Our education secretary made a surprising claim at the weekend. 

In the middle of an article explaining how reformed GCSEs and A-levels were removing pupil stress from pupils, Damian Hinds also wrote that:  “Exams and the pressure that comes with them have always been a part of our school system. Back in my day we had O-levels and CSEs but the situation was no different.”

Even putting aside the conflagration of academic competition between pupils since his mid-80s O-level days - when just a quarter of pupils got five A-Cs, and university participation was less than a third of today’s rates - the suggestion that exam pressure has not increased since seems quite incredible.

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Education in 1985 was a completely different era, a time before Ofsted, tables and targets existed. Since then this huge accountability superstructure has grown up to pile on exams and testing pressure that teachers in the 80s would struggle to understand. 

Of course, if the pressure that is passed on to pupils helps at least some of them succeed with good GCSE and A-level grades, then it can be argued it will benefit them in later life. But the same cannot be said for the system of Sats used to check performance in our primaries for more than a quarter of a century.

For their critics, these tests are the worst example of how accountability measures can warp an education system - with no obvious direct benefit for the pupils. The charge list is long - extra pressure on teachers in the toughest areas, children in tears, Easter revision sessions, curriculum narrowing and cheating.

No return to secret garden 

Defenders of Sats - who have come out in force following Jeremy Corbyn’s pledge to scrap the tests earlier this month - are equally convinced of their case. Leading lights recently used a letter to The Times to argue that Sats must stay because standardised testing “enables teachers to understand which approaches work best”. They think the tests are needed to prevent “our most vulnerable pupils” losing out to teachers who need the tests to stop them from going down the wrong road.

But you don’t have to take such a condescending tone to agree that a return to to the old “secret garden” where the public and government just left teachers to do whatever they felt was right - without checks on whether it worked - is not really tenable. We do need some kind of insight into how well our publicly-funded schools are performing. It may be an unpopular thing to say for many Tes readers, but the truth is that while teachers will invariably go into the job for all the right reasons that doesn’t mean they always get it right. 

Anyone who doubts that need only consider the mass mistakes of VAK and Brain gym or, perhaps worse still the widespread tendency for secondaries to have wasted large numbers of pupils’ time on qualifications of very dubious worth for the sake of their schools league table performance.

Huge distortions

Of course, on this last point, it was very the same accountability system that was supposed to be keeping the profession on track that led too many heads to lose sight of what really mattered for their pupils. 

So just as it is longer realistic to argue we should just trust teachers and scrap all accountability, it is also hard to claim the current high stakes accountability system with the huge distortions it has produced is doing the job effectively. The Sats results that many secondaries simply don’t trust are a case in point. But the question is: if you do get rid of them, then what do you use instead? 

As many are already warning, using teacher assessment as an alternative is likely to burden the profession with even more workload, introduce unconscious bias and leave the system without a reliable standardised measure of attainment or progress.

Hole in Labour’s plan

So how do you fill the huge hole in Labour’s Sats abolition plan? My instant thought was a combination of sample testing as a system-wide check alongside a properly resourced inspection service to make sure individual schools were performing, without the distortion of high stakes tests.

The flaw in this scheme, according to Sam Freedman - special adviser to Michael Gove when he was education secretary - is that inspections would only take place every four or five years at best and you would have no way of holding to account individual schools in the interim. 

It is a fair argument. But it is no longer one that Damian Hinds will be able to make against scrapping Sats. That is because at the start of the year his department unveiled a plan to completely remove Sats results as a trigger for intervening in under-performing schools.  His decision to tackle teacher recruitment and retention by the relaxing school accountability system has already led to a decision to replace floor and coasting standards - with a far less punitive sounding “offer of support”.
 
But it is the proposal to go much further by taking test and exam results out of this process and leaving an Ofsted ‘requires improvement’ rating as the sole trigger for this support that is the real game changer.
Never mind the four- or five-year gap problem suggested by Freedman. With no sign of an end to the exemption for inspection for “outstanding” schools, some schools would effectively be given indefinite immunity from DfE intervention over standards under the Hinds plan. Not only that - but it will remove Sats from their key function as the government’s main check on primary performance.

Some will correctly point out that Sats results are still used to reach Ofsted verdicts. But the tests are only one of several factors contributing to overall judgements. And their influence will be cut considerably under a new inspection framework that places an all-round education above narrow measures of exam and test results. So two independent radical overhauls of checks on schools - by Ofsted and the DfE - are set to combine to make Sats a comparative sideshow. 

The education secretary’s decision to row back on three decades worth of ever-toughening school accountability may turn out to be a very far-sighted one. But in making it he has also, perhaps unwittingly, conceded defeat on what should have been his most compelling argument for fending off Corbyn and keeping Sats.