School Leadership

A 20-year history of primary accountability

SATs are such an entrenched part of our school life that we perhaps need reminding of how they emerged and their implications for the future. Bill Boyle explores the wider context.

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      string(5708) "20Assessment, reporting and recordingManaging Schools Today    May 2008When a National Curriculum was first introduced toschools in England through the 1988 EducationReform Act the intention was that it ‘should bea balanced and broadly based curriculum’ (DES,1988a).Sixteen years later, after the most intense ‘national testingoffensive’ that primary schools have ever been subjectedto, the Government reiterated those sentiments by statingit would ‘make sure that every subject is taught well inprimary schools and that every child gets the benefit ofa rich, well-designed and broad curriculum’ (DfES,2004).Now, we are told in what has become the traditional styleof government ‘leak’ to the media, that primary schoolchildren will study fewer subjects to concentrate on ‘thebasics’.There is a ring of déjà vu to this. Data, which my researchcentre at the University of Manchester has been collectingfrom a large representative national sample of primaryschools since 1997, indicate that for all of that 10 yearperiod all subjects except for English and mathematics atTesting to   the limitsA 20 year history ofprimary ‘accountability’SATs are such an entrenchedpart of our school life that weperhaps need reminding ofhow they emerged and theirimplications for the future.Bill Boyle explores the widercontext21May 2008    Managing Schools Today   Assessment, reporting and recordingboth Key Stages 1 (ages 5-7) and 2 (ages 7-11) have sufferedreductions in their teaching time (Boyle & Bragg, 2006).Those reductions have been solely to make more timefor the ‘teaching’ of English and mathematics which arecoincidentally the only two subjects which the Governmentmeasures for its Standards agenda league tables.During those 10 years  English and mathematics havebeen taught for over 50% of the available teachingtime thereby reducing the other nine statutory subjectsto an undignified partitioning of the remaining 50%of teaching time between them. Our subject teachingtime data reveal that history, geography, art and musichave all but disappeared as discrete taught entities so itwill be easy to ‘roll them into one’ (as the ‘leaked reportso graphically describes what used to be called cross-curricular teaching).Another interesting side-effect of this ‘two tier curriculum’(Ofsted, 2007) has been the regularly lamented ‘shortage ofscience graduates’ from the same government departmentwhich has witnessed the reduction of primary scienceteaching time by more than any of the other foundationsubjects (Boyle & Bragg, 2005). What was the old adageabout ‘starting them young’? Sometimes you wonder ifanyone in the Government’s education department iscapable of  joining up dots any more.Testing when readyThe same ‘leak’ referred to above now promises ‘testingwhen ready’ as the latest panacea, but the same errorof conceptualisation applies. This ‘radical’ new worldis still to operate within a national ‘Standards agenda’in which the only standards that are measured are testperformances of children on testable sub-domains of twosubjects. In other words those parts of the English andmathematics curriculum on which children can be testedby the use of paper and pencil tests (I won’t debase theword assessment by using it in this context, as assessmentis a support to a child’s learning through providing specificlearning information to ‘move the child on through thenext learning steps’ not a binary judgement of simplisticfailure or success).So, for example, how can an assessment of a child’s Englishprogress be attempted without assessing his/her speakingand listening skills? Well in a government Standardsagenda it can, by ignoring those ‘hard to test’ aspects ofa child’s development. If education ‘standards’ (and theterm has become so debased as to be meaningless) are tobe measured and publicly reported (and the governmentself-acclaimed for the quality of its interventions – of whichthere have been many!) shouldn’t they be ‘measured’across a broader front than two subjects?Our monitoring data shows that teachers spend largeamounts of the ‘teaching time’ which is accrued by Englishand mathematics in various strategies of ‘test preparation’as they know that in the current political climate it is in theirschool’s accountability interests to spend time producing‘test-wise’ pupils who will ‘perform’ and achieve theGovernment’s percentage target levels. How does thatrelate to a school’s historical definition and its primaryrole in developing teaching and learning and offeringeach child the opportunities to experience a ‘broad andbalanced’ curriculum?To further promote the feeling of ‘déjà vu’, the notionof ‘testing when ready’ is not a new one in England. In factit’s almost precisely 20 years since it was approached. Inthe autumn of 1988, the Government’s newly institutedorganisation with responsibility for the assessment ofthe recently legislated National Curriculum, the SchoolsExaminations and Assessment Council (SEAC), thepredecessor of today’s QCA, issued a specification for thedevelopment of Standard Assessment Tasks (the SATs asthey soon became known) for seven-year-olds.My research centre, the Centre for Formative AssessmentStudies (CFAS), put in a successful bid for developing theassessment materials based on the assumption that theintention of the process was ‘seeking and interpretingevidence for use by learners and their teachers to decidewhere the learners are in their learning, where they needto go and"
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Leadership

