School examinations - Tested, and found wanting

School examinations

Tested, and found wanting

Oct 16th 2008
From The Economist print edition

The government does a U-turn on controversial exams for 14-year-olds

PERHAPS it was the praise showered on his boss, Gordon Brown, for getting on with rescuing banks that encouraged Ed Balls to take decisive action. On October 14th the schools secretary told Parliament that he was abolishing the “standard assessment tests” (SATs) in English, mathematics and science for 14-year-olds, which were, he said, “less and less relevant”. The SATs taken by seven-year-olds and marked by their teachers as well as the externally-marked ones for 11-year-olds would continue. But even this partial climb-down will have embarrassed a government that has long seen SATs as vital to improving teaching and informing parental school choice.

In reality, the decision had little to do with a dawning ministerial realisation that the tests are pointless: the arguments against SATs have been made loudly, often and long. Rather, it was forced by the chaotic marking of them this summer by ETS, an American firm. Requests for re-marks rocketed and some schools are still waiting for their results, three months late. ETS was fired in August, just one year into a five-year contract, losing £50m as a result.

That left the government scrambling to find a replacement. But two of England’s three big exam boards—the only candidates with the experience needed to hit the ground running—have ruled themselves out, so choice is limited. Since the tests for 14-year-olds are the hardest to mark, dropping them may have been the only way to salvage SATs for 11-year-olds.

Mr Balls has got rid of the weakest link in the long chain of tests taken in English schools (there are no SATs elsewhere in the United Kingdom). Pupils do not change schools at 14 and so do not need a portable record of their achievement at that age. And parents look at GCSE results, not SATs, when choosing secondary schools.

Some think Mr Balls should have gone further: “The government has missed an opportunity to sweep away the whole thing,” says Mick Brookes of the National Association of Head Teachers. He, and others, think the gains from SATs at any age are not worth the costs, which include a narrowing of the primary curriculum and ever-increasing teaching to the test.

The abolitionists have no chance of persuading the government to drop the tests entirely. Before they were introduced in the 1990s, no one—not teachers, parents or the state—knew just how many children left primary school unable to read, write or add up. But their arguments have persuaded the government to look for ways to mitigate the costs for schools and students.

One proposal is to replace the current exams-driven league tables with “balanced scorecards” which grade schools on a raft of measures, including exam results, attendance and pupils’ health. That may help: no more dropping sports in order to squeeze in extra drill on exam technique. Another, which is now being piloted, is to replace the SATs for 11-year-olds with “single-level tests” modelled on music exams, for which teachers can enter pupils twice a year at the level they judge appropriate. The idea is that rather than forcing all children to take a D-Day exam at the end of primary school, credit is collected along the way when it is earned.

But Alan Smithers, of Buckingham University, warns that single-level tests are no panacea. Teachers will struggle to prepare children in the same classroom for different exams. Examiners will struggle too, to produce a single test that measures the same level of ability in children of different ages. (In music tests all candidates for a given grade play the same pieces: in an English test, quite different reading texts and writing topics would suit an eight-year-old than an 11-year-old.) The changes might even have the perverse effect of making children sit more tests. “To the extent that schools are judged on results, they have a vested interest in getting as many children through tests at as high a level as possible, as quickly as possible,” Mr Smithers says. “They may be tempted to test children repeatedly, knowing they can bank the passes, and ignore the fails.”