Life After Levels

One school’s story of transforming primary assessment

Sam Hunter, Author

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781473964266, 9781473964259
• eBook ISBN: 9781473988231
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Evaluation & Assessment in Education

This is the story of one school?s successful journey to a ?life after levels?.
 
Together, the Headteacher and staff at one successful school took on the challenge: 

• Where do we begin?
• What is the best assessment system for our school and our children?
• How do we make the most of assessment opportunities in the classroom?
• How do we create an assessment policy from scratch and implement it in the school?
• How do we evaluate it, re-shape it and talk about it to parents, the wider school community and our colleagues in primary education? 

Through exploring one school's story, this text supports teachers and schools in a time of uncertainty, confusion and choice to make the most of the new opportunity to assess children without the restrictions of levels. 

"The removal of Levels has given all professionals involved in education a unique opportunity to rediscover what we value in this key aspect of teaching and learning...and it is an opportunity that we must grab with both hands. I want this book to provide a time for reflection for teachers and school leaders to re-adjust their thinking on assessment and to get excited about it."
- Sam Hunter -

Part One Exploring Assessment

1 Assessment: Where We are Now (and How We Got Here)

This chapter will:

• consider the current ‘situation’ of assessment in schools;
• explore recent history of assessment;
• examine where we are now.

Introduction

Theodore Roosevelt believed that ‘the more you know about the past, the better you are prepared for the future’. For this chapter I wish to take the former American president's advice and look at the history of assessment in our schools in this country to help us have a better understanding of where we are with assessment now. When did formal assessment start and in what form? What decisions were made by past politicians and educationalists, and with what motives, that have led us down certain paths over the past centuries? How has assessment been viewed over time and has this developed and progressed or does it remain fundamentally the same in its key principles?

Training to Teach

When I was training to teach I took the one-year PGCE course following my BA in English Literature. Once you had taken out the holiday breaks and the time spent on teaching practice that left only about 30 weeks (or just 180 days!) of university time to tackle all aspects of teaching and learning: a tough job for any Initial Teacher Training course (ITT). Therefore, it is unsurprising that I was not given an in-depth study of the history of education; it was much more about the here and now and what I needed to teach the children in my future classes to enable them to learn. So I have loved the time I have spent researching this chapter. Sometimes I have got frustrated, while at other times have been excited, as I have read of the trailblazers who have come before us.

In the Beginning

Assessment in its broadest sense has been in existence from the very beginning. Stone Age man would have assessed if their shooting range was close enough to allow them to kill a wolf while remaining uneaten themselves, while Roman gladiators would have made a judgement on how skilled their opponent was and how likely it was they were going to win the fight. Making accurate assessments helps to keep us safe, from deciding if it is safe to cross the road to testing our food to see if it is cooked properly. Patricia Broadfoot states that, ‘Passing judgement is a central part of social behaviour,’ and that we are probably unaware of the number of judgements that we make (Broadfoot, 1979, p. 12). You would have made one when you looked at the cover of this book!

Assessment in Education

However, assessment in education took that idea of making a judgement, or an assessment, and then using it to decide on the suitability or success of a learner. History tells us that the record for the first written exam took place at Oxford in 1702 (Black, 1998, p. 10). However, the ‘test trail’ then goes fairly cold until the nineteenth century when the education system that we recognise today really started to emerge.

It is impossible to separate the history of education from the social history of Britain. Before the 1800s, the profession or job that one held was pretty much determined at birth, due to the circumstances of rank, class or gender. If you were a girl then your education only required skills to help you run a household. If as a son your father was a blacksmith or miner then you were almost certainly going to follow that same path. Likewise, if you were the eldest-born son in a wealthy family then a career in the law or politics was likely while younger brothers might join the army or the clergy. Position and positioning was everything. Therefore, schooling was of relatively low importance. It was not going to help you determine and then facilitate your career choice. What is more, a period of residence of studying, such as four years at university, equalled the qualification; it was the quantity of time rather than the quality of learning that was required to endorse you for your future career (Broadfoot, 1979, p. 29).

I am sure that if I visited my GP and they told me not to worry, that they had spent the appropriate number of years at university but they just hadn't undertaken any assessments in that time I would not be feeling confident! So it was that in 1815 the Society of Apothecaries created a Court of Examiners to examine and award licences and register successful candidates to practise as an Apothecary in England and Wales (Broadfoot, 1979, p. 30). This was a key development in the journey of formative summative assessment and other professions started to follow suit. No longer was it okay simply to have completed the course, but there was now a need to prove that you were competent in what you could do. It also promoted competition for jobs. The assessment system as we recognise it today had been born.

