As results are announced keep the SATs in perspective - schools and children are much more than a test score

  Children’s author Michael Morpurgo, in a striking phrase, has referred to the SATs taken by 10 and 11 year olds as a ‘dark spider spreading fear in primary classrooms.’

Primary school headteachers were able to access their school’s results overnight and social media is buzzing with reactions.

The TES reports:

The government also published the tables which show how many marks are needed in each subject to reach a scaled score of 100, which is the “expected standard”.

This year pupils needed 26 out of 50 in reading, 57 out of 110 in maths and 36 out of 70 in spelling, punctuation and grammar (Spag) to reach the expected standard.

This compares to 21 out of 50 needed in reading last year, 60 out of 110 needed in maths and 43 out of 70 needed in Spag. The jump in the marks needed to pass the reading test comes after Year 6 teachers had reported that the reading test this year was “kinder” than it was in 2016.

The new tests were introduced last year and could not be compared with previous years. It would be a mistake to make too much of any comparison this year as leading experts suggest that the data is ‘too fragile’ to interpret with any confidence.


The TES reports Russell Hobby, General Secretary of the National Association of Headteachers:

Currently, the methods to hold schools to account aren’t as fair or reliable as they should be. Sats data only gives parents part of the picture when judging a pupil’s success or a school’s effectiveness.

At the moment, parents and schools know these results have to be taken with a pinch of salt. This can’t be right. Just looking at data misses the majority of the real work that schools do to help young people achieve their full potential.

Schools do need to be held to account but inspectors should look at more than just data. That way, when parents are reading Ofsted reports they can have more confidence that the report properly reflects how good the school actually is.

We are seeing the signs of a more balanced approach to the use of data by Ofsted, as expressed in a recent speech by Amanda Spielman, the chief inspector, in which she said, ‘Rather than just intensifying the focus on data, Ofsted inspections must explore what is behind the data, asking how results have been achieved.’

The issue of how results have been achieved is crucial.  Schools vary in their conduct of SATs and the amount of preparation. Concern about ‘teaching to the test’ in the last year of primary school, with a resulting narrowing of the curriculum and teachers and children feeling stressed by the pressure, has been widespread. Some schools hold special revision classes during the school holiday and others have endless practise tests.  Meanwhile children in private schools and those who are home-schooled escape the SATs completely.

Whatever one’s views we can probably all agree that schools and children are far more than a school. SAT results do not capture the many facets of a rich primary curriculum that will be familiar to many parents and that teachers struggle to provide despite all the pressure of SATs ‘success’.


 

Children's authors slam phonics tests

A item from the Guardian to give teachers heart over the holidays. Three cheers for our children's authors!

More than 90 of Britain's best-known children's authors and illustrators have called on the government to abandon its plans to introduce early-year reading tests, warning that they pose a threat to reading for pleasure in primary schools.

The former children's laureate Michael Rosen is leading the writers' charge against a phonics-intensive approach to teaching young children how to read.

A letter to the Guardian signed by 91 names including Meg Rosoff, Philip Ardagh and Alan Gibbons says millions is being spent on "systematic synthetic phonics programmes" even though there is "no evidence that such programmes help children understand what they are reading".

Rosen told the Guardian: "It does not produce reading for understanding, it produces people who can read phonically."

The letter calls on the government to abandon plans for reading tests, specifically the phonics screening check at the end of year one and the spelling, punctuation and grammar (Spag) test at the end of year six.
The former requires five- and six-year-olds to sound out the letters of a short word or nonsense word and blend them to make the word (for example: emp, sheb, shelf, splok, blow, pine).

Rosen claimed schools were coaching children through the process and at least half were still failing. Many were failing because they were trying to correct the nonsense words, he said, for example saying "strom" as "storm".

"It is incredibly baffling to most parents because it sounds as if they are being told that their child has failed at reading, which is not the case," he said.

The proposed Spag test is to be sat by children at the end of primary school as a way of addressing what the government sees as a lack of attention given to spelling and grammar in recent years.

Rosen said it would mean teachers spending months on a "drill, skill and kill" programme, "trying to get them to pass this thing. It's bad enough with Sats. Anyone who has a year six child will know that for the past six months up until the Sats test, our children have been drilled and drilled, doing paper after paper, when they could have been writing, reading and playing with language in all kinds of ways.

"They have no evidence that any of this stuff they've imposed will actually improve children's writing. If they produced it, perhaps we'd have to shut up, but they don't."

The letter highlights a recent Ofsted report, Moving English Forward, which recommended that the government should call on schools to develop policies on reading for enjoyment. "To date there has been no such move by government," it says.

Instead the government has concentrated on phonics programmes. "As a result, more school time will be devoted to reading as an academic, test-driven exercise; less time will be available for reading and writing enjoyment.

"We deplore this state of affairs and consider that the quality of children's school lives is about to be altered for the worse."