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SATs Testing

As the hon. Lady will know, because we discussed this in the Select Committee last week, it is one of the purposes of the Making Good Progress pilots to allow more teacher discretion in setting the level of tests for a child to take. These tests play more than one role, however. They are an aid to teacher assessment, and they also provide a way of allowing parents to see the independently validated progress of their child. They also provide a way in which we, and the hon. Lady, can compare performance school by school. All those functions can be performed only if we have universal, externally validated tests. However, that does not mean that we cannot make changes to give more discretion to teachers, and I am keen to do that if the evaluation suggests that it will work.