A culture of excessive testing early in the lives of children can be problematic to their progress in school, as well as having a detrimental effect on the morale of teachers and pupils alike, an award winning teacher has claimed. 

Nancie Atwell, a US teacher who won the Global Teacher Prize earlier this year and gave the million dollar prize to her school in Maine to help it improve, was visiting a school in London to impart knowledge about finding ways to get the very best out of students and teachers. 

She said that in the modern age of education, there is too much focus on tests, and this means that teachers and parents focus on their kids learning what they need in order to achieve a pass in tests rather than actually gaining important knowledge. 

In terms of how this affects teachers, she said that too much testing simply puts pressure on teachers to make sure that students are passing their exams. 

She said: "It takes away teachers' autonomy, their ability to respond to who their students are and what they see is going on in their classroom."

As well as criticising the overuse of testing in early life, Ms Atwell said that teachers who are more softly spoken and polite to their pupils are more likely to get a positive response in terms of learning, as she gave an English lesson, watched by schools minister Nick Gibb. 

"I've been teaching a long time and something I've learnt is, almost the softer you are, the more attentive they are," she said. 

She went on to add that even the way teachers deal with unruly pupils can be important in terms of getting more problematic students to engage more effectively through opening a dialogue. 

"I would go to that student and say, 'What's the problem. You need to engage with this, stop talking.' I'm strict. I've also got what they call 'the look'... they fear it.

"The answer to almost every issue in the classroom is to talk to the kids about what's going on."