Last week, the Standards and Testing Agency (STA) announced that the return of Sats results to schools would be delayed by one week.

The reason for this change reads like one of those tricky questions you sometime see in a Sats paper that feels vaguely unfair in its complexity and esoteric nature.

Key stage 2 results were due to be published on Tuesday 4 July. Owing to the King’s coronation, tests will now take place one day later than originally planned. What is the new test results publication date?

No points if you thought the simple process of adding a day would work. It turns out that the one-day delay to testing equates to a seven-day delay in returning results.

Mind you, given the chaos of last year, where some 2,000 papers ended up as simply “lost”, who knows when you’ll actually receive a full set of results back - if at all.

Teacher data delays

Now for part b of the question: Given that the results are being published seven days later than planned, on what date will teachers be required to submit their teacher assessment data?

Again, if you thought that would simply move by a week, then you’re mistaken. For some reason, teachers get three additional days to complete this work, with the new submission date being Friday 30 June.

Of course, this only matters if these results are part of some high-stakes regime that places schools under considerable pressure and informs judgements about teachers’ and headteachers’ careers, Ofsted inspections and pupils’ progress to secondary school.

In my own school, we schedule the final governors’ meeting of the year  several days after the release of the results. It allows governors to have early sight of one of the few external metrics available to them - and the one against which they are most likely to find the school is judged.

It won’t be the end of the world for us to reschedule but it’s not the only knock-on effect.

Even tighter turnarounds 

Schools already have a tight turnaround for reviewing test papers to ensure that they have been accurately marked. Setting aside the fact that several hundred pupils last year received results for papers they hadn’t sat - or worse, someone else’s result - this a pretty key task.

About 18,000 reviews were undertaken in 2018, with well over 2,000 affecting whether or not a pupil met the expected standard.

This year, with the delayed results date, Year 6 teachers and school leaders will have the usual 10-day window to review every paper but, this time, it’s likely to be during the last few days of term, and could quite possibly run into the school holidays.

In fact, if you’re in a Leicestershire school, it’s perfectly possible that your pupils’ results will arrive on the last day of term, giving staff the first couple of weeks of their summer holiday to find the errors that Capita and its teams have made.

Silver linings?

Perhaps, though, we should be grateful.

An additional week’s delay in publishing results might give test administrators an opportunity to clear up any mess they’ve made in the process before results are due.

Perhaps the fact that some schools will already be in the midst of leavers’ assemblies and T-shirt signing at 9.30am on 11 July will mean that the Primary Assessment Gateway is less likely to crash than in previous years?

If it’s any comfort, the Standards and Testing Agency press release does say it regrets the impact on schools. Let’s hope that everyone does see their results on the new date so as not to compound the inconvenience by adding yet more delay to the release of this year’s results.

Michael Tidd is headteacher at East Preston Junior School in West Sussex