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 1,2,3 & 4?) 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 5 The tools of the trade © Curriculum Foundation

Welcome to Unit 5 – the final unit First things first - did you do your homework for Unit 4? (You surely didn’t forget it!)

© 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.” How did it go? Did you look at the learning you have planned for this term and think of the learning outcomes that you expected? Were you able to track these to the new curriculum? Had you added anything of your own? Could you then set these out in terms of knowledge, understanding and skills? Or did you think of even better categories? Please post your ideas on the website.

© 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.” In this final Unit, we shall be trying to pull together all the various things we have been considering so far, and shall be looking at the approaches being taken by four schools in this post-levels era. The schools that have kindly offered their case studies are: Turnfurlong Infant School, Aylesbury, Bucks Sandylands Primary, Morecambe, Lancs Barrowford Primary, Nelson, Lancs Archway School (11-18), Stroud, Gloucs We are not suggesting that this is what everyone should be doing (they are all different – so you can’t do them all anyway!) but offer them as examples of different approaches. But, let’s start by pulling things together.

© Curriculum Foundation Unit 5 This final Unit is in four parts: Part 1:The story so far Part 2: Models and approaches Part 3: The four schools Part 4: Lessons to be learned

Unit 5 The tools of the trade © Curriculum Foundation Part 1 The story so far Have you been following the story so far? Do you remember how it all began? If you are not sure, the clue is in the title (it’s in red print on the title slide of each of these units!)

© Curriculum Foundation8 The DFE States: “As part of our reforms to the national curriculum, the current system of ‘levels’ used to report children’s attainment and progress will be removed from September 2014 and will not be replaced. By removing levels we will allow teachers greater flexibility in the way that they plan and assess pupils’ learning. The programmes of study within the new National Curriculum (NC) set out expectations at the end of each key stage, and all maintained schools will be free to develop a curriculum relevant to their pupils that teaches this content. The curriculum must include an assessment system which enables schools to check what pupils have learned and whether they are on track to meet expectations at the end of the key stage” The DFE States: “As part of our reforms to the national curriculum, the current system of ‘levels’ used to report children’s attainment and progress will be removed from September 2014 and will not be replaced. By removing levels we will allow teachers greater flexibility in the way that they plan and assess pupils’ learning. The programmes of study within the new National Curriculum (NC) set out expectations at the end of each key stage, and all maintained schools will be free to develop a curriculum relevant to their pupils that teaches this content. The curriculum must include an assessment system which enables schools to check what pupils have learned and whether they are on track to meet expectations at the end of the key stage”

© Curriculum Foundation9 The DFE States: “As part of our reforms to the national curriculum, the current system of ‘levels’ used to report children’s attainment and progress will be removed from September 2014 and will not be replaced. By removing levels we will allow teachers greater flexibility in the way that they plan and assess pupils’ learning. The programmes of study within the new National Curriculum (NC) set out expectations at the end of each key stage, and all maintained schools will be free to develop a curriculum relevant to their pupils that teaches this content. The curriculum must include an assessment system which enables schools to check what pupils have learned and whether they are on track to meet expectations at the end of the key stage” The DFE States: “As part of our reforms to the national curriculum, the current system of ‘levels’ used to report children’s attainment and progress will be removed from September 2014 and will not be replaced. By removing levels we will allow teachers greater flexibility in the way that they plan and assess pupils’ learning. The programmes of study within the new National Curriculum (NC) set out expectations at the end of each key stage, and all maintained schools will be free to develop a curriculum relevant to their pupils that teaches this content. The curriculum must include an assessment system which enables schools to check what pupils have learned and whether they are on track to meet expectations at the end of the key stage”

© Curriculum Foundation Yes, that’s it. The Levels have gone - “Removed and not replaced”! In the earlier Units, we spent time wondering if we should all cheer – or regret their demise. So, how do you feel about them now that you are on the final Unit? Are you still cheering? But the demise of the Levels was just the start of this whole series of considerations. What was the ‘story arc’? Who were the heroes and villains? What is left to be resolved?

. © Curriculum Foundation Label the above as either heroes or villains. (And explain their part in the story so far!)

© Curriculum Foundation And what about these? Were they heroes or villains – and what were they even doing here? And what did this next object have to do with assessment?

© Curriculum Foundation 13 The word ‘assessment’ comes from the Latin “assidere” - to sit beside (originally, as an assistant-judge in the context of taxes). That implies that assessment is something that we do with and for our students rather than to them.

