Pupils aged 11 hit by GCSE-level questions in new tougher SATs

TOUGHER SATs tests for 11-year- olds were condemned yesterday as unfair, full of ‘tripwires’ and containing GCSE-level material.

More than 600,000 youngsters in primary schools across England sat papers in maths, reading, spelling, punctuation and grammar earlier this month.

Ministers made the Key Stage Two assessments more difficult in a push to raise stand- ards. But marks are expected to drop dramatically, leaving hundreds of primaries branded failures when the Department for Education publishes results later this year.

Government advisers and academics have now analysed the test papers, published online by the Times Educational Supplement, and have given a withering verdict.

Anne Watson, emeritus professor of mathe- matics education at the University of Oxford and a government adviser, said: ‘I’m not complaining about difficult questions; there should be multi-stage questions.

‘But where are the opportunities for children to show their knowledge in a straightforward way?’ She added: ‘There were a lot of tripwires all over the place.’.

Professor Watson, who helped write the primary curriculum which schools have followed since 2014, said one of the 40-minute reasoning papers was not ‘fair and reasonable’ because it was ‘significantly harder’ than a sample assessment published last year.

One question about angles was at GCSE lower to mid-standard level, she said.

This year’s spelling, punctuation and grammar test was condemned by Pie Corbett, an adviser to Tony Blair’s government, who said some of the grammatical rules were too complicated for 11-year-olds to grasp.

‘ Children are submitting to linguistic pyrotechnics beyond the ken of most adults,’ he said. ‘The ability to create something that might be of interest or value, is being deadened.’

Mr Corbett said the ‘daftest question’ on the paper was one that asked: ‘What is the

‘Is this a cunning trick?’

function of the sentence, “How well you’ve done”?’ He said: ‘But there is no punctuation. Is this a cunning trick? Surely, no examiner would state that something is a sentence when it is not.’

Meanwhile experts at the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education, which carries out research and training on improving reading, said the SATS reading test was skewed towards retrieving and recording information rather than understanding meaning.

The National Association of Head Teachers wrote to Education Secretary Nicky Morgan this week asking for Key Stage Two results not to be published amid fears of a big dip in children’s achievement.

A Department for Education spokesman said: ‘Teachers and development experts were involved in the development of the tests to ensure the papers were at an appropriate standard for KS2 pupils.

‘This is because parents rightly expect their children to leave primary school having mastered the basics of literacy and numeracy.

‘If they don’t master literacy and numeracy early on, they risk being held behind and struggling for the rest of their lives.’