Is it normal for teachers to cheat in SATs?

[MerryMarigold]

I don't personally give a stuff about SATs, but ds1 came home and told me that teachers have told him some of the answers - in all of the tests. Is this normal behaviour? I am shocked, mostly because it is teaching ds1 that cheating in exams is ok. In this case, it is the school cheating.

This just seems really off - and will obviously boost the school's results. On another occasion the HT told my ds1 to 'get a move on' with his paper, which I thought wasn't good either. Ds1 does have slow processing, but I'd rather he was careful and did the questions correctly than storm through the paper. Another time he missed a question as he didn't know the methodology so he moved on (I taught him to do this rather than waste time on something he doesn't know) and he told to go back and do it.

Oh well, it's all over now.

No camping, as has been said upthread, all state schools are set targets for each pupil based on SATs at KS2 results. They may use midyis to set the pupils or some other method, but their targets in terms of government data are only based on SATs and schools cannot avoid this.
What this means in reality is that those targets often determine the GCSE options offered to a child. So a child with higher SATs will be targeted into single sciences, more languages....a more academic curriculum at GCSE. This creates problems if really they are not top ability, although the their cheat SATs suggested it. It means schools and students struggle to achieve unrealistic targets. Essentially it means that those pupils with over inflated SATs are set up to fail and the schools are set up to fail with those children. Those kids don't always receive the best teaching for their ability and so and short-changed. These are the longer term consequences of what is going on. Additionally, future junior teachers are also put under increasing pressure to achieve SATs results which are un achievable which puts them under pressure to cheat. This kind of action has negative consequences for the children the,selves, children in the future and teachers in primary and secondary schools into the future. It isn't an irrelevance.

Well I just reported the school I walked past. The guy at the STA was pretty shocked (because it seems to have been the whole class and was so flagrant). I asked to be anonymous as I have an unusual name and it's a feeder School for DHs secondary. No problem, he took my name off the report, and my email which also contains my name. He now refers it to the DfE dept which deals with maladministration and they will visit the school and ask some questions and then decide what happens. If they can't prove anything, which is likely, then at least it's a sharp wake up for the head.

what happens when a child comes from a prep school who haven't done SATS?

why don't the independent secondaries even ask for the SATS results?

i've been told by 2 different schools - SLT staff, both outstanding secondaries in SW London that they don't take any notice of the SATS results as they are generally over inflated.

I'm not saying you're wrong about the government GCSE targets based off SATS but isn't this just for government stats? Good schools re-test ime.

nocamping yes, we retest for setting, but the GCSE targets are set by the government. We take no notice of SATs in year 7, we re level them, although if you read above some people complain that we put them down in year 7 just to make their progress look good but come GCSE options those targets matter, and in year 10 and 11 it'll be the SATs based target that they are working towards, and that we are told by SLT to meet. The school is judged by those, as are the students. We cannot simply retest and ignore them.

Re independent students. They end up being just as disadvantaged, as in our school we level them in year 7, work out roughly where they fall in the cohort, and then set their targets in line with the other students. So if their peers have overinflated targets, they do too.

And chocolate is not wrong. And it's not just for stats, it affects the actual targets of the actual children.

And I work in an outstanding school in London, just to compare to the two you know. It's not that schools following government requirements are somehow the crap ones

Independent secondaries are looked at differently and are able to set their own targets. Because they are independent. I.e. not controlled by the government.

DS school cheated as well. The teacher pointed to the correct answer and another parent told me their child had a TA sat with them pointing at answers . I wont be reporting them and if that makes me complicit then so be it. It just confirms in my mind that SATS are bull. Teachers have enough pressure on them as it is and DS year 6 teacher has been a good thing overall. Nothing will be gained by me telling tales as I doubt they can 'prove' anything. If DS gets crazy predicted GCSEs I will explain what a load of nonsense they are based on and to work at his own pace. His secondary school is pretty good at moving kids to the right level anyway.

