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.

Another one here who has a child who has taken sats this week. No cheating at my child's school but two separate children have told my daughter they were told the answers to the spelling test. These are two separate schools both of which have has children almost bragging of the help they received! I think I'll report both to be honest, it infurates me!

I agree it's difficult. Part of the problem is that the public at large compares schools by absolute results, not by progress at all (good or bad), so there are schools seen to be 'great' in the public eye that have very poor progress, and others that are 'poor' but show excellent progress.

So at the moment, parental choice is guided by a measure of school's intake, not the education they provide.

cantkeepaway for me the difference between SATS at 11 and GCSEs are that the former don't matter and mean Jack in adult life. So no, I don't care. If cheating was going on in GCSEs then yes I would consider it to be more important as they have a lasting effect. I just cant get worked up about DS teacher pointing out 2 correct answers in 5 papers. I would reconsider if it were more questions involved.

Indeed cant it's the argument against grammar schools and why progress8 might make their lives a bit awkward. They ought to be getting good results, but is the progress actually good enough considering what they start with. Vs some supposedly "terrible" comps round here which have amazing Value Added.

ImpY - I live in a partially-selective county, and indeed, the negative progress for high ability children in one of the grammar schools, as opposed to significantly positive at some of the almost-comps, has definitely been a talking point in staff rooms, though I doubt it has had any impact on public perception as yet.

Oh well OP, if you've decided that because a crime hasn't been committed and because many many people have urged you to report you won't, because you don't like being told what to do, that's your choice. Of course it is your choice.
I'm glad that the thread has prompted some people to report malpractice. Someone just upthread shows just how easy it was to report and to remain anonymous. It probably took a few minutes to do it. And yes that poster is probably right that not much will actually happen, but it will be a bit of a warning to the HT who may well adjust their behaviour next year and know they may be high on a list of spot-checks. Job done. No child's results will be voided and no one will be sacked, unless severe malpractice comes to light. The more schools that are picked up on these issues, the better. And it's so easy to make a quick report.

Another thing that occurs to me from this thread is how many people don't understand how this data is used. People seem to think the data is simply to assess the school and not the child and that the data has no impact on individual children beyond primary. So many people seem to think that targets are wholly based on what happens at secondary and don't realise that targets for individuals are set based on SATs. The message has been repeated over and over that even if schools re-test in Yr7 or use other means to set the children, if in a state school their government targets, which will have a bearing on what schools do, will be fixed by what happened in Yr6. This impacts option choices offered at GCSE and may well have a bearing on setting lower down the school.

I also agree with the poster who said that perhaps a crisis in the system needs to occur. The more people who report malpractice, the more the whole system will be called into question.

Italian,

So it doesn't affect your child directly, and therefore it's not a problem?

The fact that it affects a vast number of other children, who have their Year 6 experience blighted by endless test preparation in order to match dishonest results, and that Year 6 teachers, schools and heads up and down the country, are penalised because their pupils do less well than those who have been dishonestly 'helped;' is of no concern?

OK...... I can see from this thread that this attitude is in fact relatively common, but I'm really struggling to get my head round the complete absence of the sense of 'common good'.

I wish more thought would go into how to improve education/schools, rather than into how we can measure/test education/schools

The trouble is, a lot of the 'thought' that is currently floating around isn't based on sound evidence, and this has been true for decades. For example, the government introduced the National Literacy Strategy in 1997, but the strategy was wrong, because too many prominent educational advisors were determined to ignore the evidence that had been produced by reading psychologists in support of teaching phonics. The result was that Whole Language guessing strategies became embedded, and are proving very difficult to eradicate even now.

There are huge divisions in educational thought about what the best approach to teaching is, and even about what it is desirable that children should learn. One very influential group believes children don't really need to learn much knowledge at all, because they can always google whatever they need to know, and that school time should be spent learning to cooperate and be creative.

Also, Italian, if he / she pointed out 2 mistakes for your DS, how many were pointed out for others? If every child gets at least 2 more marks across the whole year group than their 'true' marks, that is statistically significant - especially as the standardisation to a 'pass' of 100 can mean that 1 mark is worth more than 1 mark post standardisation.

kesstrel I did say that I accept that the two are not independent of each other ;)

Yes in order to improve education, you need to determine and agree on how to best educate. And to determine that, you need sophisticated scientific approaches, that in some sense 'measure' results of that education. I understand that there is a bit of a chasm between such scientific research and educationalists.

