News

This month, students throughout the region took their SATS. This year’s papers have left educators throughout the country concerned due to the wording and difficulty of some reading papers that appeared confusing even to school staff.

A group of Head Teachers in Darlington wrote a letter to their MP, Peter Gibson, to express their concerns about the impact of the reading paper on students.

How did the 2023 SATs go?

Findings by TeacherTapp reported the opinion of schools about this year’s SATs. TeacherTapp stated:

“It does appear that things were more stressful – with almost twice as many primary teachers reported that most of their pupils showed visibly signs of distress due to the SATs compared to previous years. We don’t know how much of this is down to the longer and harder reading paper. But given it prompted a lot of news stories, it probably made some impact.

Parents also seem more wary of SATs this year. Back in 2019, only 4% of primary teachers said they believed a parent had purposely kept their child at home so they didn’t need to sit SATs. This year, 11% of you said the same – a remarkable leap in a few years.”

High pressure, accountability measure 

Back in Summer 2020, Schools North East reported concerns of North East school leaders as they prepared for the reintroduction of accountability measures following the pandemic. In 2020 there was very strong opposition to KS1 and KS2 SATs going ahead. 88.7% responded that KS1 SATs should not go ahead, and 77.8% that KS2 SATs should not go ahead. Instead, throughout the pandemic and after, leaders expressed a broad consensus that schools should be allowed to  focus on getting children back into school, learning and socialising. In 2020, the view was that the damage caused by the Covid-19 lockdown would need to be undone slowly and gradually, respondents said, without having to worry about high stakes testing.

At that time, regional school leaders expressed that they felt that SATs were merely an accountability measure, arguing that teachers should be trusted to make pupil progress assessments, with some expressing a preference for continuous low stakes assessments to inform gap analysis.

Concerns were raised about the stress and pressures that would be put on children and staff alike. KS1 and KS2 SATs were seen as placing undue pressure on staff and children during a normal year. Three years later, it appears that this has come to fruition.

SATs 2023

North East Schools recognise that SATs can be a useful baseline assessment, to measure progress students are making and inform gap analysis. However, school leaders are concerned about the unnecessary pressure SATs can put on pupils, and the way in which results are used in accountability measures, often without context or proper qualification.

The pandemic has exacerbated the gap between the most disadvantaged students and their peers, and schools who serve these communities are under huge pressure to perform in these tests.  The impact of Covid and the ongoing cost of living crisis has had an enormous negative impact on those communities, their mental health and school attendance levels. Recent DfE data shows the ongoing post-pandemic impact on attendance, especially for the North East, which has the second highest rates of both overall absences and persistent absences. There is a genuine risk that schools will be penalised for their individual experience during the pandemic, and the public accountability of league tables may discourage school leaders from working in

disadvantaged schools.

Darlington Primary Heads Forum

These factors forced the  Darlington Primary Heads Forum to write to their MP, Peter Gibson, to express their strong concerns on the impact of this year’s reading paper.

“Last week was SATs week for all primary schools and we try to resist the temptation to be too gloomy about the tests in the moment; by their general nature it can be quite a stressful time for those concerned in taking and administering the tests and so we try to avoid making hasty judgements. However we feel that we cannot let our concerns over the reading test go unspoken. It was a disproportionately very difficult test and many more children than normal were unable to complete it.

In simple terms, there were more questions than normal which required children to read unnecessarily long questions and then overly lengthy extracts of text, for only small numbers of marks. It was very badly designed, markedly more difficult than recent years and we don’t understand how it passed the usual quality assurance procedures. As said, the result was that many more children than normal – at least half – did not complete the test in the allocated time. Colleagues have reported that children were upset and that teachers were dismayed that the children have been unable to show their true ability.

…

The reading test this year was badly designed and was too difficult. The consequence of this for children will be that it won’t accurately (or fairly) be able to determine their true reading abilities. The tests are primarily a school accountability measure and so as headteachers, we know that we will be judged more harshly as a result. This worries us. The reading test this year was unnecessarily much more difficult than in previous years.”

Read the full letter by clicking here.

Text choice advantages middle class advantaged pupils

Schools North East Trustee and CEO of SMART Multi Learning Trust Colin Lofthouse similarly expressed his feelings on the Year 6 Reading SAT, stating:

“One of the main priorities of primary education is to teach children to read to a required standard. The standard is set to ensure children can read well enough to access learning resources when they enter secondary education, be able to read to manage in daily life and of course read for pleasure.

The reading tests however are not a tool for teachers to use to check if pupils have reached this standard – that is more than apparent to teachers whose experience and training allows them to assess reading ability in much more detail, day to day and through hours of hearing children read and respond to texts. The Reading SAT is an accountability measure. Resulting in blunt comparative benchmarking which ignores the hugely complex context and background factors at play across to measure school performance. The results are seldom used by secondary colleagues to assess reading ability, they rightly prefer instead to assess this through their own processes and by hearing a child read over time. Not just one day in May.”

Read the full statement from Colin by clicking here.

Chris Zarraga, Director of Schools North East, added:

“It is clear that school leaders across the country feel that the SATs this year have been disproportionately difficult for pupils, at a time when pupils are still recovering from the aftermath of the  pandemic and the cost of living crisis. The focus on SATs as part of a high-stakes accountability framework has not supported education recovery, and has risked narrowing the broad curriculum necessary for ‘catch-up’. Pupils still need support to focus on key skills and mental health and wellbeing, that ensure children are ready to learn and in particular, ready for their next phase of education.”

SMART Multi Academy Trust is a Schools North East Partner Trust.. If you’d like to find out more about our Partner School Programme click here.

We love to hear good news from North East Schools, to share your news with Schools North East please tag @SchoolsNE on Twitter or apply here.