Interesting feature of re-testing, btw - local school does re-test, and finds very different results based on different feeder primaries. School A has lower SATs results, but has a more balanced Y6 curriculum and continues English and Maths teaching right through the year until the final week or so. School B has higher results, with a significant 'teaching to the test' culture, with almost no teaching of English and Maths post SATs because the curriculum up till then has been so imbalanced they try to redress it afterwards.

in re-testing (done 2-3 weeks into the Autumn term), School A's pupils attain very much in line with their SATs results. School B's do not. This means that in the subjects that are setted from early on, School B's pupils are doubly disadvantaged - they have very high GCSE targets BUT are (rightly) placed in lower sets on arrival in Y7 than their Y6 results indicated.

Italian - if that happened in a GCSE, would you be OK with it?

As SATs are used for school accountability for primaries in exactly the same way as GCSEs are used for secondary (even though for many secondaries the actual exit point is A-leves), why is cheating in key school accountability measures OK only for younger pupils?

And I work in an outstanding school in London, just to compare to the two you know. It's not that schools following government requirements are somehow the crap ones hmm
why do these threads always have to degenerate? nowhere did i say only crap schools follow govt requirements. i hate mumsnet for that chippiness always bubbling away. apologies for sharing my experience and qualifying where it came from.

Hyperbole, perhaps,

Yes, there's quite a bit going on here.

I remember once making my dsis cry on the school bus because she wouldn't pick up my umbrella for me, and somehow managed to make it into some huge thing about disability or murder. I can't remember except it was ludicrous (I was an argumentative child and 3 years older).

I think what we need to remember here is that a CRIME has not been committed here. There is nothing legal, I don't think. The police are not going to make arrests over this, but the after effects could still be v damaging. It's all about bureaucracy and an education 'machine' which needs 'protecting' to maintain its integrity. I am moving further and further away from doing anything at all.

Wow...some of these attitudes are morally shocking

What would you do in my case?
My ds was in the room while their deputy head () was telling other pupils to check specific answers. I also know from another mum that her dd was told a particular answer was wrong.
Bizarrely the deputy head was actually wrong a few times so was not even helping the kids.
I really don't know what to do.
I don't want this to come back on the kids and I'm not sure what I can say anyway when a lot of it is what ds has been told rather than what he actually witnessed.
Aaaargh!!

IMO it's the fact that secondary schools are measured by the amount of progress the children make based on the narrow and somewhat arbitrary measure that is their SATs that is the problem, rather than inflated SATs scores (be it by (legitimate but still not in the children's best interest) teaching to the test and cramming or by (illegitimate) cheating). Without cheating involved, SATs scores are still too narrow to predict someone's ability in e.g. history, and arbitrary as they reflect the children's achievements in a particular week only.

All those posters crying 'you can't stand by and do nothing when you've witnessed cheating/grades being inflated! Those grades cause problems down the line' - do you apply the same logic to yourselves? I.e. you do not stand by and do nothing when you witness the problems caused by the government's insistence to measure progress from pretty arbitrary and narrow KS2 SATs measures?

Or do you say to yourselves, I know it is silly to pressure this kid into achieving Bs in history etc - clearly his English SATs were the result of a having a good day, or perhaps they just weren't indicative of his non-existent sense of history - but I'll still pile the pressure on him, because my pay depends on it, because government says I must get him to that stage. And I must work within the circumstances that I find myself in.
Or, I know it is terrible that that kid isn't supported, she could get As across the board i she was only supported through this difficult stage she's currently going through, but her results don't matter as she must have had a bad day at SATs/was ill or something. So I won't, I'll focus my efforts (perhaps because my HT tells me to) on those whose results will affect our progress statistics. Again, I have to work within the limits given.

(Instead I'll rant and complain about the primary teachers who happen to succumb to the same pressures I do.)

If you're thinking like that, aren't you witnessing a great wrong (too much pressure on some kids, not enough support for other kids, due to government rules) and standing by?
The great wrong would be very nearly equally as bad as it is, even if there was no cheating at SATs level at all. But your effort to right the wrong is to shout 'you must stop the cheating at SATs level!' Which would frankly have very little effect...

