Parent Workshop Assessment without Levels

LEVELS WILL NOT BE REPLACED The National Picture There has been a new National Curriculum with new content and new assessment arrangements. In the old system there were “attainment levels” and level-related expectations. e.g. Level 4 at Y6 or Level 2 at Year 2. These created a number of problems: - There was a huge difference between children working within levels and not all children achieving a level 4 by the end of KS2 could be considered “secondary ready”. -There was an emphasis on “progress” between levels, which could result in children moving on before they were secure. The new emphasis is on “depth of learning” and it was felt that levels discouraged this. LEVELS WILL NOT BE REPLACED

National Assessments There are still external tests that are used to gauge the children’s progress and the school’s performance. Reception – benchmark test / foundation profile Year 1 – phonics check Year 2 – maths, SPaG (spelling, punctuation and grammar), reading teacher assessed writing – catch-up phonics check Year 6 – maths, SPaG (spelling, punctuation and grammar), reading teacher assessed writing

D of E – Assessment Principles The Department of Education set out three key assessment principles that schools should adhere to. Give reliable information to parents about how their child, and their child’s school, is performing; Help drive improvement for pupils and teachers; Make sure the school is keeping up with external best practice and innovation.

New Curriculum - Mastery There is now an emphasis on “mastery”. There are two related strands to mastery: fluency – knowing spelling rules accurate punctuation maths calculations and facts word reading reasoning – e.g. spelling and understanding an unknown word by extrapolating from known prefixes and suffixes.

New Curriculum - Blocking We have restructured the curriculum into longer blocks to support a greater depth of reasoning; however, there will be opportunities to revisit and review built in. The aim is to secure understanding before moving on to a new area. This means that we will probe the children’s understanding in different ways. Fluency: reading and writing numbers to 1 000 000 Reasoning: Explain the relationship between the place value of each digit as you move to the left. or Tom says that any number larger than a thousand must be a four-digit number. Is he right? Explain why. old new

What does expected look like in each year? The expectations in each year are now higher. e.g. Reading at Year 2 Greater detail will be given within parent-teacher consultations and on the website.

How we will be reporting to you We are tracking children’s progress in finer detail than before. This will allow us to report to you with greater precision than before. Headline results will be returned as whether a child is Working at the expected standard. Working towards the expected standard. Working at greater depth within the expected standard. We will also now be able to present a percentage of the curriculum that the child has mastered and also offer greater clarity about a child’s next steps.

What this means for the children - curriculum The children are now expected to work at a much more unified pace. Once children become fluent in a concept, they are challenged to deepen their understanding rather than moving on to the next area of learning. There will always be exceptions at both ends. If a child’s current levels are very clearly ahead of, or below, age-related expectations then they may be working on a differentiated curriculum.

What this means for the children - interventions Interventions are targeted at closing the gaps between children. For some children currently working below age-related expectation, SMART targets reflect these within children’s pupil passports. All children who need them will receive ad hoc interventions as well as planned interventions to bring them in line with the age-related expectation.

Child A: Working at the expected standard These children will be working broadly in line with the age-related expectation. In the past, these children may have been pushed on to new areas before they were truly secure. The emphasis will now be upon deepening their learning. The focus for these children will be to acquire fluency and as deep an understanding as possible. These children will be targetted to be working at greater depth within the expected standard by the end of year 6.

Child B: Working towards the expected standard These children will have been identified either as working towards the age-related expectation across the curriculum of a particular subject, or with significant areas of weakness within it. The focus for these children will be to acquire fluency within the basic skills of the national curriculum. For the majority of these children, they will be set targets that track a path towards “secondary readiness”; in other words, working at the expected standard by the end of year 6.

Child C: Working at greater depth within the expected standard In the past these children may have been pushed to learn additional skills rather than deepening their understanding of the skills they already have. Some of these children may have previously been pushed on to studying areas of the secondary curriculum (Level 6 tests), now they will focus on mastering the primary curriculum. Children will still be challenged to make good progress, but this will be through acquiring greater fluency, mastering conceptual understanding as well as procedural understanding, attempting to put learning into different contexts and making sure that there are no areas of weakness.

Child D: Ahead of expectations A child is more than a year “ahead” of age-related expectation in one or more of the core subjects. The distance between their current level and age-related expectation will at least be maintained. Depending on the child, they may make accelerated progress, in other words increase the size of the gap, but it is more likely that they will be challenged to deepen their understanding of a variety of areas within the primary curriculum. Rather than appearing as learning “new things” accelerated progress is likely to be demonstrated through increased understanding of the links and rationale between subject areas.