Archive | Assessment

Jim Knight, yesterday dismissed fears that teachers drill children to pass tests, but he acknowledged they are required to focus on core subjects. In a robust defence of the government’s assessment regime, Knight told MPs on the Commons children, schools and families select committee that pupils were not over-tested. He defended league tables, saying failure [...]

The traditional school report is to be replaced by an electronic version delivered by e-mail, Schools Minister Jim Knight is set to announce. Parents are to be promised much more up-to-date information about their children’s progress, on the desktop. This will include “real-time reporting” on pupils’ work and behaviour in all secondary schools in England [...]

The pressure of national tests was blamed for driving schools to cheat after a string of primaries were stripped of their results. Five schools in England were found to have broken the rules in the SATs. Four saw their results wiped out in all three subjects, English, maths and science. A fifth school was stripped [...]

According to a report published on Friday as many as one in three primary school children is given the wrong marks in the SATs.  The reports document research showing that up to one in three pupils is given the wrong mark at the end of the tests. Short papers with questions that have a narrow [...]

Assessing the children every term is something that most schools ask of all their teachers and, if not, it’s something that we should be doing to make sure they are making progress with us.  For most of us teacher assessment is fine, but for those less confident, or want evidence for their Performance Management, giving [...]

New targets from the Treasury have said that children should be going up by at least two national curriculum levels from their starting points in each Key Stage and that schools must also narrow the attainment gap between the poor and the ‘rest’. The Treasury report says the government wants to see a society where [...]

Does this not just make a complete mockery of the SATs? Teachers at Ash Green Primary in Mixenden, West Yorkshire, knew it was unlikely 98% of the Year 6 pupils would have reaching the expected standard. Even worse, 70% were said to have reached the next level up. Checking the scripts, they saw the problem [...]

The Government have announced that the “results for KS1 reveal that high standards have been maintained with nine out of ten children achieving the expected level 2 or higher in mathematics and 84% reaching the expected level or higher in reading.” Since 1997 results for seven year olds have shown sustained improvement, with nearly 34,000 [...]

As the the Year 6 test results start to return to school the chief executive of the GTC, Keith Bartley, who is in charge of setting teaching standards, said he was optimistic that the Government will have started to phase out the tests by the end of the year. There was “not a lot of [...]

So what do people think of the SATs so far?  Here’s a few of my observations: Science: Repeated topics meant that whole areas of the science curriculum (including a lot of what I cover in Y6 bar revision) have been missed out.  Two whole questions on space and sound – what happened to forces, micro-organisms [...]