Readers of Socialist Appeal would have heard the headlines this week about the delay in supplying the SATs results for schools and the damage that this is causing. Apart from the late delivery, and the whole issue that SATs as a form of assessment are not good education in the first place, one of the critical issues about the current situation has largely been missing from these headline reports. That the chaos being experienced flows directly from the privatisation of the SATs marking and that the quality of what will be eventually produced is open to serious question.

Teachers and educationalist are receiving a large number of incidental reports that the marking will be inaccurate. The commercial firm that gained the privatised contract, ETS Europe, has tried to manage the SATs marking on the basis of cutting costs and boosting their profits. They have recruited markers at low rates and consequently attracted a large number of more inexperienced teachers, who were looking to boost meagre salaries. Full time teachers with more experience, who would normally undertake exam marking, have largely avoided the imposition of these new conditions. Consequently, the operators have allowed a far higher proportion of errors. The Times Educational Supplement indicates that for KS3 Maths this was eight times as many as in the past. In addition teachers are being asked to mark papers for subject and key stages with they do no teach or have no experienced knowledge of. At the administration offices of the contractor panic and chaos seems to be the order of the day with temporary and unknowledgeable staff being hurriedly recruited to input the results, inevitably leading to even more errors and mishap.

Comments from the chalk face

The following are extracts from an online discussion board of English teachers referring to the marking of SATs. The comments are typical and are repeated in other subjects across the internet and within schools.

“We've just got our results and they are rubbish!  20% down on last year (L5+). We have looked through all papers and found major discrepancies in the Shakespeare paper and some in the writing tasks. We have also found several errors in the basic addition of marks - one candidate was 16 marks adrift. This took her from a low 6 to a mid 7!”

“I am in touch with a number of SATs senior examiners and they have been appalled by some of the errors made by the company running it this year.  There are still 50,000 scripts awaiting marking - they are being marked by a marking panel of 20 markers each weekend - so we may get the remaining results in 2012.”