NAHT Press Release

Profession takes lead on assessment after the end of levels

School leaders’ union NAHT has released the findings of its commission into school assessment today (Thursday 13 February).

The commission aimed to establish some national principles for assessment in schools to preserve consistency in the absence of a government approved system of levels.

NAHT has always acknowledged that levels had weaknesses but believes they were useful in providing a shared professional language for measuring pupil achievement and in promoting consistency between schools. They enabled schools to rate pupils against objective criteria rather than ranking them against each other. However, the association also believes that their demise creates an opportunity as well as a challenge.

The NAHT Commission into Assessment without Levels chaired by Lord Sutherland of Houndwood (a former chief inspector of schools) brought together head teachers, academics and representatives from relevant agencies including the schools’ inspectorate, Ofsted, the Department for Education, and the exam regulator, Ofqual.

The commission and its panel sat several times in autumn last year (2013). Its remit was to:

  • Establish a key set of principles for good assessment;
  • Find examples of current best practice that met these principles;
  • Secure confidence in these principles in those who hold schools to account.

Key recommendations announced by Lord Sutherland today included:

  • Schools should adopt a consistent approach to assessment across the country. The commission also produced a 'design checklist' to underpin this;
  • Schools should retain the use of levels while designing a new system;
  • Pupils should be judged against objective criteria rather than ranked against each other;
  • All assessments need external moderation and that this moderation needs real teeth;
  • Assessment should be driven from the curriculum.

A full summary of recommendations is included in notes below*.

Russell Hobby, general secretary of NAHT, said: “We must take the Secretary of State at his word and take ownership of assessment. Just because the government ceases to regulate something does not mean the profession must accept fragmentation. We can keep what was good about our previous system of assessment and address its flaws.

"The commission has taken a great deal of evidence, thought deeply about what might work and proposed a set of principles that can ensure consistency without straight-jacketing schools. As the body representing the majority of head teachers, NAHT is in a strong position to encourage and support schools in this approach.

"We call on those who hold schools to account, both locally and nationally, to send a clear signal that schools working within these principles will be doing the right thing. This will provide the confidence for a flourishing of assessment practice and creativity. Assessment, after all, belongs at the heart of teaching and learning."

Lord Sutherland said: “It is essential that everyone involved in education – not least pupils and their families - has confidence in the methods used to assess pupil performance. While there is much more still to do, the NAHT commission will have made a critical start in shaping a robust assessment system in the future.”

Education Secretary Michael Gove said: “The NAHT’s report gives practical, helpful ideas to schools preparing for the removal of levels.

“It also encourages them to make the most of the freedom they now have to develop innovative approaches to assessment that meet the needs of pupils and give far more useful information to parents.”

Report link:

Warwick Mansell,NAHT Blog
NAHT assessment report: where do we go from here?

The NAHT’s report ( see on its commission on assessment, carried out in response to the continuing apparent uncertainty besetting government policy on this very important aspect of school life, is an impressive document.

Although you might expect me to say that, given who is publishing this blog, I mean it, as will become clear, I hope, in the paragraphs below.

However, with ministers still to publish their final thoughts on where we go from here – more than two years after an advisory group they appointed first proposed the end of the national curriculum levels system – there are some potentially big policy issues which may have a large effect on the document’s implications for schools.

The document’s genesis followed a recognition within the NAHT that the DfE’s decision, which was confirmed at the end of the summer term last year, that the levels structure was to be scrapped and not replaced, created uncertainty within many schools as to how to react.

The idea was to try to find a way of supporting schools in that reaction, specifically in helping them formulate new assessment policies – covering teacher assessment, rather than national testing, which will continue to be centrally-designed by the DfE - in the light of the change and to review the role of assessment more generally in schools.

The union then convened a panel of practitioners and policy experts, invited evidence submissions and carried out interview hearings in the autumn (note 1), before coming up with this report, which has 21 recommendations.

Central to the document is an attempt to provide some national guidance on the construction of assessment policies in schools. This is a response to the DfE position that schools should be “free” to design their own systems, which, while sounding good in theory and being politically attractive to a government keen to talk about school-by-school “autonomy”, will have left many schools with the practical problem of deciding exactly what to do.

The document therefore lists seven suggested “underpinning principles” for assessment, before moving on to a more detailed “design checklist”, including notes setting out some emerging detail.

