New figures from the Department for Education (DfE) show a decrease in the overall proportion of Key Stage 2 national curriculum assessments (SATs) marks that prompted review requests. Schools could request a review if they believed there was a discrepancy between how a question had been marked and the published mark scheme. In 2018 review applications were made for 1 per cent of the total tests taken at Key Stage 2, down from 1.4 per cent in 2017.
The element of the SATs with the highest proportion of review applications was English reading, with 2.1 per cent of the total tests taken. This was a decrease of 0.5 percentage points from 2017. The English grammar, punctuation and spelling test had review application for 0.3 per cent of tests (down 0.8 percentage points), while there were review applications for 0.6 per cent of the mathematics tests taken (up 0.1 percentage points).
In 2018 there was a change in the criteria for determining if a review was deemed ‘successful’ – a successful review is now one which results in a change to whether or not a pupil has achieved the expected standard, or a change of two or more marks to the raw score (previously it was three or more marks). The percentage of review applications which were successful in 2018 was 11.2 per cent in English reading, 17.9 per cent in mathematics, and 14.3 per cent in English grammar, punctuation and spelling. Overall this means that 12.9 per cent of all reviews were successful. Due to the change in criteria the DfE say these figures aren’t comparable with those from 2017. Across all reviews there were a total of three applications that resulted in a change from ‘achieving the expected standard’ to ‘not achieving the expected standard’.
Full details of the provisional review outcomes can be found at: https://tinyurl.com/yafgcdvq