Corbyn pledges to abolish KS1 and 2 SATs

[noblegiraffe]

If Labour get elected, Corbyn says that he will abolish primary school SATs.

“Instead, Labour would introduce alternative assessments which would be based on "the clear principle of understanding the learning needs of every child."”

I’m sure some on here would think that this is a great idea, but to me it sounds like a poorly thought-out headline grabber that will cause more problems than it solves. What then for school accountability at primary and secondary? What on earth does he mean by ‘alternative assessments’ (sounds like a ‘we’ll fill in the details of that later’ policy that will be a total bodge job).

Wales went down this route and their educational standards have gone in totally the wrong direction.

I’m sure that they should be less high stakes and not allowed to distort the Y6 curriculum the way they do (tales of breakfast and Easter revision sessions for 11 year olds are horrifying) but am unconvinced that ditching them is a positive move for education.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-47950985

change in test regime etc) would be the most pragmatic way to still assess the ability of the children whilst not putting so much pressure on SLT that they feel they have to game the system.

research shows teacher assessment is biased in a way that external assessment isn’t.

This is what I think is the problem, as a parent. These assessments underpin how our children are taught and following on from that their subsequent achievements because future assessments are further compounded by target setting from the previous (biased) assessments. It would be very naive indeed not to recognise the impact of teacher biases.

What do parents want? School accountability. They like Ofsted grades. They want schools with high results.

Of course they do! Because of the way the integrity of assessments are vulnerable to 'gaming' and teacher bias.

They don’t want pressure to be put on their own kid to achieve those high grades.

Well, most parents want to protect their children from further pressure. They will comparatively feel less protective towards the professional, paid, adults who openly admit the system is routinely 'gamed' at their children's expense.

I think the conclusion of this lecture regarding algorithms is pertinent.

Labour introduced SATS in the first place.
Are they apologising for bringing them in?

If afraid they were introduced in 1991 by Kenneth Clarke and the then Conservative government

That's about the 8th time I've seen that particular piece of misinformation in the last two days. Why do people think that? @Redpostbox?

I'd be very much in favour of keeping JUST the arithmetic and reading papers from the current Y6 regime, plus the phonics and times tables screening.

I think that would be a good check that the basics were being taught well, whilst being streamline enough to allow a broad and balanced curriculum to exist along side.

Any assessment is going to become the new SATs with how high pressure education is to produce the results. FFS we have schools local to us who put the kids through weeks of "mock" phonics screens to coach them for the real thing.

I didn't actually look at Ofsted reports at all choosing my own kids' school incidentally.

Last time Labour were in power they scrapped the KS3 SATs, although that was because of a major balls-up with marking them and nothing to do with ideology.

If there are any tests, then the chances are that the results will be put into league tables - by the Telegraph if not by the government. That’s why arguments for scrapping league tables have failed all these years.

Y6 SATs have got completely out of hand at my DCs school.

The teachers are stressed , the kids are even more stressed.

The whole of the spring term is dedicated to SATs revision. They are doing mock tests constantly. Homework every single evening. I struggle to understand half of the stuff she's expected to know!

My DD is working so hard and doing everything asked of her but she will never meet the expected standard even with the two hours per week of extra tuition we pay for.

It looks like she will score about 90 if she has a good day. This would be an amazing achievement for her but the class is constantly being told that they will fail the SATs if they don't work hard enough. She knows she won't score 100 and so feels like a failure. She has come home in tears a few times after getting her mock tests results.

I don't see how the results can be a true reflection of the teaching standards at the school when so many parents , like myself, are paying for tutoring.

Assessments are a good thing to measure the schools success but the results must be so distorted by all of this teaching to pass the tests.

I'd favour a more low key approach where the kids are assessed without realising it and the individual results are not published or relied upon by secondary schools for setting purposes.

I feel so sad about the amount of pressure kids are put under at primary school.

Some primary schools seem to do more revision for SATs than my Y11s are expected to do for GCSE.

Of course they do! A school lives or dies on its SATs results and OFSTED categories are pre written from looking at the data.

Same for secondary!

I think the pressure on individuals at primary is worse because they count for a far higher percentage of results. My kids’ school only has 30 in Y6, my school has 220-odd in Y11.

Agree @reefedsail.
I think good basics with a meets standard/doesn’t meet standard yet approach would make it less stressful. The emphasis can be about giving those that don’t meet the standard yet (eg because English is a 2nd language) additional help (eg summer school, after school classes), so they can retake it and/or be offered to repeat a year.

This gives as many kids as possible the tools they need to go on to the next stage of education instead of falling further behind.

The problem with a pass/fail check of the basics is that it totally fucks up secondary school accountability. Can’t calculate progress 8 if you don’t have a more finely graded baseline.

There are huge knock-on effects to announcing ‘Yay! Let’s scrap SATS’.

Perhaps they'll promise to scrap Progress 8 too

There is no reason pupils couldn't get a mark for arithmetic and reading as they do now.

IMO what trashes the upper Primary years is trying to get them through the reasoning papers and the volume of SPaG.

Really the reasoning papers are an intelligence test and a very able pupil will be able to see how to apply the arithmetic they know to the questions. However, for those not that able, we have to show them SO MANY reasoning problems so they have direct and extensive experience of every connotation of question we can think up, that it takes up an insane amount of time. Likewise, there is so much content in the SPaG that it takes a lot of discrete practice to have it all ready to go for the test.

I think there are better things to spend time on than test prep for those two.

TBH though, I think setting pupils' GCSE targets off their SATs performance is ridiculous anyway. The viability of Progress 8 doesn't sway me in the favour of SATs.

I am old enough to remember being at primary school pre-Ofsted, pre-SATs, pre-NC (I think there might have been HMI inspections every now and again, but I don't remember any, at any of the multiple primary schools I went to).

