Promoting Quality in Teacher
Education
A Registered Charity (No 275082)
NAHT COMMISSION ON ASSESSMENT
Submission from UCET
Introduction
1. UCET welcomes the opportunity to submit evidence to the Commission. It is an important and timely
undertaking, for there is widespread concern across the country about the effects of the current testing and
assessment regime. There are also deep concerns about the effectiveness of that regime, which has now
been in place for more than two decades; and the recent OECD report, which rated the attainments of 1624 year-olds in England as among the poorest of the 24 participating countries, makes salutary reading, for
these young people were the very age group whose whole schooling was characterised, perhaps even
dominated, by regular tests that were administered with a frequency that was probably unmatched in any
other country.
What are the purposes of assessment?
2. Assessment in education serves two broad purposes. Firstly, in what is widely known as formative
assessment, teachers and learners obtain feedback on what has been taught and learned. Such assessment
is integral to the work of the classroom: without it, teachers would be at a loss to know how best a lesson
or sequence of lessons might be continued, and learners could not know whether or not they had learned
what the teacher was seeking to teach. The research evidence demonstrates convincingly that the
effectiveness of teaching depends crucially on the quality of feedback. Such feedback can be generated in
numerous ways: through class tests, through questioning and other forms of engagement with learners,
through direct observation of, and comments on, pupils’ activities, and through the myriad ways in which
teachers and learners interact.
3. The second broad purpose of assessment, widely known as summative assessment, is to establish, at
appropriate points in the school year, or a school career, what has been learned. Unlike formative
assessment, summative assessment is not intended to provide feedback that can influence the nature and
direction of subsequent learning activities; its purpose rather is to provide a snapshot of pupil attainment
or progress at a particular stage of schooling. It is for this reason that summative assessment has become
associated with the accountability of schools and teachers to their communities, so that parents can be
assured about the progress of their children and the quality of the work of their local school, and
government and the wider public can be informed about standard of pupils’ achievement across the
country.
4. The need for governments and the public to obtain evidence on the effectiveness of schools is
understandable. The education service attracts a substantial share of public expenditure; its central
preoccupation is to maximise human capital, to strengthen the country’s economic productivity by
cultivating the skills of all its citizens, to enable all members of the community to lead richly and
personally satisfying lives; and it has an obligation to ensure that the funds invested in a major public
service devoted to these ends are being used to best effect.
5. We fully accept that, for these reasons, it is vital that schools and teachers are held to account for their
work. What matters is the nature of the evidence that is gathered about the effectiveness of schools and
teachers. It is our view, and this stance will be elaborated in response to subsequent questions, that current
arrangements to render schools and teachers accountable are deeply damaging in that they have entailed in
England a testing regime that undermines effective teacher-pupil relationships and distorts the nature of
classroom learning.
UCET
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benefits
from assessment?
6. Ideally, all stand to benefit from a rationally defensible and a professionally appropriate approach to
assessment: pupils obtain feedback that promotes their learning; teachers adduce evidence that guides their
subsequent teaching; parents are informed of their children’s educational progress; communities can
evaluate the quality of their local school; and government ministers, politicians, and the wider public have
access to evidence about educational standards in the nation’s schools.
7. But we do not inhabit an ideal world. The benefits that should accrue are not being fully enjoyed by
those we have listed as beneficiaries, mainly because of the national testing regime, whose influence is
deeply pervasive, and is in need of major overhaul. The deficiences of that regime can be readily
enumerated:
(a) It distorts the curriculum, particularly in the year in which the national tests are administered. As
OFSTED and others have reported, teachers game the system by teaching to the test, by over-rehearsal,
and by repetitious preparation that has more to do with boosting the schools’ league table position than
promoting pupils’ educational progress.
(b) It results in a narrowing of the curriculum, emphasising those subjects that are to be tested at the
expense of those subjects that have an important contribution to make to pupils’ education.
(c) It encourages what can only be described as a caricature of subject teaching, setting to one side that
wide range of psycho-social objectives and personal qualities that subjects, properly taught, have to offer,
and reducing the teacher to a reincarnation of Mr McChoakumchild, preparing pupils for the tests with
Gradgrindian relentlessness.
