broken up into `phonemes'.