At that point, the first - and in many cases only - point at which how well a school had educated a child was CSEs / O-levels at 16. Which was of course fine if the school did reasonably well, but rather late if not..

Things i remember:

• different schools following completely different curricula - totally different maths, english, topics, science (or not - I did no science at all until the equivalent of Y6)
• teachers within the same school teaching essentially what they wanted to - maths all morning? No problem. A day of art a week and no english? Fine
• different schools having utterly different standards - I and my brothers were put up and down years in different schools in a desperate attempt to in some ways align what we had done in a previous school to what was being taught in the next one. i ended up permanently 1 year-accelerated, but I was in anything from my own year group to 2-3 years ahead in different schools.
• utter failure to teach not being picked up - most egregiously, the teacher who taught the wrong O-level syllabus for several years, teaching the CSE syllabus instead. However, I could also cite lots of smaller things.
• inefficient teaching methods - hand out a range of textbooks, do questions for 30 minutes, mark them yourself from the back of the book, same again tomorrow.

If there are no standard tests at all up to 16, then the same could easily creep back in. The web of accountability is closely - some would say too closely - tied together, so abolishing 1 bit affects other parts, and relying on 'teacher judgement' is deeply flawed, because the context and experience of different teachers is so different - and if teacher assessment is used as an accountability measure, the pressure to 'massage' the figures so great.

Setting pupils GCSE targets based on SATs performance and Progress 8 are two different things. If we don’t have Progress 8 (don’t get me wrong, progress 8 isn’t perfect) as a measure against a starting point, then what are we left with? Judging schools on their headline GCSE results again.

I was in year 6 in 1990, I remember doing some type of test (and can even remember one of the questions) I'm not quite sure what it was, maybe a throw back to the 11plus (no longer a grammar area)

I was in year 9 in 1993, we did loads of prep for the KS3 days but they were boycotted at the last moment.

The yr 6 are too pressured, I have a yr 6 and honestly I am very non plussed about them, also he has autism and lives in a state of high anxiety anyway so I am not adding too it.

The school has a KS1 base, the outcomes are very skewed when those results are taken into account, it isn't a big school so a couple of children not taking them and another who is 'not at expected standards' and the results take a big hit. Ofsted, seem to have difficulty with this.

But then Ofsted think everyone should be better than average, so what do they know.

@noble - there may be less granularity with pass/fail, but you still get info on how many passed 1st attempt, 2nd attempt and not at all.

Doesn’t it make more sense to spend resources giving extra help to those who haven’t got basics than spending a whole term revising? I guess everything is a balance... sacrifice a term to make sure you can monitor effectiveness of secondaries better?

But aren’t there a lot more things that can affect kids’ gcses Than just the teaching eg home difficulties, personal issues, lack of motivation to work?

If there are no standard tests at all up to 16, then the same could easily creep back in.

But surely there is another way to avoid the inconsistent mess that you (very accurately) describe in your post: we could do what many other countries do and have a concrete and specific curriculum which sets out what content is to be taught in each subject for each year and how many hours (ie. maths should be taught over no more than xx hours and no fewer than yy hours--some flexibility is always OK) are to be devoted to each subject, as an actual statutory requirement. And ideally a set of resources like textbooks or knowledge organizers that go home with pupils every day, so that parents can see what is going on too.

Other countries do this--it's hardly impossible.

If you did this, testing would have a less distorting effect--but in any case, because standards would be better maintained there would be less need for high-stakes tests in the first place. It would also make life easier for teachers by reducing workload and lesson planning. Teachers could recycle the same lessons year to year, and would find lessons easier to teach because they would know what students had and had not covered in previous years.

@kokeshi - I think perhaps starting with standardising gcses would be helpful. Why are there multiple exam boards and within each exam board multiple syllabus options???

Different schools pick different exam boards for different subjects. Streamlining it and investing in high quality resources (eg textbooks, YouTube videos) and providing access to internet would help students if they need to do revision/extra work which is key to gcses.

Kokeshi,

What do these other countries do with children whose ability is very far from the norm for their year group?

I well remember textbook-based learning in primary - but even then, there were those on book 3 and those on book 15 within the same class.

Within my current class (I teach upper KS2), I have children working on anything from the Early Years curriculum (this is rare, tbh, but differentiating the year group curriculum for those working at early-mid KS1 would be normal) to requiring greater depth work in every subject for the year group (thank goodness, the days of accelerating through future years;' curriculum are over).

A standardised curriculum is absolutely fine for the 'middle' of the class - I start my planning with the year group National Curriculum - but if that was ALL I taught, the very many children who aren't 'average' would suffer.

Teachers could recycle the same lessons year to year, and would find lessons easier to teach because they would know what students had and had not covered in previous years. In theory, this is exactly what the NC allows ... but it doesn't allow for the variation between children and between cohorts. My class last year, for example, was much more weighted to 'low average'. This year I have no low average pupils, but large numbers at the extremes!

In school systems where teachers teach more from textbooks and spend a lot less time lesson-planning, this tends to free up a lot more time for working with struggling students (individually and in small groups) which helps to keep them up to the level of the class. I'm not going to pretend that this results in students all being the same level though---trying to cater to the needs of differently-performing students is a perennial problem in education! I don't think there is any perfect solution.

I think that establishing a coherent content-based set of standards should work well for the foundation subjects like science, geography, history and RE. Harder for maths and English I agree, but for all subjects it should still be possible to set statutory limits on minimum and maximum amounts of time to be spent on every subject, so that schools cannot just choose to stop teaching certain things in Y6 and spend too much time on test drill.

I'm not sure how spending less time planning frees up any time for working with struggling students.