SATS: Testing skills for school not for life
Today marks the start of SATS week for my son, his friends and thousands of other 11-year-olds across the UK. It’s an enormously pressured occasion for all of the children, but for my son, in particular, the tests will be particularly arduous as he is dyslexic.
Perhaps if my son wasn’t 2.5 years behind his peers already I might not worry so much about how he will make it through the week, but there are a number of other reasons why I disagree with the way schools and the government handle the Year 6 SATS.
What really bothers me is the fact my son has spent every night since September desperately trying to answer mock papers, crying when he gets the answers wrong because he can’t remember what phrases such as subordinating conjunction, synonym and adverbial mean. He’s not alone; my Facebook page went wild with parents complaining their children also couldn’t do the papers, and worse still they didn’t know how to help because the questions were utterly baffling.
Perhaps worse than that – because when he’s at home I can at least manage the tears and disappointment – is the fact his entire Year 6 curriculum has been based around the looming SATS. Day in and day out the school has been ‘preparing’ the children for these tests which, in the long run, do nothing to benefit the child and everything to benefit the school.
This means lessons aren’t fun, and rather than learning how to write creative pieces of text, they’re learning ridiculous phrases such as present progressive, relative pronoun and preposition.
And what I really, really, take insult to is that on my son’s first parent’s evening of the year we were effectively told (after a deep sigh from his teacher) that because he had no hope of passing the SATS due to his dyslexia, he was pretty much a failure. So, no SATS results means you’re no good. Never mind the fact my son is a technical whizz kid, has the inventing skills of Thomas Edison and the artistic skills of Pablo Picasso (alright that might be the proud parent talking, but you get my gist). No, because my son probably won’t pass his SATS this year, according to his teacher, and probably the government, he’s no good.
What really bugs me is that writing, learning and going to school should be FUN. And this year has not been fun. For any child, surely the most important thing is that by the time they leave school they are able to write a grammatically correct piece of text, understand when and where to use punctuation, and be able to decipher the meaning of a piece of writing? Is that not all the average adult does day to day?
Which got me thinking. I write for a living, and have done so for 17 years, so how would I do when faced with the Year 6 grammar test? I’ve been helping my son revise for the past six months, I don’t have dyslexia, and I’m pretty darn good at my job, so I should pass with flying colours – right?
Wrong!
I sourced a SATS test online and answered 10 minutes of questions similar to the following:
Q: Which sentence uses the past progressive?
- After Ali finished his homework, he went out to play
- Gemma was doing her science homework
- Jamie learnt his spellings every night
- Anna found her history homework difficult
Q: In this sentence, is the word after being used as a subordinate conjunction or as a preposition?
- I went to the cinema after I had eaten my dinner
Q: Which sentence is written in the active voice?
- The book was returned to the library yesterday
- The assembly was held in the hall
- The bad weather led to the cancellation
- The floods were caused by the heavy rain
I got 40%!
I then decided to put my colleagues to the test, surely one of us would fare better? We’re all of different ages, but between us have a collective 50 years of writing professionally – if anyone should be able to pass the SATS grammar tests, it should be us?
But no!
Only two members of the 72Point creative team (and I’m sure age is on their side) managed to get over 40%! I should find this shocking, but having seen the homework my son has endured every night this year, I don’t. I for one have never had to remember what a main clause, subordinate clause or antonym is when carrying out my day job, OR when conducting normal life admin.
To quote two teacher friends of mine, both of whom shall remain anonymous for obvious reasons:
“To think how good you are at English, just shows how completely pointless this is – plus it has only been in the curriculum for 2 years – I hate the fact I have to teach grammar just to enable children to pass this test”
“I got 50% and I’m a teacher! Good job I’m teaching Year 1 where we stop at nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, prefixes and suffixes. It is so depressing seeing what the children are expected to know by the end of primary now.”
Even teachers are frustrated with the constraints of the current curriculum – my son’s school has been amazing since the day he joined but the teacher’s hands are tied and bound by the government’s obsession with testing children instead of teaching them the skills they’ll need for real life. There are so many other wonderful things which could and should be covered by the school curriculum – a bigger emphasis on science, technology, engineering, art and cooking for example.
So what does this prove? To me, it demonstrates that the Year 6 SATS tests are complete and utter nonsense which serve no purpose other than to strip young children of their childhood and ruin the last precious year of primary school.
And what will my boy take away from this experience? Well, I guess that’s very much down to our parenting, and how my husband and I handle the whole situation. We have encouraged our son to revise every night, not because we care how he does in the tests but to encourage hard work, dedication and good behaviour.
