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i.
As a priority
over the next 12 months, the Children, Young People and Education
Committee should look into the transition from an assessment system
that focuses too heavily on accountability to one that places
pupils’ educational needs at the centre of the framework, as
recommended by Professor Donaldson. There are suggestions that it
will not be long before the Welsh Government begins the procurement
process for new standardised English and Maths assessments as part
of its overhaul of the education system. If this does happen, it is
important that the Committee review any plans that the Welsh
Government develops to replace the current national standardised
tests in English and Maths to ensure that they meet Professor
Donaldson’s objectives and avoid creating further top-down
accountability.
ii.
The success of
the new assessment framework should be judged by the Children,
Young People and Education Committee according to the following
indicators: the proliferation of low-stakes formative assessment;
the appropriate use of standardised assessment alongside other
forms of assessment; and how well teachers are able to keep their
workload under control.
Delivering the
principles of the Donaldson Review
iii.
The most
important message from Professor Graham Donaldson’s
Successful Futures report was that assessment should pivot
from a school accountability focus to delivering information that
is useful for teaching. This is a view shared by GL Assessment. It
is our belief that the purpose of all formative assessment should
be for learning and development. All future improvements to the
Welsh education system will rely heavily upon the quality,
reliability, and usability of information available to teachers
about their pupils.
iv.
Any new or
updated standardised tests in English and Maths must therefore have
genuine utility to teachers and avoid simply adding to top-down
accountability. The Committee must therefore give careful oversight
to the Welsh Government’s plans in this area, ensuring that
the data generated by any national assessments is rich and granular
enough to be of practical use for teachers trying to target
individual pupil-level interventions. Assessment models that
deliver only single subject “scores”, essentially
levelling pupils, should be avoided, as these do not provide the
wealth of diagnostic and formative information necessary to guide
good teaching. The Committee should particularly be aware that
adaptive testing, whilst highly fashionable because of its ability
to deliver a reliable score with reduced testing time, generally
does not ensure curriculum coverage and is therefore poorly suited
to identifying specific gaps which teachers need to help individual
pupils to address.
v.
Since future
improvements to the Welsh education system will be founded on the
new assessment framework, new assessments must also be
realistically deliverable in a short timescale. In particular, this
means that the Welsh Government should avoid trying to implement
complex data-management systems from the outset; initial focus
should be on ensuring teachers have the information they need for
learning and development. The Committee should also ensure that the
Welsh Government is mindful of different assessment types and how
they are used so that any new standardised assessments are
age-appropriate and are suitable for their intended
purpose.
Formative
Assessment
vi.
The
Successful Futures report identified a need for more
effective use of formative assessment in particular. The primary
purpose of assessment should be to build a greater understanding of
a pupil’s needs so that teaching can better progress their
learning. The best way to achieve this is for schools to have
in place a comprehensive and consistent programme of assessment
that builds a complete picture of child’s capabilities,
achievement and progress.
vii.
Formative
assessment can be used to identify a pupil’s underlying
ability, or potential, at the start of a programme of study. This
information can initially be used to identify specific areas with
which a pupil will struggle, allowing teachers to provide
additional support to help pupils to overcome these barriers before
they become entrenched. Our Cognitive Abilities Test (CAT4),
which includes a Welsh language version, is used by schools
throughout Wales for this purpose. CAT4 assesses a pupil’s
ability to reason with and manipulate different types of material
through a series of Verbal, Non-Verbal, Quantitative and Spatial
Ability tasks, giving teachers a comprehensive profile of a
pupil’s core learning abilities. A pupil’s underlying
potential can also be compared with their actual attainment,
allowing teachers to identify where pupils are not reaching their
potential. This information is instrumental in identifying hard to
spot pupils, those that appear to be progressing but are not in
fact reaching their potential, giving teachers the opportunity to
further explore and address the underlying causes of their
underachievement.
viii.
Formative
assessment is most useful where it provides diagnostic information
that teachers can act upon. Identifying barriers to a child’s
learning or development as early as possible provides the greatest
chance of teachers’ interventions succeeding. The New
Group Reading Test (NGRT) is a screening and monitoring test
for groups of pupils that assesses reading and comprehension
in a single assessment. It is used extensively in Wales to provide
a wealth of diagnostic information identifying the cause of any
difficulty that pupils may be experiencing in these areas. NGRT
also uses adaptive questioning which automatically generates
questions that are appropriate for a learner’s level of
ability. Teachers can use the information drawn from NGRT to design
interventions that address the specific aspects of reading and
comprehension with which individual pupils struggle.
ix.
Torfaen Local
Authority adopted the NGRT to help raise standards across its 33
schools after an inspection report stated that performance in
secondary schools was among the lowest in Wales on four of the five
main indicators set by the Welsh Government. Torfaen decided to
introduce NGRT to provide an additional, reliable and independent
benchmark to inform their judgements regarding pupil progress. The
core objectives were to support teachers’ own assessment, to
provide important diagnostic information that would help to inform
teaching, and to provide an additional means to identify children
with Additional Learning Needs.
x.
The Authority
now knows where its weaknesses lie and how they can be addressed
sooner than before. Having started the process in January 2015,
Torfaen is already seeing positive results, with an uplift of 3% in
their KS4 Level 2 (including English and Maths) results by December
2015.
Standardised
Assessment
xi.
The
Successful Futures report highlighted the importance of
nationally benchmarked, standardised tests as part of a wider
assessment programme. The Children, Young People and Education
Committee should ensure that these assessments are being used
appropriately throughout the Welsh education system. Standardised
assessments provide an objective, reliable way of tracking pupil
progress. However it is important that these tests are used
sparingly and with a clear understanding of how to use the
resulting data.
xii.