Perhaps the most immediate challenge within the document to the government’s current published position concerns timing.

Schools are supposed to have detailed assessment policies in place by September this year.

But with the government not even having published its response yet to its consultation on the future of assessment and accountability in primary schools, carried out over the summer holidays and in early autumn last year and which set out its plans in this field, this looks challenging to say the least. (Note 2)

So the NAHT report proposes that schools only be asked to publish their own principles of assessment by September 2014, and that in the short term the government should support the use in schools of their own modified version of a national curriculum levels system. They should then be given until 2016 to publish their own detailed assessment framework.

All of which sounds sensible, given time pressures: there is only a term and a half now before September 2014.

Perhaps most significantly, in practical terms, the document includes an attempt by the NAHT to start the work of providing the outline of a model assessment policy for schools to use.

It mentions the need to translate the new “national” (note 3) curriculum into detailed assessment criteria, against which children’s progress can be judged. The NAHT, says the document, is now commissioning its own model version setting out the detail.

The paper then suggests that schools replace the levels system with a structure setting out what pupils should normally be expected to know by the end of each school year.

Pupils might be formally assessed every term, with judgements then made as to whether they are “developing”, “meeting” or “exceeding” each relevant end-of-year criterion. Those adjudged to be “exceeding” expectations would then also be judged against the criteria for the next year.

Importantly, the assessment criteria should be “short, discrete, qualitative and concrete descriptions of what a pupil is expected to know and be able to do”, and that this is communicated to parents termly, with parents and pupils receiving “rich, qualitative profiles of what has been achieved and indications of what they need to do next”. The document adds that “pupils should be assessed against objective and agreed criteria rather than ranked against each other”. All of which, I would guess, will go down as well with many parents as with teachers.

This must be seen as in contrast to the DfE’s plans for national test results, which originally were billed as giving pupils a single numerical mark and information as to which national performance decile they were to be placed in, though the word is that the widely criticised latter element will be ditched in the consultation response. Still, even if “deciles” go, the national tests are likely to see mastery of the curriculum, as measured by national tests at least, as entirely to be expressed numerically, relative to the performance of others.

And, says the NAHT’s document, “pupil progress and achievement should be communicated in terms of descriptive profiles rather than condensed to numerical summaries (though schools may wish to use numerical data for internal purposes)”. This seems to me to be a challenge to existing practice, as embodied in the numerical levels system itself, and in line with criticism of over-quantification contained with the DfE’s expert review which, in December 2011, recommended the ending of levels.

I think the above is the meat of the NAHT’s emerging recommendations in relation to the detail of how a new assessment system might work in schools, supported by recommendations around the use of evidence to back individual judgements on pupils and the need for external moderation of those judgements.

The report also features some impressive case studies of schools where assessment “beyond levels” seems to be working well.

Stepping back a bit, the rest of the report looks more fundamentally at the role of assessment in schools, and, specifically, how to strengthen it.

Recommendations include: “all schools should have clear assessment principles and practices to which all staff are committed and which are implemented,” “assessment should be part of all school development plans and should be reviewed regularly”, “schools should work in collaboration…to ensure a consistent approach to assessment” and “all schools should take part in external moderation” of assessment results.

Ofsted inspections should take into account the quality of schools’ assessment practices, while there are proposals for improving the teaching of assessment in initial teacher education and during ongoing professional development. Most fundamentally, the document calls for a further comprehensive review of assessment for two- to 19-year-olds (presumably by the government), implying, fairly undeniably, that current attempts to reform assessment, from early years through to GCSE and A-level, have been “disjointed”.

I have the odd small quibble with the document.

For example, in the foreword, Lord Sutherland, the commission’s chair, says that “Assessment helps pupils engage more fully in their own development and learning”. I’d probably agree, so long as the sentence began “Assessment, if well-designed, helps…”

For I’m not sure that all assessment currently works as well as this sentence as published suggests: many would argue that the current accountability-backed assessment system promotes a fairly shallow concentration on performance metrics and test preparation, rather than deeper learning. Perhaps just as fundamentally, an assessment system which encouraged an over-emphasis on grades rather than accretion of understanding, surely carries at least the risk of demotivation, particularly for many of those persistently given a message they are failing. (Note 4) So assessment in itself does not necessarily, by definition, do what this sentence suggests.

