Dear colleagues,

I would like to take this opportunity to offer my thanks in recognition of your hard work in supporting schools and pupils during the pandemic. I recognise the particular challenges faced by primary schools and early years settings throughout the last two years, including the most recent difficulties presented by the Omicron variant.

The Secretary of State, ministerial colleagues and I remain extremely grateful to you all – teachers, teaching assistants, school leaders, school support staff and local authority (LA) staff – for your remarkable efforts throughout.

As you will be acutely aware, the effects of the pandemic are widespread but vary from school to school and pupil to pupil. Primary school pupils may have missed a significant proportion of face-to-face teaching due to restrictions on school attendance in the last two academic years, and currently because of periods of isolation. However, as national curriculum tests were suspended for the last two years, we have yet to understand in detail the impact of events on pupils’ learning. That is why we took the decision that a full programme of primary assessments will take place during the academic year 2021/22.

Statutory assessments will help parents, schools and the department to understand more clearly the impact of the pandemic on pupils and how this varies between particular groups of pupils (for example, disadvantaged), schools and LA areas. At a local level, the data will provide vital information to parents about their child’s attainment, support transition to secondary schools, and identify where additional support is best targeted to individuals. At a national level, the data will help inform policy decisions about support for schools, enable analysis to underpin education recovery initiatives and to understand their effectiveness, and to track system progress as we emerge from the pandemic.

I fully understand that there will be concerns around use of the data. As primary school tests and assessments will be returning for the first time since 2019, without any adaptations, the results will not be published in 2021/22 key stage 2 (KS2) performance tables. 

The usual suite of KS2 accountability measures will be produced at school level and shared securely with primary schools, academy trusts, LAs and Ofsted for school improvement purposes and to help identify schools most in need of support. 

We have always been clear that all users of school performance data need to consider the wider circumstances of an individual school, and that conclusions should not be drawn based on a single piece of data alone. This will be particularly important in relation to the data for 2021/22 due to the pandemic’s uneven impact on pupils and schools. We will ensure that clear messages are placed alongside any data shared, to advise caution in its interpretation. This will include strongly discouraging users of the data from drawing comparisons with performance data from previous years.

We will also work with Ofsted to highlight these messages in inspector training and will ensure the messages are shared with officials across the department, including its regional teams, as well as LAs, academy trusts and governing bodies. 

I hope you agree that detailed national attainment data will be useful in understanding the impact of the pandemic on pupils and in supporting activities in the education recovery programme. 

Please pass on my thanks and appreciation to all those working so hard in our primary schools and early years settings for all their efforts during an uncertain time. 

Robin Walker MP,

Minister of State for School Standards