A New View of Education

There was now the option to study your way out of your social position and as a result society became more mobile as a wider range of professions became increasingly available to a wider range of individuals. Education was therefore viewed in a new way. It became something worth considering as now it really had the power to facilitate a change in one's prospects. From 1833, the government even offered grants to enable poorer children to attend school, widening the reach of opportunity further still. Indeed, nearly all children had some degree of schooling at this time. It was the Newcastle Commission of 1861 which put the cat amongst the pigeons when it sought to review the quality of education that was being provided:

We have seen overwhelming evidence from Her Majesty's Inspectors, to the effect that not more than one fourth of the children receive a good education. So great a failure in the teaching demanded the closest investigation; and as the result of it we have been obliged to come to the conclusion that the instruction given is commonly both too ambitious and too superficial in its character … and that it often omits to secure a thorough grounding in the simplest but most essential parts of instruction.

(Newcastle Report, 1861)

Their solution to improving the quality of education available was to introduce testing with the incentive for teachers being that they would get paid according to pupils' results. No doubt this was viewed as a win-win situation as it would help with relieving the burden of the government budget in supporting schooling for so many children while simultaneously improving standards. However, as Broadfoot comments, this simply led to drilling and rote-learning and frequent testing in the three Rs due to the ‘high stake’ nature of the tests (Broadfoot, 1996, p. 201). I have to say it feels as though we have made a close return to this with the performance-related pay that is currently finding favour in our present system, where formal summative assessments are perceived to reflect the quality of the teaching. It is also an early indication of the power of tests to restrict the curriculum delivered.

Assessment and Inspection

Although the first Her Majesty's Inspectors (HMIs) were appointed in 1840, it wasn't until 1899 that the first Board of Education was established. They issued a report in 1911 asking for a review of the role of examinations in their usefulness for preparing school-leavers to go on to employment. However, this was not acted on and instead by 1917 the School Certificate (SC) had been born. As time moved on so too did the expectation placed on achieving end-of-schooling qualifications. Because it was only the grammar schools that could issue the SC, primaries were under greater pressure to ensure that their pupils passed the eleven-plus.

Gipps and Stobart identify the era of the eleven-plus as the ‘heyday of the standardised test in primary schools’, as schools' success rates were measured by the proportion of pupils going on to grammar schools (Gipps and Stobart, 1993, p. 64). This feels very much like a forerunner to performance tables today, where assessment is used to judge ‘success’ rather than to review what a child knows.

Into the Future

Following the 1944 Education Act, driven by the then Education Minister Richard Butler, all children had been assured a free secondary school place and the chance to gain a qualification, following an increase in the school leaving age to 15. (It would not be until 1972 that this would reach 16.) However, the 1960s and 1970s saw a two-tier education system in place with grammar and private schools each running an alternative education as there were still different qualifications awarded at the end of each route. This eventually changed in 1988 with the arrival of the new GCSE (for the first time, all pupils would be assessed against the same norm-referenced criteria) and the new National Curriculum with its identified key stages for assessment. This is a key moment for us in our whistle-stop tour of the history of assessment for it was at this point that the idea of accountability, reliability and validity of assessments really started to take off. Cue the arrival of: Task Group on Assessment and Testing (TGAT) 1987; 1988 Education Reform Act; Schools Examinations and Assessment Council (SEAC) 1988; Qualification and Curriculum Authority (QCA) created 1997; National Assessment Agency 2004; Ofqual 2008; Standards and Testing Agency (STA) 2011. And so it goes on.

For primary schools, the arrival of the new National Curriculum really was the start of a new era. From 1991, all Year 2 children were assessed at the end of Key Stage 1 with the same hurdles waiting for Year 6 children at the end of Key Stage 2 from 1995. There will be plenty of time throughout this book to discuss the helpfulness, or not, of these particular summative assessments and I shall therefore attempt to avoid getting on my political soapbox too much in the first chapter! However, I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Exploring Assessment
• 1 Assessment: Where We are Now (and How We Got Here)
• 2 Principles of Great Assessment
• Part Two The Impact and Opportunity of Life After Levels
• 3 The Impact and Opportunity of Life After Levels for School Practitioners
• 4 The Impact and Opportunity of Life After Levels for Pupils
• 5 The Impact and Opportunity of Life After Levels for Parents
• Part Three Performance and Accountability
• 6 The Accountability Question
• 7 Accountability and Teacher Performance
• Part Four Assessment Toolkit
• 8 Ideas and Strategies for Primary Assessment
• Conclusions: Taking Control of Assessment
• Index