Although everyone agrees high quality teaching and high quality formative assessment practice go hand-in-hand, assessment has been through some troubled waters recently, especially in primary settings. Policy changes and efforts to drive a national school improvement agenda led to confusion, frustration and even open rebellion by a few teachers and parents when it came to Sats day.

But it’s worth stepping back a little from the foam and froth to view the calmer waters beyond and think a little more proactively about how schools and individual teachers routinely assess children.

Read the DfE’s guidance to schools on the interim teacher assessment framework at the end of key stage 2 and you will find these key and unequivocal statements. The italics are all mine.

• This statutory interim framework is to be used only to make a teacher assessment judgement at the end of the key stage following the completion of the key stage 2 curriculum. It is not intended to be used to track progress throughout the key stage.
• This interim framework is not intended to guide individual programmes of study, classroom practice or methodology.
• Individual pieces of work should be assessed according to a school’s assessment policy and not against this interim framework.

Open invitation to take control 

What I see when I read this, is an open invitation to schools and individual teachers to take full control of the assessment process. Instead of being at the mercy of outside agencies intent on scrutinising them for their own accountability agendas, schools are free to use their own assessment policies and need only resort to the framework at the end of the key stage. I wonder how many have appreciated or seized on this as an opportunity?

Having worked extensively in that no-man’s land between schools and those central government agencies and individuals monitoring them, where data so often becomes a conveniently flexible stick and not a rigid, or delicious carrot, I am in no doubt that everyone involved would benefit from schools confident enough to do this. Any credible accountability discussion should begin with an individual school’s, or multi-academy trust’s coherent assessment practice.

How much healthier for staff and for children, where a school or MAT is able to say with complete confidence, this is how we do it here. Research is increasingly being used to show how important local context is in terms of school performance. There is no guarantee whatsoever that a head teacher who does well in one specific type of school or locality, will achieve similar results in a totally different location and school, for example.

There is no shortage of fashionable, guru-type advice out there about good formative assessment: usually from theyou’re-doing-it-all-wrong school of CPD.  But it’s worth reminding ourselves that by its very nature, and in practice, formative assessment is a constant process wholly in the hands of one teacher. It’s about you and the way you gauge what children have learned from you, and how well they are progressing. What you need from your employer and its leadership is a clear assessment policy and guidelines that explain the school or MAT’s ethos regarding assessment, and which demonstrate they only exist to enhance learning.

The most easily understood example of this is: how do you communicate any assessment you make to the children you teach in such a way that they progress? Inside that policy and those guidelines, you should be free to teach your subject, subjects, age groups or specialism in the best ways you know how.

Feedback is a crucial and a routine part of the job

In my experience that crucial and routine part of the job, telling pupils how well they’ve done in such a way that they understand and can improve, is often hurried, sometimes not based on anything agreed between you and them, and at worst, it’s ad lib. Visiting schools in Finland and Sweden some years ago with a small group from the UK, I remember very clearly one particular, sixth form classroom. It was an English teacher’s room and she had a large group, around 25 students. I watched her hand out the latest essays she had marked and around half a dozen students generously let me look over their papers.

Every essay I looked at had at least one sheet of A4 paper in red, handwritten notes from the teacher, some two or even three. A representative from the DfE, also on the trip, looked over my shoulder at the essay in my hand. “Red ink!” he sneered, dismissively as he walked away to look at the furniture. Judging by a quick head count, I worked out the teacher had taken around eight and a half hours to assess that single assignment. The man from the department didn’t seem to appreciate this. The students however, did.  

Teachers are the professional assessors. It’s one of the most routine aspects of their job, any step that helps a whole school do this job objectively, consistently and to high professional standards has to be worth taking. 

Joe Nutt is an educational consultant and author

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