Assessment 1 Measure for Ever

What is assessment for? whom does it benefit? what can we reasonably expect from our assessments? if only these questions were always asked….

Assessment as certification has been with us for a very long time, enabling employers and academic institutions to have a rough guide to an applicant’s skills or potential and giving applicants a set of transparent targets to aim for. Success has never been guaranteed by those certified attainments however, interviews always follow as a way of cross-checking that an applicant is suited to a post or course, an implicit acknowledgement that certificates are not in and of themselves a reliable guide to someone’s abilities or suitability for anything.

It has always been apparent that our methods of mass testing have been inadequate, the results unreliable: the law had to be changed to allow pupils at secondary modern schools to take GCE examinations in their school as it became apparent that so many of them were already gaining GCE ‘O’ levels after they had been specifically selected at 11 to go to schools where they would not do such a thing because they were unable to do such a thing. It was later realised that by age 14 as many as 20% of the pupils in grammar and secondary modern schools were in the ‘wrong’ school, because their God-given, unalterable and above all measurable IQs had mysteriously altered. The key lies in the word: measure, to assign a numerical value to - even if it is expressed in various combinations of alphanumerics. People talking about education often refer to assessment when they actually mean measurement. The former involves an awareness of the person being assessed, the latter involves generating a number or something easily converted to one.

The SATs system has evolved with even more strangled logic than the poor old GCEs, which were actually designed by universities to progressively weed out candidates for university education. Employers simply highjacked them for their own purposes, as they were the only indicator of educability widely available. Almost by accident, the earliest Key Stage 1 SATs (when the T was for Task, as I recall), made a fairly good fist of assessing what children could do but they were so labour intensive, time consuming and hence expensive that they were quickly abandoned. SATs were never intended to do anything for children anyway, assessment was not what the government of the day or any since was actually after. They needed to be seen to be doing something about raising standards, they needed a measurement system for schools and teachers. This would then allow for all the trappings of the target culture, particularly annual tests enabling league tables, which, coupled with the less explicit excesses of the educational inquisition which OFSTED became, would ‘drive up’ standards. The language said it all – there was an assumption that teachers did not really want to improve standards, they had to be driven. Standards were identified, targets set. Failing teachers, schools and Local Authorities could be identified through the power of the graph, the cold certainty of the numbers rather than the wordy, subjective view of old fashioned inspectors.

The ’97 change of government only made things worse because they were prepared to put money into all of this, so, along with smaller class sizes, a massive influx of technology, a boom in TAs etc they also brought in endless costly initiatives aimed at ‘driving up standards’, coupled with the expansion and entrenchment of a massively expensive and completely useless ‘assessment’ system. Teaching, pupil progress, the value for money of an LA were now all redefined so that they could be measured and the expenditure justified.