SATs tests should be banned

I do agree that SATs tests for primary school children should be banned. What on earth is the point of them?
Schools will automatically teach to the test and so the curriculum becomes narrower and narrower. Children are under pressure. Teachers who work with the same primary aged children day in and day out know what individuals in their care can do and what they are finding difficult. Teachers can devise their own light touch methods of finding out what a child can do. Teachers know what children have achieved with having some test imposed from outside to try and catch children out.
Why on earth do we expose such young children to such pressure? Surely there is time enough in later life for all that. Can't they just have time to be children and enjoy life a little bit more? Why do our children have to be subjected to more tests than any other children in Europe? So that schools can be judged according to test results? These results are so very predictable. Do we really need league tables to tell us where the well-to-do professional people live or where the areas of social deprivation are?
What happened to trying to make books fun? We should all be bending over backwards to ensure that our children absoultely love books and reading, that they enjoy having stories read to them and discovering the imaginative world of fairy tales and treasure islands, magical tales, myths, legends, adventure stores, stories about children like themselves who do wonderful things, poems, books full of interesting information about the world around them, the stars, ancient history, dinasaurs....... so that they soon wish to read these for themselves. If we could achieve this, the rest would be a walk-over.From reading would come a love of writing. Of making up stories, writing notes, reports, accounts, writing poems and plays to perform,opinions......But what do we do instead? We grind away at phonics, dull exercises, comprehension tests which simply ask children to tell us what we told them.
Have you ever had a primary school child bring a worksheet home where they have to read part of a Greek myth and answer questions on it and then find out that that is all they will be doing about Greek myths and legends? It is utterly soul destroying to compare this with the wonderful Greek legends they could be enjoying and the wonderful writing they could be experiencing.

We kill the love of books stone dead by making reading a chore, by testing, re-testing and testing again. These produce an incredible amount of stress and anxiety for both teachers and children. There are even booster classes, SATs clubs, mock tests! SATs tests are not the best instrument for levering up standards.