“Miss, what level am I working at now?”
“Miss, what grade is this essay?”
For most of my teaching career I’ve encouraged questions about attainment – or at the very least smiled wearily, while pointing students in the direction of some self-assessment tasks. But, at the moment these are questions to which I have no answer. I have no idea how to mark students’ work.
Over the past six months I have bluffed my way through five parents’ evenings and written six sets of reports without saying anything meaningful about assessment at all: “James has made good progress this year. He has high expectations of himself and works hard to achieve his goals”; “Daniel has had a disappointing term. He is not yet reaching his full potential”. Very few parents seem to have realised – or cared – that feedback is based on my personal, and sometimes rather vague, view of their child’s ability.
The abolition of key stage 3 levels – a national approach to measuring achievement by giving students a number or letter to represent their attainment – does bring some benefits, such as giving us more freedom in years 7, 8 and 9. Every so often when I remember that I’m no longer tied to those occasionally restrictive structures, it does feel a bit exciting. Not having “that conversation” with year 7 parents about why their child appears to have gone down a level since primary school has been refreshing.
But the thing is, key stage 3 levels were a very useful structure. They gave a very clear overview of exactly what a student needed to do to improve their work. They felt familiar, because the levels progressed from primary school; and they allowed for easy comparison in terms of attainment between other schools and subjects.
What we’ve got now feels like Frankenstein’s monster of assessment. Different schools, different boroughs, different departments all doing different things, but with the same purpose. The assessment structure examples my school eagerly gathered from others are a mixture of: a reworded, simplified version of the key stage levels; hastily written skills expected of the average student in each year group that are too vague to be useful; padded-out new GCSE criteria applied to all year groups (this is what we’re using).
I’d love to sit down and carefully write my own assessment structure from scratch. But can I do it better than somebody who’s spent years studying assessment at university? No. And honestly, I’ve got my lessons to teach. Anything I do will be cobbled together in between teaching year 11 and marking year 8 books. It won’t be a masterpiece.
The situation for the new GCSEs is equally unsettling. While most of them won’t be taught until September (assuming they’re accredited in time – but that’s another story), maths and English started this year. The guidance we’ve got is so limited in terms of assessment, I have no idea what grade students are currently working at, and I’ve got no way of realistically predicting what they’ll get at the end of year 11.
We do have assessment criteria so we know how to mark individual exam papers and some exemplar papers as guidance – but the problem is that we don’t know what it actually means. What is 23 out of 30? Would that be a B on the old papers? And given the syllabus and grading system (which is moving to 9-1 instead of from A*-G) is very different, what is it now? A seven? Eight? Four?
I’m not blaming the exam boards as they must be in turmoil, speedily putting together new GCSEs which ignore decades of educational research. But it leaves us in a situation now where we are held accountable for grades that we don’t have the information to predict. We also can’t tell students or parents about what grade they are working at or how to improve (with any reasonable reliability) – as they have come to expect.
Self- and peer-assessment are my friends at the moment. I have long believed that a big part of my job is to build students’ own understanding of what constitutes quality work. I have been the first to shout about how the use of external assessment criteria keeps students reliant on the judgement of others, rather than developing their own internal indicators. Except, when there are no external indicators or the criteria isn’t meaningful, it is much more difficult to point students in the right direction. There are limits to what self- and peer-assessment can achieve when you’re not sure what the Department for Education (DfE), with its love of change, considers to be good work.
The GCSEs will sort themselves out; we’ll be able to predict more accurately in a couple of years. But the situation at key stage 3 feels like a step backwards, with each school encouraged to do its own form of assessment, and creating its own norm. Each school is deciding what they consider to be the average student. While this may only be what has happened in the past on a national level, on a micro, school-level, it feels very personal; it feels as though each school is only a step away from the bad old days of putting their students into rank order and comparing children against each other academically. This may be what parents and students actually want (or the higher ability ones, at least) – but I’m fairly sure it won’t raise standards.
Why, in an assessment-driven educational system, has the DfE scrapped the assessment structures? It’s going to be very difficult to check whether standards are actually being raised or not. But perhaps that’s the idea.
Names in this article have been changed.
