Science Sats axed and the rest may go too

The Government today paved the way for the abolition of Sats.

Teachers should assess pupils instead of forcing 600,000 children to sit tests in English, maths and science every year, according to an official review.

Ministers today announced that science Sats for 11-year-olds would be scrapped from next year, but the

Government's "expert group" of advisers suggested abandoning externally marked tests in favour of rigorous teacher assessments.

The proposal would spell the end of the 18-year-old system of national exams for primary school pupils and reveals the scale of damage done to confidence in public exams by last year's marking fiasco.

Children's Secretary Ed Balls abolished Sats for 14-year-olds after the debacle, which delayed 1.2 million results and left four London primary schools without grades.

The minister ordered a group of education experts and eminent headteachers to review the system.

The Government's expert group, which includes key adviser Sir Jim Rose, said externally marked tests in English and maths should continue but that investment was needed in training teachers to assess pupils.

It concluded: "The Government should continue to invest in, strengthen and monitor the reliability of teacher assessment to judge whether a move from externally marked national tests might be viable."

Sir Jim said teacher assessments could be more reliable than externally marked tests. "If teacher assessment was so robust that we were confident the information it was delivering was as good if not better than national tests, my God, wouldn't you go for it?" he said.

The Government is also proposing to move away from school league tables to a system of "report cards" based on a model used in American schools.

Report cards would rate schools on a range of features, including bullying and children's healthy lifestyles, to give them an overall grade. League tables in their present form would be impossible to compile if Sats were abandoned.

Mr Balls said he accepted the expert group's report "in full" but stressed the importance of external tests to measure pupils' progress. He said testing had played a "vital role" in improving education over the past decade, but conceded: "The system is not set in stone."

He said: "It is essential that the school report card provides a better balanced and clearly superior alternative to old style' league tables," and claimed league tables focused on "the average child", not on whether schools helped those falling behind or the gifted and talented.

The Tories condemned the Government for moving away from external exams. Shadow children's secretary Michael Gove said: "We know that parents support clear, rigorous and transparent testing at the end of primary school."