This week's head teacher column comes from Simon Detre, headmaster at St Teresa's School in Aylesbury Road, Princes Risborough.

The announcement came as something of a surprise. There were murmurings on Twitter to start with…then it was confirmed. It wasn’t the death of Davie Bowie, Alan Rickman or Glenn Frey (saddened though I was by all three).

No – the announcement to which I am referring was the proclamation from the Department for Education that children will in future be tested on their times tables.

Somebody, somewhere in government clearly realises that times tables are important and some children don’t know them well enough. I couldn’t agree more – they’re vital.

I remember learning them by rote and I still use them on probably a daily basis. Children need to know them and I think it is appropriate for schools to test this.

Whether or not we need a national test – with all the bureaucracy of regulations and the inevitable picking over results – is another matter.

Where did this announcement come from? Had there been a consultation? Was there a process leading up to it? Probably, though I confess it had passed me by – as an independent school we are not obliged to participate in most of these schemes.

Nevertheless, the pace of new announcements and regulations from the Department for Education has considerably increased in the last three years, and their predictability has decreased.

Major changes to child protection regulations, for example, that require lots of action by all schools (including independents) have emerged seemingly out of the blue.

Schools find it difficult to grapple with these and heads and deputies spend lots of time dealing with them.

They are important of course, and we take them extremely seriously – but I sometimes feel we should be spending less time sitting at a computer dealing with policies and regulations and more time with the children.

Why are there all these tests? I am not against tests per se – but there needs to be a clear benefit: they need to provide teachers and parents with some useful information.

We spend a huge amount of time (and resources) testing our children – to what end? What if we tested less and respected more the professional ability of teachers to know their children – where they are up to and what they need next?

Many tests are optional for independent schools, though some do choose to participate. At St Teresa’s we are proud to have gone from 48th to 23rd place in the most recent SATs rankings.

The system of Levels has now been abandoned, however, leaving us free to explore other possibilities and plan our curriculum freely and without constraint. That is exciting. 

If you had carte blanche, where would you start? What would be the most important things for children to learn in school?

And what would you do with all the time that schools would get back if there were fewer compulsory tests?

At St Teresa’s we use the time to broaden children’s experiences – from drama (our whole-school production of The Wizard of Oz is coming up later this term) to participation in National Hockey Championships at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

You could be forgiven for assuming that because we are an independent school we have beautifully manicured sports pitches and so on for this sort of thing. In fact we don’t – but we do not let that deter us.

Do you know what 6x7 is? If not, ask a child. They should know – but they should also know that education needs to be something bigger than passing tests.

An all-round approach is needed – because everybody has different gifts and abilities. We ignore this at our peril.

Simon Detre