Another new decade is on the horizon and, for once, we don’t have a new national curriculum in the offing. The intervening 10 years, though, have brought plenty of curriculum change - and assessment alongside it.
Changes that we can all fondly remember as we look back through rose-tinted spectacles to times passed.
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2010: Teachers really loved the Rose review of the national curriculum in 2009, and the new government saw how popular it was. What better decision, then, than to have another one. Out went the tedious business of actually delivering the new curriculum, and in came another exciting review. What an opportunity!
2011: The expert panel review of the curriculum made its recommendations for the new curriculum, such as splitting key stage 2 into two smaller key stages, emphasising the importance of oral language development and setting out clearer attainment targets for all areas of the curriculum. Thrilled by how successful the government had found ignoring the last curriculum review to be, it snatched the opportunity to ignore another.
2012: Following the Bew review, the KS2 writing test was dropped, and a new system of teacher assessment put into place. The review of the new process showed that teachers were confident in the skills of moderators, and that moderators saw that teachers were highly confident in making assessments. The Department for Education saw an opportunity for change to ensure that such high standards did not become too boring and repetitive.
2013: Buoyed by the success of ignoring recommendations from the expert panel, then education secretary Michael Gove looked closely at the expert panel’s recommendation to introduce a new assessment system that was carefully matched to curriculum content and consulted on widely…and instantly announced that he was scrapping the assessment system and would come up with a plan to replace it some other time.
2014: The new national curriculum arrived to great celebration up and down the land. Thankfully, there was no need for a gradual introduction of the approach because it was so popular and welcome. Children in Year 5 were delighted to find that they could start the new curriculum straight away - halfway through a key stage - and enjoy the new tests on the horizon.
2015: Having spent some time enjoying the new curriculum, schools were in no hurry to understand how assessment would work in the future - the freedom to guess what would happen was an enjoyable diversion and contributed in no way at all to additional workload.
2016: The new national curriculum tests left teachers and pupils milling around in bewilderment as they struggled to remember what all the fuss had been about. The new tests were a delightful opportunity to find out about unfamiliar contexts and obscure language. They were also excited to try out the temporary “interim assessment framework” for writing, solving the problem of the overconfidence of years gone by. Any suggestion that the Brexit vote was just to distract from the assessment nonsense is unconfirmed.
2017: The success of the interim assessment framework was so great - with results randomly rising and falling across every local authority - that it was decided to keep it for just one more year to allow everyone to enjoy the guessing game of how moderation might work this time around. It still didn’t.
2018: Just four years after the introduction of the new national curriculum, the DfE finally settled on the new permanent method for teacher assessment to replace the interim one…by simply deleting the word “interim”. Problem solved.
2019: Gove’s dastardly plan in 2016 to support the Brexit vote had finally paid off. The government was so preoccupied with the will-we-won’t-we Brexit debacle that everyone forgot about what a mess the whole thing had been.