Testing to the limits

16 Jun 2008

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      string(5749) "  Dialogue 31Volume 1.1 n Creative Teaching & Learning T he Rose and Cambridge Primary Interim Reviews are finally both published and everything is set for a battle between two of the ‘three wise men’. For those of you too young to remember, in 1992 the government appointed ‘three wise men’ to review the National Curriculum: Robin Alexander, Jim Rose and Chris Woodhead. They produced a report (‘Alexander, Rose and Woodhead’) which called for a focus on subjects in the primary curriculum. One of the wise men, Chris Woodhead, went on to be a notorious chief inspector of schools before moving into academia. The other two, Alexander and Rose, have produced separate reviews of the primary curriculum – and sparks have already started to fly. On 16 October 2009, Professor Robin Alexander produced the final report of the Cambridge primary review, an independent review written by 14 authors and supported by 66 research consultants and a 20 person advisory committee with members drawn from both inside and outside education. This three year enquiry is the most thorough review of primary education since the Plowden Report in 1967 (DES, 1967). Both the Cambridge Primary Review and the Rose Report encourage classroom discussion. Dr Sue Lyle explains why noisy classrooms promote the deepest learning. Speaking into meaning    Creative Teaching & Learning n Volume 1.132 Dialogue The review published 31 interim reports which were leapt on by the press – alerting the government to the criticisms the report was likely to make. To pre-empt this, they commissioned Sir Jim Rose to hastily publish a review before Alexander’s final report (DfCSF, 2008). The government’s fears were justified. The final report states: “Their [primary school children’s] education and to such degree their lives, are impoverished if they have received an education that is so fundamentally deficient”. The government is set to implement the recommendations of Rose, but the consensus from the head teacher and teacher unions, from subject associations and the education press, is in favour of Alexander. Headlines in all the serious daily papers painted a unanimous picture: primary school children have been let down. They are denied ‘fun’, ‘enjoyment’, ‘happiness’ and the opportunity to ‘use their imaginations and creativity’. They are ‘oppressed’ by the tedium of the National Literacy strategy and the pressure of testing. Teachers are ground down by excessive prescription, a surveillance culture and a rhetoric of ‘standards’ which is micro-managed by the DCSF, the QCA and Ofsted. Report findings Both reports advocate change. But while Rose calls for a ‘pruning’ operation, Alexander calls for ‘root and branch’ overhaul (TES, 2008). Although the recommendations are different in scope and analysis, there are important similarities in their recommendations on primary curriculum organisation and management. Neither endorses a subject-based approach to teaching. Rose calls for six broader ‘areas of learning’ and Alexander calls for ‘eight domains of learning’. Both want a flexible, less overloaded curriculum. One aspect of learning both reviews have emphasised is the importance of children’s talk in the learning process. Rose wants to make sure: “That serious attention is paid to developing spoken language intensively”. Alexander identified dialogue as one of his 12 aims for primary education. But Rose and Alexander have very different visions of the role of oracy in the primary school. It is important, therefore, that teachers have a good understanding of the terminology and the different assumptions that underpin the use of the terms. Why is children’s talk now considered so important in the learning process? How did this come about, and what are the implications for teachers? Background Some readers will remember the heady 80s when the National Oracy Project (NOP) demonstrated the power of speaking and listening in children’s learning. In his discussion of the history of the primary curriculum, Alexander (2009b) praises this project. It was one of the most exciting projects ever to take place in the UK – and it directly influenced the first English National Curriculum in 1990. The NOP meant that Speaking and Listening became recognised as as important to pupils’ language and literacy development as reading and writing. The first maths and science documents in the National Curriculum reiterated the central role oracy should play in children’s learning. As the Cambridge primary review complains, the SATs take over in key stage two – which test English, reading and writing, not oracy. So oracy has been sadly neglected. No one in education would dispute that our focus on the National Curriculum and standardised testing with paper and pencil tests has marginalised speaking and listening. However, it has mainly been researchers, not government or teachers, who have called for oracy teaching. The movement to promote oracy has had to fight with a climate dominated by teacher accountability based on narrow measures of pupil attainment in the SATs. Why oracy? Lev Vygotsky began the educational movement towards oracy when his work was first translated into English in the 60s. Vygotsky has influenced educationalists, psychologists, sociologists and linguists. Born in the same year as the better-known and more widely influential Jean Piaget, Vygotsky’s work was banned under Stalin. His two most famous books, Thought and Language (Vygotsky, 1962) and Mind"
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Creative Teaching & Learning

