10th July 2016 14:30
By Blue Tutors
The SATs, or Standard Assessment Tests, are compulsory national assessments given to children in year 2 and year 6. The tests themselves have been taken since 1991, however this year’s have been changed to reflect the new primary school curriculum introduces in 2014. This ‘new’ SATs measure the performance in three major areas: reading, maths, and writing (spelling, grammar and punctuation). Those taken at the end of primary school teaching, also known as Key Stage 2, were taken by 600,000 students in May. The new testing came under scrutiny earlier this year when parents and teachers protested against the increasing pressures put on young children, followed by the online leak of answers a day ahead of the test. This, along with the earlier dissemination of the KS1 tests with practice papers, has caused widespread lack of confidence in ministers’ ability to manage the education system effectively.
The new primary curriculum was designed to be a more rigorous “knowledge-based” curriculum to improve the steadily deteriorating national education standards, with the UK currently ranked 20th of the OECD nations. Given the more challenging curriculum, the tests were also expected to be more challenging to reflect the change. The way success is measured has also changed; instead of discretised levels of achievement for every key stage, each test is now standardised based on the performance indicators within the curriculum such that a mark of 100 is required to pass. As such, comparisons with last year’s results are meaningless in evaluating the ability of the students, something which the Department for Education has stressed repeatedly.
Results do however give insight into the policy changes behind the new curriculum and testing. The less than smooth implementation of the new tests aside, the numbers do tell a story. The widely quoted figure of 53% is the number of students who achieved a passing mark in all three assessment criteria. The proportion of students passing each individual subject was higher; for example, 70% of students achieved the required standard in maths alone and 66% in reading. Whichever way you look at the statistics, there is a drop in results, but is this necessarily a bad thing? The DfE insists that moving away from the push over the last two decades to increase results, which has eroded standards and producing grade inflation, means that children’s education and skills are finally being prioritized over “short-term political wins”. Surely this is a step in the right direction?
This is a case where we need to look past the statistics at what is really changing. Yet the simultaneous chance in curriculum and assessment has made it is hard to distinguish the effectiveness of teaching from the change in the way we measure performance. Whatever the outcome of the new system, the constant tinkering and recent dramatic changes in teaching in the UK has destabilised the entire system, leaving us with very few ways of assessing whether the changes have really worked. One thing is clear: the long term improvements that higher standards and expectations are aiming to produce are leaving a cohort of students losing out in the chaos. What we need now is a period of stability without more changes, to really assess the effectiveness of the policy changes to enable targeted, evidence based changes in future policy.