Robin Alexander writes here about the collateral damage inflicted by the testing-and-accountability regime in the U.K.
His analysis will be familiar to American readers. As we all seek to be “world class” and to compete with one another, our governments are imposing a dreary conformity on every school and draining them of the spontaneity and joy that is the life blood of teaching and learning.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane, it is good of you to take an interest in the UK when you’re clearly busy enough with everything that’s going on over there. It’s a good paper, but seriously out of date now I’m afraid, published before the last election and the arrival of Michael Gove, surely the most disastrously misguided Education Secretary we’ve ever had. A full list of his policies would take me far too long but suffice to say at the core of it is the same privatising agenda you’re faced with, together with lots of fiddling with our already established version of Common Core, in a way that is retrogade, ideologically loaded and at times seems calculated to upset as many teachers as possible.