We have promised him we will NOT be looking at his results – because we firmly believe that all children should be celebrated for how hard they try and not what they achieve – and that as long as he can walk out of that exam room on Friday knowing he tried his best then we’ll be the proudest parents walking the planet.
I wish all the children sitting the SATS this week the very best of luck – each and every one is doing something this week that the majority of 72Point, and probably everyone else in our industry cannot do; however pointless this will be in the long run.
If you want to take the test, please visit http://www.sats2016.co.uk/think-youd-pass-your-sats-in-2016/
Rowan Adams Joins the Team
72Point is excited to announce Rowan Adams has joined the team as Director of Communications.
Rowan has 15 years' experience in the PR industry holding roles in broadcast and start-up businesses, including Sky and the BBC. He has spent the past 6 years working in high-growth start-ups in D2C, fintech and streaming services. He joins from Patch Plants, where he lead the PR and Partnerships function, and was the one behind the World's First Plant Hotel. He will head up our marketing function and bring a brilliant creative mind to the team.
Rob Etheridge & PRMoment - Activities you might want to avoid
72Point Senior Account Manager, Rob Etheridge talked with PRMoment alongside comms professionals on PR's biggest time wasters.
“I wish I could get back the time I spent filing emails earlier in my career."
Read the 16 biggest timewasters here.
Reinventing the Wire
In 1978, a small news and pictures agency was founded in Bristol providing news and pictures to local and national press.
Almost 40 years on, SWNS is the biggest independent news wire in the UK supplying some of the world’s most hard-hitting content to major newspapers, magazines, broadcasters and websites employing more than 100 editorial staff across offices in London, Plymouth, Cambridge, Birmingham, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Yorkshire.
The commercial success built on the back of SWNS’s growth is evidenced by the wealth of coverage secured for our clients on a day-to-day basis. Using the first campaign as a case in point, Harris Brushes were able to secure coverage in the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Mirror, among others, because national and regional press trust our content and trust that we can supply them with material that works across all their platforms.
But the digital generation has shaken up the media industry. Our research revealed 76 per cent of people now consume media ‘digitally’ and almost one in ten consume more than 16 stories a day, with the average Brit consuming 5.9 media stories a day.
Our thirst for media and our ability to digest various forms of media - 95 per cent of respondents said they consume media on multiple platforms 48 per cent take a multi-channel approach to media - has given birth to a wealth of new digital platforms that aren’t easily serviced by the traditional news wire.
Which is why we reinvented it.
Bloggers, vloggers, digital editors and influencers can now source content on our new digital news wire that caters exclusively for online publications. The emphasis is on rich, visual content and news releases that encourage social sharing, with news copy, images, audio and video bundled into one downloadable file.
The wire has been launched as a one-stop-shop for editors on the hourly hunt for news, with a simple, four-click solution to capturing the story and publishing it. This ensures that we appeal to time-poor bloggers, editors and influencers by delivering content in a timely manner.
Since its launch, hundreds of users have registered with the Digital Hub for survey news, lifestyle content and releases from across the web and social media. With a target to get that number into the thousands in the near future, the hub is steadily becoming the go-to place for digital media outlets.
For 72Point clients, that means that not only do they have a pick of the national press, but also of the increasingly influential online publications that have surfaced in its wake. With the lion’s share of media consumers taking a ‘multi’ approach to media, having all the bases covered is a surefire means of receiving unparalleled coverage.
To find out more about the Digital Hub, click here.
To download our Generation Editor report, click here.
RECIPE BOXES: THE NEW WAY TO COOK?
By Marketing Assistant Apprentice Julien Kirkpatrick
In the last couple of years, the recipe box industry has burst onto the scene, getting more and more public attention, and revolutionising the way people are cooking. Time-poor professionals are replacing lengthy processes of shopping for ingredients and crafting recipes with the simplicity of having everything sent directly to their door in one neat box.
We conducted research to take a deeper look at the booming industry.
Our insights revealed that over half of respondents are signing up for recipe boxes to receive new recipes, and broaden the horizons of their culinary skills. In such a fast-moving world, slowing down to try and cook proper meals is virtually impossible, so traditional cooking has become less common.
And people want things quick. Waiting is something people quite frankly don’t have time to do. Forty-three percent of respondents said they would cook more at home if they just had the time, currently making an average of three meals per week. The convenience factor of having everything you need for dinner sent to your door in a neat package is what’s driving this industry, as with many others, and enticing consumers.
When changing to a recipe box meal-plan, the main thing that comes to people’s minds is cost. Are recipe boxes more expensive than going to a supermarket and picking the food yourself, or going to your local takeaway? This is one of the reasons why the price of the recipe box is an important consideration with potential customers, with 57% deeming it the most prominent factor in their decision-making process.
