The Committee’s report recommended that the government reform its relationship with the agencies that deliver its policies, after ministerial observers on the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) board contributed to the 2008 debacle by implementing precarious testing arrangements.

The report, headed by Labour MP Barry Shearman, went on to recommend that observers from the Department of Children Schools and Families (DCSF) not be placed on the board of the new regulator, Ofqual. Yet transferring the regulatory responsibilities of the QCA to a new quango merely paints over the cracks of a system that is clearly in need of a genuine overhaul.

The immediate problem with this limited reform  is that the government is not indicating any intention to cease meddling in ‘independent’ agencies as recommended by the report. Case in point a DCSF statement yesterday acknowledged that whilst Ofqual should be independent, “DCSF and DBIS [Department of Business, Innovation and Skills] officials should attend the Ofqual committee … as observers and be able to advise the committee, when requested, about the government’s views”.  Ed Balls and his ministers are clearly unwilling to acknowledge the role that their intervention played in the Key Stage 3 Sats fiasco. The beleaguered sacked chief of the QCA, Dr Ken Boston, although culpable, has been a handy scapegoat for the Department.

Beyond that, the real concern is that the burden of testing on school pupils remains, although the removal of testing at Key Stage 3 was a welcome move applauded by many. The 2008 debacle is a prime example of how government interference in the delivery of education policy – when ministers micro-manage and do not leave the professionals to their areas of expertise – can result in failure. It is unlikely that this latest lesson will be transferred to further testing reforms, in terms of an increase in freedom for teachers to choose appropriate systems of learning and a reduction in the pattern of ‘teaching to the test’.

Meanwhile, if the DCSF continues to interfere in the work of Ofqual – which appears likely, despite the select committee report – mere tinkering with the detail is simply a change of balls when the fruitless game of micro-mismanagement urgently needs replacing.

By Jed Cinnamon

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.

Another criticism took issue with Gove’s uncontested claim that several local authorities did not have a single pupil in a state maintained school attempt GCSE Physics, on the grounds that only six per cent of students nationally attempt Physics as a single subject anyway. But of course, that still begs the question why NONE of even that six per cent are appearing in some areas even though taking the three natural sciences as separate GCSEs still offers the best foundation for studying sciences at a higher level, which is highly suggestive of the very education gap that Gove is trying to illustrate. Similarly, Gove’s statement that twelve local authorities have fewer than a quarter of their pupils attempting English Maths, Science and a Modern language at GCSE is dismissed because only 44 per cent of pupils attempted that subject combination nationally. First, that still implies a distinct variation between areas and, secondly, that pupils should learn a foreign language and to have a GCSE level science qualification isn’t the most ambitious expectation, even though the Tories have no doubt drawn the line to put the divide in the starkest possible light. And, of course, the Tories have to tap-dance around the stats as they try to present New Labour as a unique failure when, in fact, their policies and outcomes follow closely on from what the Tories have offered in the past.
However, the main problem here lies not with one report or statistic but the entire frame of the discussion. For in the main it is taking place not in the real world, but somewhere over the rainbow, where skies are blue, the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true, and where SATS and GCSE results are reliable indicators of real pupil achievement. As we have documented, they are not, because they become alternately a series of gongs for the government to claim when the numbers come up right and a bunch of sticks for the opposition to beat the government with when they don’t. When the results have political implications, the exams will be subject to political interference, hence the gaming, the teaching to the test, the concentration on the borderline cases and, rather more damagingly, the slimming down of the curriculum. Many of these problems are explicitly acknowledged by Lupton, but they will not be solved until the discussion focuses not on arguing the toss over statistical artefacts but on genuinely useful indicators of achievement, something that can only be inferred for now from the evidence offered by universities and employers. Even then, the results will not necessarily have the final word on government policy success as other factors (levels of immigration, for example) will be bound to impact on standards.
Finally, Lupton makes a swipe at the so-called ‘marketisation’ of education that involves less state intervention and that she claims is a continuation of what New Labour are currently doing. A careful distinction needs to be made on this point, between creating a real market in education (i.e. parent choice), and the sort of ‘cargo cult market’ that the Labour government has offered so far. I mean here by cargo cult when the various icons and symbols of a market are introduced (i.e. productivity targets, delivery statements, slogans, new brands, shiny offices, and expensive buildings) so beloved of government bureaucrats, but without the underlying structure being reformed. That reform is, in essence, where rather than the state deciding what good education is and insisting on measuring it itself, parents get the final choice of what makes a good school and teachers and educationalists are encouraged to open and operate their own schools according to their professional expertise. Evidence in favour this sort of market (with the emphasis on parent choice and teacher empowerment rather than government measurement) is becoming increasingly overwhelming. Our report, Swedish Lessons, is our most recent contribution to this debate.

• 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