© Curriculum Foundation Of course, the first part of the ‘story arc’ following the demise of the Levels was the DFE saying: “All maintained schools will be free to develop a curriculum relevant to their pupils that teaches the required content. The curriculum must include an assessment system which enables schools to check what pupils have learned and whether they are on track to meet expectations at the end of the key stage” So the Levels have gone and it up to us as schools to develop our own assessment system – or what Ofsted calls “a preferred approach”.

© Curriculum Foundation In developing this “preferred approach” we first went back to the “Year of the Curriculum” curriculum design units, and remembered the breadth of the aims that we set for our pupils. (Do you remember these?) We decided that there is little point in setting these broad aims if we are not going to takes any steps to find out whether or not they have been achieved. So this is the challenge for assessment.

Then we looked at the ‘Building Blocks’ of a curriculum. Do you remember what they were? © Curriculum Foundation 16

Knowledge Skills Understanding State, name, label, draw, identify, describe Carry out, perform, find, investigate, explore Explain, justify, analyse, give reasons for Yes, knowledge, understanding and skills. If you recall, each of these levels of expectation had some related verbs that made them explicit. These are the ones that we need for assessment. Yes, knowledge, understanding and skills. If you recall, each of these levels of expectation had some related verbs that made them explicit. These are the ones that we need for assessment.

© Curriculum Foundation We noted that each of these has a different implication for assessment. Unfortunately the new national curriculum seems to have muddled them up, so we looked at how to untangle these in our curriculum design and assessment planning. (We also looked at how other countries such as Singapore have kept them very separate, which makes curriculum design and assessment planning much easier). We also looked at the way in which the three ‘building blocks’ can come together.

© Curriculum Foundation We talked about combinations of knowledge, understanding and skills being competencies. Do you remember the tree – with its roots (knowledge and understanding) and leaves (application and skills)? And that the most valuable learning took place when the two were combined? Brian Male’s definition of competence was: “The ability to apply learning with confidence in a range of situations”.

© Curriculum Foundation So, the government requires us to come up with our own “preferred approaches” to developing “a n assessment system which enables schools to check what pupils have learned and whether they are on track to meet expectations at the end of the key stage.” However, for our own professionalism, we want to take account of the wider aims and the deeper understandings that will most benefit learners. We looked at some models of how to do this.

Part 2 Models and approaches Unit 5 The tools of the trade © Curriculum Foundation There were three key models that we looked at. Do you remember what they were? (You can’t have forgotten – they were in the previous Unit!)

© Curriculum Foundation22 One was Bloom’s Taxonomy

© Curriculum Foundation23 This fitted well with the tree model

© Curriculum Foundation24 SOLO levelVerbs Uni-structuralDefine, identify, name, draw, find, label, match, follow a simple procedure Multi-structuralDescribe, list, outline, complete, continue, combine RelationalSequence, classify, compare and contrast, explain (cause and effect) analyse, form an analogy, organise, distinguish, question, relate, apply Extended abstractGeneralise, predict, evaluate, reflect, hypothesise, theorise, create, prove, justify, argue, compose, prioritise, design, construct, perform Then there was SOLO

© Curriculum Foundation25 Level 1 Recall and reproduction Recall of a fact, information or procedure Level 2 Application of skills and concepts Use of information or conceptual knowledge – two or more steps Level 3 Strategic thinking Requires reasoning, developing a plan or a sequence of steps, some complexity, more than one possible answer Level 4 Extended thinking Requires an investigation, time to think and process multiple conditions of the problem. It was Norman Webb’s “Depth of Knowledge” And do you remember the third model?

© Curriculum Foundation26 This also fits well with our model of the tree. Recall Reproduction Application of skills Application of concepts Strategic thinking Extended thinking

© Curriculum Foundation This Part 2 is about ‘Models and approaches’ – so what are the approaches we looked at? Do you remember Mark Zelman and the Cycle of Assessment?

Do you remember Professors Caroline Gipps and Gordon Stobart – and Assessment for Learning? © Curriculum Foundation And Dylan William – author of “Embedded formative assessment”? And Laura Greenstein of ‘Authentic Assessment? And, finally – what is this to do with assessment approaches?

© Curriculum Foundation It was Anne Davies and ‘Triangulation’

© Curriculum Foundation As we have made our way through the Units, we have been thinking about how these models and approaches apply to our own schools and circumstances. Now here’s a chance to look at how some other schools have approached ‘life without levels’.