Muddle (noun) – an untidy or disorganised state or collection.

We really have got ourselves in a muddle. A muddle over so many things, but hugely so when it comes to accountability.

Back in 2019, Amanda Spielman could not have been clearer. The era of judging schools through crude measures such as SATs was over. It had led to curriculum narrowing, off-rolling, the concealment of pupils with severe learning difficulties, or just plain cheating. She announced a brave new world of inclusion, curriculum fidelity and breadth when evaluating schools.

Sadly, as we all know, it hasn’t worked out at all. The pandemic took the wind out of EIF’s sails, and Ofsted’s insipid reaction to Covid didn’t help. We talk about the importance of evidence? Well, the evidence is flowing out like the rainwater from recent thunderstorms, telling us that the pandemic has had a hugely detrimental impact on children, but disproportionately so on those in the most disadvantaged areas.

But worse still, the focus on curriculum became a cult, replacing the previous cult of data. Balance, judgement and wisdom went out of the window, and obeisance to the cult conquered.

So a much-needed change in accountability, signalled to end the crude reliance on SATs scores, has led to an even worse accountability system that now will need even more reform than was deemed necessary back in 2019. Worse still, the system-wide focus on SATs remains undimmed. We are in a right muddle.

I always remember asking a parent how they viewed their child’s school. His answer was, ‘Well, it’s got three stars in local paper, so it must be OK.’

Herein lies the big problem with SATs, or, more specifically, performance tables. People take from them what they want, in this case local newspapers. Others in local authorities, or MATs, will extract what they want, or use the information for their own motives. Very competitive schools will sell their scores as a way of attracting the more ambitious pupils. In defence of Ofsted, it is the one organisation that tends to avoid using them much at all.

A reminder why I have such opposition to the use of SATs in performance tables.

The SATS data is crude and misleading. Crude as it lacks context, misleading as it gives a false impression to those outside of education e.g. journalists. Try, as I have, to explain to a journalist that all the pupils in your Enhanced Provision score ‘zero’ and this is aggregated along with all the other pupils. Firstly, it takes around five minutes for them to understand it, when suddenly it dawns on them eliciting a gasp of disbelief. ‘But that’s just not fair!!’, comes the answer.

For ‘hybrid schools*’ such as ours, it makes a mockery of the Equality Act, as it trashes the efforts of those with severe learning difficulties, and disregards their mostly remarkable progress. In Year 6 this year, we have 26% of pupils with an EHCP (over 7 times the national average) and a further 13% receiving school support for SEND. How can these (sometimes) badly-written tests provide anyone with any useful information about the quality of a school when many of the pupils don’t sit them? Do we ask special schools to be sat at the bottom of league table and tut-tut at their ‘performance’?

The use of performance tables without any mention of SEND goes against one of the core principles of the current Ofsted framework which is to put ‘SEND pupils front and centre of the curriculum.’

And again, evidence. Look at the evidence from around the world. There is not a single country that has continued with performance tables of this vulgarity. Singapore, usually held up as the gold standard of academic success, disposed of them years ago, realising the corrosive impact they had on inequality.

My last point may lead to an supplementary blog, such is my strength of feeling. It brings us back to the top of the circle. For the performance tables, and the hysteria surrounding the SATs themselves, lead to perverse consequences that are deeply worrying to anyone who cares about education in our country.

Instead of praising one of the things that is really working in England – primary education – we are, through the use of SATs data, deliberately defacing it, rather like a toddler does when it scribbles over a lovely picture of a flower.

What a muddle.

*A Hybrid School is my term for a school where there is both a specialist provision for pupils with severe learning difficulties, and which attracts parents with pupils who have SEND so that there is a disproportionate number of SEND pupils on roll. To give this some context, out of 451 pupils at our school, 61 have an Education and Health Care plan and a further 110 require additional support from the school for SEND.