Sue Riley, NACE CEO
Many of you will have seen the open letter to the Sunday Times from the recently formed Rethinking Assessment group. Born from issues raised this summer, Rethinking Assessment is a broad coalition of state and independent schools, universities, academics, employers and other stakeholders, which aims to value the strengths of every child. At its heart lies four fundamental principles:
- Many young people find the way our exam system works increasingly stressful and not a true reflection of what they are good at.
- Many employers complain that exams do not provide them with good enough clues as to who they are employing.
- Many headteachers feel that high-stakes exams distort priorities and stop them from providing a well-rounded education for their pupils.
- Many who are passionate about social mobility believe that any system that dooms a third to fail is a system with little sense of social justice.
We want to add our members’ voice and our research to this debate. There are immediate questions to be answered and longer-term opportunities to recalibrate the assessment system so that all learners have their full range of strengths recognised. As a membership organisation we can share and build on the decisions school leaders are taking now and over time provide perspectives that will inform longer-term changes.
Assessment is of course an integral part of learning and teaching. It facilitates daily ongoing review of individual progress and impacts on planning and target-setting. It supports personal learning targets. But we must not let the tail wag the dog. Not everything needs to be assessed, or indeed can be assessed, or needs to be independently assessed. We must consider too the timing of assessment – even more pressing as schools focus on tier 2 rota planning.
Whilst a decision over summer exams has been made in principle, “fall-back” detail remains unclear and learners are picking up on this, increasingly questioning the reasoning behind assignments, and the part they will play in assessment. All of this detracts from the richness of a subject.
The Early Career Framework and Teachers’ Standards have done much to support the teaching profession’s development in recent years. We must trust teachers with assessment, but teachers must be clear on what they are assessing and why.
What can we therefore now do in our schools to readdress this balance? One response lies in thinking about what we assess on a day-to-day basis in classrooms, how we build on low-stakes testing, and how we position effective challenge. How effectively do your teachers use retrieval practice for example? Deliberately recalling information forces us to pull knowledge “out” and examine what we know. The “struggle” or challenge to recall information improves memory and learning – by trying to recall information, we exercise or strengthen our memory, and we can also identify gaps in our learning.
NACE has recently undertaken a literature review of retrieval practice – looking at the theoretical framework and considering emergent related classroom practices and practical amendments and applications for more able learners. To access this review, click here.
Beyond the here and now of assessment, we need to return to the longer-term focus of the Rethinking Assessment coalition. Against the current backdrop, what could we do to improve the assessment system more broadly? How would we do it differently, allowing us to show non-traditional talents – making assessment more effective for employers, individuals and supporting the practising teacher? Fundamentally, how can we assess the child in front of us?
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