A primary school Sats paper that reduced some pupils to tears included texts on a giant bat colony, which was adapted from a New York Times article, a camping trip featuring sheep rustlers and a boy on a remote Scottish island who hears a wolf.
The 12-page reading test, featuring three substantial texts followed by 38 questions to be answered in an hour, was published on Thursday, once the assessment window had closed.
The paper, which was sat last week by 10- and 11-year-old pupils in year 6 in England, was widely criticised by teachers and parents, who complained it was too difficult. Even children who excelled in practice papers were unable to finish.
The paper was originally due to be released on Monday but was brought forward to Thursday “due to public interest”.
“Utterly miserable, scary and quite middle class” was the verdict of Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson, the headteacher of Anderton Park primary school in Birmingham.
“Most of my kids, English is not their first language, but they’re strong readers. They devour books, and yet this is how they will be judged,” she said, with undisguised disappointment.
Much of the content of the set texts was totally unfamiliar, she said. Many pupils could not finish in the allotted hour, some were reduced to tears, and it was not just the children who were confounded. “One of my year 5 teachers said they didn’t even know what a sheep rustler is,” she said.
“If you have some background knowledge of the subject, of course it’s going to put you at an advantage,” continued Hewitt-Clarkson, who said she was almost certain that none of her children had ever been camping.
“They’ve probably never seen a bat and they have certainly never been to Austin, Texas,” where, according to the second set text in the paper, more than a million bats live under the Congress Avenue Bridge.
“How utterly ridiculous,” she said of the Bats Under the Bridge text, which was adapted from a 2016 New York Times article, A Summer Evening in Texas Isn’t Complete Without a Bat Show, by JoAnna Klein. “That a text aimed at 10- and 11-year-olds is taken from something that’s adult readership level.
“We work so hard in schools finding fiction, nonfiction, poetry that are really interesting and diverse and inclusive, so our children can see themselves in texts, but there was nothing of that.”
As a Royal Shakespeare Company associate school, Hewitt-Clarkson said her children were exposed to Shakespeare from nursery up, so it was not a question of the school shying away from difficult texts. “I’m sure there are not any year 6 teachers in the land who would have chosen those texts,” she added.
Simon Kidwell, the principal of Hartford Manor primary school in Cheshire, complained the paper was too long. “The concern we have is the number of words in the paper this year, which were 35% more in the reading booklet than the previous year.
“This is children’s first experience of a formal test at the age of 10 and 11, and if they have a poor experience, that can affect the rest of their school career in terms of their attitudes towards tests.”
Kidwell, who is the vice-president of the National Association of Head Teachers, was also concerned about the sequencing of the questions. Normally tests begin with easier questions to help children settle down, and gradually get harder. This paper, he said, opened with three more challenging questions, which required children to infer and explain, rather than simply retrieve answers from the text.
“We had a couple of children who got upset because they did not finish. And from parent feedback, children went home and did not think they had done very well. It’s knocked their confidence.”
The schools minister, Nick Gibb, has said he plans to look at the paper, after complaints from schools. Gillian Hillier, the chief executive of the Standards and Testing Agency, which developed the Sats tests over three years, said they had been trialled on thousands of pupils.
“All the tests are mapped to the key stage 2 curriculum and information from the trials and reviews is used to ensure that each test is of similar difficulty to those in previous years,” she said.
The first text about Priya and her friends camping near a farm was taken from Survival Squad: Night Riders (Book 3), an adventure book by Jonathan Rock. The third extract was taken from The Rise of Wolves, a mystery adventure by Kerr Thomson about a boy called Innis Munro on the island of Nin.
QUESTIONS CHILDREN FOUND DIFFICULT
Question: “She wriggled back inside the tent …
What does this tell you about how Priya got inside the tent? Tick one.
She ran quickly inside.
She jumped through the flap.
She had to squeeze in.
She crept in quietly.
Answer: She had to squeeze in, but teachers said many children chose she crept in quietly, which they felt was also valid.
Question: In which American state is the Congress Avenue Bridge found?
Relevant extract: By day the Congress Avenue Bridge in the city of Austin could hardly look more normal: a grey, dreary city-centre road bridge. By night, it plays host to one of the most amazing shows nature has to offer. The underside of the bridge is home to more than a million bats, and every evening in summer they all come swarming out at once, rising up into the city sky like a tornado before spreading out in all directions like plumes of smoke. Standing on the bridge, you might even feel the wind from their wings as they pass by.
Austin is the capital city of the state of Texas in the USA, but it is also the bat capital of North America. The bats under the bridge attract thousands of visitors every year, and every August lovers celebrate Bat Fest on the bridge in their honour.
Answer: Texas but many children, unfamiliar with the US states, put Austin.