Instead, you could argue for SATs being scrapped, or for them no longer being used to measure progress at the next stage school, so they'd truly be about 'assessing the primary school' with no future effects for the children.

(And with my subversive hat on, I'd argue that SATs being scrapped is more likely to happen if it were to become apparent that the pressures involved with them lead to regular cheating...)

BigWeald,

How would you measure the performance of secondaries, in an ideal world?

Traditionally, the measure has been by absolute results - but that leads to obvious unfairness based on intake, where the best schools are simply those with the best intake, not those that teach best.

Progress8 is, though flawed, better because at least it TRIES to measure what the school does with its intake.

If a perfect 'start of Y7' test could be created, that might be a better baseline - but then you'd need 1 set of externally moderated, controlled tests for primary accountability, and a second a mater of weeks later for secondary accountability (they'd both need to be external and carefully controlled, as there are obvious incentives to inflate the first and depress the second).

What might you suggest instead? Teacher assessment is even more flawed (it's absolutely fine on a micro comparative level e.g. 'what did Jimmy do today and what does he need to learn tomorrow?' but it is very poor as a nationally standardised accountability measure).

Merry, I am really sorry that the posts here have had the effect on you that they have. As a primary teacher in an honest school, it makes me sad, but of course it is everyone's right to do nothing when wrong things happen.

I'd tell in these cases tbh. We cannot teach our children that honesty is only good when it benefits us.

Teacher assessment is even more flawed (it's absolutely fine on a micro comparative level e.g. 'what did Jimmy do today and what does he need to learn tomorrow?' but it is very poor as a nationally standardised accountability measure).

Why? It works as a process in Y2.

Yes but look at the junior teachers who have already complained about over inflated KS1 results. It doesn't work everywhere. And it's very subjective, so not nationally standardised.

In other countries public exams are sat at different schools with students mixed together. There is zero incentive for those invigilating to cheat as it is. It their students in the room. That might be a good way to start.

I've read some work about its relative lack of statistical reliability at a whole cohort level - can't lay my hands on it at the moment, I'll post a link as soon as I find it again!

Only from infant only schools who live and die by their KS1 results - but yes, I take your point.

DDs teacher coughed during the phonics test when they got one wrong and then asked them to try again

If used as a KS2 measure, then pretty much every school would operate exactly like the infant-only schools [and all-through primaries, who conversely have an incentive to maximise progress results by somewhat depressing their KS1 results].

There is also some research - i can only find the summary at the moment here - that there is evidence of systematic bias in primary teacher assessment, based on stereotyping.

that wasn't what i was looking for, though - will continue to hunt!

It's not their students in the room ^^

Sorry.

This is one from 2011

It states "There are therefore clear risks that summative teacher assessment will not be sufficiently reliable in a technical sense – i.e. that judgements will not be made consistently by teachers across the country. Moreover, the research indicates that pupils who are most likely to under-perform would be most vulnerable to under-assessment. " after discussing e.g. bias against children from minority ethnic backgrounds, pressure to be generous at key borderlines and the fact that as a whole assessment was (at that time) an area in which few schools were judged very highly by Ofsted.

With the change of curriculum since then affecting even the most experienced teachers' ability to mark against new criteria, and ever increasing pressure at key borderlines, I can't see that the position would have changed.

I don't have a solution, cant. I think at the end it is an expression of a cultural development towards numerical measures of accountability being the only ones that 'count'. Whereas it is hard to measure 'learning' in numbers.
Yes I do think schools should be accountable, but measuring things the way they are measured now, and making teachers' pay and careers dependent on those measures, creates unintended negative consequences that mean that some (or many?) children are failed.

Maybe the whole idea of schools needing to be 'comparable by parents' which is related to the idea of 'choosing schools' is at the root.

I wish more thought would go into how to improve education/schools, rather than into how we can measure/test education/schools (I accept that both are not independent of each other). If all schools were good, we wouldn't need to compare them so much. We don't fail children by not providing adequate statistics as to which schools do not achieve adequate progress; we fail children by having schools that do not achieve adequate progress in the first place.