Highlights from The Exam Man podcast, Series 2 Episode 8
During the first half term of Autumn 2024, we had a fascinating conversation with Daniel Walton-Smith, who is the Deputy Headteacher of Prenton Primary School on the Wirral. He also sits on the Standards and Testing Agency (STS) Expert Panel for the Department of Education. As part of this role, Daniel works on the Key Stage 1 reading panel, where he analyses potential future SATS.
Dan, could you explain to us what the statutory assessments are that you have to do in a primary school?
They start pretty much straight away. A fairly new one is something called the Reception Baseline. That's only been going for a couple of years now and is an assessment which is completed over the first six weeks when the children start in reception. It's a one-to-one assessment that they'll do with the teacher. It’s a number of literacy and a number of maths based tasks. Depending on how the child does, the teacher will input what they can and can't do on an online portal. The children don't get a score or anything like that as such. All we receive is basically a PDF document for each child with a list of statements of what they can do. The DfE collects all that data from the online portal. And that baseline in the future is going to be used to measure progress in primary schools to then see how a child does at the end of Year 6, and look at what progress they've made during primary school. Then there's a second one in reception. Even before they've started the national curriculum in Year 1, they've already been hit with two assessments. So they've got that reception baseline one, which they have to do within six weeks of starting school. And then at the end of the year, we have something called the early years foundation stage profile. The teacher will assess the child against all of the early learning goals, which are in the early years curriculum. And basically, the teacher will decide based on everything they see of that child on a day-to-day basis, whether or not that child has met each of the 17 early learning goals. They're the first two, before we've even started the national curriculum in Year 1.
We've got a child in Year 2 and this is all ringing a vague bell, but I hadn't realised that they were statutory assessments that they were doing in reception. How effective do you think those assessments are, Daniel, with kids that young?
Your child may well have even been the first year group or maybe the second year group that did the baseline assessment. I can understand the premise behind it: let's see where they are at the beginning, as soon as we've got them, and then let's see where they are when they do their SATS at the end of Year 6, and let's see how they've got on through their primary school journey. I think my only personal concern about it is it has to be done within the first six weeks of reception. For some children, it can take them longer than that before they've really settled. School can be brand new for them. Obviously for some children, if they've gone to that school for a nursery setting, then they might settle a little bit quicker because they know the building and they're a bit more used to it. But if they've gone to a private nursery or not to a nursery at all, and then they come in, six weeks isn't that long. So are you really getting a true picture? I think some kids are still in their shell a little bit and maybe not necessarily fully comfortable. And it's a one to one assessment, and they may not be comfortable with the adult who's there, and obviously you're hoping they are comfortable within six weeks and that relationship has started to form, but there's no guarantee.
Is that usually their class teacher?
It doesn't have to be. Obviously, it depends on the set up of the school. It could be a class teacher in some schools. They might have a member of SLT do it, as long as it's the same person who's doing it. In my school, we've got two classes in reception, two classes of 30. One teacher will do her 30 children and the other teacher will do her 30 children. But have they really settled? Are you getting a real reflection?
Dan, is this the equivalent then of Progress 8 in secondary schools - you've created the baseline when the students enter the school, and then with the exams at the end, the SATS in your case, you're then using that to measure their progress throughout the school. Then you can form some sort of judgment on the school in terms of how it's helping students progress. Is that the basic thinking?
Exactly that. It’s a bit like if you were to run an intervention, you'd do a baseline at the beginning, where are they at the start? Where are they at the end? Has it worked? My sister's a secondary school teacher and I know that a frustration of hers is that based on SATS results in Year 6, they're given a target for every subject in secondary. Now how your Year 6 maths test score can equate to how well you should do in a design technology GCSE, I struggle to see that link.
I think the truth with that is, Dan, is that it doesn't, but that's the measure. That's what schools end up doing, because they're working towards the measure, rather than what would make logical sense. Could you tell us now a bit about SATS?
There's a bit of change here recently in the last couple of years. Historically, there's always been SATS at the end of Key Stage 1, so end of Year 2, and SATS again at the end of Key Stage 2, so Year 6. As of the academic year just gone, the Year 2 SATS are now “optional”. If a school decides they don't want to do them, that's fine, there's no kind of comeback on them. I'm yet to find a school that isn't doing them. So, now whether that's because it was the first year and people were nervous to take it out completely, I don't know, but any school that I've had any kind of contact or communication with did them last year. Certainly for the foreseeable future, I see most schools continuing to do them.
