What will assessment look like with the new UK national Curriculum?

When I went through teacher training the UK national curriculum was still very much in its infancy.  At the end of each year and key stage parents would receive a report with a level on it.  The levels would run from 1 through to 8 with students expected to achieve increasing levels as they progress through the school system.  With schools taking full control over assessment, how will UK education change in the next 5 years?

The establishment of any meaningful educational scale takes a generation to get bedded into the British psyche.  I was one of the first cohorts to go through the GCSE examinations as a student.  These were still called O levels for about 5 years after I left school by many people, even amongst my peers.  The GNVQ had been around for over 15 years before people started taking it seriously. In the bedding in period for a metric there is little recognition for the system.  The national curriculum levels had just enough time to be recognised before they were placed delicately on the scrap heap.

The National Curriculum levels had to go.  It was not really a problem that they were confusing to parents. These can be explained relatively easily.  It's probably not really important that they didn't really mean that much to the students either.  The extra stress in students for the SATs exam won't really have done much harm.  If anything that taught half a generation the need to cope with stress. The problem was more the narrowing of the curriculum, teachers really did teach to the test for a number of reasons.  The second problem was that the levels were coming to the maturity where they may have been considered useful information to universities and employers.  Imagine being able to determine that a student had been considered a low achiever in year 9, but had happened on some good GCSE marks, would they still look like such a good hire? The most important problem was that they provided the wrong sort of information.  In terms of measuring students they were disastrous.  Only those in the top brackets were essentially still in the competition.  I have nothing against competition per se, but there comes a time when it is fun and productive, and the SATs did not even approach that closely.

Beyond why they had to go, the more important question is what will replace them?  I have worked for the past 6 years in the Queensland education system.  Borrowing from this system there are a number of points I would like to offer.  

Grades tell us very little about what students need to do to improve,

Firstly what information do students need?  If a student is told that they are halfway down the list of performance the common response is to give up.  Knowing that they have the ability to write an sentence is a motivator.  It is important to focus on the positive, as students need to feel they are making progress, and that they are being recognised as making progress.  Students need a focus.  It is useful to know that I need to work on rearranging formulae.  It is not useful to be told that my maths assignment was rubbish. Or at least without telling me why.  

Students, and parents often want to compare themselves with others.  This is rarely a useful thing.  When I was at school we always had a part of the report that stated our position in the class.  Being placed 30/30 in art didn't make me want to try in art.  Being placed 1/30 and 2/30 in science and maths made me focus.  I might have tried harder in art if I felt more valued, I wouldn't have been less capable in Maths and Science without that information.  The 5 point scale system in Queensland offers the same problem, students who receive C's feel content to bumble along.  

The five point scale offers other problems.  Teachers who award D's often get uncomfortable questions.  Teachers who award C's for the same student do not get those questions.  Students who appear every week in the principals office receive good behaviour marks because the teacher wants to avoid professional questions.  Such students then get to bully teachers imperviously. The five point scale is too far removed from the work produced by the student that it is seen as an almost completely subjective award.  

What could be done then?  There are a number of key skills which students should learn by the time they start their GCSEs.  Not necessarily the content taught in each subject, but the skills needed to succeed in each subject.  For example in mathematics the ability to use a formula is a key skill.  This could be broken up into levels of complexity, and situations.  It is easier to use a single step formula, such as Newton's first law, than a complex formula such as the quadratic roots rule.  It is also easier to use Newton's first law in the question you did from the text book last week to use the same rule in determining the braking distance of a fully loaded truck.  

Queensland identifies a number of common skills which it calls common curriculum elements. http://www.qsa.qld.edu.au/downloads/senior/qcs_elements.pdf.  

These skills run through a number of topics, and can be associated with a range of complexities, and contexts. Assessment tasks could be aimed at assessing these core competences within each subject, and reporting developed which uses a similar skill list as a baseline for conversation.  This needs to be done in a way which extends and challenges students, but also informs them and their teachers and parents of their development needs. 

If we are to increase the proportion of students who have access to their educational goals then we need to cease discouraging them.  If we told every child who wasn't potty trained at 1 that they were not as good as their cousin, then the streets could smell a lot worse.  We need to let go of comparative judgements, we need to recognise achievement in our students, communicate that achievement without comparison to others, and point them forwards.  Only then might we stand a chance of getting the best for every student.