School probed over claim it ‘helped pupils to cheat’

EDUCATION officials are investigating claims that a school broke rules to coach pupils in advance about a crucial national curriculum exam.

The Mail on Sunday has seen dozens of examples of coursework from children attending Eastbury Primary School in Barking, East London, which suggest they were told in advance about the contents of the Standard Assessment Tests (SATs) writing paper recently taken by ten and 11-year-olds across the country.

Schools can open the exam paper only one hour before the test is due to begin, and teachers are forbidden from coaching children.

A complaint was first investigated by the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham in March and the school was cleared. Now another claim is being probed by the Standards and Testing Agency (STA), the executive body of the Department for Education and Skills which is responsible for the SATs exams.

Copies of work from children’s exercise books, which were passed to this newspaper by a source, reveal they were asked to complete several pieces of creative writing both in classrooms and as homework from March this year. The exam paper – which the pupils sat on May 15 – contained instructions to complete similar pieces of work.

The allegations are particularly harmful because the school’s headmistress, Carole Thomas, is training to be an inspector with the schools’ regulator, Ofsted.

The source said: ‘Teachers were told to let pupils watch YouTube videos on very specific subjects and to prepare Powerpoint presentations for them so they were fully informed.’

The first allegations were investigated by the London Borough of Barking. A spokesman said: ‘A thorough investigation of a previous allegation of “coaching” very firmly concluded that there was absolutely no substance to the claims and no case for the school to answer. The headteacher at Eastbury is someone in whom the local authority has real confidence.’