Next year's SATs could be the last, says Schools Secretary Ed Balls

SATs could be scrapped after next year, the Government suggested yesterday.

Schools Secretary Ed Balls hinted he was ready for change in the wake of the summer marking fiasco, saying he wants to move to new assessments tailored to each child's ability.

A switchover could happen by 2010. It follows the shambolic marking of this year's SATs, which Mr Balls admitted was a 'fiasco'.

Contractor ETS Europe failed to mark papers in English, maths and science by the July 8 deadline, meaning thousands of children broke up for the summer holiday without knowing their results.

Even now, 1 per cent of results for 11-year- olds - around 18,000 - are yet to be returned to schools.

The future of SATs testing was already in doubt after the Government's exams body dumped ETS from its five-year contract in August, but Mr Balls has now signalled he will kill them off for good. Speaking on BBC 1's Andrew Marr Show, he said: 'The current system is not set in stone.

'We are looking currently at a way in which we could assess progress child by child with individual level tests where the tests would be chosen in a way which was right for the child, rather than everybody doing the same test on the same day.

'For 2009, we are going to do the same kind of tests as in previous years before the problems with ETS, but for the long term I am really keen to get this right, to listen.' SATs are currently taken in May by 1.2million pupils at ages seven, 11 and 14.

The new system would be based on music grade exams, with children sitting a 50-minute test in reading, writing or maths when teachers judge them ready to achieve a certain grade, regardless of their age. Pupils would have two chances each year to take the tests.

Mr Balls also hinted that external marking could be ditched for all but Key Stage 2

exams, which test 11-year-olds on their ability in english, maths and science.

'I think it is important to have external marking, at Key Stage 2, certainly,' he said.

'It is important that we have that objectivity for parents.

'I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water and go back to the old days where we didn't have the information.'

An independent inquiry into this year's marking delays, led by Lord Sutherland, will report later in the autumn.

ETS is accused of failing to prepare properly to handle 10million scripts, leading to delayed results, lost papers and hundreds of candidates being wrongly marked as absent.

The firm has apologised - but papers for entire year groups of pupils at dozens of schools will have to be re-marked because teachers are worried the results are not are reliable.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority announced earlier this year that the contract for marking the exams in 2009 would be awarded for one year only.

But the QCA still faces difficulties in its search for ETS's successor, with two of Britain's biggest exam boards, the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance and OCR, ruling themselves out.

More than 400 schools put forward 22,500 pupils for pilots of the music exam-style tests in December.

But, in a further embarrassment for the Government, the delayed results, released last month, showed pupils fared far worse than expected with 90 per cent failing in one exam.