Responding to this morning's Key Stage 2 Sats results, Paul Whiteman, general secretary at school leaders’ union NAHT, said:

“Teachers and school leaders have worked incredibly hard with their pupils to support not only their academic progress but also their social and emotional wellbeing throughout another challenging year. They should be congratulated for their ongoing efforts to ensure every child is able to thrive in school and pupils can be proud of their achievements.

“Our members raised significant concerns about the difficulty of the reading paper this year and the impact it had on children.  The threshold for the expected standard is five marks lower than last year, and the lowest since 2017 – this is significant and clear recognition that this was a more challenging test for children. It validates what school leaders were saying and it is a real shame that the department was not willing to acknowledge this earlier.

“It is time to change the system of statutory assessment which is of little benefit for teachers or children, yet has a range of negative consequences. These tests are simply a snapshot of what a child can do when faced with a particular set of questions on a single day in May and they are given far too much significance. The depth of understanding teachers have of children’s learning and progress across the whole curriculum is of much more value to children, parents and secondary schools.

“Already this morning, confidence in the systems has been knocked with issues for schools accessing their results on Primary Assessment Gateway, despite assurances from government that the problems of last year would not be repeated. Leaders will be rightly frustrated that this has happened yet again and it will leave people questioning whether other issues from 2022 have been resolved, which included missing and incorrectly allocated marks for pupils.”

Commenting earlier this morning about the issues faced by leaders in accessing results, NAHT's head of policy, Sarah Hannafin, said:

“It’s beyond belief that for the second successive year, schools have had issues logging into the Primary Assessment Gateway system, which they use to access results.

“We were assured that changes had been made so there would not be a repeat this time around. However, from 7.30am this morning, many schools had similar problems as leaders tried to access their results before starting another busy school day.  T

“The government has made SATs extremely high stakes for schools, so it should come as no surprise that demand to access the system on the morning results are released is high. School leaders are expected to get things right, adhering to deadlines for completing tasks and submitting data; the same expectations must be met by the government.”