The Standards and Testing Agency has apologised to schools affected by “unacceptable” missing papers and delays with key stage 2 Sats results this year.
The move follows concerns about incorrect results and missing marks in this year’s Sats.
Now the STA has written schools a letter, which it says can be shown to Ofsted ”if there are any questions about results that arise during an inspection”.
The letter, seen by Tes, says the STA is “sorry about the issues that have occurred and the impact they have had on your pupils and your school”.
It adds: “We place high expectations on schools to administer the tests and you should expect the same high standards from the STA and its suppliers.”
The letter, from David Malcolm, the agency’s head of policy and stakeholder engagement, also apologises on behalf of Capita, which was contracted to oversee the marking process.
It says: ”We and our delivery partner Capita know that every pupil’s result in every school is important and Capita recognise that it is unacceptable for there to be delays in a result being received, or for any paper to be lost in the process of being scanned and marked.”
Capita’s “focus”, the letter states, ”has been on delivering the right outcomes for all pupils and they wish to apologise to you, your school and the pupils and parents affected by any missing results on 5 July”.
The STA also confirms in the letter that the investigation into the missing scripts had now been completed and that any scripts still missing are now deemed to be “lost”.
In July headteachers’ leaders called for an “immediate investigation” into reports of incorrect Sats results and missing marks.
Sats 2022: Incorrect results and missing marks
This followed warnings over the quality and accuracy of the marking, with the NAHT school leaders’ union saying it would highlight concerns about the way the marking of papers was managed and the operation of the Sats helpline this year.
Today the STA said it had spent two months working with Capita to ”undertake thorough investigations”, and as part of the process had ”conducted physical searches of the script storage and scanning warehouse, viewed scanned scripts on-screen and reviewed attendance registers and other administration information in relation to the 2022 tests”.
As a result, Mr Malcolm said, a “significant number of scripts have been found and marked”, and these results will be available to view on the Primary Assessment Gateway from today (7 September).
Mr Malcolm added that these scripts have been subject to an automatic marking review, given that the deadline for this process had passed, and said that schools would not be charged for this.
But the STA said that despite “significant work to search for them, some scripts have, however, not been located and are now deemed to be lost”.
“In a small number of cases, this may be all scripts for a certain paper,” it added.
This means that any scripts that have not appeared on the gateway by today have been “lost”.
Pupils with missing outcomes could still be awarded an expected standard
The STA has clarified that pupils with missing test outcomes will not be awarded an overall scaled score but could (for English grammar, punctuation and spelling or mathematics) still be “awarded the expected standard based on their raw scores in any other papers for that subject”.
“Pupils whose raw scores are above the minimum needed to be awarded a scaled score of 100 will be awarded an outcome of ‘AS’ (expected standard achieved). The outcomes of pupils whose raw scores from the remaining papers are below the minimum needed to be awarded a scaled score of 100 will be categorised as ‘M’.”
Ofsted ‘aware of the situation’
Mr Malcolm also notified affected schools that Ofsted inspectors will use 2022 key stage 2 outcomes “cautiously”, and “this applies regardless of the particular situation for schools who did not have full KS2 test results on 5 July”.
In March, the government revealed that Ofsted will use this year’s Sats data to judge schools’ curriculum delivery, but the Department for Education said it will “advise caution” on how assessment and results data is used this year because of the “uneven impact” of the pandemic.
In the letter to schools, Mr Macolm says the data that Ofsted inspectors use appears in the Inspection Data Summary Report (IDSR) and will not include data for pupils where scripts are lost.
“The data from test results returned on 7 September will not feature in IDSRs until January 2023,” he adds.
Mr Malcolm adds that Ofsted “cannot use data generated by the school - for example, teacher assessment data - in place of missing test data”.
He says: “Ofsted are aware of the situation facing some schools as a result of missing KS2 test results on 5 July and will inform inspectors as required. You can show this letter to Ofsted inspectors if there are any questions about results that arise during an inspection.”
A Capita spokesperson said the company was ”proud to have delivered the 2022 key stage 2 tests”.
“The overwhelming majority of pupils, from over 16,000 schools, have had their scripts processed and correct marks returned to them.”
The spokesperson said that following a “thorough investigation”, around 0.05 per cent of the total 3.8 million scripts, “have been recorded as either lost or missing”.
“We recognise that it is unacceptable for there to be delays in a result being received, or for any paper to be lost in the process of being scanned and marked. We have apologised directly to the affected schools and their pupils.”
The spokesperson said Capita was “working together with the Standards and Testing Agency on a formal lessons learned exercise”.
A DfE spokesperson said the department had ”worked closely” with Capita “to make sure they took every possible step to find missing papers over the summer, and we recognise the disappointment caused to children, their parents and schools where papers have not been found”.
“Parents can be reassured there will be no impact on their children’s progress to secondary school, and we have put strong safeguards in place to avoid school-level results being misinterpreted.
“We will be using the coming months to make sure Capita has a robust plan in place that prevents these issues from recurring in future years.”
