Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment his Department has made of the effectiveness of SATs in measuring children’s learning and attainment.

The main purpose of statutory assessment, as set out in the Standards and Testing Agency’s test frameworks is to ascertain what pupils have achieved in relation to the age-related attainment targets set out in the national curriculum. These test frameworks are available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-curriculum-assessments-test-frameworks. A validity framework to demonstrate how well the tests meet this purpose is published in the appendices of the test handbook, available on GOV.UK.

Due to the cancellations of the statutory assessments in 2020 and 2021, the most recent version of the test handbook is from 2019 and is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/2019-national-curriculum-test-handbook.