Assessment is critical to great teaching, but it's easy for teaching to serve assessment, rather than the other way round.

This training programme is designed to help you refine your approach to assessment without using levels or other systems that rely on a linear progress flight path. As the National Curriculum documents make clear, depth of learning is as important as progression.

There is no one best assessment system: what matters is what will be right for your school. So this training is not about promoting one assessment model; instead it gives a variety of models to look at and provides collaborative exercises and activities to help you design a bespoke system for your school.

Aims and outcomes

  • Agree a strategy for developing assessment without levels in your school, and moving away from a fixation on linear flight paths.
  • Clarify what makes a valid and reliable assessment and ensure that the intended outcome of any assessment is clearly defined and purposeful.
  • Make assessment serve learning, not the other way round with our assessment model templates and case studies.

How to use this programme

  1. Complete the core content units over one to two terms to refine your assessment system OR select an individual unit to target a specific issue.
  2. Make use of the associated reading and resources to supplement and deepen your learning.
  3. Ensure participants document their progress after units and reflect in later input sessions.

Course content

  • Unit 1: Moving away from a levels mindset
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    • Unit 2: Comparing assessment approaches
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      • Unit 3 Trialling, monitoring and evaluating
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        Author

        Previously, John taught secondary English and modern foreign languages. He became an advisory teacher, then a local authority adviser responsible for assessment across all phases. John has provided independent consultancy, research, evaluation,...

        Owen Carter is co-founder and managing director of ImpactEd, a not-for-profit organisation which exists to help schools and education providers understand and improve the impact of the programmes they run. A...