(d) It results in evidence about schools’ performance that is inaccurate and unfair. It is now well
established that school attainment is largely determined by a wide range of environmental factors, and that
while teachers are the most critical school factor in influencing attainment, that influence is relatively
small. Consequently, it is questionable to use school performance in national tests as a measure of the
quality of the work of a school. A fairer measure, using a value-added approach, would be to judge quality
by the extent to which a given school exceeded the expectations for pupils with characteristics that are
known to be associated with low achievement.
(e) It has had to acknowledge that, since the beginning of the current testing and assessment regime, a
stubborn tail of some 20-25% of pupils fail to reach the expected standard of Level 2 at KS2 and 5 A*-C
passes at GCSE.
(f) The evidence submitted to the Cambridge Primary Review, an authoritative investigation into primary
education, indicated that national tests “put children and teachers under intolerable pressure, undermined
children’s self-esteem, ran counter to schools’ stated commitment to a full and rounded education; and
turned the final year of primary schooling into a year of cramming and testing”.
(g) To quote Professor Harry Torrance, “successive research studies over 40+ years have indicated
that it is the vitality of teacher–student relationships and the quality of teacher–student interaction
that are the most important factors in improving student learning experiences and raising
attainment. Yet this is precisely what is threatened by an over- concentration on testing. The focus
of the teacher–student relationship is currently oriented towards criteria compliance and grade
accumulation, rather than learning. “
(h) Finally, the stress placed on national test results can lead to a misunderstanding of the quality of
current provision. If the national tests are assumed to reflect the true condition of education
provided by the schools, some might be convinced that that provision is worthy of commendation.
However, if the national tests relate to a very small sample of the total curriculum offered by
schools, it is clearly inappropriate, on the basis of test results, to draw conclusions about the quality
of the overall performance of the system.
What are the elements of good assessment practice?
8. Professor Torrance has noted that the key policy problem is that assessment will always impact on
teaching and learning; the key issue is to try to accentuate the positive impact and diminish the negative
impact as far as possible. He proposes that good assessment practice should meet the following criteria:
(a) Assessment should underpin rather than undermine learning. It should assist students in their learning.
Arguably, if this condition cannot be met, the proposed assessment is an unjustifiable imposition on
learners and a misuse of resources.
(b) Assessments should meet appropriate standards of validity and reliability: assessments should
measure what they purport to measure.
(c) We should not assume that all assessments should take the form of written tests. Tests can measure
some outcomes of an educational programme but by no means all. A wide range of diverse skills and
understandings are needed for the future. This in turn requires a wider range of assessment methods to be
deployed to identify and report a wide range of learning outcomes - practical work, coursework, oral
work, and extended project work, for example, to test practical competences and their application, rather
than simply the memorisation and regurgitation of knowledge.
9. Furthermore, assessments should not have a negative “backwash” effect on the curriculum. They
should not be afforded such high stakes and potentially have such a pronounced affect on the
reputation of teachers and schools that some of the central objectives of the curriculum are
marginalised. While we accept that the assessment system can have a positive impact on what is
taught and learned, in the sense that the assessment tasks can faithfully reflect a fair sampling of all
that a challenging curriculum offers, and can stimulate even more resourceful and enterprising
teaching, assessment can too easily retreat to what is thought to be easily assessed and measured,
leaving key aspects of the curriculum virtually un-assessed.
10. Finally, the passing years have witnessed what has been described as “the politicisation of
assessment outcomes”, enabling ministers, or their opponents, to make political capital out of test
results. Good assessment practice would require that national testing regimes are politically neutral
and transparently so.
Is a universal system of assessment necessary to measure pupil progress and attainment?
11. Clearly, there is no point in instituting a universal system for the purpose of enabling teachers in a
particular school to obtain the evidence (s)he requires to adjust teaching for the benefit of pupils. Such
decisions are bound to be classroom-based or school-based. Even at national level we question the need
for “a universal system of assessment”. Such a system is clearly required when, as with GCSE and A
level, pupils, wherever they are located, must be assessed by the same measures and their performance
judged against nation-wide criteria. Universities and employers could never cope with a system in which
these assessments varied between one part of the country and another.
