Commenting as the Department for Education today admit that thousands of KS2 SATs papers are still missing, leaving hundreds of pupils without marks as they start secondary school, Paul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders' union NAHT, said:

“The DfE have finally admitted today that this year’s KS2 SATs papers were grossly mishandled. More than ten times as many papers have gone missing than in any other recent years, with more than 2,000 lost scripts impacting more than 500 schools.

“Although this may be a small percentage of the number of papers overall, it still leaves hundreds of pupils without marks – pupils who are now entering secondary school without the end of primary results the government deems so important.

“Additionally, this year we have also had significant problems with accessing the helplines, reports of mis-allocated marks, and the results website crashing, resulting in a lack of confidence in this year’s SATs overall.

“Now the government has finally come clean about the scale of the problems this year, we know that hundreds of pupils do not have results for the tests they sat, which is simply unacceptable. It also leaves many primary schools with incomplete results that could skew their data.

“Schools are held to incredibly high standards when it comes to handling SATs papers; the threat of maladministration looms at every step in the process. The government must be held to the same standard. We need a full investigation into what went wrong this year, so that we can be absolutely assured it will not happen again.”