Year 6 SAT results have a long-term impact on children throughout their secondary school career, most especially during their GCSE years. Decisions about who gets extra support and who takes higher-level papers will be unwittingly determined according to tests done in primary school.
I was once standing in a primary school playground with a parent waiting for her Year 6 child to come out after a day of SATs testing. She was trying to convince me-or perhaps herself-that the whole thing didn’t matter. “They do their own testing for setting anyway when they get there,” she said, about the local secondary school. “So this doesn’t count for anything.”
The parent was unaware that I taught at the secondary school she was talking about and I didn’t have the heart nor the courage to tell her what I knew: every single book that her child would write in for the next five years would have a sticker on the front with her child’s “target” for that subject by the end of the year. The targets are calculated from the SAT results. In four or five years’ time, her child would be selected for extra support during his GCSE course according to how far off he was from achieving his “target”. If his SATs score indicated that he should achieve a Level 6 or higher in mathematics at GCSE, he would automatically be put in for the higher-level paper, regardless of what his teacher felt was best, because he simply had to have the chance of reaching his “target”. In another school I worked in, the targets were also used to help determine who would take triple science and who would take double. SATS results hang around secondary-school children like bad smells.
The targets could be changed by teachers, but very rarely were. It was especially unusual for a target to be moved down-I only ever saw this happen on one occasion, for a child suffering from anxiety. Another child explained to me once how miserable it was to have targets that were too high, for every subject, throughout her entire school career. “I’ve never hit my target. Ever. Not once. I shouldn’t be in top set.” She understood more than the teachers what had happened. “It’s all because I did too well on my SATs. I had a lot of help.”
Students who speak English as a second language and arrive in England in the later years of primary school often face the opposite problem: their SAT scores are artificially low and their targets don’t reflect what they’ve achieved in secondary. Teachers aren’t incentivised to make targets harder: they are often judged on how their classes perform against targets. I’ve come across examples of children given a target grade for the new year that they had achieved in last year’s exam. One determined child begged me to raise her targets across all subjects. “I’m not going to get 5s,” she predicted. She was, of course, right.
Because discourse is around “targets”, it isn’t obvious to teachers that they are being asked to stick a primary test score on the front of every book, or use it to determine who should get GCSE interventions, or which papers a child should take. But in essence, this is what was happening. And even after the official eradication of levels, it is still happening. This kind of target setting is a negative consequence of measuring schools by their overall Progress 8 score. The most natural way for schools to tackle the P8 challenge is to break it down into a score for every child. Thus, you are marked by your primary SATs score as you walk in through the gates to join the Year 7 assembly on your very first day.
There is strong evidence from Goldstein and Leckie at Bristol University that Progress 8 scores should take into account a child’s background. Teaching professionals obviously can’t stomach such an idea: a disadvantaged child, with the same SAT score as another, should not be given a lower target. But this problem only arises because we are turning a measure into a target. That’s what we should stop doing. Progress 8 – especially once recalculated to account for disadvantage – can provide valuable information about a whole school, but there are much better ways to provide individual children with targets for their Year 9 French exams than what they did in maths and English tests three years before.