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 1,2,3 & 4?)
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 5
The tools of the
trade
© Curriculum Foundation
Welcome to Unit 5 – the final unit
First things first - did you do your
homework for Unit 4?
(You surely didn’t forget it!)
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How
did to:
it go?
It was
Did you look at the learning you have planned
the focus
on the
national
for“Keep
this term
and think
of new
the learning
curriculum.
your subjectWere
or year
outcomes
thatTake
you expected?
yougroup
able
check
thatcurriculum?
skills are specified
toand
track
thesethe
to ways
the new
Had you
at theanything
beginning
of theown?
programme.
added
of your
Lookyou
at the
‘subject
content’
‘statutory
Could
then
set these
out inor
terms
of
requirement’
section andand
planskills?
some Or did
knowledge,
understanding
learning
which you can help
you
think ofexperiences
even betterbycategories?
your pupils explore this ‘content’ through
the skills.”
Please
post your ideas on the website.
© Curriculum Foundation
In this final Unit, we shall be trying to pull together all the
It was
to:we have been considering so far, and shall
various
things
be looking at the approaches being taken by four schools
in this
post-levels
era. The
thatnational
have kindly offered
“Keep
the focus
on schools
the new
theircurriculum.
case studies are:
Take your subject or year group
and check the ways that skills are specified
Turnfurlong Infant School, Aylesbury, Bucks
at the Primary,
beginning
of the programme.
Sandylands
Morecambe,
Lancs
Barrowford Primary, Nelson, Lancs
Archway
Stroud,
Gloucsor ‘statutory
LookSchool
at the(11-18),
‘subject
content’
requirement’ section and plan some
We are
not suggesting
that this
what everyone
learning
experiences
byiswhich
you canshould
help be
doing (they are all different – so you can’t do them all
yourbut
pupils
this ‘content’
through
anyway!)
offerexplore
them as examples
of different
the skills.”
approaches.
But, let’s start by pulling things together.
© Curriculum Foundation
Unit 5
This final Unit is in four parts:
Part 1:
The story so far
Part 2:
Models and approaches
Part 3:
The four schools
Part 4:
Lessons to be learned
© Curriculum Foundation
Unit 5
The tools of the
trade
Have you been following the story so far? Do
1
you remember howPart
it all began?
far
If you are notThe
sure,story
the clueso
is in
the title (it’s
in red print on the title slide of each of these
units!)
© Curriculum Foundation
The DFE States:
“As part of our reforms to the national curriculum, the current system of ‘levels’
used to report children’s attainment and progress will be removed from
September 2014 and will not be replaced.
By removing levels we will allow teachers greater flexibility in the way that they
plan and assess pupils’ learning.
The programmes of study within the new National Curriculum (NC) set out
expectations at the end of each key stage, and all maintained schools will be free
to develop a curriculum relevant to their pupils that teaches this content. The
curriculum must include an assessment system which enables schools to check
what pupils have learned and whether they are on track to meet expectations at
the end of the key stage”
© Curriculum Foundation
8
The DFE States:
“As part of our reforms to the national curriculum, the current system of ‘levels’
used to report children’s attainment and progress will be removed from
September 2014 and will not be replaced.
By removing levels we will allow teachers greater flexibility in the way that they
plan and assess pupils’ learning.
The programmes of study within the new National Curriculum (NC) set out
expectations at the end of each key stage, and all maintained schools will be free
to develop a curriculum relevant to their pupils that teaches this content. The
curriculum must include an assessment system which enables schools to check
what pupils have learned and whether they are on track to meet expectations at
the end of the key stage”
© Curriculum Foundation
9
Yes, that’s it. The Levels have gone “Removed and not replaced”!
In the earlier Units, we spent time wondering if we
should all cheer – or regret their demise. So, how
do you feel about them now that you are on the
final Unit? Are you still cheering?
But the demise of the Levels was just the start of
this whole series of considerations. What was the
‘story arc’? Who were the heroes and villains?
What is left to be resolved?
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.
Label the above as either heroes or villains.
(And explain their part in the story so far!)
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And what about these? Were they heroes or villains
– and what were they even doing here?
And what did this next object have to do with
assessment?
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The word ‘assessment’ comes from the Latin “assidere” - to sit beside (originally,
as an assistant-judge in the context of taxes). That implies that assessment is
something that we do with and for our students rather than to them.