And then we've got the Year 6 SATS, which are compulsory. So the year 2 ones have always been slightly different and a bit more “relaxed”, if that's the right word, as schools were given a month to do them. They could do them any time in May. Obviously the children are younger. So you might do it in groups, etc. It's a little bit more chilled. Often the kids don't even probably realise. The word SATS won't even probably be mentioned in most primary schools. It will just be, we're just going to have a go at these questions. Obviously in Year 6, it's a lot more formal. There's set dates. Every school has to do the tests on the same date. The Year 2 ones have always been marked internally. They've never been sent off, so schools mark them. In Year 2 you can mark the paper and see what the child's score was. The score will give an indication as to whether they're working towards, working at expected or working at a greater depth. What they can do in Year 2, even now with the optional ones, is you can go against the test. So for example, if you've got a child who you think on the test has maybe just bombed a little bit and made a couple of silly mistakes and maybe didn't quite reach the expected standard on the test, but you think you've got enough evidence in that child's book, you can like override it. The year 2 data and the key stage 1 data that's published has always been teacher-assessed data. You obviously are meant to use the test score as a bit of an indicator, but there was always that flexibility to override it. Sometimes you get a kid who has maybe fluked a couple of tick box questions and you've thought, actually, I think that score is maybe slightly high. Because of the accountability involved, I think most schools would go, oh, great, they've passed the test, so I've got the evidence now to say they're expected, when really there'd possibly be a debate that they weren't. But it often worked more the other way.
The way the SATS work, both in Year 2 and Year 6, is they do the test, they get a raw score, how many marks they've got right, and then that raw score is turned into a scaled score between 80 and 120, with 100 being the expected standard. What often happens is those kids who end up scoring around 98 or 99, they didn't quite get as expected on the test, but is there enough evidence in the book to say they're expected? So that's what often happens in Year 2, because it is still teacher-assessed. It's very hard to describe the process of the Year 6 SATS: the level of information that Headteachers and Deputy Headteachers have to take in, in terms of the rules, packaging up the test papers, sealing them, having them locked away, waiting for a courier to come.
You're very much talking to the right audience!
Yeah, I imagine it's a similar thing at secondary, of course. So they're a lot more serious and heaven forbid that a child's off and you're having to contact the STA and say, can they do their test tomorrow and all this kind of stuff. How do they actually physically do them? In a classroom? Or do they go into halls? How does it logistically work usually? It's up to the school. Some schools will put them in a hall and set it up a little bit more like secondary. Other schools will do it in their classrooms. The difficulty with the classroom is there's all kinds of rules about things. All the displays have to be covered up or taken down. I think most schools like to try and do it in the classroom because it feels you're trying to take a little bit of the pressure off. It's not that big a deal, you've done loads of tests, it's just another test, give it your best. Doing it in the classroom may make it feel slightly less formal. But I think that doesn't really work because the kid looks around the room and goes, well, if it's not so serious, why have you taken everything off the wall? And why are you speaking all seriously? So it's really difficult. The local authority will kind of randomly appear - in about 25% of schools I think they aim for. You get no notice and they might want to see how the test is being administered. They can actually rock up any time after the papers are delivered. So it could be a week before the SATS, they will come to check the papers haven't been opened, they're locked away.
Or they might come during the actual week of the test. And they'll just walk around any rooms that are being used. Or they sometimes come after and check that it’s still sealed if it hasn't been collected yet. So there's a whole window where they might come and just check that everything's been done how it should. I guess the only difference at Secondary is you've got like a whole regulatory body that's responsible for doing that. With SATS they've given that responsibility to local authorities to administer. Is there someone, Dan, at the school who is your SATS person, dealing with all of this? So they're in charge of where the papers are stored and how they're stored, keeping an eye on that and making sure that everyone who's administering the test is aware of the rules. There will be someone who is in charge of the whole process. That's good practice to have that kind of person. In some schools, the Headteacher will want that, because there's so many situations where a Headteacher can get into bother because something might have just accidentally been done slightly wrong. Otherwise they might delegate it out to a deputy head or an assistant head or someone on the senior leadership team will be in charge of assessment. But it is good practice that there is someone who is in charge of the whole process, because it starts months before really.
Even now we're thinking about next May’s tests and starting to think about access arrangements and who might get what. So there's a range of access arrangements, which some children can be eligible for, such as extra time, or some people qualify to have the questions read to them and these type of things. So you have to gather up the evidence of that, if a child is going to have that. Who might need extra time and they can get that because of their writing speed or they can get it because of their reading speed and things. Obviously that adds to the logistics, because any child who is having access arrangements, depending on what that access arrangement is, might need to be in a separate room. Anyone who's having a reader, the readers can only be one-to-one. So even if you have three people who qualify to have the questions read, you can't have one adult reading to three of them. It has to be one-to-one.
