Teachers working as Year 6 Sats markers say they were left unable to access training materials and sessions for hours over the weekend.
A school leaders’ union says it will contact the Department for Education about the “deeply worrying” reports.
One marker, who wished to remain anonymous, told Tes that Saturday’s events were “chaos on a mammoth scale reminiscent of last year”.
Last year, after marker training was disrupted, the Standards and Testing Agency (STA) was forced to apologise to schools for missing papers and delays with key stage 2 Sats results.
This year’s KS2 national assessments were sat by Year 6 pupils across the country last week, with Capita overseeing the marking process for the second year.
One marker told Tes that they spent three hours on hold to Capita on Saturday morning after being unable to log into the online training that was due to start at 9am.
They said that they had experienced the chaos of the marking process last year and that they would not have signed up again but they needed the money.
“If I didn’t need the money, I wouldn’t put myself through it”, they said.
Another marker told Tes that it took over two hours for the website issue to be resolved, and complained of “diabolical communication”.
“This meant training has had to be rushed as there was no contingency,” they said.
Several markers took to social media to vent their frustrations. One teacher, based in Leeds, reported on Twitter that they could not access the virtual training on Saturday first thing due to “high demand”.
Another marker said that even when they did eventually get through to the helpline “nobody can answer your query so it’s futile”.
Yet another said that the helpline “is staffed by staff who are not familiar with the processes so cannot actually help”.
Markers also reported that they were unable to access training materials until late on Friday night because the site “couldn’t cope with the number of people trying to access it”.
Tiffnie Harris, primary and data policy specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders, called the comments “deeply worrying”.
She said: “There were significant issues with Sats last year, for which the STA and Capita apologised and promised to address.
“We intend to pick this up with the DfE to ensure that everything is being done to address any difficulties. We simply cannot have a situation in which marking is disrupted, particularly as the process has been delayed by a week because of the coronation bank holiday.
“Alongside the widespread concern over the difficulty of the reading paper, this all adds up to an inauspicious start to this year’s Sats process.”
Responding to the concerns, a Capita spokesperson said: “We are proud to have successfully delivered training to more than 3,500 KS2 markers over the weekend. Unfortunately, there was a delay to training materials being available on Friday evening and to training sessions Saturday morning, which resulted in increased demand in our contact centre.”
Feedback gathered and the lessons learned from 2022 have informed Capita’s plans for this test cycle, the spokesperson said, adding that contact centre capacity has increased by more than 20 per cent compared with last year.
Capita will continue to review each stage of the marking process to ensure it is performing effectively.
A DfE spokesperson said: ”We are aware of a short delay in marker training starting. We build in contingency time to allow for such issues so the impact of this was minimal.
“This had no impact on marking, as training then continued across the day and the weekend with no further issues. Over 3,500 markers were successfully trained.”
