Let’s help disadvantaged pupils do better by hiding how badly they are doing now!

“What comes next: A fairer approach to primary assessment” is a paper by the Institute for Public Policy Research, a progressive think tank.

Here’s the IPPR’s own summary of its report:

We set out four recommendations for immediate implementation from the 2027/28 academic year.

Recommendation 1: The Department for Education should establish an independent ‘statutory accessibility and bias audit’ for all key stage 2 assessments.

Recommendation 2: The Department for Education should remove the Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar (SPaG) test.

Recommendation 3: The Department for Education should change how results are published and reported by:

– ending the publication of school-level key stage 2 results, which would also end the publication of school-level league tables

– using rolling averages (for instance, three- or five-year averages) of attainment data from the department and from Ofsted for internal monitoring and inspection.

Recommendation 4: The Department for Education should introduce a competency framework for pupil results in place of scaled scores.

However, reform must go further to build a truly equitable system that properly supports disadvantaged pupils. Therefore, we also set out a further recommendation to act as the foundation of a longer-term, more significant reform to primary school assessment.

Recommendation 5: The Department for Education should introduce a random sampling approach to assessment across years 3–6.

Emphasis added.