Most primary schools don't have lots of surplus rooms hanging around, do they?
Exactly, and then the logistics of that is, these groups are going to have to do the test first, and the other kids are going to have to be held somewhere else. Then once the first group have finished, they go off and obviously they can't mix with the second group because they haven't done the test yet. If a poor child happens to be ill during that week you're having to speak to the parent and ask whether they think they'll be back in tomorrow? The parent might say, yeah, I think they'll be okay tomorrow. Then it's the whole logistics - they're going to have to come through a different entrance to the rest of Year 6 because they can't go near Year 6s. You're having to ask parents, even though you can't make them. Good practice is that you say to the parents the child shouldn't really speak to any of his friends tonight on the phone or the Xbox because theoretically a child could get what was on the paper and get some last minute revision in. So until they've caught up with their peers and they've done the test, they're not meant to mix with the rest of the group. So logistically, it could be really difficult.
Most local authorities set the timetable in terms of the days that the test is done on but not the time. So you could theoretically say, we're going to do the test at two o'clock this afternoon, but most schools tend to do it as early as possible. They try and get it done, particularly if they know that they've got a range of different groups that are having to do it throughout the day. It can take some schools all day because group one are doing it and then group two are doing it. They might only have one or two staff available to read the questions and they might have eight kids that have the questions read to them.
Do you ever have external help to support like that? Secondary schools have invigilation teams, which you wouldn't need, but do you sometimes have external support to help with access arrangements?
No, not common in terms of getting people in, like yourselves at secondary level. It is good practice to have a governor or some governors involved in the SATS process, even if it’s to come in and just do a random spot check themselves to say they've checked the papers have been locked away. Or they might come randomly one day and check that you're doing it all properly. Anyone who's going to be involved in any of the access arrangements or anything like that has to be given some training. So there's a document called the ARA, which is basically the rules of how everything's meant to be done.
Does that change yearly?
There is a new one released yearly but it doesn't often massively change. There's sometimes the odd tweak, but nothing huge, but we will meet a couple of weeks before the SATS every year and anyone who's going to be involved in the SATS in any way will all be in a meeting and we'll go through the rules again, even though most of them know it like the back of their hand. Everyone signs to say they've had the training. Then if anyone comes in and does one of these random spot checks, we have a file with all the evidence for the access arrangements, all the evidence of the training that the staff have had etc. That's just good practice to have that. So it's really quite a military operation at Year 6 level and is probably on a par with kind of the logistics that you have at secondary in terms of GCSE. Pretty much everything you're saying are things that we have to do as well at secondary, and I don't think there's much more on top, to be honest. Obviously we're doing it for a longer period of time with more students, but apart from that it sounds pretty similar.
Can I ask a bit about the pupils and the parents as well and how they find the experience of going through these assessments? You hear quite a lot about high levels of stress and things like that. How have you found that with the pupils and the parents?
I think you get a bit of a range really. You have some parents who are very much of the view that they just want them to do their best. You have others who are a bit more keen and are saying is there anything more we can be doing at home? Is there some book I can buy?
What's your answer to that? Is there any prep that parents and children can do, or is it very much an assessment of where they are in Year 6?
You can't really revise. It's a tricky one, really. I understand the parents who say I want my kids to do the best they possibly can. And if they think that for their child, that means I want them to do a bit more practice of some stuff at home, then obviously they're more than entitled to do that. I think my argument would be that if a primary school has got the preparation right, then there shouldn't be a need for too much additional stuff at home. We bang on to all of our parents that at primary school level, if you read to your children every day from the age my daughter is - she can't read yet and she says some words and not others - if at that age you are starting to develop a love and a culture in your house of reading books, then that will turn your kid into a kid that will read. And all the research that's out there says that kids that read have better vocabulary and go on to have better life opportunities. There's a very clear link between the number of books they read, the number of words they know by the time they're five years old. So there’s research out there about reading four or five books a day to your kids - for one, two, three year olds, the books are only four or five pages long, so you could easily read five books in a day to them. If you do that, even if out of those five books, two of them are the same book every day and you're just mixing the other three up, the research is out there that they will know millions more words by the time they're five years old.