Standardised
assessments are particularly useful in that they place pupils in
the context of other pupils of exactly the same age nationally.
This means that they can highlight school-wide issues, which can
often be difficult to pick up because teachers assess their pupils
with reference to other pupils in their own school; if all pupils
have the same difficulty, a problem will not necessarily stand out.
A nationally-benchmarked assessment brings these issues to the fore
because pupils are being compared on a much larger
scale.
xiii.
Year-on-year
tests guarantee a level of consistency over and above that which
can be offered by teacher observation alone. This is vital for
preserving an accurate, reliable picture of pupil progress as they
move between teachers, year groups or even schools. Having reliable
data means that teachers can track the impact of their
interventions to ensure that they are achieving maximum
benefit.
xiv.
Judicious use
of standardised assessment can support more accurate teacher
judgements. In 2014, Torfaen local authority noticed that there was
a large discrepancy between teacher assessment projections, which
placed Torfaen first in the country, and actual results, which
placed Torfaen LA 16th and of 22 local authorities.
Since implementing NGRT, Torfaen’s projections and teacher
assessments have become much more realistic.
xv.
Sharon Davies,
Head of Learning at Torfaen LA, explains: “We believe that of
our schools should have hard evidence on which to base their
target-setting. We need to have a robust benchmark and we need to
be outcome driven. How can you monitor progress effectively if you
don’t have a clear starting point? This is what NGRT gives
us. It’s a highly valuable check and
balance.”
Using smart
data to minimise teacher workload
xvi.
It is
important that, as Welsh teachers transition to a new assessment
system, that this does not increase teacher workload. Good quality,
‘smart’ data is crucial to a self-improving education
system, but it is essential that this data enhances teaching and is
never a burden.
xvii.
The most
fundamental way to guard against increasing workload is to ensure
that all assessment data is generated for a purpose. Teachers
should therefore be mindful of the purpose of every assessment that
they undertake and the way that the generated data will be used to
inform their teaching. Good quality teacher training and
professional development is central to building this
understanding.
xviii.
Secondly,
teachers should only assess as often as necessary. A guiding
principle of assessment should be to “assess once, use the
data often.” Assessment data is only as good as the use it is
put to, and it is essential that teachers only use assessments when
they deliver a demonstrable benefit.
xix.
Finally, where
possible and where appropriate, teachers should make use of digital
assessments. Assessments that provide automatic marking and
reporting can vastly simplify the task of assessment for
teachers, ensuring that their focus is on
how the data is used, rather than how it is collected, collated and
managed.
Example of
Best Practice
xx.
Porth County
Community School is an 11-18 Local Authority maintained school at
the heart of the Rhondda Valley. Just under 27% of pupils are
eligible for free school meals, well above the Welsh national
average of 17.4%. Around 45% of pupils live in the 20% most
deprived areas in Wales. Richard Jenkins, Deputy Headteacher,
explains the challenges that this poses the school:
xxi.
“We
often have children entering the school with literacy and numeracy
at below the expected level for their age. Typically, about 40% of
our intake is up to two years behind where they might be expected
to be. We do work with our feeder schools in our cluster, and that
is getting better all the time, but our focus on Key Stage 2 to 3
transition is to work very hard to get our children and their
families to feel very positive about joining the
school.”
xxii.
To
achieve this goal, Porth uses GL Assessment’s Complete
Digital Solution (CDS) package alongside the National Reading
and Numeracy Tests and teacher-led assessment to gain a whole pupil
view. CDS incorporates seven digital assessments, including
Cognitive Abilities Test: Fourth Edition (CAT4), the New
Group Reading Test (NGRT) and the Pupil Attitudes to Self
and School (PASS) survey, which together provide critical
insight across ability, attainment and attitude. The school uses
the data drawn from these sources to create a banding system in
Year 7, allowing the teachers to target a great deal of their
intervention work on the lower ability classes. The school
particularly aims to improve pupil confidence and
competency.
xxiii.
Because of the
school’s diligence in measuring progress over time and the
quick turnaround of results from digital assessments, Porth is able
to quickly and efficiently evaluate the success of its
interventions. This means that failing interventions can be
adjusted early without wasting weeks trying to establish if they
are having the desired effect. Richard comments:
xxiv.
“We are
much better equipped to understand our children very well now that
we have this strategy. We are much more confident that we are
targeting interventions properly and we are tighter in monitoring
that we are on course to hit targets. This gives us much more
confidence that these interventions in Key Stage 3 will have an
impact on the performance of these children in Key Stage
4.”
Conclusion
i.
As the Welsh
education system continues to adopt and integrate the
recommendations of Professor Graham Donaldson’s Successful
Futures report, it is essential that the Children, Young People
and Education system monitor the success of these changes,
particularly as they pertain to assessment.
ii.
The most
important change is the shift of emphasis from assessment for
accountability to assessment that focuses on pupil’s learning
and development. For this transition to be successful, schools
should make better use of formative assessment to build a more
complete picture of a child’s ability and evaluate their
pupils in a wider context through the use of standardised
assessment. Throughout the whole transition, schools should be wary
of an adverse impact on teacher workload and guard against the
generation of spurious data.
iii.
When the Welsh
Government publishes further details on the specifics of the new
assessment framework, the Committee should closely review those
plans to ensure that they are deliverable and meet the expectations
set out in Professor Donaldson’s Successful Futures
report. The availability to teachers of reliable, objective
information on their pupils will be the foundation of a stronger
Welsh education system and it is essential that any new assessments
support and encourage better teaching, rather than recreating a
top-down accountability system.
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