By Gavin Mackintosh-
Over 2,000 end of primary school exam SATs papers are missing, leaving hundreds of schools without results for their pupils as the new school year starts. The disgraceful figures published by the Department for Education today reveal a worrying level of negligence and scandal, the missing papers this year being 10 times higher than in past years.
Exactly why the papers are missing and who will be held accountable, is a pertinent question to the scandalous affair.
Whoever is responsible for the missing papers deserves disciplinary action at the very least, if not outright sacking.
Figures published today reveal that in previous years 100 per cent of SATs tests were available, however this year it dropped to 99.7 for grammar, punctuation and spelling tests. For maths it was 99.8 per cent and reading 99.9 per cent.
Analysts shocked by the scale of the lost papers believe a number of officials handling the scripts have withheld several papers to potentially hide falling standards in may schools which could reflect poorly on the academic standard of various schools, or of state primary schools in the Uk as a whole.
Reading and writing standards in primary schools have varied since the pandemic, but final year pupils in many primary schools in the Uk have made a lot of progress in reading and writing by the time they are in their final year. Many schools still reveal struggling pupils in their final year, which is what SATS exams help to establish, by showing where pupils are at that final stage of their primary school education.
Pupils who prepare for the eleven plus on top of their SATS, usually make more progress in reading and writing, especially those who make into a grammar school.
The Department Of Education have blamed this year’s missing data on “unexpected difficulties” during the “collecting and processing” of assessments.
Figures published today reveal that in previous years 100 per cent of SATs tests were available, however this year it dropped to 99.7 for grammar, punctuation and spelling tests. For maths it was 99.8 per cent and reading 99.9 per cent.
In July, there was 3,339 test scripts missing across reading, maths and grammar, punctuation and spelling tests. This impacted 1,047 schools.
About 1,150 were found over the summer – but this still leaves 2,186 papers missing impacting 523 schools.
The school leaders’ union NAHT union had “deep concerns” about the management of SATs this year – run by outsourcing giant Capita for the first time under a £107 million contract.
In July, a poll by Teacher Tapp suggested that 20 per cent of primary teachers had received KS2 Sats papers with marks missing. NAHT has since raised further concerns with the STA about marks being incorrect as well.
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders’ union NAHT, said the process had been “grossly mishandled”.
Whiteman added: “Schools are held to incredibly high standards when it comes to handling SATs papers; the threat of maladministration looms at every step in the process.
“The government must be held to the same standard. We need a full investigation into what went wrong this year, so that we can be absolutely assured it will not happen again.”
This included markers being locked out of a webinar, Capita’s results service crashing and two-thirds of teachers hanging up after no-one answer the helpline phone.
“Now the government has finally come clean about the scale of the problems this year, we know that hundreds of pupils do not have results for the tests they sat, which is simply unacceptable. It also leaves many primary schools with incomplete results that could skew their data.
“Although this may be a small percentage of the number of papers overall, it still leaves hundreds of pupils without marks – pupils who are now entering secondary school without the end of primary results the government deems so important.”
DfE blamed this year’s “larger volumes” of missing data on “unexpected difficulties” during the “collecting and processing” of assessments.
But for teacher assessments in writing and science, pupils with missing results are included in regional measures as “not meeting the expected standard”, with teachers urged to provide any outstanding assessments as soon as possible.
In 2019, 99.7 per cent of teacher assessments were included in the data, but this year it dropped to 99 per cent.
As of July 24, 4.5 per cent of pupils in special schools had writing and science teacher assessments missing, compared to 0.8 per cent of pupils in mainstream schools.
This included markers being locked out of a webinar, Capita’s results service crashing and two-thirds of teachers hanging up after no-one answer the helpline phone.
A Capita spokesperson said the “overwhelming majority” of 3.8 million test scripts from 16,000 schools were marked. But following a “thorough investigation” around 0.05 per cent of the total have been recovered as lost or missing.
“We recognise that it is unacceptable for there to be delays in a result being received, or for any paper to be lost in the process of being scanned and marked. We have apologised directly to the affected schools and their pupils.”
A D& E Spokesperson told The Eye Of Media.Com; “We have worked closely with our delivery partner Capita to make sure they took every possible step to find missing papers over the summer, and we recognise the disappointment caused to children, their parents and schools where papers have not been found.
“Parents can be reassured there will be no impact on their children’s progress to secondary school, and we have put strong safeguards in place to avoid school-level results being misinterpreted.
“We will be using the coming months to make sure Capita has a robust plan in place that prevents these issues from recurring in future years.”
This publication will be using the coming months to push for accountability in this very sorry affair.