Primary Assessment: where are we so far?

In a little over a month, I’ll be speaking at a conference in London about primary assessment. I have previously spoken at such an event back in May/June of this year, and at the time shared the stage with a representative from the DfE who seemed to have as little clue as the rest of us about what was likely to happen.

Things move quickly in education, particularly under the current government, so much has emerged since then, yet there are still plenty of unknowns and plenty of areas of uncertainty. It’s for that reason that I’ll look forward to attending the same conference to hear from other experts in the field, and to see how other schools are tackling the challenges of our situation.

Since the summer, we have learned a good deal more about the nature of the test, as well as something more about teacher assessment. There remain many unanswered questions, particularly about how Teacher Assessment will work, and I’m hoping that the DfE representative might be able to shed some light on that matter. I’m also fascinated to hear from Ofsted about what they say they’ll be looking for in the systems that schools use.

What we do know, perhaps more clearly than ever, is that schools are being left to ‘go it alone’ when it comes to internal assessment. Of course, schools were always free to do so, but the levels system became all-but-universal. Now, schools are working individually, in partnerships, alliances and chains to create their own systems of tracking progress and recording assessments to support their judgements during each key stage.

What seems to matter more than ever is that schools collaborate on this. Whether that be with other schools in their locality, or through ‘buying in’ a shared system which provides a sense of moderation as back-up, schools need to be aware of what others are doing more than ever. Rather than looking to the DfE for a preferred model, or the required approach, schools should be looking at what is available in the ‘marketplace’, and making a choice that suits their requirements. As Dylan Wiliam said in his recent Teach Primary article – simple off-the-peg solutions may no longer be good enough.

Of course, that’s why at the conference I’ll be talking about my own, adaptable, free model of Key Objectives and the accompanying tracking documents. I’ll also be talking about how I think mastery approaches can support the combination of assessment with planning and teaching. That’s not because I think I have all the answers: I don’t think anybody does any more. I think all we can do is share what we know and find what works for us, within the confines of the system we have.

It’s a difficult time for school leaders to know where to turn and what to use, but it’s also an opportunity for us to really take a grip of how assessment works in our schools and to make it work for the benefit of our students, rather than for the producers of graphs.

---

The conference at which I will be speaking is the Optimus Effective Primary Assessment under the new National Curriculum conference in London on Thursday 29th January. More details are available at http://www.optimus-education.com/conferences/assessment15

Readers of my blog who would like to attend can receive 20% off the standard rate if they use the promotional code MT15 when booking online.

How to get booked for primary teaching conferences – an idiot’s guide.

I’ve sat through a fair few presentations at conferences myself, and have even given a few. I seem to have been subjected to particularly many lately that seem to lack any real direction or purpose, and have no idea what impact they were meant to have. I have, though, noticed an increasing commonality between some of the poorer presentations I’ve seen and while they’ve left me frustrated at having wasted my time, these tricks seem to go down a storm with audiences of primary educators. The same may be true of secondary colleagues, but I’ve less experience with them.

So if you’re not really bothered about achieving anything, and merely want to set up a career as a sort of after-dinner speaker for between meals, then I suggest the following patter is guaranteed to bring a healthy income:

1. Find some common sense statements and turn them into ‘bon mots’.
2. Take random useful qualities, or ideas, or just words and turn them into an acronym.
   (Why Plan, Do and Review, when you can Plan, Research, Implement, Complete & Keep?)
3. If an acronym won’t work, create a diagram for the initials. Stars are good. Or hexagons.
4. Intersperse your words with asides about imaginary children you once met.
5. Use the Chart-Art facilities in PowerPoint to link seemingly unrelated things into a single diagram.
6. Present broad concepts with a background of a grid as if to imply a scientific graph.
7. Throw in a critical comment about Michael Gove (no need to worry about his successor yet).
8. Point out that you love being in the classroom.
9. Remind people that it’s all about the kids.
10. Blame Ofsted for something (it doesn’t matter what, it always goes down well).
11. Use the phrase “research shows”. No need to back this up with any references.
12. Throw in some references to books you’ve read. Implore people to read them.
13. Make another comment about Ofsted inspectors.
14. Say something that shows you understand how busy teachers are.
15. Refer to well-known Scientists: a mis-quote from Einstein is as good as any real research.
16. Emphasise the importance of things other than Literacy and Numeracy.
17. Point out that SATs are not a real measure of children’s achievement.
18. Say again that it’s all about the kids; “that’s why we came into this profession”.
19. Make a reference to the teacher who gets snarky about her mug / chair / parking space.
20. Criticise the DfE. No specifics are necessary: just criticise the department somehow.
21. Show people some Buzzfeed style activity that shows their learning style.
    Or their dominant brain hemisphere.
    Or their balance of red, blue, green or yellow leadership style.
22. Acknowledge that evidence doesn’t support these ideas, but claim that they remain valid.
23. Blame secondary schools for something.
24. Raise the issue of the “mood hoover” or hard-to-engage staff member. No solutions needed.
25. Remind people that we’re preparing kids for an unknown future, so anything goes.

