The news this morning has been buzzing about the Tories’ announcement that, if elected, they will scrap the Sats test for 11 year olds. I think this is a wonderful idea. I’ve heard stories from teacher friends about children in tears with stress over exams at 11 years old. This situation should never happen.

Getting rid of Sats will leave a problem. How do we rank primary schools? Up to now league tables have been compiled based upon Sats results. Unions have long complained that this is an unfair criteria as poor children do worse than rich children no matter what teachers do. Fair point.

The answer to the problem already exists. Ofsted have been ranking schools based upon a huge array of criteria for a long time now. The only problem, as I see it, is the lack of objectivity in their rankings. Schools are notified long in advance of the inspection, causing schools to play the system as well as the inevitable observer bias. We also have no idea whether Ofsted are looking at the right things.

A simple research project could prove the usefulness (or lack thereof) of Ofsted’s rankings.

In healthcare there is a statistic often generated that predicts life expectancy at birth based on the socioeconomic background of their parents. Given socioeconomic data of a school pupils and their corresponding Sats results, a statistician could quite easily generate a “Sats results at birth” for the average child. From that number schools could be ranked based upon how their pupils score above or below that average.

If Ofsted rankings are objective one would expect a nice clear correlation between the ranking and a school’s performance (using the above correction for socioeconomic class). Once Ofsted results are proved consistent and objective, Sats can be comfortably scrapped while still maintaining an objective ranking system for school performance.