June used to be a delightful month in the Sats year groups. Year 2 and Year 6 teachers everywhere would breathe a sigh of relief that the tests were behind them and they could spend the final weeks of term teaching things the tests didn’t credit, enjoying the company of their classes and preparing for the activities of the summer term.
Then came the joys of moderation. Already this week, teachers in those year groups have had visits from their local authority moderation teams to check their judgements; for others, that joy is still to come. For the majority, we thank our lucky stars not to have been selected this year.
Not because the moderation experience is awful - far from it. Most teachers I speak with have a great deal of respect for the professionals who lead the discussions. It’s the system that fills us with dread: the umpteen tick-boxes; the copious evidence; the cut-offs that separate children into successes and failures on the basis of a single punctuation mark. The whole business is a source of frustration.
As a Year 6 teacher, it’s those in key stage 1 I feel for. It’s chore enough to have to tick all those daft boxes for several pieces of writing for every child. I can only imagine what a bore it must be to have to repeat the process for maths and reading as well. Then, when the visit finally comes, can anybody really scrutinise that volume of work in half a day? The whole business is a joke.
The science assessment burden
But alongside this is another burden: the science teacher assessment framework. It’s all part of the pretence that we all keep up that science is still a core subject. It’s quite clear now that science doesn’t hold the high place in most schools’ curriculums that we might once have thought. Nevertheless, we are still stuck with a teacher assessment framework for the subject - and what a framework it is. For each key stage, the requirements for the expected standard in reading are set out in fewer than 100 words. For science, it takes 250 for KS1 and more than 700 words of detail for KS2 - some 24 bullet points which set out virtually all of the national curriculum content.
Indeed, just one statement covers virtually the whole scientific process, requiring children to pose scientific questions, plan investigations, control variables, group and classify ideas, carry out fair tests and use a wide range of secondary evidence for supporting information. That’s no small feat to be ticked off.
Yet in theory, every Year 2 and Year 6 teacher should be checking every child’s work against every bullet point before they make their final judgement. In reality, schools will necessarily find ways to make the process less onerous. Some will use their best guess about each bullet point. Some might ignore the criteria altogether. The consistency is simply non-existent. No moderator will scrutinise the judgements, no local authority will query the results, and no official will ever care.
The whole teacher assessment edifice is crumbling, not because of teachers, or even moderators, but because the system we’ve been given is rotten at its very core. It’s time we killed it off.
Michael Tidd is deputy head at Edgewood Primary School in Nottinghamshire
