Plans have been announced by Justine Greening, the Education Secretary for the DfE, for a primary assessment system that focuses on pupil progress, mastering literacy and numeracy, and scrapping excessive workload for teachers.
The new primary assessment plans aim to deliver a better foundation for measuring progress and the impact of schools.
There are a number of important announcements in the full document, which you can read here. Please see below a summary of the main announcements:
By Katie Blainey, Publishing Director
I’m delighted to be sharing news of an exciting collaboration!
Over the years, Rising Stars has become the assessment provider of choice for over 11,500 primary schools, whilst Hodder Education has been providing rigorous tests to schools for over 40 years. This term we are pleased to bring together two of the most trusted names in education to launch RS Assessment from Hodder Education, to make it even easier for you to access the support and resources you need.
Thanks to Lorraine Petersen, Independent Educational Consultant – Former Chief Executive of Nasen, for the following article.
Setting the scene
Statutory assessment plays an important role in ensuring that every child is supported to leave primary school prepared to succeed. It is crucial that every school is able to demonstrate every pupil’s personal attainment and progress not just at the end of a key stage but throughout their primary education.
Those pupils who have not completed the relevant programmes of study when they reach the appropriate age for statutory assessments do not have the knowledge and skills to achieve expected standard in the national curriculum tests. This is a diverse group including those with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), those from disadvantaged backgrounds and those with English as an additional language. Schools have to look for other ways to monitor and celebrate success and progress for this group of pupils.
On 31st August the DfE released the results of the KS2 national curriculum assessments and information about the 2017 performance tables.
2017 KS2 SATs results
This year there has been an increase in the proportion of pupils achieving both the expected standard and the higher standard in reading, writing and mathematics, compared with 2016.
The proportion of pupil’s achieving the expected standard has increased by 8 percentage points, from 53% in 2016 to 61% in 2017, and those attaining the higher standard has also increased from 5% to 9%. Continue reading →
Thanks to Cerys Hadwin-Owen, Assessment Publisher for RS Assessment for Hodder Education, for the following article.
On the face of it, training for a marathon and preparing for SATs might seem like completely different experiences. However many assessment experts have recognised the similarities between sport and assessment in the past (including Daisy Christodoulou in her latest book). Here at RS Assessment from Hodder Education, we find it really helpful when explaining to schools and teachers how our wide range of assessment resources work together, and amidst the very valid concerns around over-testing that face both primary and secondary schools in the current climate, we feel it’s an analogy worth sharing.
Thanks to Camilla Erskine for this article.
Interactive assessments are those that are completed and automatically marked on a computer or mobile device. There are various types of interactive tests, ranging from ready-made tests – either specifically for digital use or those that have been adapted from existing paper-based tests – to tailor-made tests that are created from a bank of questions. Such customised tests can be as short or long as the teacher wishes, focusing on a particular topic or style of question, or they may be designed to assess across topics that have been taught over a period of time, for example over the last half term. Some interactive tests can also be created by children themselves – it depends on the system being used. Interactive assessments are most widely used in mathematics as the subject generally lends itself well to automatic marking, but they are also available for English and other subjects as well as to assess skills (e.g. cognitive reasoning).
The scaled score conversion tables for the 2017 key stage 2 national tests have been published by the DfE.
Thanks to Deputy Head Michael Tidd for this post.
As another year draws to a close, conversations in school revolve around new classes, end-of-year reports and sports days – and of course, final assessments. For those teaching in Year 6, much of that is taken out of our hands, and the work is done by this time of the year, but not so for the other year groups. And it’s the other year groups that we’ll be taking forward into the new academic year.
We talk a lot as a profession about the doubts raised in secondary schools about Key Stage 2 data, and even in junior schools about infant data, but we tend to be a bit more circumspect about the same challenges within our schools. So how do we make sure that our end-of-year assessment data is just as valuable as a start-of-year indicator to the new teacher?
Thanks to Charles Weedon, Educational psychologist and teacher, for this post
Charley really toils with some of the things we ask her to do in the classroom. The policies about learning difficulties, the rhetoric, are often impressive….. But the reality sometimes seems more threadbare and stretched day-by-day, and the outside agencies that might be able to help us just don’t seem to be there. Despite our best efforts, Charley is going nowhere good – reading still agony, written work looks like a battlefield, and while some days she’s worryingly quiet and withdrawn, others she’s off the wall and causing mayhem.
Thanks to Joanna Keelan, Year 6 Teacher at Walton-le-Dale Primary School for the following article
I believe the new style SATs tests are challenging, which all of us in the profession knew when the new curriculum came out in 2014. Little did we know how challenging until SATs in 2016, however, the tests the children sat this year, gave all abilities in that year a chance to show their ability.
It does not stop the pressure the staff in Year 6 feel, when trying to prepare the children for these tests. We want to give them the best chance of showing a true reflection of their knowledge, and in the time scale we’ve got, for some children it is impossible. We are lucky enough in our environment, to have two strong TAs placed in year 6 full time, who take children out for interventions in more specific areas. I truly believe this makes all the difference.