That should comfortably fill an hour or more. If you pad out the slot with anecdotes about children (your own, your class… a niece. Any will do) and comments that show how you were once an excellent teacher, then all you need now is a couple of common sense statements to underpin your work, or some popular messages that make your listener feel that they agreed with your every word: “we need more focus on the whole child” or “learning isn’t linear” or “teachers do the most important job in the world” are good examples.

Now, I wonder if there are any opportunities for running courses on how to run a course…?

Primary Assessment conference: what did we learn?

This week I gathered at an Optimus Education conference in London along with over 400 primary teachers and leaders to consider just how we move forward with life after levels. So what did we all learn?

Firstly, let me confess that I think it’s a sign of how things are, that I was a keynote speaker. The reality out there is that schools have so much change to manage at the moment – from the new curriculum and SEN code of practice, to infant school meals and sports funding – that few can devote the quality time needed to devise and create an assessment system to replace levels. That means up and down the country school leaders are looking for guidance and inspiration. Significantly, that guidance is not coming from the DfE, and so it is often down to individual schools and leaders to share what knowledge they have. Thus it is that I have found myself in a situation of being more knowledgeable than average.

Conference began with a welcome and summary from Mick Walker – formerly of the QCDA – followed by Annabel Burns from the department. Ms Burns did an admirable job of delivering the departmental message of freedoms for schools, summarising the landscape in which we found ourselves and the apparent rationale behind it. She also kindly clarified for colleagues that the new accountability framework will require schools to meet either the new attainment floor standard (85%+ at the ‘expected standard’) or the new progress standard to avoid the perils that accompany falling “below the minimum standard”. It has since crossed my mind that we still don’t really know how progress will be measured during the transition years (essentially 2016 to 2023) while we wait for the new reception baseline victims students to work their way through the system… but that was only one of many questions that seemingly remains unanswered (unanswerable?) about this brave new world.

After I’d spoken about the pitfalls and opportunities ahead, the floor was opened to questions; understandably, most of these were directed at the expert from the department. The result was some clarification (checked against the public document released in March) about which subjects would be subject to teacher assessment, and some further confusion about how this would be done. Ms Burns explained that there would be “several” performance descriptors for KS2 Writing, for example, but appeared to imply that teacher assessment for other areas didn’t need them because there would be test scores for teachers to use (perhaps indicating the department’s view of the value of teacher assessment). She then clarified that in fact there would be single descriptors for Reading, Maths and Science creating a binary choice for teacher assessment of these subjects: either a student has met the expected standard… or they haven’t. No room for nuance here: that is apparently to be provided by the new “precise” scaled scores.

But enough of the DfE’s role. I presume that they draw straws to attend such events and then after the event head back to try to iron out the latest issues that schools have identified. The real strength of this event was to be the sharing of good work already begun in schools.

I was glad to be able to attend a presentation by the headteacher and assessment coordinator of Hiltingbury Junior School, who have been awarded one of the DfE’s Assessment Innovation Fund grants. Their school has been working on a model of assessment ladders showing objectives for core subjects. Creating simple booklets of the ladders they have begun to share assessment directly with children throughout their school and were sharing that model in their locality. The ladders certainly looked purposeful, and seemed to broadly meet the 7 Questions I’d previously set out – or will do as the full system is rolled out. Schools would be able to adapt the model themselves hopefully, with materials being made available free through the TES website due course. Certainly something worth looking at, and it was a great opportunity to see these in advance. My only question is one I frequently have about assessment in primary schools: why the widespread obsession with ticking things off exactly three times?

Later, having spoken again myself about approaches I’d taken to assessment, it was a chance to hear Bruce Waeland (@htbruce) about parental engagement in his school. He was honest enough to state that his school had not yet begun to implement a new assessment model, but it was clear that he had plans for keeping parents on board when he did.

Inevitably, the nature of workshop choices at conferences means that I missed some things I’d have liked to have seen. Andrew Carter of South Farnham school in Surrey presented his school’s model, and I’m hoping to what Dame Reena Keeble has to say about the model used at Cannon Lane in Harrow when the conference is repeated in Birmingham next month. It certainly seems that school-to-school partnership is the ideal path of travel, since the DfE clearly intends to offer little outside the accountability framework. Perhaps events such as this will become more common as schools take the lead?

---

Optimus Education Conference: Effective Primary Assessment after Levels

The Optimus Education conference will be repeated in Birmingham on Wednesday 18th June. For details of the day, see the link here. Readers of this blog who wish to attend the conference can obtain a 20% discount by booking with promotional code: MTIDD