The recipe boxes market has become quite saturated, with there now being nine “main” companies dominating the market. Some of which are better- known than others, with Hello Fresh the most well-known according to our poll.
With it being such a saturated market the number of people trying them is increasing day-by-day. There is a high possibility that people might want to try different services to see if they like one better than another, with 60% of respondents to our poll trying more than one recipe box and 41% trying three or more.
Word of mouth was a key driver for potential customers trying boxes out, with 28% admitting that being recommended by family and friends had motivated them to try a recipe box service. And if happy with their service, these customers will be loyal with 70% committing to more than six months and the average length of commitment being 8.5 months.
One thing’s for sure, the industry is waiting for a powerhouse to creatively dominate the landscape and position themselves as forward-thinking, solution providers to all of these concerns. Who will that be?
For more information, contact us: hello@72point.com
Radio Days that Deserve Capital Letters
I read with interest the article in The Guardian this month about Radio days often being perceived as a waste of time and money amongst PR people.
I just wanted to throw in my two pennies worth.
I agree if you are just re-hashing a press release, based on what the client wants the listener to hear with no regard to the specific demographic or location that the radio station is serving, then yes it's probably a big waste of your clients budget and time.
If you are trying to offer PR for a company who have stores all over the UK and the biggest station that you are running on is BFBS serving the armed forces in various locations around the world, then this probably isn't going to work well for you.
The key to effective Radio PR is to target the stations with relevant content; you have to think about the audience. Radio is such a fragmented market place with very defined target audiences. We have to think about what the audiences want to hear not what we want them to hear. The copy we send out to the Radio stations can't just be a replica of the press release; it has to be re written and targeted for a Radio audience.
You can't expect to get on air across the BBC promoting a specific campaign or trying to receive endless brand mentions, that would be against everything the BBC stands for, and quite rightly so as a publicly funded corporation. If you can go to a station with content that's targeted to their audience and locality then there is every chance they will find a use for the story.
Also think about the guests that you hear on the radio stations that you are targeting, if you're running a story about how much TV the average family watches over Christmas, look for a third party spokesperson that relates to the content, someone who has a family would be a good place to start and also someone that relates to the Radio stations audience you are targeting.
A Radio station aren't going to accept a story where the copy is about a specific product where a survey carried out by that product revealed that the same product is key to everyday life… and the spokesperson well this just happens to be the Marketing Manager for the company that makes that product.
The article says that people who run Radio PR companies will no doubt disagree with the comments made, actually I agreed with most of the points the writer raised, having worked as a presenter for most of my working life, I know how annoying it is to be a presenter on a 15-24 Hit Music Station - Capital FM in London and being sent a story that is clearly aimed at the 40+ market.
In summary listen to the Radio stations that you want to be on, what are they talking about and what type of guests do they have on. This way you can be useful to Radio stations by going to them with ready made content that they can just insert into their running order.
Chris' blog was original posted on his own blog which you can read here....
Does 'pure PR' still exist?
After almost 50 years of operating as the Public Relations Consultants Association, the PRCA has launched an industry-wide consultation into whether it should change its name. They will consider whether to drop the ‘C’, which is deemed too inclusive for an organisation that has members from across the entire breadth of the industry, and also ‘PR’, which is considered to be a redundant term in a sector of wide and varied specialities. Go the ‘A’ Team!
The public consultation raises the question over whether “Pure PR” still exists. According to The 'A Team', public relations is the intersection between people and a brand, and is primarily concerned with “reputation” and “gaining trust and understanding” between an organisation and its various publics - whether that's employees, customers, investors, the local community - or all of those stakeholder groups. PR professionals use a variety of techniques to achieve this, and differ from marketers because they secure ‘earned’ media rather than ‘paid’.
But there are very few PR professionals left operating so rigidly. "As the dividing lines between practices have blurred over the years, many within our industry no longer term themselves as offering pure PR,” the PRCA statement read, “the industry has changed in nature”.
They’re not the only ones to notice. As Fifth Ring’s Katherine Fair says, “it is getting difficult to pinpoint exactly how communications, marketing and public relations differ from each other”, which, according to Ogilvy’s Stuart Smith, means there is a rush to be “THE agency” that can “own the insight, the big creative idea, produce the content and optimise the channel: paid, owned, earned media”. The definition of PR as being focused on getting a good press “is close to being redundant”, Alastair Campbell says. PR is now about marrying several disciplines to achieve numerous objectives.
