I'm not sure if my 11-year-old daughter has learnt much from sitting her dreaded SATs this week, but the experience has taught me something. It's not that standard assessment tasks are too stressful. It is that a downgraded test-obsessed education system is not challenging our children enough.

“As a parent” I am supposed to be all against SATs. But I don't object to a few short exams - and to judge by their cheery demeanour, my daughter and her friends don't mind that much either. (The allegedly condemned girl ate a hearty breakfast...) What I object to is them effectively sitting 45-minute tests for more than a term. Our daughters go to a decent local state school with good teachers in northeast London. Yet the constraints of the system mean that our eldest's class has seemingly done little for months beyond preparing for these narrow tests.

The report that an education committee of MPs issued on SATs this week scored some good marks in my book. It caned the way that Government control of the curriculum through targets, tests and league tables (the Three Ts?) has created a system of “teaching to the test” and “narrowing the curriculum”, so that children are taught fewer subjects and in a less-rounded way. This has “compromised teachers' creativity”, “distorted” education and led to “shallow learning”.

Too much of the debate about tests has focused instead on claims that SATs are too stressful, and can damage children's mental health. “Tested to destruction?” asked the BBC's Panorama. Yet as far as I can see the problem is not that our 11-year-olds are stressed out by SATs so much as they are bored out of their brains by the rote learning. If anything, SATs should be less stressful than the 11-plus exam we all took in my day. That decided my future as a grammar school boy. By contrast, these tests have no bearing on my daughter's place in a local secondary school that will ignore the results anyway. Those most stressed about SATs seem to be education-crazed parents screeching “Don't panic!” at our relatively calm children.

It is not often I get the chance to play teacher's pet to new Labour, so let me agree with what the Schools Minister told the MPs about stressful tests: “I think that life has its stresses, and that it's worth teaching about that at school.” Indeed, but here's a question: doesn't that commonsense attitude jar with the Government's instructions to schools to give children at least five times more praise than criticism, and lessons in “self-esteem” or even “happiness”? Discuss.

Our children are not always the delicate little flowers many imagine. As some contributors to the MPs' report observed, they have a “natural resilience” that helps them to handle setbacks - if we let them. Time to stop telling them how stressful silly SATs are, and give them a more challenging education worth getting stressed out about.

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