The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) has published a report today calling for reforms to the system for judging England’s primary schools, in order to make it fairer on schools and better for children.
The report, Sense and Accountability: Holding our Primary Schools to account for what matters most, follows consultation with a panel of primary and assessment experts, including CEM Director, Professor Rob Coe and CEM’s Director of Policy, Katharine Bailey.
The panel were drawn together by ASCL in response to concerns about the intense focus placed on Key Stage 2 SATs results and the negative impact this has on schools and children.
Katharine Bailey emphasised: ‘My prime concern with the current system is that it encourages the profession to focus on how to ‘pass’ an inspection rather than how to improve pupil outcomes. An example of that is teachers are under pressure to create an overly–detailed and largely useless audit trail to demonstrate progress to Ofsted. What they should be doing is focussing on using assessments themselves, in the classroom, where it matters most.’
School performance tables are based largely on a single set of tests in English and maths, taken by 11-year-olds during one week in May, at the end of seven years of schooling.
With such high-stakes use of data it is unsurprising that there are negative consequences on teaching and learning, with many teachers reporting ‘teaching to the test’, narrowing of the curriculum and increased pressure and workload as a result of statutory assessment and accountability.
In a report published in April 2017, the House of Commons Education Committee said that “Many of the negative effects of assessment are in fact caused by the use of results in the accountability system rather than the assessment system itself”, and that “the stakes should be lowered at primary school in order to combat some of these negative impacts.”
The report published today contains 15 recommendations – some are aimed at government, some at Ofsted, and some are for school leaders and leadership organisations.
The proposals include:
The recommendations would involve a considerable amount of change including holding schools to account for a broader range of measures, to piloting different approaches to accountability, exploring different models in order to find out what works and what doesn’t work.
The report cites Professor Rob Coe and Gabriel Heller Sahlgren’s 2014 proposal of trialling different approaches to accountability, and states that ‘If the government is serious about implementing evidence-based policy in education, it needs to commit to properly investigating the impact of the current approach to accountability, to exploring alternative models, to trialling any proposed changes and to monitoring the system on a long term basis.’
The report brings fresh hope to those who have long argued that while the focus on progress in primary schools is good, the current system needs further scrutiny.
Katharine Bailey says that she is ‘hopeful about this report because it highlights a fundamental truth; we don’t know what system of accountability is going to be effective. The report makes some recommendations based on good evidence and that’s a great start, but it also makes clear that we need to evaluate how well any new system is doing the job and be prepared to change it.’
Read more on the CEM Blog: Assessment and accountability