Summative assessment

National curriculum assessment has undergone considerable change for the new framework. The National Curriculum review expert panel recommended that:

Attainment Targets in the presently established level descriptor form should not be retained.³⁰

Responding to their report in June 2012, Michael Gove confirmed that:

In order to ensure that every child is expected to master this content, I have ... decided that the current system of levels and level descriptors should be removed and not replaced.³¹

So the attainment targets in all National Curriculum subjects merely state:

By the end of each Key Stage, pupils are expected to know, apply and understand the matters, skills and processes specified in the relevant programme of study.³²

This establishes a direct link between the contents of the programme of study and its assessment.
Subsequent DfE guidance has made clear that:

Schools will be able to introduce their own approaches to formative assessment, to support pupil attainment and progression. The assessment framework should be built into the school curriculum, so that schools can check what pupils have learned and whether they are on track to meet expectations at the end of the Key Stage, and so that they can report regularly to parents.³³

Perhaps the most obvious way to address this is to adopt an entirely criteria-based approach to assessment, with teachers forming a judgement as to whether each child has learned all the content of the programme of study by the end of the Key Stage.

The evidence to support this judgement can be assembled over the course of the Key Stage and need not be an onerous burden: as a child demonstrates their mastery of part of the curriculum the statement could be ‘ticked off’, with evidence of this achievement forming part of the child’s Computing portfolio or blog. It’s likely that many pupils will assemble a lot of evidence for some statements and less for others, but some evidence of mastering each element should suffice to demonstrate meeting the expectations of the attainment targets.

Moreover, as a pupil’s profile of achievement is built up, the statements yet to be achieved should provide a clear guide for planning, showing exactly where the ‘gaps’ are in each pupil’s knowledge, skills and understanding, and thus where subsequent teaching should be targeted.

Comparing individual profiles, and the evidence on which they’re based, at the beginning and end of the year, should provide ample evidence of progress, of a far more meaningful nature than ‘two sub-levels’, specifying exactly what has been learned that year that wasn’t already known.

For this to work effectively, it might be sensible to break down the programme of study statements into their constituent clauses. As pupils achieve individual clauses, or perhaps as they achieve all the components of a statement from the programme of study, their achievement could be recognised through some form of badge. Mozilla’s OpenBadges system³⁴ provides one possible solution.

While the DfE and others make a strong case for the abolition of attainment levels, their use is ingrained in many teachers’ professional practice, as well as in the systems schools have in place to monitor pupils’ progress. Nothing in the DfE’s guidance prevents schools from continuing to use levels to monitor progress, and it seems likely that some schools will choose to do so, at least for the short to medium term.

In developing its computer science curriculum, Computing at School produced a set of level descriptors³⁵ for computer science, which might be used, perhaps with a little modification, alongside some statements from the old ICT attainment targets³⁶ to report progression on the computer science (CS), information technology

(IT) and digital literacy (DL) components of the programme of study.

Alternatively, bearing in mind the emphasis on a direct link between what’s taught and what’s assessed, it’s possible to take the statements from the programme of study and arrange them into some sort of order, from easier to harder statements. A somewhat arbitrary numbering might suggest a structure similar to the levels of the old attainment targets. For example, see the table on the next page. Note that this table is meant for illustration only, without any implication that these stages equate to old levels.

Another approach to levelling, although perhaps not in the spirit of the DfE’s guidance, is to look at the nature of activities and the capabilities demonstrated by pupils separated from the subject content itself, perhaps using Bloom’s revised taxonomy, or something similar, as a guide.

• Remembering
• Understanding
• Applying
• Analysing
• Evaluating
• Creating