Part of exam agency accused of "massive failures" over Sats is scrapped

The exam watchdog today abolished its agency responsible for school tests and suspended its chief executive after a damning report into the collapse of this summer’s tests for 11- and 14-year-olds.

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood, the former chief inspector of schools, judged the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority – the exam watchdog – responsible for “massive failures” that led to tens of thousands of pupils receiving their exam results late or not at all.

Hours after Sutherland’s report was published, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority said its agency responsible for school tests – the National Assessment Agency – would no longer exist. The NAA had been responsible for commissioning the US firm ETS to mark the disastrous Sats in a five-year contract worth £156m.

Ken Boston, the chief executive of the QCA, tendered his resignation at the weekend after he had read the report. The QCA today said it had suspended Boston and David Gee, the managing director of the NAA, while it considered Sutherland’s report.

Most of the blame for the disastrous Sats could be attributed to the QCA and ETS, Sutherland said. The QCA had failed to check the track record and reputation of ETS and could have “stepped in” to avoid some of the delays, he found. The exams watchdog wrongly gave ministers and civil servants “copper assurances” that schools would receive test results on time, although they knew ETS was already behind schedule.

Sutherland said QCA acted with an “it will be alright on the night” attitude. But he said the “primary responsibility” for the failure to deliver the test results on time rested with ETS.

Government officials did not escape blame. Sutherland’s report revealed that several were privy to meetings between QCA and ETS as observers. “The role of these observers should be better defined in future,” he said.

Schools and the tests markers had been “badly treated” and “did a professional job to persevere in the face of numerous challenges,” he said. Sutherland urged the government to modernise the way tests were marked in future and suggested that online marking would be one way to do this. The fiasco not only delayed for months results of the tests, taken by 1.2 million pupils, but has led to the scrapping of Sats for 14-year-olds.

Sutherland said: “I have had it made plain to me that this was failure on a massive scale. A whole batch of scripts had not yet appeared a month ago. That is really quite traumatic for children.”

The exam board Edexcel will administer next year’s tests for 11-year-olds, although the contract has not yet been signed.

Opposition politicians demanded an apology from Ed Balls. The Conservative children’s secretary, Michael Gove, said: “The Sutherland report points the finger at a series of figures, still in office, who did not act as they should have done to safeguard the interests of our children.

“Ken Boston has pointed out that minsters were closely involved at every stage of the process. They cannot escape their role in the fiasco by claiming, as Ed Balls has done, that they were at ‘arms length’ from this disaster.

“Ed Balls must apologise for the government laying the foundations and failing to prevent this year’s fiasco.”

The Liberal Democrats education spokesman, David Laws, said: “Ministers need to accept their own responsibility in relation to this shambles.

“Ed Balls needs to answer the implied criticism in Ken Boston’s evidence which suggests that he does not believe that ministers can simply wash their hands of their own role in this mess.”

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