My name is Shahed Ahmed. I'm the Headteacher here at
Elmhurst Primary School which is in the London borough of Newham.
There are a number of changes in the new curriculum.
A lot of those are to do with the actual content of the curriculum.
There is more challenge across the different subjects.
In mathematics there is more challenge in fractions and in number.
The other big change is in terms of assessment.
There is the removal of levels across the whole curriculum and that is
a very big change that schools need to consider and teachers
need to get hold of and find good ways of addressing those changes.
There are two things that classroom teachers need to bear in mind.
There are two sorts of assessments.
There is the on-going assessment that a classroom teacher does as they
are teaching, as they are marking the children's work,
which we call formative assessment.
Then there are the end of term or end of year type assessments which
are called summative assessments.
These could be as a result of a level in the children’s work
or of testing.
Something to bear in mind is that with the removal of levels,
as teachers in schools, we need to find ways of assessing and
having that assessment going on.
I went to China recently to look their teaching of
mathematics because the children in China, particularly in Shanghai,
are very good at mathematics. One thing I saw was the
way in which they assess the children in maths.
What they did, very effectively, was to have short, regular tests going on.
At the end of every unit, for example, if they were teaching fractions,
then at the end of two or three weeks they would have a short test on
fractions, which they would mark, see where the gaps were,
give them a mark out of 50 and then record those marks.
They could see how the children were progressing in those unit tests and
that would be a summative assessment and they would also be formative and
diagnostic because they would see where children were struggling quite
quickly at the end of that unit instead of waiting until the end of the term or
the end of the year. They would then teach the next lesson or the next few
lessons to teach those children so that they actually did understand the
things that they did not quite get right in the test.
That is an example of a very effective formative assessment and summative
assessment which gives real information for the teacher and for the school.
You have to bear in mind that they will still be having SATS,
SATS in year 2 and SATS in year 6.
They will be standardised across the whole country so that
comparisons can be made.
That information will still be available for schools.
The other thing that schools could be doing is to be looking into other
standardised tests which could produce standardised scores,
age related scores, which actually can be more meaningful than a general level,
which does not mean very much. What has happened over the years,
with levels, is that schools have spent sometimes too much time
worrying about levels. A lot of teacher's time is taken in levelling
children's work that is then tracked by schools.
Schools spend a lot of time tracking children's work,
sometimes at the expense of actually good teaching and finding out what it is
that the children can do and can't do in that particular topic, in that
particular subject and then teaching them so that they can do the next bit.
For example, can a child multiply a two digit number by a two digit number?
If they can't, teach them so they can. That is much more powerful than a general
level which covers too many different and diverse things.
There is a worry for teachers and for schools about what Ofsted will inspect.
My understanding is that Ofsted will look at whatever data a school has.
If there are no levels then Ofsted will not be able to look at levels.
Ofsted will be able to see the progress that has been made in a lesson observation.
They will be able to look through children's books and see the progress
reports being made in those books. Whatever test data that a schools has,
whether it be the ongoing data at the end of every unit,
at the end of every term or a standardised test at the end of every year,
they are the sorts of information that schools will be able to produce.
I believe that is what Ofsted will look at.
Things will evolve and there was a time when there were not any levels.
Going back many, many years we did not have levels.
There will be a period where there is some uncertainty but I think
we need to really hold on to what is important and what is important is
that children learn and that we teach them well. The assessment actually
comes out of the teaching in that lesson and the work that we then look
at in their books and marking.
The problem with levels is that they don't mean very much to the
vast majority of parents. If a parent goes along to a parents evening and the
teachers says, "Your child is at level 4C or level 4B or 4A" it actually does not
mean very much to parents.
However, if a teacher can say, "In reading, in a standardised test,
they are reading at the age 11" that means much more to a parent because,
for example, if my child is aged 10 but reading at age 11, that is more meaningful.
If a teacher actually talks about, "In science they can devise a test,
an experiment, an investigation in science and bear in mind some variables that
you can control and variables that you can change" and if child is able to
do that, then that is the sort of thing that I think a parent will be much more
interested to learn than a generalised statement that a child is at a 4B or
4A in science.
I think that by removing levels, schools will find much more
useful ways of assessing the children and have information that is much more
accessible for parents.