One reason that many of us become teachers is a love of our subject and a desire to pass on that love to future generations.

A focus on the curriculum and the knowledge we choose, as educators, to impart is quite rightly central to this. 

But, as we consider what changes we may or may not need to make to our teaching, a behemoth that we have long since been battling once again rears its ugly head: the assessment monster.

Shared meaning

Assessment of course can be a wonderful thing. It allows us to identify what students know, build on prior knowledge, and plan for ways to fill gaps in understanding and determine their next learning steps. 

Equally, however much we may not like the focus on outcomes, external examinations provide some valuable measurement, allowing comparisons to be made in terms of performance. This is required to determine differences in cohorts. 

Daisy Christodoulou recently tweeted that: “The purpose of the GCSE - to provide a shared meaning - is completely legitimate.” 

However, she also acknowledged that this purpose is “not the same as the purposes teachers are mostly concerned with: to teach subject content, to know what a student can know and do, to promote mastery.” 

Slavering monster

Broad summative assessment has a place and a purpose within our system. But assessment modelled around this format has become a monster that eclipses the importance of curriculum, slavers in the face of progress and gives many of us sleepless nights.

With the advent of the new GCSEs, I found that curriculum design was focusing on summative-style assessments, masquerading as formative ones. Curriculum design discussion now explored “which assessment objective does this task cover? Which of the questions’ skills are the students working on? AO1, AO2?” And, even worse, lesson objectives that simply said: “Learning how to answer question two on paper one.” 

No longer were we teachers of geography or history or literature - we were teachers of assessment. Increasingly, I was finding myself drilling students on key questions, checking they knew what the stem on question three was, rather than checking that they understood what the text was about or what the writer was trying convey.

Students consequently stopped walking into the lesson curious about language or history. Instead, they were curious about the exam paper. 

“Are we looking at question one again?”

“We haven’t gone over question five for ages. I’m worried I’ve forgotten how to do it.” 

Worship of the assessment gods

Worse still, they weren’t curious about any of it. They, like their teachers, were fatigued by a relentless focus on assessment, in a system littered with mocks, mocks of mocks and feedback from mocks. This is all before Year 7 have made it to Christmas. This surely isn’t the kind of system we want, is it?

Of course, there should still be a place for exam-skill preparation. For some, walking into an exam never having seen the exam-paper format could be devastating. However, now I come to think about it, that was pretty much the experience of myself and my peers: one mock exam in Year 11, just to check we knew where the exam room was for the most part, and off we went. 

No ream of past papers, no lesson after lesson analysis of what the examiner was looking for, no mark schemes or breakdown of model answers. Just us and the subject and an expert to help us to explore it. Assessment was the end goal, not our daily diet.

External pressures are often encouraging this worship of the assessment gods. When you are expected to report neatly linear progress, using a GCSE format with key stage 3, it is hardly surprising that the emphasis has shifted. 

Make these assessments higher stakes with league tables inside and outside of schools, and then have difficult conversations with those staff members whose students have not performed at the expected level, and further distortion occurs. 

Putting the horse back in front of the cart

At Research Ed Surrey on 19 October, psychology teacher Ben White talked of how data meetings created a pretence of work. Our real work takes place in the classroom, yet more and more often teachers sit in meetings, poring over data that is both unreliable and lacking in purpose. 

Worse still, the data from these assessments grabs the curriculum reins even more fiercely and forces a gallop towards poorly defined interventions, restructuring of classes and a further narrowing of the curriculum. I have even heard some claims that it doesn’t matter what teachers glean from assessment; it is for the parents and the data team, not the teachers.

So that is why I believe we need to put the curriculum horse back at the front of our cart of education and relegate assessment to the seat at the back. We need to consider our priorities, and make sure we have them in the right order for the sake of our students, and our staff. 

We need to build a curriculum that is filled with the best bits of our subject: the bits that will enable students to be successful not only in their exams but for years to come. Let’s help to them to get really good at exploring our subject, not just exploring our assessments.

Zoe Enser is an English teacher and director of improvements at Seahaven Academy in East Sussex. She tweets @GreeboRunner