The Year of the Curriculum : Life Without Levels The programme consists of a Bridging Unit and five further units: (Have you completed the Bridging Unit and Units 1 & 2?) Bridging Unit Coming to terms with the new National Curriculum Bridging Unit Coming to terms with the new National Curriculum Measuring what we value Making use of assessment What is the new National Curriculum asking for? The new National Curriculum in context The tools of the trade © Curriculum Foundation

The Year of the Curriculum: Life Without Levels Unit 3 What is the new national curriculum asking for? © Curriculum Foundation

Welcome to Unit 3 First things first - did you do your homework for Unit 2? (Do you even remember what it was?)

© Curriculum Foundation It was to: “Keep the focus on the new national curriculum. Take your subject or year group and check the ways that skills are specified at the beginning of the programme. Look at the ‘subject content’ or ‘statutory requirement’ section and plan some learning experiences by which you can help your pupils explore this ‘content’ through the skills.” So, did you do that? How did it go? Were you able to devise learning experiences which helped your pupils explore the ‘content’ through the skills? Please post your ideas online.

© Curriculum Foundation Unit 3 This Unit is in three parts: Part 1: What do we want from assessment? Part 2: What do we want our pupils to do with their learning? Part 3: Assessing a rounded curriculum

Unit 3 What is the new national curriculum asking for? Not in the gangster sense of “He was asking for it!”, but in the sense of, “What sort of learning is being asked for?” We need to be sure of this before we know what sort of assessment is needed. As we saw in Unit 1, the Levels in the old curriculum were intended to provide a structure for curriculum design and to promote progress within a context – but became ends in themselves. ‘Making two Levels progress’ became detached from the actual learning it represented. © Curriculum Foundation Part 1 What do we want from assessment? (And what is the new curriculum asking for? )

© Curriculum Foundation It is also worth remembering that when the old national curriculum was introduced in 1989, there were expectations about what Level would be achieved at different ages – but governments soon started to ratchet these up. Right up until 2014, the national curriculum stated that “the great majority” of pupils were expected to attain Level 2 at age 7, Level 4 at age 11 and Level 5/6 at age 14. So how many is “the great majority”? 70%? 75%? 80%? (If a government achieved a majority like that, they’d be rather pleased!)

© Curriculum Foundation The expected Levels of attainment were even expressed as a range. When did Ofsted or the government last acknowledge the likelihood of a range?

© Curriculum Foundation Somehow, the benchmarks for the ‘great majority’ became the expectation for all. How did we let that happen?

© Curriculum Foundation The same thing happened to GCSEs. Do you know why there is such a focus on Grades A-C? (Back in history again!) When GCSEs were introduced in the 1970s, they combined the old ‘O’levels and CSEs. The former were taken mainly by Grammar Schools, the latter by Secondary Moderns. In the new system, Grades A-C were deemed the equivalent of an ‘O’level pass. But only about 20% of the population took ‘O’levels in the old system. The rest took CSEs.

© Curriculum Foundation And again, an expectation of 20% became 80%+ How did that happen?

© Curriculum Foundation There is, of course, always a danger in pointing these things out. Some people will say that we don’t care about high standards, or whether everyone succeeds. So let’s make it clear: We are all in favour of high standards, and we all want everyone to succeed. What we are pointing to is the great success of the British education system. We need to remember this when some people try to paint SAT and GCSE results as some sort of failure!

© Curriculum Foundation Whilst we are on the subject of the great success of the British education system, you will remember Andreas Schleicher of PISA. Our rankings in PISA are often seen as evidence of poor performance – and were put forward by Michael Gove as a reason for revising the curriculum. But we need to to look at the details of the PISA reports.

© Curriculum Foundation The reports compare national performance against a range of factors. One of these is the gap between the richest and poorest people in a country. Where the gap is widest – so is the gap between the highest and lowest attainers. Where the wealth gap is least, so is the attainment gap. Britain has one of the widest wealth gaps in the world – but its educational attainment gap is much narrower than would be expected. Therefore, PISA finds that Britain does better than any other country in bridging the wealth gap.

© Curriculum Foundation If you extrapolate the figures, you find that if our wealth gap were the same as Finland’s– then our attainment would be the highest in the world. So what needs to be changed to improve our PISA rankings? The curriculum??

© Curriculum Foundation So, how did we end up in a situation where our great successes in SATs, in GCSEs and in PISA tests are somehow seen as evidence of some sort of poor performance? How did it happen? And what do we have to do to make sure it does not happen again with this new curriculum?

© Curriculum Foundation Which brings us to the proposed Baseline Tests for EYFS Of course we already have the EYFS Profile. So what’s the issue with the proposed Tests? Although they are not, strictly speaking, a part of the new national curriculum, they have significant implications for assessment across all the year groups so we all need to know about them.

