KS2 SATs Marking Failings Prompt Independent Review, Appeal Deadline Extended to 7 September
If your child sat their KS2 Sats this May, you will already know results day did not go to plan. Schools were meant to receive results on 9 July. Most did not see them until 16 July, a week and two days late, after the company now running the marking process ran into technical problems it could not fix in time.
This was the first year that Pearson Edexcel had responsibility for marking the Key Stage 2 tests, having won the government contract previously held by Capita. Examiners reported weeks of glitches in the online marking system before the delay was even announced, and the Department for Education has now confirmed a formal review into what went wrong and why it took so long to say so.
What actually happened
Results were due on 9 July. Schools were told, with little warning, that they would not arrive until 16 July. The Department for Education blamed "technical issues" at Pearson, though reporting from Schools Week and Tes described a marking system beset by glitches for weeks beforehand, with examiners flagging problems long before schools were told anything was wrong. Secondary schools, who use the scaled scores to place incoming Year 7 pupils into sets, were left without the data they needed right at the point they would normally be finalising it.
For a Year 6 parent, the practical effect was straightforward but stressful: a results day that didn't arrive, no clear explanation for over a week, and a summer holiday starting with an unresolved question hanging over it rather than a clean answer about how your child had done.
The marking scheme itself, not just the delay
The delay is only part of the story. Heads and the NAHT school leaders' union have also raised concerns about the marking scheme, particularly for reading, describing it as rigid and, in the words of NAHT's head of policy Sarah Hannafin, prone to catching pupils out rather than rewarding genuine understanding. NAHT says it flagged these concerns to the Standards and Testing Agency after last year's tests, and that the same issues persisted this year, with children losing marks for answers that showed they understood a text but weren't phrased in the narrow way the mark scheme required.
That matters because Sats results, however imperfect a measure of a child's ability, still shape how a school talks to parents about progress, and in many cases how a child is set or grouped when they start secondary school. A generous reading of a slightly-off answer and a strict one can be the difference between a child feeling like they did well and a child feeling like they let themselves down, for reasons that have nothing to do with what they actually understood.
Why the contract switch matters
Key Stage 2 marking is a huge logistical operation. Hundreds of thousands of scripts, across reading, maths and grammar, punctuation and spelling, need to be marked accurately and consistently within a few short weeks so that results land on the same day for every school in the country. Capita had run this for years. Handing it to a new provider was always going to carry some risk in year one, and that risk landed. The Department for Education has not said publicly what went wrong inside Pearson's system, beyond describing it as technical, and that gap is one of the specific things Dame Christine Gilbert's review has been asked to close.
It is also worth being clear about what this delay was not. It was not a change to how children were tested, and it was not evidence that this year's cohort did unusually badly. The tests themselves went ahead as normal in May. What broke was the machinery behind turning completed papers into a result a school could hand to a parent, and that distinction matters if you are trying to work out how seriously to take the disruption versus the underlying number your child came home with.
The results themselves
Behind the disruption, the national picture moved only slightly. 63 per cent of pupils met the expected standard across reading, writing and maths combined, up from 62 per cent last year. Reading held steady at 75 per cent, maths rose a point to 75 per cent, writing rose a point to 73 per cent, and grammar, punctuation and spelling rose a point to 74 per cent. All four measures remain below the 65 per cent combined figure recorded in the last full academic year before the pandemic, though they have recovered steadily from a low of 59 per cent in 2022.
In other words: a normal, unremarkable year for outcomes, wrapped in a genuinely abnormal year for delivery. That gap between a fairly stable results picture and a badly handled process is part of why the government has felt compelled to act rather than let the story pass.
The review, and what happens next
Dame Christine Gilbert, chair of Ofsted, has been asked to lead an independent review into the delay. Her brief is to establish what went wrong this year and to recommend changes to how the tests are delivered and marked in future, with the Department for Education saying explicitly that part of the goal is to rebuild trust with schools and families. The department has also said it is exploring options for recourse against Pearson, including financial penalties and, potentially, cancellation of the contract itself.
There is a concrete deadline attached to all this that matters directly to parents. Schools normally have until 24 July to request a review of a child's Sats marking if they believe a mistake was made. Because of the delay, that deadline has been pushed back to 7 September 2026. If you were unconvinced by your child's result, or a subject felt out of step with how they normally perform in class, there is more time than usual to raise it with the school and ask for the marking to be checked, so it is worth having that conversation with a teacher before the new school year gets underway rather than assuming the window has already closed.
What this means for families
None of this changes what Sats measure, or how much weight any individual family should put on a single set of scores from a single week in May. A test is a snapshot, not a verdict, and the delay says more about a marking contract than it does about your child. But if a result looked genuinely surprising against everything else you know about how your child reads, writes and works with numbers, this year gives you a longer and more legitimate reason than usual to ask the school to double-check it. At Blue Tutors, we regularly see the gap between a single test score and a child's actual grasp of a subject, which is exactly why results like these are worth a second look rather than a quiet acceptance.
The bigger question, for the review to answer properly, is whether a similar mess is possible again next May. Parents and schools alike will be watching for Dame Christine Gilbert's findings before then, and for clear evidence that whatever is agreed with Pearson, or its successor, actually holds.