Primary Assessment and Accountability Under the New National Curriculum

Primary assessment and accountability under the new national curriculum

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Teacher assessment and reporting to parents

1 Will these principles underpin an effective curriculum and assessment system?

• National curriculum levels will be removed and not replaced - there are significant damaging and impactful implications for how possible it will be to monitor progression for pupils with SEN and SLCN in particular. At worst, therecommendations negate the possibility of effectively monitoring and supporting effective progression for these children; at best they make it incredibly difficult;
• Schools will be able to introduce their own approaches to formative assessment - we are particularly concerned about the implications of this as we know schools and teachers are not confident, and in many cases competent, in identifying language levels for all children, including those with SLCN[1]. The result could be unintentional inflation of levels and under identification of SLCN, resulting in pupils’ needs not being met;
• The DfE will not prescribe a single system for ongoing assessment and reporting - the real danger here is, as the Department will know, pupils from deprived areas often cluster in particular schools and, without a national standard for teachers to refer to, schools may develop their own attainment targets related to expected local levels. This would mean they would fail to recognise that SLCN is far more prominent in a particular school or community than it would be among a more linguistically able cohort of pupils because their only barometer for comparing expectations would be within the class intake itself. This is something that happened before national standards were introduced. Secondly, there is a relatively small but significant amount of pupil mobility that is often more prevalent in our most vulnerable pupils, again causing complications for pupils, parents and potentially outcomes of these most vulnerable children and young people.

• We recognise the fact that National Curriculum levels and sub levels, P scales, and level descriptors are not without their flaws and in particular, developmental stages of learning were not always accurately represented. However, the current system gives a clear framework to schools and teachers, from which they can develop the school curriculum of their choice to address those Programmes of Study. It allows all children and especially those with SEN/SLCN to see their progression, teachers to plan such progression and parents to understand it. We would suggest enhancing these so that they more efficiently do the job they were intended to do
• The existing Framework has given us a nationally recognised, consistent and comparable way of making judgements of attainment and of measuring and demonstrating progress meaning that children and young people with SEN have a level playing field. This has the effect of raising expectations of pupils and enabling them to be included in the processes the school operates for all pupils.Levels of progression within assessment support children in seeing what the next small step is and how they can achieve it. This is particularly important for pupils with SEN when an emphasis should be placed on the progress a pupil has made rather than where they stand in the class league, with the consequent damaging impact on a potential fragile self esteem and their motivation to learn[2].
• Having national levels and assessment also provides the framework for Assessment for Learning which ensures pupil involvement in their own learning, is supportive of good teaching practice and builds on learning theory such as that proposed by Bruner and Vygotsky. The meta-cognitive skills underpinning this are necessary for achieving the deeper learning needed for understanding, rather than surface learning that is the potential outcome of the current recommendations. Both feedback and metacognition have been recently identified in the DfE funded Educational Endowment Foundation Toolkit as the two most impactfuland cost-efficient interventions to improve the attainment of disadvantaged pupils.[3]. However, with the current recommendations, there will be no consistent framework within which to support or capture these two key approaches for teachers, resulting in disparate and inconsistent approaches across our educational provision.
• Summative end of key stage assessment sets a high bar, which is clearly an admirable goal. However, the current recommendations are likely to result in a simple pass/fail that does not encourage motivation for learning or support learningfor pupils with SEN. What happens if pupils fail? To motivate and engage, we need to be able to reward tangible small steps of progress as students build their attainment goals. The proposed changes represent diagnostic testing rather than a system which supports children’s learning.

• Children with SLCN need specific teaching of the foundation knowledge and skills to reach the next level. The new curriculum does not support teachers or pupils to identify what this will look like for spoken language, giving no guidance or specificity in the programme of what to expect and how to develop these key skills. The removal of levels and focus on end of key stage tests is likely to encourage a focus on surface knowledge acquisition rather than deeper learning and skills.
• The combination of these two factors is hugely challenging for ensuring progression and attainment in children with SLCN; these children don’t develop reflective skills by themselves as they are language dependent, so the lack of levels to support understanding of progression further disadvantages these pupils.
• Despite the fact that the existing levels are not necessarily developmental in their progression, they none the less provide an important breakdown. Breaking down spoken language into its component parts and into levels is vital to show that speech, language and communication (SLC) skills do develop throughout a pupil’s school life,and also that they are critical in other subject areas. This supports parents in their understanding, teachers in their teaching and pupils in their planning for development. Without this breakdown of skills and an additional focus in assessment on acquisition of knowledge, there is a danger that children’s SLCN will not be recognised and assumptions made of a general low level of ability, rather than specific language impairments. This will result in lowering of expectations, insufficient targeted support at the right levels and poorer outcomes for these children, the opposite of what the new guidelines are aiming for.
• Recent research[4]and our own experience,tell us that schools and teachers find it difficultto know how to judge pupils’ progress in spoken language[5]and yet the proposed system depends on them being able to do this. The risk is unintentional inflation of speaking and listening outcomes by teaching staff, resulting in under identification of children with SLCN and potential impact of poor language on literacy and attainment as they progress through school. There is much evidence on the impact of poor language and literacy attainment on all core and other subjects within school.[6][7][8]

• The argument that parents don’t understand level descriptors is very easily refuted; schools have worked hard to explain levels to parents and children themselves are very good at translating their progression into easily digestible information for parents. Furthermore, we are entering a phase where parents themselves have been through an education system based on levels, so if we are taking a long term view, there would be an understanding that parents will only get better at understanding the current system, rather than introducing something new and of no use to support children’s learning.
• It is still unclear exactly what and how schools will report toparents; will parents continue to receive feedback around their child’s progression or will they just receive decile scores? If it is solely the pass/fail end of key stage assessments and decile scores, it is almost impossible to see how this information would be useful to parents in order to support their child’s ongoing learning and engagement.
• It is particularly difficult to see and understand what this will look like for parents of children with SEN/SLCN. It is likely that many children with SEN/SLCN will not pass end of key stage tests, leaving both parents and their children demotivated and unclear of next steps, other than to fail the following end of key stage tests.
• There is no way of accounting for strengths of individual children in this system, for example, children with specific language impairment will be very likely to fail phonics and grammar items within the English prescriptive content; it is difficult to see what good progress will look like for these children and almost impossible to see how their strengths in educational progression will be captured in this system. It’s is a potential disaster for these children, with nothing really to work towards and no recognition of the areas where they are able and successful.
• Evidence suggests children do well when they are motivated to learn and have a clear idea of their educational progression and next steps; the risk with the new system is not only to take away this clarity of progression, but to write off children very early in the school career, demotivating both them and their parents.

2a) What other good examples of assessment practice we can share more widely?

1. Where students have not achieved required levels on school assessments but that without additional support, assessment and discussion teachers have not known the appropriate level, or way, in which to break down the learning steps and goals for that pupil.
2. Where students have achieved high scores on a particular task e.g. a phonic reading skills task and been thought to have no learning needs but have subsequently failed to progress as expected. Without further and more detailed individual assessment the student’s language comprehension difficulties had not been revealed and therefore targeted.

2b) Is there additional support we can provide for schools?