And the research says then, based on the number of words they know at five, that is a really huge indicator on how they will do at GCSE, university and what their income will be as an adult. That research is out there, it's really clear. If they read and they learn their tables, which parents can really help with at home, then we can take care of the rest in school. With any exam, revision and preparation is great, but it’s getting that balance right and not tipping it over. A teacher needs to time it right, if you start going too big too soon in the autumn term with your Year 6s, they can burn out by May and you've lost them. The majority of schools will do several practice SATS papers throughout Year 6. There's often one around October half term - let's see where we're at. There's often one around Christmas. Then in the spring term, they might do one or two more before the SATS in May. Some schools do a full mock week, which might be a couple of weeks before, where they will try and run it as close as possible to the real week, just to test out the logistics as well from a school point of view. Is everything going to work on the day? If you get the momentum right and time it, so you've got them really bang up for it by the time that the tests come, then that can make a big, big difference.
Do you ever talk to the parents about the purpose of the test? When students are doing, say, GCSEs or A-levels, the purpose is helping them to move to the next stage. They're being selected for how they've done at their GCSEs or at their A-levels. You can see why parents and kids can be really anxious about that, because if they don't get their five GCSEs at grade four or above, they won't get their college place etc. But obviously with SATS, that’s not the purpose.
No, I've never had to put my SATS results on a job application! And there are some myths about them with which parents come to us. Some parents think that it will impact what school they get into, even though they'll know their secondary school already before they even do the exam. But I think there are still some parents who say, is it going to impact them? Obviously, you have some parents who at the time of the SATS, might be going through an appeal to get to a different secondary school, and want to know if it’s going to make a difference. It sometimes depends what school the child's going to as well, because from my school, we've got kids who go to anywhere between 10 and 15 different secondary schools. Some of those schools we know use the results to put them straight into sets in Year 7. And I know other schools that almost say, we don't trust the SATS scores, we're going to test them ourselves when they get here.
The big one often is parents who are appealing for secondary school and they're going through that process at the same time. They often ask us to write a letter of recommendation for the appeal, but we're not allowed to do that. We're allowed to send in a document, but it's a very factual document which literally states, this is the child's attendance. We can put scores on it but we're not allowed to write a glowing report saying Johnny is a wonderful boy etc. So there are some misconceptions and I think we just try and sell it to the kids and the parents as one of two things. We want you to show how hard you've worked in primary school and how much you've learned. And we also want to show your new school what you're great at and what you need a bit more practice on.
I've run CATS tests a few times, which for people who don't know are the assessments that secondary schools will do with Year 7s. Often it's not necessarily because you don't think that the SATS tests are right. It's just an extra piece of data that you can put alongside to check them and to look for anomalies and things like that. We always say to them at the beginning, try and answer every question, but don't get yourself into a state if you can't do questions, because finding out what you can't do is just as important for us at this stage as knowing what you're great at, because that means that we can put the right help in place. But whether or not they listen to that, I don't know.
We say similar things to the Year 6s. I always say to them there is going to be more than likely at least one question on this test where you go, oh, I don't understand that. And that's fine. In the internal tests that we do with other year groups where there aren't any statutory assessments, often it's about getting the children to understand why we are doing this test: it's important for your teacher to know what you can do and what you need more practice on. And the teacher then uses that to plan your lessons. And it's trying to sell that to them because there's not many year groups in primary school where there isn't a statutory assessment.
We've spoken about the two ends -reception and Year 6. And we've briefly spoken about Year 2 with the optional ones. But you've got those other tests in reception and then there's the phonics check in Year 1, which is statutory. If they don't pass the phonics check in Year 1, then it's statutory that they re-sit it in Year 2. Although if they don't pass it in Year 2, they then decide not to make them do it again in Year 3, which I always find interesting. I think really they should keep doing it until they've passed it. Year 3 get a bit of a year off. Year 4, used to get a year off, but they've now thrown an assessment in there!
At the end of year 4, they now have to do a statutory multiplication test. That's quite new since COVID. They do it on a screen. They log in and they will get 25 random times table questions, anything up to 12 times 12, because the National Curriculum says that by the end of Year 4, they should know their times table up to 12 times 12. It won't give the same times table twice and it also won't give you ones that are the same - so if you get 6 x 8, you won't get 8 x 6 because it's the same thing. They come up one at a time on the screen. The child has six seconds to type the answer in. After six seconds, the screen refreshes and the next question comes up. That's quite a lot of pressure.
Does that make it a bit more fun, like a game though?
