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Education: Assessments

Answer

The National Curriculum tests for key stage 2 took place on 12-16 May. The National Assessment Agency (NAA) administers those tests on behalf of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. Delivery of the national curriculum tests is always challenging in view of the scale and timing of the task and it is unfortunate that this year's exercise has encountered difficulties. As usual during the test delivery period, we are in regular contact with the NAA and I take a close interest in the progress of test delivery, I have asked David Gee, Managing Director of the NAA, to write to my hon. Friend. A copy of his letter has been placed in the Library.Letter from David Gee, dated 20 June 2008:"The National Assessment Agency is responsible for overseeing the safe delivery of the National Curriculum Tests. The tests at KS2 and KS3 are sat by over 1.1 million pupils.""To remove the risk of error in the marking of pupils work it is important that an accurate record of pupil attendance for each test is recorded. For many years this has been a paper process which given the scale of the tests brings with it inevitable errors that require correcting, For the 2008 test cycle a new contractor ETS was appointed and one of the many improvements they offered was to move the recording of pupil attendance online.""Schools were provided with a copy of the most recent pupil records as collected from school census data and were required to annotate against each pupil which tests were actually sat. Some pupils move schools during the year and so there was the additional facility to edit the records.""A new website provided by ETS delivered this service On the first day of the KS2 test week the website unfortunately suffered technological problems for three hours. While key stage 2 schools had a period of 10 days to submit their entries an estimated 745 schools out of approximately 16,000 were impacted by the website being not available during this time.""Help line service for schools is provided by ETS throughout the test period. During the time of system outage the ETS helpline did experience a high number of calls as schools reported this issue. The volume of calls caused callers to be held in a queue and ETS have acknowledged and apologised for this frustration. Staffing of the helpline has been increased in response to this issue to give greater capacity.""As in previous years the NAA will be conducting a review in to the delivery performance of the tests including consulting with schools, markers and other stakeholders to ensure good practice and necessary improvements are captured and acted upon"

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

213109; 478 c276-7W;478 c278W

Session

2007-08

Subjects

Assessments National curriculum tests

Link

View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk