In a month which has seen the first of a series of teacher strikes over pay and conditions, and at a time when we see the evidence of social and economic inequity all too clearly in schools, it’s right to consider the damaging and far-reaching impact of our current over-reliance on formal tests and exams to assess our children.
At the recent Next Generation Assessment Conference, David Gallagher, Chief Exec of NCFE, compared written exams to penalty shoot outs. I like the metaphor. To suggest that, after 14 years of schooling – involving a wide range of learning activities – we should assess 16-year-olds’ strengths, knowledge and understanding through a series of high stakes, individual, formal written exams in test conditions is no more satisfactory than, after many rounds of 90 plus minute matches – involving two teams playing skilful team football – deciding the winners of the tournament on a penalty shoot-out.
We know that penalty kicks are just one of a wide array of skills that top footballers demonstrate. And that top managers look for breadth of technique, pace, mental attitude, work ethic, creative flair, the ability to read the game and to play with others to elevate the performance of the team. The same, of course, is true of employers. They aren’t looking for young people drilled and skilled in just one discipline – the memorisation and written regurgitation of factual content in timed conditions. They want the equivalent of all-round footballers, not just penalty takers.
But what worries me about the metaphor is the assumption that we don’t spend our time practising metaphorical shoot outs in school. My experience of visiting lots of classrooms in a wide range of schools and trusts is that, post covid, a great deal of ‘penalty practice’ is taking place, and opportunities for ‘open field play’ are being squeezed. In other words, the classroom activity too often is mirroring the assessment methodology.
Often I see silent and individual writing exercises, considerable time spent on post unit tests requiring non-contextual factual recall of content, mock exam practice started years before terminal exams and didactic and lecture style lessons, pumping content into learners from over-full syllabuses. In other words, lots of penalty practice. I see less student-led, expansive, enquiry-based activity, pair or group collaborative tasks or learning through talk and interaction with peers. Put another way, there’s not so much whole match play.
Our learners are educated in a high accountability system, where teachers feel the relentless pressure to drill their classes to ensure strong test and exam outcomes (success at penalties), and league tables rank schools by attainment and progress.
Yet, unsurprisingly, many of our students are failing, under the shoot-out pressure, to get their penalties in the back of the net, despite the regular practice, because the conditions are just not conducive. Their barriers to learning are not being addressed. It’s as if their boots are the wrong size, they’re battling with the flu or they’ve never been shown how to execute an effective run-up.
We have more children than ever living in real poverty, coming to school from homes with insufficient food, inadequate heating and lacking the amenities needed to be emotionally receptive to new learning in the classroom. Around 800,000 children are from families on universal credit but nevertheless do not qualify for free school meals. Many live in the 750,000 households that are estimated currently to be at risk of mortgage default, with all the attendant stress that will bring. Millions will be living in homes with pre-payment meters, 3.2 million of which ran out of credit last year. (The equivalent of one home every 10 seconds was cut off and a fifth of those cut off were without energy for two or more days.)
Increasing numbers of young people are coming to school with a backpack full of worries and anxieties. They are fearful of the stigma of poverty and painfully aware of their knowledge and skills gaps after the past three years of covid disruption and financial cuts to in-school and external agency support. The danger is that they slip into the shadows, marginalised by a lack of self-belief and status and experiencing a sense of isolation and otherness.
What they need is a school experience that welcomes and lifts them, that convinces them that they belong, that they are as important as the next child and that they too can have agency. A school that envelops them in a safe, low-threat learning environment and encourages them to explore new concepts and skills with their peers, in a collaborative manner. A school where staff have time to build strong and deep relationships with individual pupils, to uncover their strengths and support them to build on them, to discover their passions and encourage them to showcase them, to grow the trust required for fragile learners to share their confusions, to accept and seek help in expanding their learning.
Faced instead with content-heavy lessons, individualised common-to-all assessments in timed conditions and with no learning aids, many are simply vanishing into the darkness. Without being regularly supported to learn collaboratively, pupils whose social skills’ ‘muscles’ became flabby and out of condition during periods of lockdown are not being given an opportunity to get them re-toned. Too often this is manifesting in defiant and anti-social behaviour and exclusion.
The concept of a learner profile, capturing a student’s achievements, knowledge and skills in a multi-modal way and over time from Reception to 18 is central to creating the safe assessment environment needed for all to thrive. It enables educators at the school to know and understand learners in greater depth and more holistically, to build stronger relationships with them and to support them more effectively.
It allows learners to demonstrate achievements and skills as part of a team as well as individually, to show progress when they are ready rather than at a set time, to show their knowledge practically or orally as well as in writing. It allows them to reflect on and better understand themselves as learners, to find a language to articulate to an audience their strengths and achievements, their learning journey and learning challenges, their aspirations and interests, their learning preferences and dispositions. It supports them to translate their skills from a school context to the outside world.
The inequalities between the educational experiences and outcomes of groups of learners are stubbornly entrenched and, in places, accelerating at an unprecedented rate. The IFS reported in 2022 that 16-year-olds who are eligible for free school meals are still around 27 percentage points less likely to earn good GCSEs than less disadvantaged peers. The SEND Green Paper of 2022 talks of ‘a vicious cycle of late intervention, low confidence and inefficient resource allocation’. Learners with poor mental health (estimated to have increased to 1 in 6 pupils according to the 2022 Times Commission) are three times more likely not to pass five GCSEs (NatCen 2021).
The data around the life chances of those who ‘fail’ at school, in terms of correlation to low-skilled employment, stunted earnings, poor health and cost to the state are well rehearsed. If we are serious about levelling up, we have to enable students to graduate after 14 years of schooling with more than a reductive set of numbers and grades. With a learner profile, they would each be equipped with a robust record of their skills, knowledge, capabilities, real-world experience and achievements, including, but not limited to, academic test and exam success.
Politicians of all persuasions need to be building the concept of a learner profile into their party manifesto pledges if they really want to effect social mobility through education.
This blog is a longer version of the piece originally published in Schools Week
if(window.strchfSettings === undefined) window.strchfSettings = {};window.strchfSettings.stats = {url: “https://rethinking-assessment.storychief.io/why-the-learner-profile-is-central-to-the-levelling-up-agenda?id=1560742115&type=2”,title: “Why the Learner Profile is central to the Levelling Up agenda”,id: “2fcac104-1d5b-43c0-8402-758616df40be”};(function(d, s, id) {var js, sjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if (d.getElementById(id)) {window.strchf.update(); return;}js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;js.src = “https://d37oebn0w9ir6a.cloudfront.net/scripts/v0/strchf.js”;js.async = true;sjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, sjs);}(document, ‘script’, ‘storychief-jssdk’))