I think for the way children are now, they quite like the fact that it's on a screen. I think they maybe don't fully realise that it's a test. A lot of schools use something called Times Tables Rock Stars, which is an app where you practise your times table in that kind of way anyway. Lots of schools use it, so it replicates that really. There's no official pass mark as such on that test, but the DfE only release two bits of data to do with it. They release the percentage of children who score 25 out of 25, and the fact that they release that data suggests that you've got to get 25 out of 25 to pass, because that's all they release. And they release the average score nationally. What is quite interesting is nationally, it's just under 30% of kids get full marks on it: 27%, 28%, 29%.And then year 5 get a year off, and then there's the SATS in year 6. So there's quite a lot of assessment in primary school.
That's something that I'm not sure many people would be quite aware of. I feel like we should know about this, having kids in primary school. You touched there on the technology used in the year 4 tests. Are there any moves or signs around year 6 SATS being moving digital?
I haven't heard anything about the Year 6 SATS, but there are a few things popping up around apps and tools. And obviously AI has exploded in the last 12 months. And there are things out there now where schools can buy into subscriptions for different sites and things where you can do online assessment. A lot of schools will use a type of test called an NFER test. They have termly tests for each year group. And there's a Year 5 autumn test, Year 5 spring test, etc. Other tests are available! …. but NFER is one of the most popular ones. And they've just recently released an online assessment where the kid does the test on the iPad and it automatically marks it. The teacher gets the scores, a breakdown, a gap analysis, what the kids could do, what they couldn't do, what the class could do. I think that is the future.
The SATS papers get sent off. Every year they're asking for people who want to mark the SATS papers and earn a bit of extra money. But there's a very tight turnaround on that. They have to mark quite a few papers in quite a short period of time because we get the results back within about six or seven weeks. If you think about the amount of tests nationally. I know a couple of people who have done the marking. They don't actually get a whole paper. They mark on the screen. So, the test gets sent off, they get scanned into some kind of big supercomputer somewhere, and they pop up on markers’ screens. I don't think they mark the whole paper, they just mark one page, and then it gets spliced back together at the end and a total score.
That's exactly how the exam boards do GCSE and A-levels as well. It’s to try and avoid the bias in marking, to split the questions, and also have examiners who are just marking one question so they can do it quicker.
What I would like is some kind of a banding system. Schools are already put into a banding or a group based on their level of deprivation, which is quite a good indicator of the context of the school. We all know that, and the percentage of kids that might be pupil premium etc. It's always baffled me that a school that might have 2% of their kids are pupil premium and there's a school a few miles down the road where they might have 60% pupil premium. But external people will come in and compare them by the same thing. So the school with the 2% of kids who are pupil premium will get massively praised … you're 10% above national and Maths, that is outstanding, blah, blah, blah. The other school who are 5% below, you're below national. And you're thinking, of course they are. I can almost guarantee if you swap the staff in the two schools over, there would be no difference. That's not saying that there aren’t phenomenal teachers in the school with the 2%, but there's phenomenal teachers in the other school.
So what I would like is to group all the similar schools, whether you did it by pupil premium percentage or some kind of indicator and say, right, you are a band, whatever, five school, and then only compare them by what was the national average of band five schools - or some kind of system like that. I know some people would say that's what the Progress 8 is for, but I've seen schools where an Ofsted inspector has said your Progress 8 is good, but you're still below national. I know Ofsted are making some changes at the minute, and I'm excited to see hopefully what they come up with. But a lot of schools are still out there, and everyone knows whether that's a good school or a requires improvement school or whatever. A lot of them are based on simply the data when there is so much more underneath that. I think with the Progress scores they're good in what they intend to do, but one of the issues is getting people to catch on. As with your Ofsted inspector saying I see that your progress is good, but I'm still thinking in terms of attainment.
We've had the Progress score in secondary schools for nearly 10 years now and I still don't think it's quite broken through. Everyone still prefers to talk about attainment.
The other issue is that in primary, there are some schools that are just an infant school or just a junior school. So the problem with them is if you're an infant school, you'll do the reception baseline, but they won't have Year 6 SATS and the Year 2 one is now optional. And even if they weren't optional, they don't measure to that, they measure to Year 6. So they end up not having a progress score. And if you're a junior school, are they going to use the reception baseline from the infant school that the child went to, which is technically a different school? So how is that going to work? I'm not quite sure of the answer to that one.
That's so interesting. Thank you so much, Dan. I could talk data and assessment all night. It's just my thing, a bit of a data geek. I am so fascinated by the parallels. And as a parent, as well as running a podcast about exams, I've learnt an awful lot that I should have known. So thanks for doing some more teaching in the evening!
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