It would be tempting for schools to panic about the introduction of the new, harder National Curriculum at a time when the old measures for progress in levels and APP have disappeared, qualifying floor standards for achievement and progress have been lifted, and with the government baying for the blood of coasting and failing school leaderships.
It would be all too easy to respond by buying in a tick-led assessment system, which tracks pupils as they are remorselessly pushed through the yearly learning objectives and assessed regularly according to how they measure up to the government’s learning expectations. (We have developed a student tracking system in Climbing Frames which seeks to avoid the worst of this).
In the process, it would also be all too easy to regimentalise the teaching in schools to ensure that all the NC learning objectives are met come what may, and that more creative approaches are progressively pushed to the margins by didactic outcome-based teaching. If you think this is setting up a straw man, just think how anxiously schools have been either unpicking the learning objectives of the National Curriculum, or choosing a system that will do it for them, and you will understand just how hard schools are driven by the ‘hands off’ government and Ofsted agendas.
Some corporate chains which have been swallowing up failing schools have responded to the real and perceived failures of their acquired schools by adopting a standardised, didactic teaching and learning policy as their response to improving standards. The knowledge-based curriculum however – and it’s not half as bad as the government wanted it to be – does not have to be taught as a slow, painstaking accumulation of facts. And there are ways of making assessment serve creative teaching and learning, rather than burying it.
In fact, the new curriculum could make a useful framework for approaches that put knowledge about learning skills alongside knowledge about facts, and traditional tracking assessments could sit alongside more innovative forms of assessing progress and achievement.