In the first of my series about developing a new assessment system in our 2 form entry primary school in suburban south London, I will try to shed light on how we arrived at the place in which we now find ourselves. I will share the information, discussions, interpretations and decisions that lay behind the assessment system that we now have in school. As I have already said in the introduction piece to this series, not for one moment do I claim that we have cracked this particular nut, that our system is correct, ideal or that it should necessarily be adopted by any other school. I share it because I hope that it will be useful to others that share the task of responding to this policy. I also hope to attract the thoughts of others in order that we can continue to refine our ideas and practices, challenge our assumptions and drive us to develop a world class approach to assessment. I deeply believe in the power of collaboration and the potential that can be fulfilled when educators seize the initiative rather than waiting for the slow death of 'policy paralysis' imposed by external organisations with their own agendas.
My school's basic philosophy and approach to assessing without levels is rooted in the conversations I had in late 2013 with Tim Oates, the chair of the expert panel that reviewed the National Curriculum and by extension the UK's approach to assessment. In a quirk of fate, Tim and I had a mutual former colleague and he kindly offered to come and speak to our staff about the thinking behind the new National Curriculum and the logic of dropping levels as a model of assessment. When Tim came in January 2014, his presentation was essentially a version of the content of this video.
We drew 6 key lessons from Tim's presentation that informed our subsequent approach to assessment.
1) Learning in the new National Curriculum is arranged such that it allows pupils to work at an appropriate pace to secure the key concepts, skills and understanding of the subjects. This key learning is made up of clear and progressive statements the build year on year though the child's education.
2) Levels are dysfunctional. They mean different things at different times to different people. They create in the mind of both pupil and teacher the idea that success is based on the reaching of a particular point rather than a sense of a strong, qualitative, evidence based judgement of whether a pupil properly and securely understands the key concepts required by the National Curriculum.
3) The new policy approaches are now predicated on what is often described as a 'growth mindset' model of attainment. That is to say that the assumption is that all pupils are capable of all things where it is presented to them in the right way and they apply an appropriate amount of effort.
4) Assessment should focus on whether a child has understood a particular thing, an idea, skill or body of knowledge rather on whether or not they have reached a particular point, i.e level.
5) In order to ascertain that a pupil has really understood a particular thing, teachers need to become experts in probing a pupil's understanding and providing opportunities for children to express their understanding. Classroom activity needs to generate a volume of evidence to support judgements of understanding. This will come from better and better questioning and an increase in the amount of useful assessment that takes place in the classroom.
6) Undue emphasis on progress promotes the practice of moving a child on with insecure understanding and this prejudices their future education.
Our interpretation of this was made up of 2 principles that would go on to inform the model of assessment that we adopted. First was that any assessment system that we developed should first and foremost be qualitative rather than quantitative . We have become used to, in recent years, all manner of statistical metrics to look at school performance. Chief among them was 'average points score', which was used to look both at average attainment and progress for all manner of groups in the school. We see no place for these types of metrics in the kind of assessment environment that Tim describes. What becomes so important is the rich and voluminous evidence that informs the robust assertions that a pupil has or has not yet learned a particular thing to a secure enough standard for that point in their learning. We wanted a system that could answer questions that APS never could. What have the pupils learned? What have they not learned? Why haven't they learned it? How sure are we that they have learned it?
The second principle was that whatever system we developed would place emphasis on depth and security of understanding and that progress needed to be thought about in a different way. The requirements in primary school was to secure the 2b in year 2 and then 2 levels progress before the end of KS2. Schools were judged on their ability to achieve the 2 levels progress and praised if they could deliver 3 or even more. The environment that Tim describes is fundamentally one of attainment. The pupils need to acquire a certain set of skills, understandings and knowledge. The measure of progress should be thought of as a way of keeping an eye on the overall trajectory of the pupil or group. That is to say, at their current rate of learning are they likely to achieve the required body of knowledge or not and if not why not and what can be done about it? Rather than an ever increasing demand for more and more content to be taught in order to meet the higher levels required to achieve 3 levels progress. A cursory conversation with any secondary colleague soon revealed that the learning that had been drilled into pupils in advance of the SATs was fragile to say the least. Very few secondary schools have much regard for the levels that came up from KS2 because they rarely reflected what the pupils really could or could not yet do. The learning was not secured.
Our aim therefore was to develop a qualitative assessment system that could provide us with reliable information about what a pupil could do and what remained to be addressed. It was to be predicated on the idea that depth and security, i.e attainment was the key measure of success and that progress be a tool for mapping trajectory over time. In my next post I will attempt to show what we adopted and developed and discuss the challenges we faced in doing so.
"This key learning is made up of clear and progressive statements the build year on year though the child's education."
ReplyDeleteActually, it really isn't and they really don't. However,
"Undue emphasis on progress promotes the practice of moving a child on with insecure understanding and this prejudices their future education."
Are these somewhat contradictory?
Hi Juliette,
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading and joining the conversation! I think there is some real milage in a discussion about the value of the body of knowledge identified and required by the National Curriculum. Although there is a great deal of content whose importance I agree with, it does feel somewhat arbitrary in places. That said, our team here have worked through the core subjects especially and found strong threads that progressively build year on year.
The point about undue progress, I think, is an interesting one. Clearly there is a real tension between the idea of a progressive year on year curriculum (whether or not that is in fact what we have) the need to create truly deep and secure learning, and the appropriate rate of progress through that content. Evidently, if we want our pupils to have acquired a complex body of knowledge by the end of their schooling, the complexity of the concepts will need to increase over time thus the system demands progress. Equally, if the progress through that body of knowledge is too rapid then the pupils' conceptual understanding will be fragile and specific to the context in which it was learnt. An example from a recent discussion in a staff meeting at our school was the my year 6 pupils could halve numbers and shade half a shape but could not identify how many halves were in 2 and 1/2 oranges. Their understanding of the concept of half was context limited and fragile. They had not had sufficient time to generalise their learning into the full range of contexts in which they would encounter it. The perceived need under the previous system to push on to finding quarters or thirds for example had trumped securing the central concept.
I don't accept that an emphasis on depth and security is at odds to a progressive curriculum. Increased depth and security requires only more time and that it what teachers have been given by the much reduced content coverage required in each year group. Take maths as an example. Our team has identified between 24 and 30 key ideas to be learned in each year group. In a 39 week school year, that represents considerable less than once concept per week. Strong medium term planning and a cycle of frequent, high quality formal and informal assessment will allow teachers a great deal of latitude to open learning right up. Most schools still adhere to an hour of maths per day and that equates to some 195 hours of maths lessons. It seems to me that 195 hours to teach between 24 and 30 mathematical concepts is time enough indeed and represents a real commitment to the central policy objective of greater depth and security of understanding.
Although I want this discussions to be about the practicalities of implementing a statutory policy, I agree that there are some issues with how the policy is being implemented. Our older pupils, who have not benefitted from the previous years of the curriculum have struggled and are performing comparatively poorly. That said, our year 1 pupils, in their first year of this approach have performed very well indeed. I am nervous as well, that the system is open to abuse by the institutions whose agendas drive those of schools. The tension between attainment and progress is palpable and I worry that it won't be long before performance indicators start demanding more and more progress, undermining the central change in the new policy picture, especially as if other schools' experiences are similar to ours, national standards will appear low for the next few years as we rapidly try to backfill from the old curriculum.
That said, I am an eternal optimist and remain hopeful that we are on the brink of something really different and exciting. My next post about what we are doing at my school, will follow soon!