More than three in five calls to an official Sats helpline for schools went unanswered last spring, a report by assessments watchdog Ofqual has found.
Those who stayed on the line had to wait an average of 53 minutes to get a response, according to Ofqual’s National assessments regulation annual report 2022 published today.
It provides more detail on a series of major problems with last year’s Sats marking and moderation process, which Tes reported on at the time.
The report says around 62 per cent of the 7,135 calls to the helpline were unanswered and those whose calls were answered found that the helpline was often unable to resolve their queries because of “insufficient” staff and “inadequate training”, it adds.
It also says that hundreds of pupils received results for tests they did not take, with the contractor Capita “entirely reliant on schools to identify where these issues had occurred”.
Last May, Tes reported that headteachers had criticised “ridiculous” wait times on the Standards and Testing Agency (STA) helpline during key stage 2 Sats - the first to take place since before the Covid pandemic.
In June, union leaders called on the government to “thoroughly review” the exams amid concerns about the quality and accuracy of the marking.
In September, the STA apologised to schools affected by “unacceptable” missing papers and delays.
The Ofqual report says that during test week in May, “schools faced excessive waiting times on the contractor’s telephone helpline set up to resolve queries, and large numbers of calls went unanswered”.
On incorrect results, it adds: “There were 372 cases where pupils received a result for a test that they did not take, or received a result belonging to another pupil. STA stated that these cases were the result of errors in the manual processing of pupil data.”
The report also flags issues with the scanning, marking and timely return of some modified test scripts, and raises that on the morning results were returned to schools, many heads were unable to access the Primary Assessment Gateway, an online portal managed by Capita, “for several hours”.
It says that on the day of results, STA returned more than 99.5 per cent of results to schools, but that it had to send a letter to 3,360 schools - a fifth of all primaries - notifying them that the results in one or more subjects would be delayed for some of their pupils.
After several issues were resolved, around 4,000 results were still “unaccounted for”, and approximately 2,000 scripts were found during several weeks of searching the contractors’ scanning facility in late July and August.
Eventually, in total, just under 2,000 of the approximately 4,000 unaccounted for scripts were declared lost, with the number of scripts lost each year between 2015 and 2019 below 200.
Responding to today’s report, Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said: “The whole debacle was unacceptable and must not be repeated this year. The government wants schools to deliver Sats, therefore it must make sure everything is properly in place for them to do so.
“There is a lot of learning to be done and improvements to be made, but our members have heard little about what is going to change to give them any confidence that things will be better.”
He said the report’s findings chimed with feedback from members, who had also highlighted “the website crashing on the day results were released”, school leaders left on hold to the helpline for hours on end and thousands of scripts being lost.
A Capita spokesperson said: “We are proud to deliver tests for the STA, and we welcome Ofqual’s report.
“We engaged with schools and the STA to get their feedback on the administration of 2022’s tests. This feedback has informed our plans for the 2023 test cycle and will help ensure we understand and address any past issues and improve operational performance.”
The STA has also been contacted for comment.