Speaking into meaning

5 Apr 2010

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      string(5688) "primaryleadershipTODAY • Issue:1320When a National Curriculum was first introduced to schools in England through the 1988 Education Reform Act theintention was that it ‘should be a balanced and broadlybased  curriculum’ (DES,1988a). Sixteen years later,after the most intense ‘national testing offensive’that primary schools have ever been subjected to,the government’s Education Department in its FiveYear Strategy for Children and Learners reiteratedthose sentiments by stating it would ‘make surethat every subject is taught well in primary schoolsand that every  child gets the benefit of a rich, well-designed and broad curriculum’ (DfES,2004). Now,we are told in what has become the traditional styleof government ‘leak’ to the media, that primary schoolchildren will study fewer subjects to concentrate on‘the basics’.A broad and balanced curriculum?There is a ring of déjà vu to this. Data, which myresearch centre at the University of Manchester hasbeen collecting from a large representative nationalsample of primary schools since 1997, indicate thatfor all of that 10 year period all subjects except forEnglish and mathematics at both Key Stages 1 (ages5-7) and 2 (ages 7-11) have suffered reductions intheir teaching time (Boyle & Bragg, 2006). Thosereductions have been solely to make more time forthe ‘teaching’ of English and mathematics whichare coincidentally the only two subjects which thegovernment measures for their Standards agendaleague tables.During those 10 years  English and mathematicshave been taught for over 50% of the availableteaching time, thereby reducing the other nineATs are such an entrenched part ofour school life that we perhaps needreminding of how they emerged and some ofthe mixed messages that accompany them. Inthis article Bill Boyle once more reminds us ofthe background.STesting to the limits – avery ‘accountable’ 20year period in primaryeducation in EnglandAssessment, reporting And recording21Issue:13 • primaryleadershipTODAYstatutory subjects to an undignified partitioning ofthe remaining 50% of teaching time between them.Our subject teaching time data reveal that history,geography, art and music have all but disappearedas discrete taught entities so it will be easy to ‘rollthem into one’ (as the ‘leaked report so graphicallydescribes what used to be called cross-curricularteaching).Another interesting side-effect of this ‘two tiercurriculum’ (Ofsted, 2007) has been the regularlylamented ‘shortage of science graduates’ from thesame government department which has witnessedthe reduction of primary science teaching time bymore than any of the other foundation subjects(Boyle & Bragg, 2005). What was the old adage about‘starting them young’? Sometimes you wonder ifanyone in the government’s Education Departmentis capable of  joining up dots any more.Testing when readyThe same ‘leak’ referred to above now promises‘testing when ready’ as the latest panacea, butthe same error of conceptualisation applies. This‘radical’ new world is still to operate within a national‘Standards agenda’ in which the only standardsthat are measured are test performances of childrenon testable sub-domains of two subjects. In otherwords those parts of the English and mathematicscurriculum on which children can be tested by theuse of paper and pencil tests. (I won’t debase theword ‘assessment’ by using it in this context, asassessment is a support to a child’s learning throughproviding specific learning information to ‘move thechild on through the next learning steps’, not a binaryjudgement of simplistic failure or success ).So, for example, how can an assessment ofa child’s English progress be attempted withoutassessing his/her speaking and listening skills? Wellin a government Standards agenda it can, by ignoringthose ‘hard to test’ aspects of a child’s development.If education ‘standards’ (and the term has become sodebased as to be meaningless) are to be measuredand publicly reported (and the government self-acclaimed for the quality of its interventions – of whichthere have been many!) shouldn’t they be ‘measured’across a broader front than two subjects?Test preparationOur monitoring data show that teachers spend largeamounts of the ‘teaching time’ which is taken up byEnglish and mathematics in various strategies of‘test preparation’ as they know that in the currentpolitical climate it is in their school’s accountabilityinterests to spend time producing ‘test-wise’ pupilswho will ‘perform’ and achieve the government’spercentage target levels. How does that relate to aschool’s historical definition and its primary role indeveloping teaching and learning and offering eachchild the opportunities to experience a ‘broad andbalanced’ curriculum?To further promote the feeling of ‘déjà vu’, the notionof ‘testing when ready’ is not a new one in England.In fact it’s almost precisely 20 years since it wasapproached. In the autumn of 1988, the government’snewly instituted organisation with responsibility forthe assessment of the recently legislated NationalCurriculum, the Schools Examinations and AssessmentCouncil (SEAC), the predecessor of today’s QCA,issued a specification for the development of StandardAssessment Tasks (the SATs as they soon becameknown) for 7 year olds.Developing assessment materialsMy research centre, the Centre for FormativeAssessment Studies (CFAS) put in a (successful) bidfor developing the assessment materials based onthe"
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Leadership

