Ministers are stripping primary school children of their basic human right to a well-rounded education, a teachers’ leader warned today.

Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said national tests for 10- and 11-year-olds, formerly known as Sats, contravene the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Under the Convention, which Britain signed in 1991, children are entitled to a broad education which develops their “personalities, talents and abilities to their fullest potential.”

Blower told the NUT annual conference in Liverpool that Sats only gave children the right to pass exams, not the right “to be educated in the round.” They reduced children to “little bundles of measurable outputs trained in a mechanistic model of education,” she said, repeating words used last month by the children’s commissioner, Maggie Atkinson.