Academies trust urges school exam overhaul

National school tests in England have come under attack from the body that runs the government's flagship scheme for specialist schools.

In a report calling for the scrapping of Sats, the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT) says there are "severe" problems in defending tests against accusations of dumbing down over time and that children are suffering a level of stress that is now "unreasonable and counter-productive". The paper includes GCSEs in the problem.

The government is now on a "dead horse" and should dismount, urges the paper written by a former head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, Prof David Hargreaves, who is now an associate director of the trust.

His co-authors were a headteacher, Chris Gerry, and Tim Oates, head of research at exam board Cambridge Assessment.

Although some academies have come under fire for their GCSE results, the trust's intervention will come as a surprise blow to ministers.

Today, the Department for Children Schools and Families made it clear it would not adopt the trust's proposed solution of sample testing to monitor national standards.

"The whole teaching profession agrees that in the matter of assessment we are in a fine mess," said the document, reported in the Times Educational Supplement.

"In its defence of the current assessment system, the government has consistently exaggerated the technical rigour of national assessments and the GCSE.

"Maintaining standards over time, and defending improvement against the charges that the exams are becoming easier or marking more lenient, is a particularly sensitive area."

It continued: "If you want to measure change, don't change the measure. But the nation does - and should - revise the national curriculum regularly.

"Whenever there is change, whether minor or radical, the maintenance of test standards becomes a particularly severe problem. And this is a constant, not occasional, problem."

The report listed the "damaging side effects" of the current system.

Hargreaves and his colleagues added: "Tests and examinations always cause a degree of stress. But it is widely claimed that the level of stress is now unreasonable and counter-productive.

"For most pupils there are few years during their school career that are free from some kind of national testing."

In many state schools, teachers spend more time focusing on pupils who are on the borderline between C and D grades at GCSE to boost a school's reputation, said the team.

They urged replacing the use of Sats taken by every child for monitoring national school standards with a sampling system.

The report concluded with a Dakota native American proverb aimed at future redesigners of the testing system: "When you discover you're on a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount."

A spokesman for the DCSF said: "As we have made clear on many occasions, we are not looking at sample testing of randomly selected pupils.

"It is hard to see how any sample of children could be truly representative of one school, never mind all schools. The idea that children are over tested is not a view that the government accepts."

He said that those who pretended that there was a consensus on testing generally left parents out of the equation.

"We don't believe that in this day and age parents can be expected to have hidden from them the real achievements of their children at school."