But measuring schools/individual teachers by their students' outcomes/progress is a different beast again. It rarely serves to determine which is the best way of teaching. But it frequently sets wonky incentives which are, at the end of the day, not in the children's best interest.

I agree about a key part of the problem being the incentives within the system and unintended consequences.
A system where pay, ofsted rating and pupil numbers is determined by results incentivises teachers to be obsessed with preparation, cramming and the tests themselves rather than educating. How can it do otherwise. The unintended consequence is that people cheat. They feel desperate to avoid the wrath of the headteacher, the scrutiny of ofsted, a plethora of horrible lesson observations and the impact their results might have on the whole school - so they cheat. And it becomes endemic, as shown on this thread by how many parents report experiences of cheating in just this last week.

And it's so easy to cheat. When exams are staffed by the class teacher and no other or few independent adults are in the room, and when it is expected that it happens. Lots of teachers on here are shocked by reports of cheating, but I imagine lots aren't either. It's easy to say that it just shows SATs aren't worth the paper they are written on and we should ignore the whole process and take no notice of them because of it.....but our children have to go through the process of being crammed, put under pressure and having their secondary education affected by them....this is why we can't just ignore it all.

Regarding targets, my ds was definitely not set in secondary following his sats results but on the school's own assessments.
Also, yes results can be recorded and targets and trajectories can be set but let's say a child comes with inflated results, and a gcse target is set. Child struggles in y7 to maintain and is later set lower accordingly. Child doesn't attain gcse grade projected from sats.
Then what? If it's happened a lot, the school is held to account. If it hasn't it's an anomaly hopefully explainable by providing evidence.

How does it Impact option choices? I know for example that my ds took a science test recently (y7) which will affect setting. Nothing to do with this SATs.
I will be asking specifically about this too at the upcoming evening for my y6 dd because I really thought they didn't affect the children in real terms, just schools' own tracking and targets.

OhCrepe,

Say a whole feeder school 'massages' their SATs results, because they want to look good and avoid a poor ofsted.

Then maybe 20% of the senior school's pupils have inflated KS2 SATs grades. In order to get a progress8 of zero (exactly expected progress) they have to make much more than expected progress in reality.

The school has 2 choices: they leave it, give the same input to everyone, and accept a below average Progress8. OR they look at which pupils are at risk of not making expected progress, and pour effort into them - after school, before school, lunchtimes, during the holidays - to get those all important grades out of those particular pupils.

As a result the children who could really have done with that extra boosting because their grades were just below 'important to them' boundaries (like 3-4, or the old D to C) don't get it - there isn't the resource available.

The shift to progress8 is new this year, but it WILL matter for the current year 6 going forward, as it matters for this year's year 11s.

"If every child gets at least 2 more marks across the whole year group than their 'true' marks, that is statistically significant - especially as the standardisation to a 'pass' of 100 can mean that 1 mark is worth more than 1 mark post standardisation."

This!!

Then you have the knock on effect of the destroyed confidence of the children that actually would have possibly done better if all SATS were 'TRUE' workings.

This thread has really saddened me!

Since when did we start giving our young the impression that cheating was ok? Whether or not you think these SATS are important is irrelevant. The kids do and they worked bloody hard to get here!

Think they will work hard for the next lot of tests or do you think that they will think it will be ok to cheat their way through?

Speachless really...

@whattheactualchuff

I totally agree, clearly I am very naive as it had not even crossed my mind this might happen.

It does matter to the children. They have all worked hard and deserve honest results.

Can'tkeepforever
Thankyou you explained why my Sen dd wasn't given booster Sessions like her cousin.
Am I right in thinking they felt like she made sufficient progress from her SATS in yr 2?

So, if a child starts with low SATs, it is likely they will be offered a smaller number of GCSEs, possibly vocational qualifications and unlikely to be able to choose 2 languages or separate sciences. All fine if that is suitable for their ability. Not so great if they underperformed in SATs at KS2. To be offered the more academic option that child would have to consistently outperform the children with higher SATs to prove to the school that they were worth taking a 'risk' on by allowing them to take harder options which the SATs indicate they might fail at, which would reduce the schools results. So there would be an effect.