Testing to the limits - a very ‘accountable’ 20 year period

15 Jul 2008

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      string(5633) "Shifting the ‘Who, What, When, Where, How and Why’ of Assessment‘What does learning look like?’ is one of the key questions Project Zero (PZ) has explored for much of its 50-year history. In recent years, our work has been equal parts grappling with the thorny reality of schools and bureaucratic systems on the one hand, and trying to imagine ‘What if… What other possibilities might there be?’ on the other.One form this work takes is developing alternatives to traditional notions of assessment and accountability and expanding what ‘counts’ as learning in classrooms and schools. Because the way learning is assessed directly influences what gets taught, assessment is an especially powerful lever for transforming teaching and learning. PZ researchers have investigated questions of assessment in a variety of research projects and, from these investigations, produced many resources that offer alternative ways of conceptualising and enacting assessment, including the Arts Propel handbooks, The Teaching for Understanding Guide, Making Learning Visible, Making Thinking Visible, and many more. (For related resources, see Additional Reading at the end of this article and http://www.pz.harvard.edu/50th/assessment-reimagined.) Of course, PZ is only one of many centres and organisations that have worked on these issues over the years, and we have collaborated with a number of them, including EL Education (formerly Expeditionary Learning), educators from the preschools in Reggio Emilia, Italy, the Educational Testing Service, state departments of education and numerous schools and school districts. Taken as a whole, this collective work on assessment invites a reimagining of the ‘who, what, when, where, how and why’ of assessment. This reimagining involves four fundamental shifts. Assessment Reimagined: Four Fundamental Shifts FROMTOAssessment driven by what can be easily quantifiedAssessment driven by the most important goals for student growth and learning, whether those goals can be quantified or not (the ‘why’)Assessment done to teachers and studentsTeachers and students as protagonists in the assessment process (the ‘who’)Assessment of a final product at the end of a learning experienceAssessment of process as well as product, integral to the learning experience (the ‘what’ and ‘when’)Assessment as a one-on-one activity (teacher assesses student; principal assesses teacher)Assessment as a collective and relationship-building process that happens in context (in classrooms, faculty meetings, etc.) (the ‘how’ and ‘where’)As illustrations of these shifts, consider two examples from public (UK state) school classrooms in the US, one primary and one secondary:Example 1: Joan Soble, Secondary School English Literature TeacherOne semester, as Advanced Placement (AP) English teacher Joan Soble gets to know her 11th and 12th grade students (age 16-17), she is struck by the sorts of public figures they voice admiration for. ‘We live in a culture that confuses ‘celebrity’ with ‘greatness’, Joan reflects. She wonders: Do her students understand this difference? Joan decides this is an important topic to focus on with them—especially given how their understanding of greatness might influence their future aspirations as they move beyond high school. Joan formulates the central question with which she wants students to engage (What do we mean by ‘greatness’?), chooses a reading and plans for the class to discuss it in both small and large groups. In the large high school in which Joan teaches, AP courses are open to any student who elects to take them. As a result, Joan’s students reflect a broad range of learners with diverse perspectives, which she expects to emerge as they discuss the complex topic of greatness. She hopes this will become a good opportunity for students to listen thoughtfully to differences of opinion and work through them to achieve consensus about the definition of greatness. Class conversations pose challenges almost immediately. The students all hold different points of view—which Joan feels has the potential to generate meaningful learning conversations—but the students seem more interested in expounding on their own perspectives than on really listening to those of others. Could class consensus on ‘greatness’ be reached (as Joan and a number of the students hoped)? Was that even a desirable goal?Concerned about the nature of the group’s conversation, Joan decides to consult with her colleagues who meet regularly to share and discuss student work. She brings a videotape of the class discussion, along with excerpts from the students’ written reflections to the group’s next meeting and asks her colleagues to use a protocol (or structured conversation) to give her feedback. Listening to her colleagues’ feedback, Joan realises not only that consensus among her students might not be possible, but also that it might not be that important. As a result, she shifts her focus in the classroom to helping students engage more deeply with one another’s thinking. After making adjustments to her approach over the course of a few weeks, she again brings more documentation back to her teacher-colleagues for examination in the context of a protocol. Her colleagues’ reflections on the video clips of class discussion confirm Joan’s initial impression—the students are still voicing arguments about their own views, but the tenor of the conversation has changed. They seem to be arguing"
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Arts-Based Learning

Assessment Reimagined

8 Jan 2019