THE American firm hired to carry out the marking of this year’s delayed Sats tests could face penalties running into “tens of millions of pounds”.
Results of national tests for 11 and 14-year-olds were due to be published last week, but an administrative fiasco delayed the marking.
It will mean children at schools across the country, including Huddersfield, are unlikely to get their results before the school holidays.
In a statement to an emergency Commons committee meeting chaired by Huddersfield MP Barry Sheerman, Ken Boston, head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) apologised for the failure of contractor ETS Europe to have the Key Stage 2 and 3 results ready for publication on July 8.
And he said the delay may have “very significant” financial consequences.
He said: “I think there has been severe reputational damage in relation to the failure at this level, which any large company would be concerned about.
“There are financial penalties that could run into tens of millions of pounds.”
He said that large, international companies such as ETC operate in various parts of the world but that the “experience in England has clearly been unsatisfactory”.
Dr Boston listed a host of issues, including problems with recruiting and retaining markers, and delays in getting papers to them. Markers had also been given wrong information about the time and location of training, call centres were unable to deal with calls and there had been “slow and unpredictable” data feeds. Some unmarked scripts had also been returned to schools.
Mr Sheerman said: “A lot of the problems centred on the marking and the recruitment of markers and could have been faced some time ago.
“This was a US company with no experience of the UK education sector and that is why they had difficulties.
“The big question now is how do we stop this situation in the future? I still feel that we do too much testing for 7-11 years olds, and we should rely more on teachers’ views.”
Dr Boston told the committee the QCA had done “everything possible” to ensure ETS could deliver the results to school on time.
He said: “We have had up to 70 of our own staff co-located with ETS, providing technical support, developing communications for schools and markers, establishing emergency marking centres, supporting call centres, managing and recruiting for data entry centres, and supporting the management of scripts.”
He said the QCA was now “exploring all possible commercial and legal avenues to ensure that suitable action for this failure is taken.”
Dr Boston told MPs that on-screen marking might be the way forward. Almost half of GCSE papers and many at A-level are marked this way, but not the Sats.
He said: “We need to move as quickly as possible to on-screen marking for key stage tests. It is fast, reliable and secure.”
