The Year of the Curriculum:
Life Without Levels
The programme consists of a Bridging Unit and five further units:
(Have you completed the Bridging Unit and Units 1 & 2?)
Bridging Unit
What is the
new
Coming to terms
National The
Curriculum
Measuring
Making usewith the new
new
National
what we
value
of
assessment
National
Curriculum
asking for?
© Curriculum Foundation
Curriculum
in context
The tools
of the
trade
The Year of the Curriculum:
Life Without Levels
Unit 3
What is the new
national
curriculum
asking for?
© Curriculum Foundation
Welcome to Unit 3
First things first - did you do your
homework for Unit 2?
(Do you even remember what it was?)
© Curriculum Foundation
It was to:
So, did you do that? How did it go?
“Keep the focus on the new national
curriculum. Take your subject or year group
Were
youthe
able
tothat
devise
and check
ways
skillslearning
are specified
experiences
which
your pupils
at the beginning
of thehelped
programme.
explore the ‘content’ through the
Look
at the ‘subject content’ or ‘statutory
skills?
requirement’ section and plan some
learning experiences by which you can help
Please post your ideas online.
your pupils explore this ‘content’ through
the skills.”
© Curriculum Foundation
Unit 3
This Unit is in three parts:
Part 1: What do we want from assessment?
Part 2: What do we want our pupils to do with their
learning?
Part 3: Assessing a rounded curriculum
© Curriculum Foundation
Unit 3
What is the
new national
curriculum
asking for?
Part 1
Not in the gangster sense of “He was asking for it!”, but in the
sense of, “What sort of learning is being asked for?” We need
to be sure of this before we know what sort of assessment is
needed.
What do we want from assessment?
As we saw in Unit 1, the Levels in the old curriculum were
intended to provide a structure for curriculum design and to
(And what
is within
the new
curriculum
asking
promote
progress
a context
– but became
ends in for?
themselves. ‘Making two Levels progress’ became detached
from the actual learning it represented.
© Curriculum Foundation
)
It is also worth remembering that when the old national
curriculum was introduced in 1989, there were expectations about
what Level would be achieved at different ages – but governments
soon started to ratchet these up.
Right up until 2014, the national curriculum stated that “the great
majority” of pupils were expected to attain Level 2 at age 7, Level
4 at age 11 and Level 5/6 at age 14.
So how many is “the great majority”? 70%? 75%? 80%? (If a
government achieved a majority like that, they’d be rather
pleased!)
© Curriculum Foundation
The expected Levels of attainment were even
expressed as a range. When did Ofsted or the
government last acknowledge the likelihood of a
range?
© Curriculum Foundation
Somehow, the benchmarks for the
‘great majority’ became the
expectation for all. How did we let
that happen?
© Curriculum Foundation
The same thing happened to GCSEs. Do you know
why there is such a focus on Grades A-C? (Back in
history again!)
When GCSEs were introduced in the 1970s, they
combined the old ‘O’levels and CSEs. The former were
taken mainly by Grammar Schools, the latter by
Secondary Moderns. In the new system, Grades A-C
were deemed the equivalent of an ‘O’level pass.
But only about 20% of the population took ‘O’levels in
the old system. The rest took CSEs.
© Curriculum Foundation
And again, an expectation of 20%
became 80%+
How did that happen?
© Curriculum Foundation
There is, of course, always a danger in pointing these
things out.
Some people will say that we don’t care about high
standards, or whether everyone succeeds. So let’s
make it clear: We are all in favour of high standards,
and we all want everyone to succeed.
What we are pointing to is the great success of the
British education system. We need to remember this
when some people try to paint SAT and GCSE results as
some sort of failure!
© Curriculum Foundation
Whilst we are on the subject of the great success of the
British education system, you will remember Andreas
Schleicher of PISA.
Our rankings in PISA are often seen as evidence of poor
performance – and were put forward by Michael Gove as a
reason for revising the curriculum. But we need to to look at
the details of the PISA reports.
© Curriculum Foundation
The reports compare national performance against a
range of factors. One of these is the gap between the
richest and poorest people in a country. Where the
gap is widest – so is the gap between the highest and
lowest attainers. Where the wealth gap is least, so is
the attainment gap.
Britain has one of the widest wealth gaps in the world
– but its educational attainment gap is much narrower
than would be expected.
Therefore, PISA finds that Britain does better than any
other country in bridging the wealth gap.
© Curriculum Foundation
If you extrapolate the figures, you find that if our wealth
gap were the same as Finland’s– then our attainment
would be the highest in the world.
So what needs to be changed to improve our PISA
rankings? The curriculum??
© Curriculum Foundation
So, how did we end up in a situation where our
great successes in SATs, in GCSEs and in PISA
tests are somehow seen as evidence of some
sort of poor performance?
How did it happen?
And what do we have to do to make sure it does
not happen again with this new curriculum?
© Curriculum Foundation
Although they are not, strictly speaking, a part of the new
Which
brings
us tothey
thehave
proposed
Baseline for
Tests
national
curriculum,
significant implications
assessment across all thefor
yearEYFS
groups so we all need to know
about them.
Of course we
already have the
EYFS Profile.
So what’s the issue
with the proposed
Tests?
