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School Gate: The twenty-five best exam blunders I The New York City system the School Report Card will be based on I The Bronx Aerospace High School (X545) where the system is used

Pupils in England are to escape school testing at the age of 14 after the Key Stage 3 tests were abolished yesterday with immediate effect.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, said that the national curriculum tests, known as SATs, would be replaced by more intensive teacher assessment and new systems for tracking pupils’ performance. Tests for 11-year-old pupils at the end of primary school, known as Key Stage 2, will stay, although the Government is proceeding with a pilot project for a single-level testing system, which may replace them eventually.

We should have learnt from the US experience

Given the widely reported problems of ETS in the US, none of this year’s difficulties should have come as a surprise

• Educational Testing Service: American markers had earlier problems

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BACKGROUND

• Children give SATS verdict in their exams

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The move, which was welcomed by teaching unions, experts and opposition politicians, comes after a series of highly critical reports on overtesting in schools and the bungling of this year’s test-marking by a US contractor, ETS Europe.

Every year 1.2 million pupils sit 9.5 million national curriculum test papers. The reform will cut this testing burden on schools in half. Results of the Key Stage 3 tests, in English, maths and science were published but rarely used to compile league tables because GCSE scores were used instead.

The measure represents the third significant government U-turn in two days, after Gordon Brown’s decisions to abandon his parliamentary battle to allow police to detain terror suspects for up to 42 days and drop the plan for secret inquests.

Under a second plank of the reforms, an annual school report card will be drawn up for every school in England, grading it from A-F and allowing parents to assess its performance. A panel, to include two head teachers, will advise on bringing in the changes and the effect they may have on teachers’ workload and training.

Mr Balls denied that the reforms represented a U-turn on testing, but accepted that the scrapping of the tests had been influenced greatly by the views of leading head teachers. They believe that the tests, introduced by the Conservatives in 1993, have outlived their usefulness, not least because GCSEs and A levels provide an objective and externally marked measure of school performance.

“We are moving away from a one-off national test to a more intensive tracking in Years 7, 8 and 9,” Mr Balls said. “I don’t think it necessarily means less testing, but it certainly means less national testing done externally.”

Although secondary schools will still be able to put forward 14-year-old children for tests if they choose, Mr Balls said that he wanted the emphasis to be on regular tracking of individual pupil performance by teachers. This would benefit particularly children who had not reached the standard expected when they left primary school.

Mr Balls said national testing for pupils aged 11 would remain for the time being as it was the only externally administered independent gauge of standards in primary schools. He added, however, that the Government was proceeding with a pilot for a system of single-level testing in primary schools, which may eventually replace Key Stage 2 as well. Single-level testing is similar to traditional music exams: children are entered for the grade of performance their teachers believe they can achieve.

The reforms may well signal the beginning of the end of all national curriculum testing in its current form. The regime was introduced in the 1988 Education Reform Act, which brought in the national curriculum. Tests for seven-year-olds were watered down in 2005 when schools were allowed to mark the papers.

The new school report cards, which will require primary legislation, will show pupil test scores, information on attendance, pupil motivation and other nonacademic measures. They are modelled on a system devised by New York City.

Christine Blower, acting general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said that the abolition was an admission that the current testing system had failed. “For too long, English, mathematics and science teachers in secondary schools have found themselves skewing everything to enable their pupils to jump through a series of unnecessary hoops,” she said.

Michael Gove, the Shadow Schools Secretary, said the Conservative Party supported the move to “fewer and more rigorous” testing. John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leavers, welcomed the consultation on a school report card, which he said would show that “schools do much more than prepare students for exams”.

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