Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what progress she has made on her plans to abolish SATs at Key Stage 1; and if she will make a statement.

In March, we published a consultation document, ‘Primary Assessment in England’, which set out a number of proposals to improve the primary assessment system. One of those proposals was that a new assessment should be introduced in the reception year, to provide a new baseline for measuring the progress that pupils make at primary school. One of the potential benefits of introducing such an assessment would be that schools could receive greater credit for the education that they provide during reception, Year 1 and Year 2.

We made it clear that, once this new baseline assessment had become established, and its data available to calculate progress measures for pupils reaching the end of Key Stage 2, we would no longer require data from statutory assessments currently administered at the end of Key Stage 1.

We sought views on whether those Key Stage 1 assessments should be made non-statutory.

The consultation exercise closed on 22 June, and we will be publishing our response in due course. The consultation document is available to read at:

www.gov.uk/government/consultations/primary-assessment-in-england.