Ministers accused of setting children up to fail in Sats row

Nearly half of pupils in England failed to meet the required standard in reading, writing and maths in their 2016 Key Stage Two tests - the first set of tests to assess the new primary school national curriculum which was rolled out in 2014.

Labour frontbencher Angela Rayner said yesterday that many teachers believe the new expected standard is “beyond the reach” of the majority of children as she launched a blistering attack on Education Secretary Nicky Morgan.

But Mrs Morgan accused Ms Rayner of peddling “mad conspiracy theories” after she suggested the Government was trying to bring back the 11-Plus “through the back door”.

The latest Sats results showed that 53 per cent of 11-year-olds passed all three key areas of testing, prompting concerns that the tests were too tough.

Leading an opposition day debate on the issue, Ms Rayner said: “Our children are being set up to fail.

“Almost half of England’s 11-year-olds will now go on to secondary school being told by this Government that they are failures.

“But the real failures are this Government and in particular the current Secretary of State for Education, who pushed ahead with this flawed system despite all the warnings from the education profession that its primary assessment system was not fit for purpose.”

Ms Rayner said separating children on the basis of Sats results and making them re-sit the tests “sounds to me like the dark days of the 11-Plus” where children were “branded failures” before reaching their teens.

“It seems to me that this Government is hell bent on bringing back the 11-Plus through the back door,” she said.

But Mrs Morgan hit back and said Ms Rayner’s speech “captured everything that is wrong with the Labour Party at the moment”.

“Mad conspiracy theories, deferring to the unions and zero answers to the problems facing this country,” she said.

She suggested Labour wanted to “sell young people short”.

However, the Education Secretary admitted the roll-out of the new tests was “not as smooth as it could have been and for that we have apologised”.

But she rejected the idea that the tests were a failure.

She said: “Lower results do not represent a failure of our reforms.

“I have been very clear that it is not possible to compare this year’s results with last year’s results.

“We have always been clear that because we had both introduced a new curriculum and raised the bar, results would be lower as the new curriculum beds in.”

She also insisted that children who did not meet the three-subject benchmark had not “failed”