National primary school tests including Sats and the Reception baseline assessment (RBA) should be scrapped because they do not produce “fair or accurate judgements on schools or pupils” according to a new report by a former Department for Education adviser.
The EDSK think tank report calls for a move away from “the distorting and damaging effects of overbearing one-off tests” to more regular but shorter assessments in three subjects: reading; maths; and spelling, punctuation and grammar (Spag).
It also calls for pen-and-paper tests to be replaced with online assessments, as used in many other countries, to make the results more reliable and less burdensome for schools.
The report came as the government reintroduced Sats for next year and brought in the new baseline assessment test for Reception pupils.
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Tom Richmond, director of EDSK and lead author of the report, said: “We will never provide a world-class primary education in England if the government’s only approach to raising standards is to simply make pupils sit more national tests.
“Other countries are years ahead of us in replacing pen-and-paper assessments with online adaptive tests to track the performance and progress of primary-age pupils.”
The report claims that the way in which government holds schools to account for their performance on national tests is distorting the results of the tests themselves.
“For example, the high-stakes accountability system puts enormous pressure on teachers and school leaders to spend weeks, if not months, preparing pupils for Sats in Year 6, which can also lead to other subjects such as art, music and science being squeezed out of the curriculum,” it says.
The report also finds that having five national tests for pupils throughout primary education creates a significant workload burden for teachers and leaders yet does not help them improve teaching and learning.
And it says Sats at age 11 come too late to provide useful feedback to primary schools on how they could raise literacy and numeracy standards.
The report adds that the results from the new RBA introduced this autumn will only be used to judge schools six years later when a pupil completes their Sats rather than helping teachers understand pupils’ strengths and weaknesses during their primary education.
The RBA is a test of children’s English and maths skills when they first start school. It serves as the basis for a new way of measuring progress in primary schools, whereby outcomes are tracked from the point children sit the RBA to the point they take their Sats in Year 6.
The report also calls for the one-size-fits-all nature of Sats to make way for more “adaptive” tests that provide a more personalised assessment by giving pupils easier or harder questions depending on their performance during the test.
Mr Richmond added: “Requiring pupils to complete so many disconnected one-off high-stakes tests does not help to improve teaching and learning, nor are the tests able to reliably identify the pupils and schools that may need more support. On that basis, a new approach is needed to reduce the pressure on school leaders and the school curriculum while also improving the accuracy and fairness of primary school assessments.”
The report has been written by Mr Richmond and Eleanor Regan.
Nick Brook, deputy general secretary of school leaders’ union the NAHT, said: “The way in which government currently holds primary schools to account through national pupil testing undoubtedly does more harm than good.
“Today’s report from EDSK shines a light on the problematic nature of the current system, and correctly highlights a number of issues with the way primary statutory assessment currently works. NAHT have long argued for fewer statutory tests throughout the primary years, which have for too long narrowed the curriculum and distracted focus from great teaching and learning.
“In finding a better approach to primary assessment, EDSK are right that we need to think creatively and learn lessons from other education systems around the world. Yet we know that any approach that uses pupil test results to hold schools to account has potential to have unintended impact and introduce perverse incentives.
“It is clear that there are no simple solutions and no perfect answers to this problem, but it’s one that we must continue to wrestle with. As part of this, we must be careful not to create a new set of problems in our attempts to solve existing ones. We hope that EDSK’s report will provoke much-needed debate and scrutiny on this important theme.”
