Primary school results let down by poor spelling

Poor spelling and punctuation and a misunderstanding of decimal points lay behind the failure to meet government targets for literacy and numeracy in primary schools, the exams watchdog has revealed.

The results, from national tests taken by 11-year-olds this summer, are thought to have contributed to the resignation of Estelle Morris, who as School Standards minister in 1999 had pledged to resign if they were not met.

The Government had said that by this year, 80 per cent of pupils aged 11 would reach the required standard for their age in English, and 75 per cent in maths. But only 75 per cent of pupils achieved the required standard in English this summer – the same proportion as last year – and 73 per cent in maths, an increase of two percentage points on last year.

Commonly mis-spelt words included "made", "speak", "lie", "slow" and "you" as well as the more difficult "released", "deceived" and "unused", the Qualification and Curriculum Authority (QCA) said in a report on the tests, which will be sent to all schools next month.

In maths, children were confused by fractions and were often unable to rank them by size. Primary pupils in their final year also failed to understand the meaning of digits coming after a decimal point; they could not relate hundredths, tenths and units to each other.

Writing standards rose by three percentage points but, overall, English results remained the same because the reading ability of 11-year-olds fell by the same amount. Children often failed to reach the required reading standard because they could neither recognise key words in the comprehension passage nor pick out the main idea from a sentence or paragraph. They struggled to "trace the development of events and action through to the end of a narrative" and to "recognise the same idea when expressed in different ways", the report said.

Spelling remained the main concern, with pupils often confusing the names of the vowels with their sounds, a spokesman for the QCA's English specialists said. And even the brightest 11-year-olds, judged to be performing at a standard normally reached by 13-year-olds, could not use apostrophes properly.

In maths, officials praised pupils' achievements, saying that they "increasingly use a structured and systematic approach to solving problems". But they urged teachers to do more to show pupils how to convert fractions into decimals and to check that they had found all possible answers when there was more than one solution to a problem.

Meanwhile, the analysis of responses to English and maths tasks set for seven-year-olds this summer found that pupils needed to be taught to recognise more words by sight, with some failing to recognise the main question words. In maths, most children could identify odd and even numbers and successfully identify half of a given set, for example finding half of 12 objects.