Anyone else do optional SATS which are externally marked?

[bigbobble]

That is the question really. Does anyone else's primary school do optional SATS which are externally marked? If so, why?

All our Juniors are now sitting SATS in 'exam conditions' and the argument is that it prepares them for Y6 SATS. But external marking? Very odd.

My son is 8 and has Aspergers. He has a TA as he needs a scribe. He tells me that she was prompting him yesterday on answers and telling him to stop and do it again. His class teacher was talking to another who was administering the test today telling her how the children should write the answers and how they shouldn't leave blanks as it gets marked down .

I can only think that the results feed back as the part of the data Ofsted get and which they have decided make the school so outstanding. But it all seems like a load of old rubbish for me and I think it is very unfair on the kids.

Ofsted would take a dim view of teacher assessment which only relied upon testing. They also cross reference teacher assessment and classwork to check standards. I can only assume that the school prefers to have an external opinion on one aspect of assessment - but it shows a strange lack of confidence in staff moderation, which it seems the staff are rebelling against since the marks won't even be accurate because of the cheating.

What a waste of money!

Thanks Feenie. Ofsted won't becoming near our school. It was made outstanding in 2007 and has recently been told, without an inspection, that it can continue with its outstanding label for the foreseeable future.

I understand there is a new regime at Ofsted so inspections are only prompted for outstanding schools following complaints or discrepancies with the data.

They will still be subjected to subject specific inspections, I think, just not general ones.

My school did that a couple of years ago when we had new management and they wanted an objective view of the levels. TBH some of the staff were not impressed that the new head didn't trust our professional skills, but it saved us hours of marking, so meh!
On the other hand, if the staff don't mark them, it is harder to see where the teaching gaps are.
The results don't get sent to ofsted, but just become another statistic on the school's data sheets sorry, are then used by the class teachers to plan next steps of work.

So it was done as a temporary measure? I can understand that to some extent but I can't understand it as a general practice, especially when teachers are clearly undermining the whole process by prompting responses etc.

Yes, just the once. When we got the papers back, we still had to look through them to see what we needed to focus on in teaching. We found so many mistakes in marking and disagreed with so many of the level judgements that we agreed the saving in marking in really wasn't worth it!

That's atrocious - I spend many hours each year appealing our appalling marking, and marks have gone up by as much as 20%. But I would be furious if we'd actually paid for the service!

I've never heard of this. But you live and learn, eh?

I know- we weren't impressed either!

A couple of years ago, we sent back all of our Y6 writing SATs, as level 5 kids were coming back with L3s. They refused to re-level (and were going to charge a fortune to do so). We plummeted down the league table.
We kept all the evidence and when Ofsted came in recently and asked why the results had been so poor, we showed them the papers. They agreed with us!
Not really relevant to the OP, but just wanted to share!

but not really very surprised.

We had the same one year, had to appeal the appeal!

Given these problems with external marking, why would you pay for it if you didn't have to? I really can't get my head around why they do it.