It was no surprise to me, in October 2014, when my head teacher placed at the top of my new performance management form the requirement to develop and implement a way of assessing pupils attainment and progress without levels. Since then, it feels like I have worked on little else. I have attended dozens of local authority meetings, meetings with cluster schools, conferences and briefings. I have read hundreds of pages and watched many youtube clips. I was even persuaded, against my better judgement, to speak at a conference myself. Working closely with our amazing assistant head teacher we have wrestled with the minimal guidance from the DFE, the tit bits and rumours from Inspectors speaking at events, hearsay and our own idea of what assessment should and could be.
By no means have we finished this work. There are still so many unknowns, so many problems to solve. I have decided to write a series of posts that will share what we are doing and why we are doing it. What this won't be is an analysis of the virtues, or otherwise, of this approach. It won't be a moan or a critique. That is not to say those discussions don't have a place but this will be for those of us charged with delivering what will soon be a statutory change. I would warmly welcome contributions from anyone involved in this process who wants to contribute to this discussion in this spirit.
I anticipate this series of posts being made up of 4 parts;
1) Our interpretation of assessment without levels
2) Our approach to assessment without levels
3) Sharing information with stakeholders
4) Ongoing challenges
I will aim to post once a week for the next 3 weeks, with the first post to come this bank holiday weekend!
I shall follow with interest. I was also charged with (actually I had to remind SLT that we needed to do SOMETHING) helping to develop a new assessment system. Ultimately, though, I only have the qualifications and supposed 'expertise', not the authority to make the final decision, and what we are currently doing is very much not something I wish to be associated with. I am, however, full of barely-suppressed rage. I'm not even sure we need any assessment systems, or whether the energy expended is compensated by any positive effect. (I wrote recently about an example that works without: https://julietgreen.wordpress.com/2015/05/03/watching-the-speedo/). I'm presuming there are hundreds of thousands of primary schools in the UK. Are they all to develop 'their own system'? What an utterly ludicrous situation! However, I promise to try to be discursive rather than simply condemnatory...
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