Comment: Tests betray our children

Tens of thousands of the exams taken by 11 and 14-year-olds have not yet been marked by the private contractor, with results already a week late. Headteachers have also warned of serious problems in the quality of marking: it has emerged that some Sats papers have been marked by teenagers who have only recently taken A-levels, while heads are reporting significant errors.

This debacle is the fault of ETS Europe, an arm of an American company that holds a £154 million five-year contract to mark the Sats. It could now face substantial financial penalties. But some of these problems were foreseeable: ETS, for example, wanted to do all training for maths and science markers via the internet. The schools secretary, Ed Balls, should apologise for his department having mismanaged the contract but yesterday he repeatedly refused to do so.

The row also exposes a more fundamental problem with the way such tests are run. Exam papers that have been released show an oddly mechanical system of awarding points for sentence structure and the like that ignores both spelling and grammatical errors as well as failing to reward any writing flair. If this is a wider problem, it must surely call into question the Government's claims for rising school performance based on these and similar test results. But in their obsession with testing, ministers appear to be ignoring the quality of children's education.