NEW evidence has emerged to suggest that Ed Balls, the schools secretary, and his deputy manipulated evidence to avoid blame for last year’s school tests fiasco.

On at least three occasions, including on the floor of the Commons, Balls and Jim Knight, his junior minister, accused Ken Boston, head of the former exams watchdog, of downplaying the scale of the problem in a meeting last June.

Only after the release of Lord Sutherland’s official report into the debacle, which disrupted the education of tens of thousands of children, did Knight quietly admit that Boston had not even been present at the meeting.

The Sunday Times has now established that Knight made this admission only after Boston’s employer, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), discovered the truth while checking the case against him, ahead of his departure.

It has also been confirmed that just 10 days after Knight first gave his erroneous account to Sutherland’s inquiry last October, the peer sent him a full transcript of what he had said, asking him to check it for factual accuracy. Knight soon returned it, certified as correct. It took him four months to recall what had really happened.

Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary, has now called on Sutherland to reexamine what he calls “the Knight manoeuvre”.

“It is crucial we get at the truth of what happened last time as it will have consequences for next time round,” Gove said. “Ken Boston has already accepted his share of responsibility but it is deeply worrying that the government acknowledged it had misled Lord Sutherland only once the QCA had made its own inquiries. There have to be questions over whether or not a public figure was smeared in order to cover the government’s embarrassment.”

Last month, after Boston’s resignation as chief executive of the QCA had been accepted, he broke his silence at a select committee hearing to launch a furious attack on Balls and Knight for “sexing up” the evidence against him and called it “outrageous” and “fiction”.

This weekend, Sutherland, whose report largely blamed the QCA under Boston for the fiasco, nevertheless backed the former chief executive’s decision to speak out. “His criticism was that the minister had made a mistake and that it wasn’t good enough,” Sutherland said. “I think he was right to say so once he had checked his own records.”

The chaotic marking of last year’s 1.2m Sats tests for pupils aged 11 and 14 was largely blamed by Sutherland on the QCA and on ETS, the American contractor that proved unable to cope with the marking despite its £156m contract. Ministers managed to avoid blame, but this position is now looking increasingly hard to sustain.

It has also been established that Boston and Sir Anthony Greener, then chairman of the QCA, warned Balls in a series of six meetings between July 2007 and March 2008 of the dangers inherent in the testing system. They told him the government’s insistence on paper marking rather than a more up-to-date onscreen system was one of many factors posing a risk to the QCA’s operations.

It is understood that ministers were worried that computerised marking would expose the flaws in the testing system. Internal research suggested that computer marking would produce such different results from the paper system that schools might move “crazily” up and down league tables, and undermine the credibility of the whole testing system.

Relations between Balls and Boston are said to have broken down in March 2008 in an angry meeting at which Balls accused QCA leaders of being too ready to make public statements about education policy.

Ministers did not grasp the scale of last year’s marking problems until the end of June, when it was already too late. Both Balls and Knight claimed to have pressed Boston and other officials repeatedly, but to have been fobbed off with blithe reassurances that any problems were well under control.

It has now emerged, however, that what Balls called his sustained pressure on Boston consisted of only one face-to-face meeting, at which Sats were mentioned only briefly.

The key meeting that Knight had recalled on June 17 last year was with a deputy of Boston’s, not the chief executive. Speaking to the Commons schools select committee in February, Knight called it a “very memorable” meeting at which he had managed to extract information from Boston and his deputy only by using “detailed scrutiny and questioning”. Four days later he recalled that Boston had not been present.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: “Lord Sutherland has made it absolutely clear that the genuine mistake that the schools minister [Knight] made in his evidence to the independent inquiry ‘did not materially affect any of the key findings’, which showed that the responsibility for the delivery failure of last year’s tests lay primarily with ETS and also with QCA. We have also said, on a number of occasions, that we accept Lord Sutherland’s recommendations in full.”

Heads back test boycott

HEAD TEACHERS have moved to boycott national curriculum tests for 11-year-olds, defying a last-ditch attempt by Ed Balls, the schools secretary, to persuade them against the move.

The decision to ballot for a boycott of next year’s tests was backed by 94% of delegates at the conference of the National Association of Head Teachers in Brighton.

The NAHT, which represents 85% of primary heads, is waging a joint campaign with the National Union of Teachers, which voted at Easter for a similar ballot. Ministers have warned that refusal to stage tests could breach heads’ statutory duties. However, Sue Sayles, past president of the association, said yesterday: “It’s our moral duty personally, within our local branches and as a national association, to show Ed that we have balls.”

As he tried to win over heads, the schools secretary told the conference he hoped league tables based on test results – bitterly opposed by unions – would become a “thing of the past”.

“Our great schools and our great head teachers are about much more than the narrow view provided by league tables,” he said.

Times Recommends

• Margot Fonteyn: In her footsteps
• Forget beautiful people, let's have wonky Brits
• Fundamentalist brew: faith and power