Alternatively for a child who has inflated SATs, they may find that in order to achieve the necessary progress expected of a high achiever, they are pushed into more academic options or to take more GCSEs which in the end result in less good outcomes for them than if they had taken slightly fewer or different subjects. Yes, schools obviously use professional judgment and can see a really obvious dis-connect between SATs and actual performance, but when data sheets and computer programmes are working and setting targets and when schools are under pressure to get high Progress 8 scores, some children with inflated KS2 scores may well be pushed into less appropriate choices. And parents often don't argue with this, because they like to think their kid is clever (and the Ks2 SAts told them they were of course). It won't happen with every child and schools will use some discretion in offering options, but if most of the intake comes from schools which inflate KS2 performance through cheating, then the school really outs itself on the line regarding ofsted if they downgrade the expectations of most pupils and don't put most of them in for options which will deliver the necessary progress.

Do ask your school about this. It will be interesting to see what they say. In all likelihood they will say they look at each child.....it's true to an extent, within a context that they have overall progress targets to make and can't achieve those unless a certain number of children are pushed towards the harder options.

Don't we parents sort of collude in this when we choose schools? People are always telling me that such-and-such school is the 'best' because it has the highest Sats results. And then it tends to attract the pushiest parents, carries on getting the highest results in addition to the fact that there seem to be a correlation between Ofsted grades and having high ability kids to begin with.

Is it any wonder that schools end up doing this sort of thing?

My kids' school doesn't, afaik, cheat plus it takes a lot of kids managed out of the local academy. Therefore it's not the 'best' school in the area.

I'd echo that our response to this doesn't just affect schools and teachers, but the experience our children have of education. those SATs are important to them. They work hard for them and they want an honest and fair test experience and to feel proud of their achievements at the end of an important stage of their education. They want to be given fair chances at secondary to do what is right for them. Anything like cheating which removes that honesty and opportunity damages their experience, and we all care about the experience of our kids, even those who don't care about what is happening to others.

I agree Lotsofsighimg.
As parents we do look for the good and outstanding schools and we look for the ones with 'better' intakes. We then push the school and our kids to achieve at a higher level. It all encourages this cheating or at least cramming process and the fear in schools of 'failing'.

Those schools which take a broader range of kids and who refuse to cram or won't cheat then deliver lower results...perhaps more honest results. And their reward......league tables and ofsted place them lower, they get scrutinised by their academy chains or forced into academy chains and relationships with other schools to push them to improve, heads get driven out etc etc. Grim.

Makes you realise the benefits of independent schools. I know they have the pressure to get their kids to pass entrance exams and get top GCSE and A Level results, but they avoid this SATs crap, the unintended negative consequences of progress pressures and the visits from Ofsted. Yes, ISI inspections exist, but they don't usually ruin the careers of head teachers or result in a regulatory regime of constant observation and then cramming of 10 year olds! Oh to be free of it all.

Thanks for explaining. I will definitely ask.
I'm a teacher but work in specialist area of SEN in primary so my data is scores from standardised assessments ive used (i.e. based on a normative sample, like the Salford sentence for example) to inform my planning and track progress.
I do liaise with mainstream and record school levels given but they're just a number and often vary from teacher to teacher so they're not really helpful in thinking about an individual's needs. Shocked to think they hold that much sway in secondary school and it still really does come down to protecting a reputation rather than getting the best out of the pupils. Grrrrrrrrr

I agree that we are in a data driven world which has gone mad.
Schools employ data managers and data analysts who spend all day looking at figures and working out who they need to intervene with in order to reach whatever goal the school has set. In the past it was getting the C/D over the borderline for GCSE or getting a KS2 pupil across the Level 3/4 borderline. In some academic schools it's getting pupils who are C/B borderline into the B grade at A Level. Sadly less care is given to X who might be A*\A borderline because their A is 'good enough'. And too much care is given to pushing students into subjects which will give them the higher grades, rather than the ones which will open doors to the next stage - so many students were pushed into less academic sixth form options because their grades would be more certain, when they were capable of the academic options, but their lack of them then closed doors to certain unis or courses. This is less prevalent now with the eBac and facilitating subjects at A level thing, but is still present to an extent. Often school data and headline figures drive actions rather than what is actually best for an individual.

Well in other news, ds did not get his 15min extra. Apparently it was 10 per cent of total fine so 3 mins/ 4 mins. All his prep was with 15 min extra. He has v slow processing. Maybe the 'help' was to compensate for that, I don't know. The whole school has dropped hugely, and it wasn't that high to start with.

Dropped in my estimation

I'm the head of a junior school and today I reported a member of staff who had prompted a child to rethink a couple of answers.

Have you been trying to get rid of them for some time? 

Can't see you doing that if you thought they were genuinely a great teacher. You'd have had a word, right.

He's not a teacher but brilliant support staff. I reported him because I need to by law and I take my job and its responsibilities very seriously!