Lord Bew on His Review into Ks2 Testing

This review deals with Key Stage 2 assessment and it’s become clear in recent years that there's a great deal of unhappiness among our teachers and amongst our teaching profession about the way in which that assessment has been carried out. So we’ve been looking at ways to see if we can improve the system and, at the same time, improve standards. Our whole approach is to recommend actually the providing more data in order to give a more rounded picture of a school’s performance and therefore to provide more detail on progression, to provide rolling averages – all these thinks I think provide a fairer, more balanced picture of a school’s place. There is a major change proposed in our report and that is that while the panel accepts that vocabulary, spelling, grammar, these sort of things can be tested externally. Nonetheless, as for writing composition, we do believe that is right that it be teacher assessed and that this be the lion’s share of the assessment in the writing element for Key Stage 2 tests. This involves a major renewal of trust, or commitment of trust, to our primary school teachers, but it is a very substantial change in the way that the exams are currently organised. The panel, and indeed those that we talked to, all believe in school accountability. But there are ways of doing this which are more, or less, fair. In our view, by introducing rolling averages over a three-year period, we reduce some of the arbitrary elements that can sometimes unfairly affect a school’s performance, and provide a more rounded picture of what’s going on in a school. And one of the key problems that teachers have is sudden absences of pupils at the time of the test, and we want to extend – to a week – the time available for that absence, to allow for students to take that test. One of the features of our report is to lay a much stronger emphasis on progression. We’ve made a number of suggestions of ways in which progress can be measured and we’re hoping that the consequence of doing that will again lay an emphasis on how much value-added there is in the school for individual pupils as well as the broader issue of attainment. We’ve paid a lot of attention to the whole issue – and it’s a very vexed issue – of transition between Primary and Secondary schools. We’ve argued that teacher assessment should be carried out earlier, we think for example that in the writing tests it might well be a good thing if teachers at the secondary level are involved in the moderation of that process and there is an approach in the report which is designed to bring together these two worlds; connect them in a more fruitful way for the benefit of the individual child. Well our approach essentially involves a combination of elements. We do believe that external testing, in the way that it operates, does provide a measure of protection for the most disadvantaged children. We do believe it imposes a pressure on the system which actually, potentially protects the poorest child. However, we also believe that a concern with standards need not lead to the stifling of creativity and in particular in the area of the writing test, where there is probably more criticism than there is in other areas of the testing process, if we make the change that we’re proposing towards more teacher assessment, we allow for a more creative development of the relationship between the teacher and the child in a way in which teachers themselves are asking for and which we think we ought to respond.