Furious Billington headteacher's disgust over SATs fiasco

8:30am Monday 21st July 2008

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By Deborah Lewis »

A FURIOUS headteacher has told of his disgust after bungling examiners recorded 200 pupils who sat tests as absent.

Anthony McNamara, head of St Augustine’s RC High School, Elker Lane, Billington, has become the first East Lancashire head to speak publicly about the SATs fiasco.

He said the ‘appalling’, ‘shambolic’ and ‘disgraceful’ situation had left teachers at his school stunned.

Mr McNamara said: “The irony of this is that 14-year-olds don’t even need these tests. Our children are tested to death by this Government who are only interested in exam results and not what makes a good school.”

The online results for maths tests sat by the school’s 14-year-olds (key stage 3) recorded the entire cohort – 205 pupils – as being absent.

The National Association for Headteachers said this latest blunder proved the system to be “totally incompetent”.

Results for SATS in English, maths and science sat by tens of thousands of 14 and 11-year-olds (key stage 2) were meant to be available online by July 8.

Private US firm Educational Testing Services (ETS) won a five-year £165million contract to deliver the results for the National Assessment Agency, part of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA).

The deadline was then extended to July 15, but schools, including over 11 in East Lancashire, reported a series of mistakes ranging from receiving another school’s papers, getting none back at all, and grave doubts over the quality of marking.

National reports today claim that ETC is facing the sack over the fiasco.

St Augustine’s did not receive any marked test scripts back until Friday – when only science papers were delivered – nor could they download results from the web until then.

Anne Edwards, exams officer for the Elker Lane school, said: “When we were finally able to download the results we couldn’t quite believe it.

“For every maths test every single student is marked as absent, when only about two pupils were.

“I contacted ETS and they said they would email colleagues and ‘probably’ change the record to say ‘results pending’ instead.

“It was very clear that the helpdesk had no information whatsoever.”

Mr McNamara said that he did not feel the marking was reliable, concerns that are shared by many. The results of the national curriculum tests are used to compile school ‘league tables’.

He said: “This is an absolute shambles and a disgrace.

“As a taxpayer I’m personally angry that £165million is being paid to ETS.

“But moreover, the majority of people in education are now questioning the value of SATs at all.”

Tony Roberts, the National Association for Headteachers ’s Lancashire membership secretary, said: “I think St Augustine’s problem is the best example I have yet heard – and I’ve heard of a lot – that proves beyond doubt that the system is totally incompetent.

“The league tables must be declared void, and the NAHT will continue to pursue this after schools break up.”

A spokesperson for the National Assessment Agency said a ‘limited’ number of schools had reported similar problems with pupils wrongly being recorded as absent.

He said: “These pupils are showing as absent due to a data collation issue.

“This is most commonly caused when more than one marker was involved in marking a school's scripts; each marker could only input marks for that part of the school's scripts they had been allocated and so they had to record the outstanding scripts as missing.

“Some pupil records are therefore incorrectly and temporarily showing as an 'A' code.

“Schools affected by this are asked to contact the test operations agency helpdesk so individual issues can be investigated and resolved on a case by case basis.

"These schools' papers will be sent back to the school and the results released as soon as possible.”

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