Sats boycott hits tens of thousands of pupils
Tens of thousands of children in England are missing their Sats tests as head teachers in hundreds of schools stage a boycott.
About 600,000 10 and 11-year-olds are due to take the national schools tests from Monday.
But heads and deputies from two big unions voted for a boycott.
BBC News contacted England's councils and found that - among the 113 which responded - 15% of schools are not doing the tests.
The councils which took part cover 73% of England's 17,000 primary schools.
Of those the BBC has details of, nearly 1,900 (15%) say they will boycott the tests and about 5,650 say they will not (45%).
The councils say they do not know the situation in the remaining 40% of schools.
The tests, in maths and English, are only taken in England.
The results are used to make up the primary school league tables.
Support for the boycott across the country is patchy, varying from areas such as Bedford and Bournemouth, where the councils say all schools are running the tests - to Hartlepool, where all 31 primaries are said to be boycotting.
In Manchester and Birmingham, the councils say half of schools are staging a boycott.
'Patchy'
The head teachers say that the tests damage children's education because they encourage teachers to "teach to the test", so that other subjects are squeezed out of the curriculum.
And the league tables, they say, humiliate schools and do not show what they and their pupils really achieve.
The industrial action is being taken by the National Association of Head Teachers and heads and deputies in the National Union of Teachers but members are free to stage the action or not.Mick Brookes, the general secretary of the NAHT, said: "We're got to ask the question: is it right that the school, the whole school, is held to account on sometimes inaccurate test results that are enacted by one particular cohort in the school over a 45 minutes test. That is ridiculous.
"What we're saying is, of course schools need to be held to account. But they need to be held to account for what every child is doing in the school and the breadth of the curriculum, not just narrowing it down to English and maths."
At some schools where the action is being taken, heads have opted to get children to sit last year's Sats tests and will pass the information on to parents.
That is what is happening in Montrose School in Leicester, where head teacher Sandra Sutcliffe hopes the industrial action will spark a national debate.
"It was a very difficult decision to make," she said.
"Our school does very well in the tests but I hope this will raise a dialogue about whether a 45-minute exam is the best way to make conclusions about six years of work in primary schools.
"The curriculum has become very distorted and some of our children are losing their sparkle and interest."
She says she is in favour of having national data on how children are doing in schools, but not in the form of league tables.
Moral duty
This industrial action will be one of the first issues facing the person responsible for education in a new government.
Labour's Schools Secretary Ed Balls had urged the heads not to take the action, warning them that they would be in breach of both moral and statutory duties to hold the tests.
The authorities see the tests as a vital way that schools are held accountable to both the government and parents, giving parents information about how their local schools and their children are doing.
But parents themselves seem divided on the boycott.
The co-founder of the Netmums website, Siobhan Freegard, had said it was too late to stage a boycott, because of all the hard work children had done to prepare for them.
In the run-up to the election, both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats had said they were against the boycott but that they would reform the Sats.
The Liberal Democrats had said they would put more emphasis on classroom assessments by teachers.
Sats were abolished in Wales and Northern Ireland and have never been taken in Scotland.
