Quality | 2009.09.15
Balls had early warning of Sats fiasco
The schools secretary, Ed Balls, was warned of the impending disaster of last summer\'s Sats marking five months before it happened, memos seen by the Guardian reveal.
Minutes from meetings and email exchanges between officials at the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) suggest that Balls, his ministers and their officials may bear more of the responsibility for the Sats fiasco than suggested by the conclusions of an independent inquiry published last December.
Last summer, 1.2 million pupils aged 11 and 14 received their Sats exam results late or not at all after technical and logistical failures. Some schools were still waiting for their results more than six months after they were due. The problems led to the scrapping of national testing at 14.
The independent inquiry into the debacle by Lord Sutherland largely cleared ministers of blame.
It pinned responsibility on the American marking firm, Educational Testing Services, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and its subsidiary, the National Assessment Agency.
Ken Boston, the QCA chief executive, and David Gee, the NAA\'s managing director, subsequently resigned and ETS had its marking contract terminated.
Balls has told parliament that ministers were only informed results would definitely be delayed on 30 June, 10 days before they were due.
The memos, which have been posted on the DCSF\'s website , show that as early as February – five months earlier – there was information that would lead Balls to conclude things were going badly wrong with the tests.
In a four-page briefing sent to Balls in April last year, with the ministers Jim Knight and Andrew Adonis copied in, Sue Hackman, the government\'s chief adviser on school standards, refers to an earlier letter the DCSF had written to Balls on 8 February "alerting him to a potential risk to the delivery of this summer\'s national curriculum tests".
This related to a trial in autumn 2007 by ETS of a new system of online training for markers, which had not gone well. Hackman wrote in April that the trial "did not provide any robust evidence of improvement in marking quality". She then warned Balls of ETS\'s lack of experience "and the weakness of their management capability". But she added: "Although these risks are significant, we are content with NAA\'s contingency arrangements and mechanisms for monitoring them."
More problems, including faults in the IT system, were flagged up in another memo, dated 15 May. "There have been some glitches in the new system, but these have now been fixed," it said.
Nick Gibb, the Conservatives\' shadow schools minister, said the discovery of the memos raised questions as to why they were not included in the Sutherland inquiry or listed in its reference sources.
He said: "The only conclusion you can draw is one of huge complacency by ministers. Why did they not act?"
A DCSF spokesperson said:
There is nothing new in these documents released on our website. The documents show DCSF officials challenging the QCA/NAA on the apparent problems in receiving robust reassurances. Lord Sutherland has considered the evidence and reached the conclusions he sets out in his report: that the prime responsibility lay with ETS but that there were also significant failings in QCA. He criticised DCSF for not making clearer the role of observers in the process and we have rectified this."
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009[...]/edballs-warned-of-sats-fiasco
