ABSTRACT
In 1987 a National Curriculum Task Group for Assessment and Testing (TGAT) was established by the Secretary of State for Education to make recommendations on how children’s performance and progress across the subjects of the national curriculum should be assessed and reported. The task group’s report recommended that, at the end of each Key Stage, statutory assessment should combine teachers’ own assessments (TA) with the results of externally provided tests, known as Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs). During the course of administering the tests, the teachers were to observe children’s activities and, using standard procedures, mark the artistic, written and oral work the children produced. As far as possible the SATs were expected to represent normal classroom activities, fitting ‘unobtrusively’ into the teachers’ existing practice. At the end of the testing process, teachers would combine the test results with their own assessment to arrive at a judgement about the ‘level’ a pupil had reached. The levels expected at Key Stage 1, within an overall 10-level scale, were 1 (below average), 2 (average) and 3 (above average). The principles of the TGAT report were accepted as the basis for the assessment arrangements, and Key Stage 1 teachers administered them in 1990 for the first time, as trials, and in 1991 as the basis for reporting to parents.
