Don’t be ‘over-ambitious’ with year 8 reading test, says expert

An expert has warned government against having “too ambitious objectives” for a planned year 8 reading tests, amid fears of further failures related to outsourced assessments.

Schools Week revealed last year that the government will introduce a statutory reading test in year 8 by 2029 as part of its schools white paper.

It aims to ensure that poor reading skills do not hold back key stage 3 pupils from accessing the wider secondary school curriculum.

But this year’s SATs fiasco – in which results were delayed by problems with Pearson’s marking system – has prompted fresh concerns about outsourcing administration of the test to a private company.

The Department for Education said the Standards and Testing Agency (STA) was “developing the specification” for the test “and will confirm further details in due course”.

The STA launched market engagement for the proposed test in March, noting it was “considering and open to a range of delivery models”.

The initial contract is estimated to begin in January 2028 and end in March 2029. The tender notice is not due to be published until October next year.

SATs results were delayed by nine days this year. It is not the first time there have been issues with outsourced national tests.

Missing papers

In 2022 when Capita oversaw SATs, thousands of papers went missing, markers were locked out of training and there were excessive helpline waiting times.

And in 2008, ETS Europe was ordered to pay back £24.1 million of nearly £40 million it received to run SATs tests after results were delivered late. The government then oversaw the delivery of 30,000 results.

Tim Oates, a fellow at Churchill College Cambridge and the former director of assessment research and development at Cambridge University Press and Assessment, acknowledged the “checkered history”.

“It’s when you introduce over-ambitious objectives for a test that you can have significant problems.”

Oates, who led the coalition government’s curriculum review in the early 2010s, added that once issued a contract had been issued with a certain specification, “it’s quite difficult to shift things”.

“If you need to fine-tune the testing, that can be quite tricky.”

He said he hoped that during market engagement, the government would think “more broadly” about the types of organisations that could bid.

It is not yet clear how the year 8 reading test will work, including whether it will be administered online, be a written comprehension test or will need teachers to assess pupils on a one-to-one basis.

Oates argued for “a very focused test” that was “not too ambitious” but could “produce incredibly dependable evidence on attainment”.

He said that it would be possible for a state organisation to run this sort of test, while only contracting out some services such as distribution or online systems.

Union questions test

Unions have questioned the need for a mandatory test when schools already routinely assessed pupils’ progress.

Daniel Kebede, the general secretary of the National Education Union, said the SATs’ delay “serves as a stark reminder that vast amounts of public money are being wasted by private contractors”.

“When these companies fail to deliver on the service agreed, schools are left struggling with additional workload, uncertain timelines and unacceptable pressure.”

The government has launched an independent review into the failings, which will explore whether changes to the delivery and operation of results could improve things. It is set to be published in October.

Ellie Harris, principal research fellow and head of children and young people at IPPR, said the question of using profit-marking organisations to deliver public goods was “a particularly live one, given the recent delay to key stage 2 test results”.

“One of the big benefits of privately contracting is that you’ve got a contract and somebody fails to meet it, there are consequences to that, which is much harder to do if it’s a public body.

“There are key performance indicators, [and] you can set terms in a way that you can’t if you do it in-house. Arguably there is more competition and therefore you can drive the price down.”

But she added that if the DfE was unable to penalise companies for contract failures, such as by recouping any money, it was difficult to see the benefits of using the private sector.

Reduced outsourcing

The government also recently published guidance aimed at reducing outsourcing for future public sector contracts.

Harris said the delivery model would depend on how standardised the test would be.

Different bodies or organisations producing slightly different tests, in the same way as GCSEs, “doesn’t seem proportionate” for a reading test.

Oates also recently chaired the international panel advising Paul Givan, Northern Ireland’s education minister, on curriculum and assessment reform.

The panel’s final report included fluency checks, which would be a one-minute test of reading speed in words per minute. Givan accepted the report’s recommendations.

“It’s very robust, very easy to administer, and really valuable educationally”, Oates said. It could be used as a benchmark or case study for the year 8 reading test in England.

Tom Middlehurst, deputy policy director at the Association of School and College Leaders, said there were “significant concerns about the design, delivery and use of these tests”.

“It is imperative that it aligns with the curriculum rather than creating new expectations – how they do this for a test halfway through the key stage is unclear.

“It must be straightforward for schools to deliver and minimise the impact on workloads, recognising that a majority of schools don’t have one-to-one devices to allow for synchronous digital testing.”

Results would be available to the government and Ofsted, but would only be published at a national level rather than at school level.

‘Accountability burden’

It is understood a school’s performance in the test would not trigger an early inspection.

But Middlehurst said sharing the outcomes of the test with Ofsted “will inevitably undermine the test’s usefulness as a diagnostic tool and bring in an additional accountability burden through the backdoor”.

Darren Northcott, the NASUWT’s national official for education, said that it was not clear what purpose the tests would serve. Adding another test “would lead to further narrowing of the curriculum” at key stage 3.

But Oates argued that there was a need to “help schools to make more of key stage 3 in terms of attainment and progression” to avoid an attainment dip.

“Obviously, a test is not the only way to do that, but it is part of the picture.”

The test would be the first statutory test in key stage 3 since 2008, when year 9 SATs were scrapped.

While Oates recognised that tests risked “narrow[ing] the curriculum”, there needed to be “more granular detail on [pupils] as they progress through key stage 3”.

The DfE is also introducing a new expectation for schools to assess pupil process in writing and maths in year 8, and will signpost schools “to a range of high-quality products” to help them to do this.