I would also reword the sentence in the foreword which says: “One critically important role of assessment is to help appropriate types of the accountability of schools to parents, governors, local authorities and government and tax payers”. Accountability, which is indeed important, does not have to be based on assessment results, and personally I would stress that the most important use of assessment judgements, in this document’s context, is directly to help support the child’s learning. This point is made impressively later in the document, when it says, in a statement designed for a school to use, that “Assessment serves many purposes, but themainpurpose in our school is to help teachers, parents and pupils plan their next steps in learning”.

Quibbling aside, there are two issues, I think, facing this document in terms of the government’s possible policy response.

The first is perhaps the most familiar of any question behind any consideration of the impact of assessment in England’s schools system: what purpose are the results to serve?

For while the NAHT’s intended purposes for the teacher assessment judgements in this new system are clear, there is far less certainty about the government’s position.

There needs to be clarity about what, if any, aspect of the new teacher assessment system is to be used by the government, inspectors and the public to judge school and teacher performance, and what is not.

Clearly, a lot turns on how these questions are answered. If the judgements generated in the system above are used entirely for internal purposes – to provide information to pupils and parents on children’s progression through the curriculum, to help pupils improve and possibly as an aide to heads’ own improvement efforts for their schools – there is the possibility that they will be unpolluted by any felt need to present a school in the best possible light for external judgement.

If not, the danger, as ever, is that the reverse will be true on occasion and that the judgements made might be coloured by, as the document itself acknowledges, considerations such as teachers’ felt need to be pessimistic in their judgements of younger children in order to demonstrate greater seeming progress later, and vice versa.

To work effectively, I think, then, that it would be better for judgements generated by a teacher assessment system to be freed of any requirement to serve as checks on adults’, rather than children’s progress.

Yet the DfE consultation document itself says remarkably little about this very important question. Has it learned nothing from the experience of 25 years of high-stakes accountability in English schools, I wonder?

The only reference that I could see was the following DfE paragraph:

“We will continue to publish schools’ end of key stage teacher assessments in English, mathematics and science. Whereas national curriculum tests show a snapshot of performance and give precise results, teacher assessments give a better indication of pupils’ performance across a period of time. Both sets of information should be available to parents, inspectors and governors.”

Many would agree with the second sentence in the paragraph above. But the third suggests that the DfE sees none of the problems of using TA judgements also to judge schools. If its position stands, there will inevitably be questions about whether the admirable principles of this NAHT document can be realised in full.

I wonder, especially given that the consultation document implies that the matter has not been given much thought, whether this might be an area where there might have been a change in the DfE’s position since July. If so, it would be welcome.

Indeed, perhaps this is the reason that, under recommendation 12, the document says: “The Department for Education should make a clear and unambiguous statement on the teacher assessment data that schools will be required to report to parents and submit to the Department for Education.” (Note 6)

The other issue, of course, is the perennial one of resources. Will schools have the funds to implement the impressive-sounding suggestions for outstanding assessment practice outlined in the report, and – and this is a related question, of course – will there be enough staff time for the professional development and ongoing commitment to assessment they imply?

In general, the government’s curriculum and assessment reforms have not come with the funding allocated under Labour for changes in classroom practice through, for example, the National Strategies and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. Instead, the coalition’s mantra has been one of devolving power to heads to come up with their solutions, while also, seemingly, devolving the responsibility for funding it to heads looking after their own budgets.

I wonder if there will be a small amount of funding through the DfE for extra professional development on assessment, following the consultation response. But will there be enough? Given the scale of change both set out in this document and implied by the government’s reforms themselves, this will remain a key question.

Notes:
Note 1: Just to be clear, although I’ve written a lot about the government’s reviews of assessment and the curriculum on this blog, I didn’t play any part in this NAHT review.

Note 2: The government position on assessment in primary schools has been subject to repeated delays, with the consultation itself having been put back from early 2013 and a reaction promised, when the consultation document did eventually come out, last autumn. Two weeks ago, there were news reports about the likely inclusion of baseline assessments of early years children in the DfE’s response, as if this was very imminent, but still it has not been released. Some might say the DfE itself has struggled with the task it is now passing on to schools: how to replace levels, while coalition politics – the consultation was launched in July not by Michael Gove but by Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg and David Laws – may not have helped.