© Curriculum Foundation Firstly, the present EYFS Profile is pretty much what is says on the cover – a “profile”. The proposed test is something much narrower. Do you remember Kaplan and Norton from Unit 5 of the Curriculum Design course? They suggested the idea of a “balanced scorecard” that moved away from a “uni-dimensional” approach.

© Curriculum Foundation The present Handbook points out that: “A completed EYFS Profile consists of 20 items of information: the attainment of each child assessed in relation to the 17 ELG descriptors, together with a short narrative describing the child’s three characteristics of effective learning.” So we are looking here at a rounded picture that takes account of of the actual curriculum ELGs that have been set.

© Curriculum Foundation The present Handbook also points out that: “Assessments will be based primarily on observation of daily activities and events. Practitioners should note in particular the learning which a child demonstrates spontaneously, independently and consistently in a range of contexts.“ Does that remind you of the “authentic assessment” we were discussing in Unit 2? (Do you remember Prof Greenstein?) “Spontaneously, independently and consistently in range of contexts” sounds pretty authentic, doesn’t it?

© Curriculum Foundation The present Handbook goes on to say that: “Accurate assessment will take account of a range of perspectives including those of the child, parents and other adults who have significant interactions with the child.” Of course, the “parents and other adults who have significant interactions with the child” are very much part of the “authentic setting” – and also give a wider perspective. So – what’s not to like? (And why would the government want to introduce a new baseline?)

© Curriculum Foundation To understand this, we need to look at the intended purpose. The purpose of the present Profile is to “support future curriculum planning and… provide the year 1 teacher with important information about each child’s approach to learning.” But in the new baseline, the government states: “The purpose of the reception baseline is to support the accountability framework and help assess school effectiveness by providing a score for each child at the start of reception… and which will be used as the basis for an accountability measure of the relative progress of a cohort of children through primary school.”

© Curriculum Foundation What is being looked for is a baseline for a quantitative measure of progress. But the real question here is whether anything can do this validly and reliably at such a young age – especially with a single score on a single scale. And where some children taking the test will be a year older than others – which is 20% of their lifetime! The government consulted on these procedures ….. Of 1,063 responses to the DfE’s question, in its July “consultation” as to whether the principles of that paper were right, 57 per cent said no, with only 18 per cent in favour. Yet the thrust of the proposals are unchanged. Some 51 per cent replied that there should not be a baseline check at the start of reception, against 34 per cent in favour, with the detailed concerns of expert groups not even mentioned. Yet it is happening. Similarly, 73 per cent of consultees were against allowing schools to choose from commercially available baseline assessments, compared to 12 per cent in favour. Again, it is happening. And 68 per cent said that if the baseline assessments were to happen, they should not be made optional, against 19 per cent who said they should. They are being made optional.

© Curriculum Foundation You may remember the Cambridge Review from Design Unit 5. It said: ‘Notions of fixed ability would be exacerbated by a baseline test in reception that claimed to reliably predict future attainment. This could lead schools being unambitious in relation to children with low baseline assessment scores.’

© Curriculum Foundation The other key issue is the nature of the proposed tests themselves. The government is proposing a model of six commercially produced tests from which schools will choose one. The six tests are very different in nature and approach, which makes reliability and comparability real issues. They vary from the ‘Early Excellence’ option that is play based and carried out over time during normal activities (authentic!) using Leuven Scales to booklet-based procedures with minimal practical resources, to a 30 minute digital procedure. So, some very different approaches to choose from.

© Curriculum Foundation The present Handbook recommends that: “Assessment should not entail prolonged breaks from interaction with children, nor require excessive paperwork. Paperwork should be limited to that which is absolutely necessary to promote children’s successful learning and development” But most of them involve procedures that are different from the usual practical activities in which young children engage. This is contrary to the present DFE advice. The danger is that some schools might choose the easiest approach rather than the most valid.

© Curriculum Foundation To sum up …..

© Curriculum Foundation For most British schools over the last twenty five years, assessment has been a matter of determining what ‘level’ a pupil has attained in terms of the National Curriculum ‘Level Descriptions’. We have been giving little thought to expectations beyond these.

© Curriculum Foundation In many cases, assessment became a matter not just of ascertaining what level a pupil had attained (which, as we know, is hard enough anyway), but of predicting what level they will attain in some future test or examination.

© Curriculum Foundation To avoid all this happening again with the new curriculum, we must ensure that we: Use assessment for its intended purpose - to guide learning Take account of our wider aspirations for our pupils Take a wide range of evidence into consideration –and not rely on tests And this includes the Reception Baseline!