The big plastic box was full of water and four of us were lobbing assorted objects into it, shouting “FLOAT!” or “SINK!”, seemingly at random. The teacher looked bemused.
I was 7 years old and I remember it clearly because I had overheard my mum, a teacher at the school, explaining to a parent that these new tests - Sats, she called them - were nothing to worry about.
Being an anxious child, I obviously began to worry straightaway and by the time it was my turn to test my knowledge of buoyancy, I was very worried indeed.
Just over 30 years later, many people still tell others not to worry about Sats, yet many other people - adults and children alike - do still worry about them. This year is no different: anxiety around the fairness of testing children after two years of disruption is upping the fears of adding trauma on to existing trauma for pupils.
I have a lot of sympathy for those who worry about Sats. Because the way accountability is set up means that Sats do matter, a lot. They matter to the primary school the pupil attends, to the secondary school the pupil will go to next, to parents, to the teacher, to the headteacher. We have built a system in which key stage 2 Sats have become the arbiter of the success of a primary education (and therefore an assessment of teaching and school leadership), a judgement on a pupil’s ability (not attainment) and a determiner of curriculum pre-Sats and future opportunities after them.
I also have sympathy, though, for those who stress the need for these standardised tests to take place. A national assessment that gives us a glimpse of current attainment in a comparable way and from which we can begin to understand where we are with our teaching and learning seems sensible. And many of this view are right that the tests alone are not the only problem, rather it’s the way the data is used and overinterpreted.
Away from the polarising extremes of social media, you find a similar hedged view to my own among many primary school teachers commenting in the more moderate corners of the internet. Indeed, over half term, as the build-up to this year’s Sats hit the home stretch, many primary practitioners expressed support for the idea of standardised assessments but lamented the beast that the tool has become in reality.
How do we find a solution to this problem?
Time and cost constraints, alongside multiple other factors, mean that we will never get an accountability system that truly understands and records the journey of a child through the system, so we do need to recognise that a proxy measure of some description will be necessary.
But we also have to recognise that the current proxy measure is not working as well as it could. The way accountability in general works at the moment is not much better than back in the early 1990s, when my fellow pupils and I guessed whether something would float by roughly weighing it in our hands.
Sats - along with the majority of the national standardised tests - are not built to tell us the fullness of a school experience but provide a (narrow) snapshot of attainment on that day.
As a start, if we were to treat Sats with that understanding, then at a national level they could play a role that does not undermine schools or pupils, and they would still give us a useful national picture. Through a fundamental cultural shift at government level, Sats could be used to start a conversation, not bypass one.
But I think we can push it further than that. Would it not be better to have a standardised assessment-driven accountability system through which schools can get genuinely instructive feedback? Could it be designed in such a way that standardised assessments fulfil the accountability need but that they primarily exist to be of use to teachers and pupils to inform a positive change?
Many schools do this already by using standardised assessments built for that purpose. Throughout the pandemic, in the absence of the usual national tests, these self-administered diagnostic assessments became a key tool for the government to benchmark the need for catch-up (data they have clearly decided to ignore) as a secondary factor to their being useful for schools and pupils.
As we go into another summer term that starts with Sats and ends with GCSE and A-level exams, it’s hard not to think that simply reverting back to what we have always done is a missed opportunity. Where was the evolution of assessment proposal in the White Paper to seize the moment and create a more useful accountability system through intelligent assessment?
No one wanted a huge shift, but we got no sense that change was even considered.
And so now we go into a long term that will likely cause more anxiety and unintended consequences than good. Pupils, staff, parents - they all deserve much more than a system only slightly more advanced than throwing children into a bucket to see if they float or sink.
