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Wednesday, 23rd July 2008

The Spectator on the Sats fiasco

The wonder of the National Curriculum Tests marking scandal is that it has taken a decade for the inadequacies of the school exam system to become widely known. As Liz Brocklehurst, a former exam marker, reveals in this issue (see page 21), the exam system has been in crisis since being politicised in David Blunkett’s days as education secretary. For ten years, markers have been put under pressure to interpret answers in a bizarrely over-generous fashion, even to the point of marking obviously wrong answers as correct. Little has been revealed about such practices because the markers have been sworn to secrecy. As the results got better and better, allowing the government to crow about how it had raised education standards, ministers attempted, often successfully, to stifle criticism by claiming any attack on the examination system was an attack on the hard efforts of the pupils themselves.

This year there is no way that Ed Balls, the current Education Secretary, can get away with that ruse. It isn’t critics of the exam system who are insulting the intelligence of children, it is the exam system itself. Over a million children will end the school year this week knowing their hard work in Standardised Assessment Tests (Sats) has been put through the mangle of an incompetent marking operation. No amount of patronising congratulation by Mr Balls or anyone else will make up for the fact that, as revealed by one disgusted headmistress last week, imaginative, literate children have in some instances been awarded fewer marks in their Standard Assessment Tests than children who have yet to master basic spelling and grammar.

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Ray

July 24th, 2008 11:14am

Hear, hear!

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