© Curriculum Foundation
13
Of course, the first part of the ‘story arc’ following
the demise of the Levels was the DFE saying:
“All maintained schools will be free to develop a curriculum
relevant to their pupils that teaches the required content. The
curriculum must include an assessment system which enables
schools to check what pupils have learned and whether they
are on track to meet expectations at the end of the key stage”
So the Levels have gone and it up to us as schools to
develop our own assessment system – or what
Ofsted calls “a preferred approach”.
© Curriculum Foundation
In developing this “preferred approach” we first
We decided that there is little point in setting these
went back to the “Year of the Curriculum”
broad aims if we are not going to takes any steps to
curriculum design units, and remembered the
find out whether or not they have been achieved. So
breadth of the aims that we set for our pupils. (Do
this is the challenge for assessment.
you remember these?)
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Then we looked at the ‘Building
Blocks’ of a curriculum. Do you
remember what they were?
© Curriculum Foundation
16
Yes, knowledge, understanding and skills.
If you recall, each of these levels of expectation had some related
verbs that made them explicit. These are the ones that we need for
assessment.
Knowledge
State, name, label, draw, identify, describe
Skills
Carry out, perform, find, investigate, explore
Understanding
Explain, justify, analyse, give reasons for
We noted that each of these has a different implication for
assessment.
Unfortunately the new national curriculum seems to have
muddled them up, so we looked at how to untangle these in
our curriculum design and assessment planning. (We also
looked at how other countries such as Singapore have kept
them very separate, which makes curriculum design and
assessment planning much easier).
We also looked at the way in which the three ‘building blocks’
can come together.
© Curriculum Foundation
We talked about combinations of knowledge, understanding and
skills being competencies.
Do you remember the tree – with its roots (knowledge and
understanding) and leaves (application and skills)? And that the
most valuable learning took place when the two were combined?
Brian Male’s definition of competence was: “The ability to apply
learning with confidence in a range of situations”.
© Curriculum Foundation
So, the government requires us to come up
with our own “preferred approaches” to
developing “an assessment system which
enables schools to check what pupils have
learned and whether they are on track to meet
expectations at the end of the key stage.”
However, for our own professionalism, we
want to take account of the wider aims and
the deeper understandings that will most
benefit learners.
We looked at some models of how to do this.
© Curriculum Foundation
Unit 5
The tools of the
trade
There were three key models that we looked
Part 2
at.
Do youModels
rememberand
whatapproaches
they were? (You
can’t have forgotten – they were in the
previous Unit!)
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One was Bloom’s Taxonomy
© Curriculum Foundation
22
This fitted well with the tree model
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23
Then there was SOLO
SOLO level
Verbs
Uni-structural
Define, identify, name, draw, find, label,
match, follow a simple procedure
Multi-structural
Describe, list, outline, complete, continue,
combine
Relational
Sequence, classify, compare and contrast,
explain (cause and effect) analyse, form an
analogy, organise, distinguish, question,
relate, apply
Extended abstract Generalise, predict, evaluate, reflect,
hypothesise, theorise, create, prove,
justify, argue, compose, prioritise, design,
construct, perform
© Curriculum Foundation
24
AndNorman
do you remember
the third
model?
It was
Webb’s “Depth
of Knowledge”
Level 1
Recall and reproduction
Recall of a fact, information or procedure
Level 2
Application of skills and concepts
Use of information or conceptual knowledge –
two or more steps
Level 3
Strategic thinking
Requires reasoning, developing a plan or a
sequence of steps, some complexity, more than
one possible answer
Level 4
Extended thinking
Requires an investigation, time to think and
process multiple conditions of the problem.
© Curriculum Foundation
25
This also fits well with our model of the tree.
Recall
Reproduction
Application of
skills
Application of
concepts
Strategic
thinking
Extended
thinking
© Curriculum Foundation
26
This Part 2 is about ‘Models and approaches’ – so what are the
approaches we looked at?
Do you remember Mark Zelman
and the Cycle of Assessment?
Use data to
improve
learning
Establish
learning
outcomes
Collect and
analyse
assessment data
Plan learning
experience
Actual learning
experience
© Curriculum Founda
© Curriculum Foundation
on
Do you remember Professors Caroline Gipps and
Gordon Stobart – and Assessment for Learning?
And Dylan William – author of “Embedded
formative assessment”?
And Laura Greenstein of ‘Authentic Assessment?
And, finally – what is this to do with
assessment approaches?
© Curriculum Foundation
It was Anne Davies and ‘Triangulation’
Observa on
Triangula on
Product
Conversa on
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© Curriculum Founda on
As we have made our way through the
Units, we have been thinking about how
these models and approaches apply to
our own schools and circumstances.
Now here’s a chance to look at how some
other schools have approached ‘life
without levels’.
© Curriculum Foundation