12. However, when the purpose of assessment is to obtain evidence of the performance of the school
system as a whole, there is no need for a comprehensive testing of every pupil in the system. Leaving
aside the logistical difficulties of testing whole national cohorts, which has not always proved
straightforward in England, or the expense involved, proper sampling strategies should provide the
necessary evidence about the performance of the school system as a whole. Indeed, since the burden of
assessment on individual pupils would be substantially reduced in such a strategy, allowing a more
thorough examination of the skills and understandings to be assessed, and the adoption of a wider range of
assessment techniques, it is arguable that sampling would procure a much more valid assessment of
pupils’ school attainments.
What aspects of learning should be assessed and how?
13. It is a truism that whatever is taught must be assessed, for teaching cannot claim to be effective if there
is no evidence that learning has taken place. However, the question acknowledges that some curricular
activities may be less amenable to assessment than others, as is indeed the case. However, UCET
maintains that there are serious difficulties in attempting to differentiate between those aspects of the
curriculum that are to be assessed and those that are to be exempt from assessment. To invoke that
distinction is to create a two-tier curriculum, in which the non-assessed elements are regarded as of lesser
value. The activities that are customarily included in the latter category are the aesthetic subjects, together
with those that are concerned with the cultivation of personal qualities and such dispositions as being
cooperative, being curious, being inventive, being self-critical, having the capacity to negotiate, to be
tolerant, to be resilient, and much else besides. These various qualities and dispositions may be immune to
paper-and-pencil tests but they are open to assessment by skilled teachers who appreciate the importance
of these curricular aims and who have criteria according to which they evaluate their work and are
therefore in a position to report on the extent to which their pupils demonstrate those qualities that cannot
be captured by traditional forms of assessment.
What forms of assessment are appropriate for use at the following ages?
o 0-4 years (early years)
o 5-7 years (key stage 1)
o 7-11 years (key stage 2)
o 11-14 years (key stage 3)
o 14-16 years (key stage 4)
14. We do not wish to insist on which forms of assessment are appropriate for particular age ranges of
pupils and would be suspicious of any who claimed to have established a definitive relationship between
form of assessment and the age of pupils. We have sought to argue in this submission that there are certain
general principles of assessment that should apply in any educational context. We would be prepared to
concede that in the early years it would be prudent to rely on the professional assessment of teachers, who
would base their judgements on the observations made in their daily interactions with their pupils, and
who could be relied upon to make valid judgements about the educational progress of their pupils. We
would also concede that assessments at the end of Key Stage 4 should be based on performance in national
assessments such as GCSE.
15. However, between Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 3 we agree with Professor Torrance that the more
individual pupil achievement is tied to system accountability, the more accountability will dominate
the student experience and that therefore we should restrict national testing to the minimum that is
politically necessary, attend to national monitoring standards through the use of small national
samples, and re-conceptualise the integration of curriculum development and assessment by starting
from the perspective of the curriculum: that is, there is a need to put resources and support into rethinking curriculum goals for the twenty-first century and developing illustrative examples of high
quality assessment tasks that underpin and reinforce these goals, for teachers to use as appropriate.
16. Understanding and addressing key educational issues for the twenty-first century requires much
more curriculum flexibility and responsiveness and this
requires investment in teacher professional development at local level. Twenty years of increasing
central control and regulation have produced a narrow and risk-averse education culture, which is the
very antithesis of the ostensible purpose of the exercise. Producing higher test scores is not enough, for
learners or for governments. The need for better quality educational encounters and better quality
information with which to take decisions has never been more acute.
What should be the outcomes, learning, teaching and/or reporting, of an effective assessment system?
