One of the issues with the Key Stage 2 ‘Sats’ tests (taken in the last year of primary) is the face-value results that they are turning out. The fact that over a quarter of primary leavers fail to achieve to the expected level in maths and English is frequently taken to be an indictment of low school standards. Yet below the surface even this achievement figure has been shown to be inflated, with secondary school teachers revealing stark disparities between pupils’ performance in the end of primary Sats and their actual abilities. Research we did last summer, for example, showed that the majority of Year 7 teachers surveyed had found their pupils’ Key Stage 2 Sats results to be higher than the pupils’ true levels.
Primary school teachers, in turn, have long been expressing concerns that the pressure to achieve Sats benchmarks is compelling them to teach to the test. A scenario which is perceived to narrow the curriculum and focus disproportionately on so-called ‘borderline’ pupils – children at a level where coaching will bring them just over the benchmark.
In other words there are fundamental problems with Sats. However it now transpires that there are also practical critical weaknesses. Today’s Times Educational Supplement (TES) reports that teachers across England are continuing to raise concerns about the quality of Sats marking this year, particularly in the writing tests. Stuart Powell, head of a primary in Canterbury, for example, has expressed ‘alarm’ at the inconsistent marking of his pupils papers. He has given an example of questionable marking, which is published in the TES, where two conspicuously different levels of work have been given the same scores. Extracts from the two (taken from the TES) are indeed alarming:

Paper 1
‘The noise subsides as students settle down. What had been a cacophony louder than a rock festival is now a murmur quieter than a cricket. Stragglers rush past in dribs and drabs, worrying about how angry their teachers will be.’

Paper 2
‘I was in the market and all people were rushing around. It smell like a pig! Everyone was dropping the food in the basket. The food was nice but the people wasn’t! I was woking round the market to buy a chocolate.’
Both of the above pieces were awarded three marks out of eight.

What is clear is that a lethal combination of political pressure on the one hand and plain incompetence on the other has rendered testing in primary schools highly destructive. Testing, for both the purposes of national accountability and a gauge of where pupils are at is hugely important. Testing today is however achieving neither. That the Key Stage 2 Sats are not working has now become apparent to the point that the government has, much more explicitly than ever, indicated their imminent axe. However the proposed alternative, what is called ‘single level testing’, also appears to be beleaguered. Political pressure for these tests to work immediately and inadequate piloting provide little assurance of an effective testing regime.

• 90% of secondary school teachers surveyed have found the Key Stage 2 Sats results to be inconsistent with pupils’ true abilities, this last school year
• 79% of secondary school teachers have found that up to a third of their Year 7 year-group’s abilities have been lower than their Key Stage 2 Sats results, this last school year

Teaching to the test or ‘coaching’ is seen to be the number one reason for inflated Key Stage 2 results:

• 77% out of those teachers who feel that Key Stage 2 results have been sometimes or often higher than pupils’ actual abilities consider the main or second most important cause to be teaching to the test, or ‘coaching’, for the Sats.

‘Increasingly rarely primaries don’t coach pupils for the Key Stage 2 Sats.’

Secondary head of maths, North East

A major repercussion for secondary teachers of this artificial inflation is that it appears that they have made little or no progress with their pupils – or worst, that pupils have gone backwards. In reality, many of these pupils were never at their stated level. With ‘value added’ a central measure of school quality, secondary teachers frequently find inflated Key Stage 2 results put them under huge pressure to catch-up:

‘There is a lot of pressure to catch up in order to make up the two new levels of progress required. The progress which needs to be made puts us under an awful lot of pressure.’

Secondary head of English, Yorkshire and Humberside

One remedial measure increasingly adopted by secondary schools is to do their own testing. Directly related to misleading primary Sats results, nearly two-thirds of the secondary schools surveyed (62%) tested pupils on entry into secondary school this last academic year.

‘We do baseline testing so that we can show what we have done with them – by using the Key Stage 2 results it would look like we hadn’t made any progress.’

Secondary head of science, South East

‘The Key Stage 2 Sats have become little more than “vanity testing”: “proof” for the government of rising standards in primary schools which the consumers of these results – secondary schools – aren’t buying,’ commented Anastasia de Waal, Head of Family and Education and author of the report.

The purpose of testing in state schools has come to be more about ‘proving’ that standards are rising – irrespective of whether they actually are – than genuinely gauging standards. As a result, independent testing is being resorted to as an antidote to distortions now rife in government testing. Universities are increasingly carrying out their own testing because of flaws in the exam process, as are employers on school leavers.

Now secondary schools are following suit, resorting to their own independent testing.

• Vast sums spent on Key Stage 2 testing wasted as secondary schools cannot use the results
• Significant gaps left in coached pupils’ learning

Teaching to the test has become such a widespread phenomenon because of government pressure to boost test and exam results at whatever cost. Up and down the country primary school teachers are finding themselves compelled to teach to the test both through official guidance and through pressure to do what they can in the short-term to gain higher Sats scores. [p19]

The result is that the mechanism for testing teacher and school effectiveness has come to actually undermine educational effectiveness. Over the last decade higher test scores in primary schools have all too often represented less learning and worse educated pupils.

The solution is not scrapping primary testing, however. Discussion around the issues which primary school testing in this country currently faces often leads to the conclusion that the root of the problem is testing per se. The evidence on what has gone wrong in testing strongly suggests that this is an erroneous position. Testing itself is not the problem. Testing can be stimulating for pupils and useful in terms of measuring how effective teaching and school policies are; if testing is used effectively, it can indeed be a valuable accountability tool, with no detriment to even comparatively young pupils.

The underlying problem is that testing has become the end rather than the means in driving up school standards thereby warping its potential to ensure accountability. [p18]

The solution is testing which gauges a truly randomised snapshot of learning, rather than the testing happening today, whereby the sum of learning, all to often, becomes that snapshot. To do so schools should not be forewarned on either details of the test content, or the timing. Annual unseen testing at any point in upper primary school (between Years 3 and 6) would provide a more accurate picture of learning levels and progress in a school.[p19]

Notes to editors:

• 107 secondary school teachers who taught in Year 7 in maintained schools in England this last school year were surveyed using a telephone questionnaire, between 8th and 24th July 2008
• The views of 47 maths teachers, 32 English teachers and 28 science teachers were obtained
• Responses cover the following regions: North East – 2, Yorkshire and Humberside – 8, North West – 5, East Midlands – 3, West Midlands – 4, East of England – 4, London – 16, South West – 12, South East – 5
• The full report can be read here