© Curriculum Foundation
Firstly, the present EYFS Profile is pretty much
what is says on the cover – a “profile”. The
proposed test is something much narrower.
Do you remember Kaplan and Norton
from Unit 5 of the Curriculum Design
course? They suggested the idea of a
“balanced scorecard” that moved away
from a “uni-dimensional” approach.
© Curriculum Foundation
The present Handbook points out that:
“A completed EYFS Profile consists of 20 items of information: the
attainment of each child assessed in relation to the 17 ELG
descriptors, together with a short narrative describing the child’s
three characteristics of effective learning.”
So we are looking here at a
rounded picture that takes
account of of the actual
curriculum ELGs that have
been set.
© Curriculum Foundation
The present Handbook also points out that:
“Assessments will be based primarily on observation of daily
activities and events. Practitioners should note in particular the
learning which a child demonstrates spontaneously, independently
and consistently in a range of contexts.“
Does that remind you of the
“authentic
assessment”
we wereand
“Spontaneously,
independently
discussing
inin
Unit
2? of contexts”
consistently
range
sounds pretty authentic, doesn’t it?
(Do you remember Prof Greenstein?)
© Curriculum Foundation
The present Handbook goes on to say that:
“Accurate assessment will take account of a range of
perspectives including those of the child, parents and
other adults who have significant interactions with the
child.”
Of course, the “parents and other
– what’s
not to like?
adultsSo
who
have significant
interactions with the child” are very
(And
government
want
muchwhy
partwould
of thethe
“authentic
setting”
–
to
baseline?)
andintroduce
also giveaanew
wider
perspective.
© Curriculum Foundation
To understand this, we need to look at the intended
purpose.
The purpose of the present Profile is to “support future
curriculum planning and… provide the year 1 teacher with
important information about each child’s approach to learning.”
But in the new baseline, the government states:
“The purpose of the reception baseline is to support the accountability
framework and help assess school effectiveness by providing a score
for each child at the start of reception… and which will be used as the
basis for an accountability measure of the relative progress of a cohort
of children through primary school.”
© Curriculum Foundation
• Of 1,063
responses
to thefor
DfE’sisquestion,
in its for
July “consultation”
as
What
is being
looked
a baseline
a quantitative
to whether the principles of that paper were right, 57 per cent said
measure
of progress.
no, with only 18 per cent in favour. Yet the thrust of the proposals are
unchanged.
But the real question here is whether anything can do
• Some 51 per cent replied that there should not be a baseline check at
this
validly and reliably at such a young age – especially
the start of reception, against 34 per cent in favour, with the detailed
with
a single
score
on anotsingle
scale. Yet it is happening.
concerns
of expert
groups
even mentioned.
• Similarly, 73 per cent of consultees were against allowing schools to
And
where some children taking the test will be a year
choose from commercially available baseline assessments, compared
older
others
– which
of their lifetime!
to 12than
per cent
in favour.
Again, is
it is20%
happening.
• And 68 per cent said that if the baseline assessments were to happen,
The
government consulted on these procedures …..
they should not be made optional, against 19 per cent who said they
should. They are being made optional.
© Curriculum Foundation
You may remember the Cambridge Review from
Design Unit 5. It said:
‘Notions of fixed ability would
be exacerbated by a baseline
test in reception that claimed
to reliably predict future
attainment.
This could lead schools being
unambitious in relation to
children with low baseline
assessment scores.’
© Curriculum Foundation
The other key issue is the nature of the proposed tests themselves.
They
vary from the
‘Early Excellence’
that is play based
and
The government
is proposing
a modeloption
of six commercially
produced
carried
outwhich
over time
during
(authentic!) using
tests from
schools
willnormal
choose activities
one.
Leuven Scales to booklet-based procedures with minimal practical
resources,
toare
a 30very
minute
digital
So, some very
different
The six tests
different
in procedure.
nature and approach,
which
makes
approaches
tocomparability
choose from. real issues.
reliability and
© Curriculum Foundation
But most of them involve procedures that are different
The danger is that some schools might choose the easiest
from the usual practical activities in which young children
approach rather than the most valid.
engage. This is contrary to the present DFE advice.
The present Handbook recommends that:
“Assessment should not entail prolonged breaks from
interaction with children, nor require excessive paperwork.
Paperwork should be limited to that which is absolutely
necessary to promote children’s successful learning and
development”
© Curriculum Foundation
To sum up …..
© Curriculum Foundation
For most British schools over the
last twenty five years, assessment
has been a matter of determining
what ‘level’ a pupil has attained in
terms of the National Curriculum
‘Level Descriptions’.
We have been giving little thought
to expectations beyond these.
© Curriculum Foundation
In many cases, assessment
became a matter not just of
ascertaining what level a
pupil had attained (which, as
we know, is hard enough
anyway), but of predicting
what level they will attain in
some future test or
examination.
© Curriculum Foundation
The national
curriculum in
England
To avoid all this happening again with
the new curriculum, we must ensure
that we:
Key stages 1 and 2 framework document
September 2013
The national
curriculum in
England
• Use assessment for its intended
purpose - to guide learning
• Take account of our wider
aspirations for our pupils
• Take a wide range of evidence into
consideration –and not rely on tests
Key stages 3 and 4 framework document
December 2014
And this includes the Reception
Baseline!
© Curriculum Foundation