Scotland’s new National courses have left teachers and pupils “drowning” in assessment, and teenagers are at risk of “collapsing under the burden”, damning research from the body in charge of them has shown.
One union boss said that the Scottish Qualifications Authority’s findings, based on visits to 40 schools, are confirmation that the new assessment regime faced by Scotland’s secondary pupils is “unsustainable in its current form”.
The verdict on controversial unit assessments - which get an entire report to themselves - is overwhelmingly negative: 88.7 per cent of teachers said these had worked “badly” in their subject.
The SQA, which also canvassed views in two separate online surveys of more than 3,000 and 337 teachers respectively for its reports, identified “a huge concern about the volume of unit assessment” across all subjects, with teachers’ comments including “there is never an escape” and “assessment is never-ending”.
Even worse, most teachers did not think that unit assessments improved teaching or learning, instead viewing them as “just something to get through”. School leaders said that, even where there were benefits, they were completely “outweighed by the amount of staff and pupil energy required”.
An SQA spokesman said that the evidence it had gathered had already been used to inform a report by the government’s Working Group on Assessment and National Qualifications (“‘Unsustainable’ workload for teachers and pupils,” TESS, 13 May).
The group’s report (bit.ly/QualsWorkload) had established a range of reasons for teachers’ mounting workload, with unit assessments among them.
“Some of these factors are the direct responsibility of SQA: the remainder must be addressed by others within the education system,” said the spokesman.
The SQA has already introduced various measures to tackle workload and is currently implementing a three-year plan that it is “confident… will alleviate workload concerns arising from assessment, re-assessment and the recording of evidence while, at the same time, maintaining the standards and credibility of our qualifications”.
A Scottish government spokesman said: “SQA and Education Scotland have provided unprecedented support to teachers for the introduction of the new qualifications.”
This is an edited version of an article in the 20 May edition of TESS. Subscribers can view the full story here. To subscribe, click here. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here. You can also download the TES Reader app for Android or iOS. TES magazine is available at all good newsagents.
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