SATs Results

Gordon Marsden Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to speak in this debate. First, I should comment on the uniformly thoughtful and interesting contributions from Back Benchers. Let me begin by mentioning the intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne), who challenged the Secretary of State on the whole issue of secondary improvements. Although that is not the subject of this debate, secondary schools would be assisted if they and their heads did not have to worry about how to play catch-up on key stage 2 SATs fails.

The hon. Member for Southport (John Pugh), in a thoughtful speech, was rightfully caustic about some of the Secretary of State’s newspeak on SATs. His quote from one of his respected local headteachers about this being “one big mess” is devastating, so we should all take it into account. It is worth mentioning that, in a survey, 97% of primary teachers and leaders expressed concern that schools were preparing pupils for the tests at the expense of the wider curriculum, and other Members have spoken about that today. The hon. Gentleman also talked about a sense of common enterprise. His contribution, like others, pointed out that we need not only a sense of common enterprise, but evidence-driven policy.

The hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart), the former Chair of the Education Committee, used the interesting word “volatility” to describe what has happened this year. That was not a great word to use; his five years as Chair might have given him a choicer set of words to describe the fiasco of the process and outcomes that this year’s SATs have left us with. He also talked about the need for people to row back in, but surely the whole problem is that the specs were not there in time for them to do so. That point needs to be taken on board.

The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Heidi Allen) struck a chord with many Members by talking about the way in which we need to keep our teachers with us. My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) regaled us with tales of her days, and perhaps the Secretary of State’s days, in the sandpit. Apart from that, the most enlightening thing in my hon. Friend’s speech was when she relayed what her local headteacher, Katie, said. Perhaps it should have been what Katie did and what Katie did next. To be fair, the Secretary of State was gracious and told us what Katie needs to do next: get her thoughts in before 15 July. Again, this raises the issue that people can have legitimate concerns without being anti-testing.

The hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) said that the tests should not be set to a low benchmark. Nobody in the House would dispute that point. He said that there needs to be more time for prep and more time for learning subjects other than English and maths. Perhaps we can welcome him as an additional recruit to those of us who talked to the Minister last week about the need to widen the EBacc.

My hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) rightly expressed concerns that some of the outstanding schools in his constituency have had bizarrely low results. He also rightly asked what the Government would do about the security of the tests. I hope that the Minister will take on board those issues in his response.

My hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State got an unfair blistering from the Secretary of State. My colleague painted a stark picture of the strengths and skills of the young people who took the tests this year being cast aside or ignored because they have been the guinea pigs and victims of the Department’s shambles this year. She did show passion, and she needed to do so, because the pupils who took this year’s key stage 2 SATs have been very badly let down. Why is that? It is because the Department’s resources and Ministers’ focus were obsessively trained on their national programme of academisation. As my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), among others, said when the previous statement was made, they took their eye off the ball. Tens of thousands of children have suffered, and for what? For a humiliating climbdown on forced academisation under fire from the Government’s own side, which now means that the Secretary of State will have to swerve and dodge in the academy-lite education Bill that may or may not come this autumn or under this Secretary of State.

In this instance, process cannot be divorced from outcome. Russell Hobby, the general secretary of the NAHT, was quite right to say that the Government had made

“serious mistakes in the planning and implementation of tests this year”

and

“with the delays and confusion in guideline materials.”

The Minister for Schools said in this House on 10 May that Pearson UK was investigating the uploading of the key stage test on to a website and was committed to investigating it quickly. I do not recall whether we have had a full explanation of that from the Minister, so I ask him to give us one now. I also echo what my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling said by asking the Minister to tell us what steps he has put in place to reduce the possibility of this happening again.

The Secretary of State wanted to cloud talk of her failures by saying that this was all driven by an NUT plot. If she were to pause for a moment from her rant about the NUT, perhaps she would like to look at the joint statement that the National Governors Association and the NAHT put out. They said that schools did not need to draw conclusions from the SATs data because they provide

“no intelligence on the rate of improvement of teaching and learning.”

They went on to point out that many will be “feeling demoralised”, saying:

“Pupils, teachers and parents and all involved in schools should be proud of the work they have put in to implement”—

the new curriculum and the testing regime—

“in what has been a very short timetable.”

It is simply not good enough for the Secretary of State to be complacent about this matter. The Government’s complacency has already been commented on by the Public Accounts Committee, although that does not seem to have affected the Secretary of State’s ability to be Madam Pangloss on the issue. In her first response to the results, she said that they had been a “good start”, but Anne Watson, who was the emeritus professor of mathematics education at the University of Oxford, said:

“The aim to raise standards has resulted in a new way to measure performance so that no comparative judgments can be made…This means we do not know from the data alone whether the Government has done a good job or a bad job and whether the test designers and score-scalers have done a good job or a bad job.”

After all, these results mean that, according to this Government, 47% of children in this country are not ready for secondary school. How do we tell children and their parents that?

The Secretary of State—the Minister has said this on another occasion—talked about the fact that pupils either “don’t mind” or “enjoy” taking these tests, and the ComRes poll gave them some comfort in that respect. Pupils might not mind taking the test, but they mind with absolute justification the test being taken out of context and their teachers being left frustrated that they are not able to engage at an early enough stage.

When the Minister made his statement in May, my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe made an absolutely key point:

“By rushing ahead with the policy without properly involving professionals or parents, the Government failed to spot the fundamental flaw in the design, which was that the test that they had developed were insufficiently comparable. As a result, they were forced to abandon their approach to baseline test entirely.”

He went on to say:

“There has been a constant stream of chop and change in primary assessment under this Government. Since September, the Department for Education has updated or clarified on average at least one primary school assessment resource every other working day.”—[Official Report, 10 May 2016; Vol. 609, c. 554.]

We do not regard that as good enough.

On the floor standard, I think the Secretary of State said that the details would be made available in September, yet her Department told Schools Week that the results would not be published until December. Whether it is September or December—the Secretary of State or the Minister is welcome to clarify this—what an indictment it is that schools should have that sword of Damocles over their head for four or six months.

Ultimately, this comes down to what happens in individual Members’ constituencies and the responses that they get. In my own area of Lancashire, the spokesman for the National Association of Head Teachers said that, with 94% of Lancashire schools judged good or outstanding by Ofsted,

“there is something wrong in the assessment process”,

and that schools need to support their children and their staff

“and carry out what is effectively damage limitation.”

Last Friday I visited one of my primary schools in Blackpool, where the head and others are doing some extremely good work. I observed a session with an excellent Pobble literacy tutor, but when I spoke afterwards to the head, he had a huge sense of frustration that the school had not been able to structure its exam preparation because of the continuous chopping and changing to which I and my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe have referred. The head said, “I fear it will put more pressure on testing in these students’ first year in secondary schools.” The schools will not regard the tests as useful, and the consequence will be deflated students and pressured parents—those are my observations, not those of the head.

The years between the ages of nine and 11 are almost as crucial for young people as the time of transfer to secondary school. I am old enough—I suspect that others in the Chamber may be old enough—to remember the nine-plus. I remember from doing the nine-plus that it was a testing time, so it is not good enough for the Minister and the Secretary of State to draw a veil over this year’s results by setting up straw people and saying that the Opposition or other critics are not interested in testing or in standards. We are interested in both, but we are also interested in their being delivered competently, and this Government have not shown competence.