Free school 'not made aware' SATs were compulsory He added: "We'd never done them before - training would have been required for the staff, and pupils would not have been ready." The confusion came to light when national results for 16,000 primary schools across England were released this morning by the Department for Education (DfE), showing English and maths test scores for pupils in the final year of primary school. But while overall trends showed one in four 11-year-olds falling short of the standard expected for their age group, Maharishi Free School recorded zero per cent for both English and maths tests. It has now emerged that the school - which had 11 pupils eligible but does not appear in the national table of schools with the lowest performance - had simply failed to administer the tests. "We will be doing them next year," said Mitchell. A DfE spokesman said: "Pupils at the Maharishi Free School did not sit the tests this year. We have written to inform the school it must administer the tests. The free schools programme is a key part of Michael Gove's school reforms, established by the Coalition government following the 2010 general election to give parents" groups and charities powers to run their own state-funded schools independent of local council interference. The Maharishi Free School attracted controversy when it converted to a free school last year for its focus on teaching "transcendental meditation" techniques. It takes its name from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian guru famous for having had a profound influence on the Beatles' late career. According to its website: "Creativity and intelligence are systematically developed with a few minutes of Transcendental Meditation (TM) at the beginning and end of the school day." SATs tests in English and maths were taken by hundreds of thousands of 11-year-olds in England in May. Primary school league tables showed nearly 500 schools had missed Government targets for the three Rs.