Education Secretary Justine Greening has confirmed pupils who fail tests at the end of primary school will not have to retake them and instead they would be offered support to catch up. She has also promised there will be no new national tests or assessments for the next two years.  

The spelling and grammar test for seven year olds introduced in 2015-2016 will remain non-compulsory for schools next year. The plans for pupils to resit exams raised concerns from teachers who feared some pupils would be labelled as failures when starting secondary school. The news was welcomed by leaders and unions who have all been threatening to boycott next summer’s Sats if no changes were made to primary assessment.

 The changes come after a difficult academic year for the Department for Education over assessment. As new tests were introduced, teachers complained materials and information were slow to apear and there were a number of tests leaked. Ms Greening said in a written statement: "Summer 2016 saw the first pupils taking the new assessments in English and mathematics at the end of primary school. They were set against the new national curriculum, which has been benchmarked against what the highest-performing countries around the world are teaching their children.

As a result, the new assessments rightly raised the bar on what we expect pupils to have been taught by the age of 11, better preparing them for secondary school and beyond." But she said teachers had risen to that challenge with 66% of pupils meeting or exceeding the new "expected standard" in reading, 70% in maths and 74% in writing. Ms Greening said: "The pace and scale of these changes has been stretching.” "Our objective is to make sure that children are ready for the next stage of their education. We know, and Ofsted inspectors understand, that the 2016 assessments and results mark a break with the past and are not comparable with the preceding years." In recognition of this, Ms Greening said no school would face any intervention, such as being taken over and turned into an academy, on the basis of these results alone. Commenting over the ban in Year 7 resits, she said: "Rather, we will focus on the steps needed to ensure a child catches up lost ground.” She has suggested a targeted package of support will be created to ensure struggling pupils are fully and correctly supported by teachers. Christine Keates, head of the

Nasuwt teaching union, said: "It appears that the Secretary of State has now recognised the real challenges around statutory end of key-stage assessment. The recognition that there were problems with the 2015/16 data, and that because of this no schools should face harsh sanctions solely on the basis of that data, is a welcome step towards relieving the pressure and anxiety some schools have been experiencing."  

Reporting to the TES, Ms Greening concluded: “I have listened to what teachers and headteachers have been saying over the last three months. But also, my sense was that when a child gets an outcome at key stage 2 and then has a summer holiday and then comes back to school, it wasn’t clear to me we were going to get our objectives achieved by the resit.”
“I felt it was much more important to focus on the underlying problem of why children were not getting to the expected standard.”
“I’m genuinely approaching this in an open-minded fashion,” she said. “I am looking at primary assessment in the round rather than looking piecemeal at how we should evolve key stage 1, or piecemeal what we do on key stage 2 and resits, or piecemeal about baselining. I don’t think that’s a sensible approach.” The consultation will mean that the early year foundation stage profile will remain in place as the Department for Education gathers views as to what stage of primary school a pupil's progress should be measured."

The previous attempt to introduce a baseline test was abandoned by ministers after they decided that the results of different tests could not be reliably compared." "We need to get this right because the work that had been done had not resolved this," Ms Greening said. "It’s now time to have an open consultation about what is the right way to measure progress and what is the right starting point for that.”