Pearson Education failed to deliver on KS2 results

[DeafLeppard]

Just got an email from DS's primary school -KS2 SATS results delayed until after 16th July because Pearson Education have cocked everything up. Assume that's nationwide?

Bloody well hope that the DfE have a good contract that results in significant penalties for Pearson, and that they're disqualified from future contracts. Nice to dream, isn't it?

Standard for modern Britain.
Nobody will give a shit.
Nothing will be done.

Yes it is a joke. That’s one day before the end of term for us. So we won’t be able to give our year 6’s their long awaited results until right before they leave! Barely any chance to discuss anything or support those who are disappointed etc.

Is this all we can expect nowadays?

The letter from the education secretary was pretty scathing and clearly put the blame on Pearson rather than themselves.

They messed up a level maths last year didn’t they?

Maybe they are doing it on purpose so the government will scrap the pointless things 🤔

Our school finishes on Tuesday for the summer, so were due to get results on their last day.
Looks like someone will be working over the summer!

Will they though? I guess they could wait till September 🤷🏻‍♀️. If I was a teacher and not getting paid I wouldn’t be working. I’m maybe missing something as dd is grown up. She did sats but I don’t ever remember marks being given out. Maybe I’ve forgotten. I just assumed the primary school passed them on to the secondary schools.

We got my son's results in his end of year report on the last day of term.

Pearson have royally cocked up, but the bigger issue is that the DfE don’t have the skills or experience to specify system needs effectively or manage big contracts. There have been all sorts of completely avoidable howlers in the lead up to this. If the DfE got themselves into schools (and local authorities) to see how things actually work on the ground, rather than just for the ‘gram, they might be able to see how to draw up and manage these outsourced projects better.

And schools only have until 24 July to submit papers for marking review. Given the stories from markers of how the system was glitching, there could be lots of missing marks that make a huge difference to whether a school is downgraded or upgraded in an Ofsted inspection. Absolutely unreasonable timescales given some schools will already have broken up by the 16th and many will finish on the 17th.

This isn’t a new or unique issue. Whoever ran the Sats when I was in Y6 in the late 90s didn’t provide our results to the school and apparently it was a nationwide issue. My cousin in the same year as me got predicted levels but my school didn’t offer that. I was supposed to be going to Disneyland with DGPs if I got good grades. They didn’t understand why my cousin got his results but I didn’t (no one got proper results that year) and thought I had “failed” my Sats when in reality the results never came out.

Pearson are awful to work for so I'm not surprised they've fucked up - I suspect the issue is that couldn't get a sufficient number of markers this year because they're crap and no one wants to do it.

Yes, that was usually the way it’s done, I thought?

I was a SATS team leader from 1990 to 2019. Yes, there have been issues over the years, but there has never been a year when results were not given to schools on the due date. There are incidences when schools did not get their results as such, but that was down to investigations of ‘Maladministration’ of individual schools, not a nationwide error.

It's school dependent.

I've never had my child's report on the last day, always 2 weeks before - to give us opportunity to speak with the teacher about it if needed.

You might get the report on the last day, but the school isn’t usually expected to have only one day to fill in the SATs results on every Year 6 child’s report and get them proof read and printed. Where a child has a test result out of line with what was expected, it’s nice to be able to reflect that in the comments. And the last two days of term are unbelievably hectic already, and often a time when major safeguarding issues emerge. Plus schools need to check every test paper where the result does not match expectations to see if there are marking errors. It’s done on screen and can be painfully slow.

Get the name right. It's Fucking Pearson.

Ask any Exams Officer or Data Manager.

That's another x days working in summer to try to access them for the start of Y7.

I know our headteacher well and I’m fairly sure she’ll want to get them to parents over the summer.
Im not fussed if I get them or not.

I live in an area where we finish for the summer in early July. For the past 3 years, our last day of term has been the day that the schools were given the SATs results.
Reports have already gone out, so students are verbally told their SATs results on the day by a teacher and parents are sent them via email on that same day too. Our last day of term this year is Tuesday, which is the day they were supposed to be received.

@BravasPatatas im not sure what your point is. That school had all year to plan for that way of working and presumably had emails templated and ready to complete. Schools this year working to a more typical pattern have been given less than three working days notice.

Schools are required by law to report the results to parents in writing.

The bigger deal here is that however little these tests might matter to children in the longer term or to parents, the DfE makes them VERY high stakes for schools. If there have been as many marking errors as it sounds like there may have been given what markers have been saying about the Pearson platform, schools will need a lot of time to check for errors in marking and adding up of marks. If key staff have booked holidays for the first week of the summer break - in all good faith because - it’s unreasonable to expect this to be done by 24 July, which is what the DfE are expecting.

No point really, it was just general chit chat on a discussion forum. Apologies.

They would have been able to download the results file from the Primary Assessment Gateway by the first week of July, though. Then it could be imported into the MIS, matched to students, reporting for SLT/Governors collated and analysed against various demographic details and prior attainment, and after that, templates checked, updated, the report/letter run set up, then printed and double checked, put into envelopes, etc. At the same time as the major MIS companies release their summer updates, getting admissions data (as there are things that cannot be asked before accepting a place that are needed), working to share information about the outgoing y6s (which requires KS2 data to be in before the CTF for each secondary school is generated - or it's no more use than name and date of birth) - printing second copies and putting it to each hard copy file to be sent to the new schools, timetabling updates and staffing processes for September and a thousand other things. So they could often be a nice, neat box of printed letters and envelopes sitting in a secure office until the day they were due to be handed on and the excel spreadsheet used to generate a mail merge or an upload to the document server (so that a copy is visible in a communications app) is the least of the problem. Oh, and ks2 data is also uploaded to education data packages to generate bands, targets, highlight potential unmet needs and then exported back into secondaries' MIS and analysed/reported upon.

Thanks to FP being their usual selves, they've screwed over both primaries and secondaries and caused a load of hassle for parents and children.

Like I said, Fucking Pearson.

When I did SATs in 2003 we never got told our results. To this day I have no idea what I got. When I went to secondary school which had lots of people from other primary schools no one else knew either.

We were just told it was for your sets in secondary school.

Are people seriously having results days for 11 year olds?!

I did SATS in 1996 and we were told our results.

I had a DD in that cohort.

We received SATs results, but there was a thing where some parents were not telling their children the outcomes/denying their existence because they did not believe in testing in the first place.

The secondaries did CAT4 testing in the first half term in any case, as they were impartial and broader, so groupings in schools that didn't keep to mixed ability classes were determined by those instead - and it meant they could decide what to do with children who had been withdrawn from them or were EHE or from overseas, something that's still done to this day.

I don't think I ever explicitly told my DD2 her results. I just said we were very proud or some such. She wasn't a very questioning child. Luckily school didn't make a big fuss either. This would have been 2016 I think.