We have coined this ‘The Content Umbrella’. It’s a simple concept. It denotes the merger of previously detached industries, including, but not limited to PR, digital marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimisation and content marketing, and it is a shift that has been on the cards for some time.As Google demands better quality content, online media consumers get turned off by display and brands look to engage rather than convert an amalgamation of disciplines has occurred leveraged on the basic principles of creating and distributing content.
“Pure PR” is a relic of a time gone by. Today, PR professionals must marry several principles that fall under the content umbrella and in doing so re-shape the industry’s outlook. The re-naming of the PRCA is a symbolic move for the industry as a whole; PR is dead, long live PR.
PR’s Fake News: Finding Meaningful Metrics
How many people were actually at Donald Trump’s inauguration? Official estimates say a maximum of 900,000 were in attendance, 100,000 fewer than Obama’s second inauguration and close to a million fewer than his first. Certain publications were happy to pitch much lower than that and soon a stream of images flooded social media showing vast swathes of empty spaces earning journalists the reputation of being “among the most dishonest human beings on earth” according to the incoming President.
In fact, so great is the challenge of fake news that President Trump used his first full day in office to unleash a remarkably bitter attack on the news media, falsely accusing journalists of both inventing a rift between him and intelligence agencies and deliberately understating the size of his inauguration crowd. But whatever your opinions are of the man his incoming ceremony showed that the time for playing guesstimations is up, and media and PR professionals need to start listening up.
The PR industry has long wrestled with metrics and has at times become consumed by them. Having to prove the value of brand awareness and the actionable response of positive press coverage is no easy task, and in trying we have almost created our industry’s version of ‘fake news’ in statistics that try to convey a meaningful message, but often end up saying very little at all. Without getting all President Trump on the industry, we really need to look at our numbers.
Let’s start with AVEs. I mean, it’s 2017 and we are still constantly asked to supply these godforsaken metrics. These are the sort of figures provided back in the days when PR account executives would sit with a ruler and a bundle of newspapers and measure the size and space of a piece of coverage to generate an “equivalent advertising value” for that space. Today, people use it because the figures returned are often much higher than any PR budget and so they make PR people look good, but it’s fake news.
Even the more sophisticated measurements are struggling to keep up. Take SimilarWeb. They collect multiple amounts of data and apply an evolving algorithm with a scalable estimator to come up with a ‘best guess’ number of how many people view a piece of coverage. It takes into account the popularity of the publication, average click through rates and where the coverage sits on the homepage, but it still returns ludicrously over-beefed numbers that rarely correlate with the number of shares and other actionable responses. In fact, the PR numbers often converge with the top piece of news content from that day, even though anyone with an ounce of rationale would see the disparity.
The problem we are really trying to confront in the PR world is that we’re trying to assign arbitrary numbers (where bigger=better) to disparate campaigns which are all out to achieve disparate objectives. I have been sent countless invites to seminars discussing how best to calculate a measure of success for the PR industry, and on each occasion, I decline on the basis that surely a one-size-fits-all approach is part of the problem.
At 72Point we take each project by its individual merit. If it’s big numbers you are looking for then that’s what we can deliver – we landed on an average of 14 sites per story in December with an average of over half a million eyes per story. If it’s generating a social buzz, then we’re well set up for that too – our stories achieved an average of 5,546 social shares in the same month. And if it’s generating a bit of Google juice with follow-links and keyword optimised content then let us know, because we are one of few companies in the industry that have eschewed fake metrics for real results, because that is what ultimately counts for our clients.
Prolific North Live 2018
February 28 - March 01 2018
Prolific North Live provided 72Point the opportunity to network with the biggest movers and shakers of the Digital industry. It also allowed us to showcase our digital content and social outreach work through the Digital Keynote Theatre, which featured talks from industry leaders from BBC, Channel4, Barclays and The Sun. It was a fantastic way to share our message up North as leading news-generation and content experts.
Download the event e-book, Prolific North Live - What Marketers Want 2018
Related blogs:
- Why PR Needs to be a Valuable Part of your 2018 Marketing Strategy
- How to Make the Most of Marketing Exhibitions
- The Future of Digital Media is in the North – Here’s Why
Watch highlights from the 72Point Digital Keynote Theatre in our exclusive video:
PRCA Digital Awards 2022 - Shortlist
Some great news on the awards front.
Our 'Christmas Personalities' campaign with client Don't Cry Wolf for Green Chef has been shortlisted in the Best Use of Content Marketing In a Campaign category at the PRCA Digital Awards 2022.
You can check out the creative here on Oath Studio's website: https://lnkd.in/dAYVY9aw
Great work by all and congratulations to all the other great agencies who have been shortlisted.
