The introduction of assessment without national curriculum levels has undermined teachers’ confidence and led to an increase in formal testing in some schools, new research has revealed.
The research published by the Department for Education today finds that in 42 schools contacted, no two schools had the same way of assessing pupils.
And the study by the National Foundation for Educational Research says that schools would welcome some form of national standardisation for non-statutory assessment, guided by annotated exemplars of pupils’ work.
“Many interviewees, both teachers and senior leaders, said that AWL [assessment without levels] had undermined teachers’ confidence in assessment judgements,” the report states.
“Teachers commonly said they knew their pupils well and felt able to identify their next steps, but felt less certain in making summative judgements.
“Interviewees explained that a lack of common national standards for non-statutory assessment had created concerns about whether their interpretations were ‘correct’ and comparable to those of other teachers.”
The lack of a common language meant that some schools now assessed pupils on entry rather than using information provided by other schools, and secondary schools found it difficult to understand and compare assessments in non-statutory subjects from different primary schools.
And while most teachers said the balance of informal and formal testing had stayed the same, in some schools there had been a shift to more formal testing due to a lack of confidence in teacher judgements.
“I would say that we now have more testing put in place with the removal of levels, if I’m perfectly honest…I think there is that additional requirement within education to have that supporting evidence really,” one primary school senior leader told the researchers.
While there are statutory assessments at the end of Reception, Year 2, Year 6, and in secondary school there are national exams such as GCSE, AS and A levels, there has been no common assessment framework for other year groups since levels were scrapped in 2014.
The researchers found a “wide variation” in the language used to describe pupils’ performance. Even when schools had brought in the same external system, they had customised it to create a different number of categories and renamed them.
The language used included pupils being “emerging”, “expected”, “developing”, “securing”, “mastering”, “met”, “exceeding”, “below standard”, “working towards”, “at standard”, “above” and “exceptional”. Some schools used colours such as “red”, “amber”, “green” or “bronze”, “silver” and “gold”, and some used alphabetical or numerical systems.
The researchers found that schools may be using similar words to describe different levels of attainment, which could be confusing.
Levels were a way of describing children’s attainment as they progressed through each subject. Each level in each subject had a set of criteria that children could be assessed against and children were expected to move up a level every two years - with level 2 being the expected level at Year 2 and level 4 the expected level at Year 6.
They were removed following criticism that children were being labelled and because the use of “best fit” to assess children against the given criteria meant that children could be at the same level without knowing the same things.
Today’s report finds that since levels were scrapped, teachers were focusing more on formative assessment for learning and felt that their school’s assessment approach was more effective than previously.
The DfE has been contacted for comment.
