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What if Scrapping SATs Increases Accountability and Workload?

Many might applaud Labour’s plan to scrap SATs, but what if the alternative is teacher assessment that raises the accountability stakes and devours time, asks Clare Sealy…

Clare Sealy
by Clare Sealy
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On first inspection, the announcement by Jeremy Corbyn that he would scrap SATS seems like a great idea.

But before cheering too loudly, we need to look at the detail of what the leader of the opposition actually said.

Labour will abolish high-stakes testing, only to replace it with some other, as yet undecided method of holding schools to account. (Corbyn said he would consult parents and teachers before finalising details.)

So the Labour leader promised only to get rid of tests, not of accountability. Undeniably, some children find SATs stressful – tales abound of crying children.

Yet is the cause of this anxiety directly attributable to the tests themselves, or is it caused by an accountability regime that uses results as a stick to beat schools with?

Perhaps instead of blaming tests, we should wonder whether some schools are passing down the pressure of this accountability to children.

We need to be sure that any new system does not replicate the high stakes of the SATs regime.

However, opponents of Corbyn’s proposal fear schools might be faced with an equally high-stakes system of teacher assessment.

On the face of it, teacher assessment sounds infinitely preferable to testing. However, that depends on the extent to which that assessment is linked to accountability.

If the reputation of schools is strongly linked to data from teacher assessments, then it is probable we will face a scenario similar to that which existed when GCSE’s consisted of coursework.

As this coursework had high-stakes implications, children were often made to repeat it many times.

This meant very little actual teaching took place as children spent lesson after lesson redoing work.

Not only that but marking all that coursework was extremely time consuming, and it was sometimes questionable how much of it was genuinely the child’s own.

There were rules in place to try and prevent outright cheating, but many schools sailed pretty close to the wind with regards to the regulations.

Do we really want to give up any teaching during most of the spring term to the endless redrafting of coursework, all of which will need to be assessed again and again by teachers?

Do we want to be held account via teacher assessment, when we already know from the assessment of writing that it is really difficult to get teachers to agree on standards, despite systems of moderation?

Questioning teachers’ ability to assess work accurately arouses strong passions. It seems to be casting aspersions on teachers’ professionalism.

Yet, as much as I would like this not to be true, the evidence from research seems to strongly suggest that teachers are not able to reliably assess the standard of children’s work.

It hurts to say this, but as professionals we need to accept what is actually true and not what we would like to be the case.

One only needs to look at the difference between KS2 science teacher assessment results and those from science sampling tests to see the scale of the problem: as many as 82% of pupils reached the expected standard according to teacher assessment; 23% according to test results!

This may be because teachers do not take science assessment very seriously – it is, after all, neither moderated nor used for accountability.

However, this does not bode well for a post-SATS low-accountability system.

So the alternatives seem to be remaining with the present system of testing, while trying to alleviate the harshness of associated accountability pressures via the new Ofsted framework, introducing teacher assessment that is directly linked to accountability, with all the problems with workload, loss of teaching time and unreliability that brings, or cut any link between assessment and accountability.

Regrettably, the science scenario seems to indicate that this might cause standards to plummet.

Perhaps having SATs is the least worst option, especially if the new Ofsted framework really does mean that one’s data is not one’s destiny.

Or maybe Corbyn’s consultation will discover some form of teacher assessment that is reliable, does not generate masses of workload and does not devour teaching time.

I’d like the latter to be true, but I fear it might be wishful thinking – although I’d be delighted to be proved wrong.


Clare Sealy is a primary headteacher in Bethnal Green, London. You can find her at primarytimery.com and on Twitter at @claresealy.

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