By Emma Morley

Last updated 09:27, Saturday, 04 October 2008

If you would just allow me for one moment to reminisce about my days at primary school... it’s 11am on Friday morning and this could only mean one thing.

Time for the weekly spelling test. Pens/pencils are poised ready for the first word.

While I can’t say I enjoyed the experience (after all tests are not meant to be enjoyed), looking back they don’t leave me with any distressing memories.

So I was astonished when I heard that a primary school in Gloucestershire has stopped giving spelling tests to pupils because they find them ‘unnecessarily distressing’.

Feeling nervous is not a bad thing – children should learn to manage this sort of feeling because it is something they will have to deal with throughout their education.

Pushing it aside only delays the inevitable.

Getting children to learn say 20 spellings as a homework task will help to set them up with skills that will come in handy in the future.

If they ever learn a foreign language later in their school career then they will have to learn lists of words.

Whether or not our children are tested too much is another issue but surely in the whole scale of things a simple spelling test shouldn’t be too much, especially when it is so valuable.

While I appreciate that some things have to move on, I think that we can be too keen to abandon things that always worked. Sometimes old techniques are still the best.

Children will come across things that they don’t want to do or don’t like at school but that isn’t a good enough reason for not doing them – it’s all part of life and growing up.

I hope other schools don’t follow this example or this isn’t used as a model for removing other unpopular aspects from the school day.

Pandering to this type of nonsense will not help our children in the long run.