17. Professor Torrance maintains that a new approach to testing is required, one that involves the central
development of an item-bank of authentic assessment tasks encapsulating meaningful and challenging
curricular objectives, to test performance more validly and underpin high quality teaching. These could be
used by teachers to structure their own classroom work towards the end of each Key Stage and inform
their teaching more generally. Such a development would in turn require the provision of in-service
support to enable teachers to administer and mark tasks in similar fashion, organised collaboratively in
local consortia, and leading to further development of assessment criteria and local and possibly national
items, allowing teachers to both draw from and add to the national resource. Further in-service support,
again organised via local consortia, might be introduced to analyse patterns of pupil responses and
particularly common errors and misconceptions.
What quality assurance mechanisms are needed to ensure the robustness and reliability of assessment?
18. There are three features of a robust quality assurance system. Firstly, schools themselves should have a
clearly articulated policy which governs assessment practices and which is carefully monitored as part of
the schools’ evaluation of their educational effectiveness. Secondly, OFSTED should ensure that
inspections include the rigorous scrutiny of schools’ assessment arrangements and probe the evidence
generated by schools on the quality of their assessment arrangements. Thirdly, there is a need for a
national agency to evaluate the effectiveness of national assessment arrangements.
What role should assessment play in the accountability system, including formal inspection of schools?
19. As we have already made clear, assessment has a key role to play in holding schools and teachers to
account. However, we consider that national testing has such negative effects on the quality of teaching
and learning that it should be abandoned in favour of the regular and systematic sampling of attainment
levels in schools.
20. The formal inspection of schools must obviously involve the scrutiny of the academic performance of
pupils. However, we would expect that a body such as OFSTED would probe the raw scores of pupils in
national assessments, and seek to establish the impact of the school, in particular the resourcefulness and
commitment of teachers, in effecting the educational progress of pupils. OFSTED ought to be able to
distinguish between effective teaching, which generates high pupil achievement, at whatever cost, and
good teaching, which offers pupils an educational experience of high quality. Besides, OFSTED should
be able to isolate the contribution that the school, rather than social environment and family background,
makes to the education and progress of pupils.
What other areas of assessment should be considered by the Commission?
21. UCET suggests that the Commission should consider the role of teachers’ professional judgement in
the assessment system. Teachers are in a unique position to assess pupils’ achievements and their
educational progress, and it ought to be possible, given appropriate moderating arrangements and
reliability checks, to draw on this important resource.
Assessment and teacher education
22. As the standards for QTS make clear, no programme of professional preparation would be complete
without equipping beginning teachers with the skills and understandings relating to such a central aspect
of the teacher’s role as making judgements about pupils’ learning. Three aspects of this professional
preparation may be highlighted. Firstly, student teachers engage in the study of the purposes of
assessment, the different forms of assessment, the characteristics of sound assessment, including reliability
and validity, the crucial role of feedback in learning, and the role of assessment agencies in the
accountability system. Secondly, student teachers acquire the skills of assessment; they observe
assessment practices in schools; they devise assessment instruments to use with pupils; they practise the
different ways of giving and receiving feedback, including the non-verbal cues that betoken understanding
or puzzlement; they assess samples of pupils’ work, testing their judgement against that of their
supervising teacher; and they participate in moderation sessions and other discussions in which teachers
plan how their teaching needs to be modified in the light of assessment evidence.
23. Thirdly, initial teacher education programmes seek to exemplify in all their work sound and effective
assessment practices: the specification of assessment criteria; the provision of high-quality feedback; the
assessment of teaching skills through direct observation of classroom practice; and the setting of tasks and
assignments that replicate the conditions of professional life. In these and other ways the students’
experience of the programme reinforces the lessons which the programme seeks to provide, the skills and
insights it explicitly fosters, and the professional values it asserts.
Acknowledgment
UCET is extremely grateful to Professor Harry Torrance of Manchester Metropolitan University for
granting permission to draw on and to quote extensively from two of his papers: a summary of the
evidence he submitted to the Bew Report on KS2 Assessment in 2011, and his article, Using Assessment
to Drive the Reform of Schooling: Time to Stop Pursuing the Chimera? published in the British Journal of
Educational Studies, December, 2011.
Gordon Kirk,
Academic Secretary.
28 October, 2013.