Pledge over Sats results deadline

The manager of the project to mark this year's national curriculum tests in England promises the results will go out to schools by 8 July as intended.

Concerns have been raised about the administration of the tests for 11 and 14-year-olds by the US-based ETS.

These have included confusion over markers' contracts, late notice of training, and problems with online systems affecting markers and schools.

Andy Latham of ETS Europe said: "We will get the results out on time."

This is the first year that ETS have had the marking contract from the National Assessment Agency (NAA).

Mr Latham acknowledged there had been problems.

He said the biggest issue had been communications, with four times the volume of calls to the helpline for markers as had been expected. It had been beefed up.

"I'm very confident that we are on top of it now. That does not mean everything is going to go silky smoothly for the next couple of days," he said.

Competence assessed

This weekend, markers of the Key Stage 2 "Sats" - national curriculum tests in English, maths and science taken by 11-year-olds this week - are due to be trained.

Last weekend, Key Stage 3 (14-year-olds') test markers had their training. They then had to pass an online "standardisation" test of the competence and consistency of their marking.

About 4,600 of the 5,000 that had been recruited had got through this, said Mr Latham, who is on secondment from the US as vice-president for NAA Projects.

But some of those complaining to the BBC News website said they had not yet received scripts from schools to begin marking them.

Mr Latham said he was confident the results would be out on time

Mr Latham said the system had been changed this year so that instead of scripts being sent straight from schools to markers, they were going via a central distribution point.

"They are going out now. We are going to try to have them out to more than 4,000 markers by end of day Saturday," he said.

"They have been going out since Tuesday."

'Obligation'

The Key Stage 2 papers had not yet gone out because the markers had yet to be trained and "standardised".

Mr Latham said it was "clearly a common theme" that people had been given late notice of training venues - often far from their homes - for which he apologised.

But he said he had visited several training sites last weekend and had not seen any of the reported problems, such as team leaders not having lists of the markers who were reporting to them.

Some markers have also raised concerns that ETS will struggle to deliver the results of all the tests back to schools by the 8 July deadline.

"I'm extremely confident that we will get the results out on time," Mr Latham said.

"That's a strict contractual obligation that we have, so we will move heaven and earth to do that."

He revealed that ETS has contingency plans to group together markers - who usually work at home - in central locations, if delays are occurring.

In fact, he said, this was probably going to be done anyway for some of the test scripts, as it tended to be a much quicker and more productive way of working.

Another possibility was to have markers deal with larger numbers of scripts. He said that, because they were paid on a piece rate, some had asked for this anyway.