Kevin Harcombe: DfE assessments are nothing to do with learning

Faced with 155 individual judgements, Kevin Harcombe broke out the plasticine and gave staff time for some much needed omphaloskepsis...

Looking back at staff training over the past five years the aims have been to, 1) improve teaching till it is all ‘outstanding’, 2) improve SATs outcomes in reading and writing (and now grammar, punctuation and spelling) and, oh yes, 3) improve SATs outcomes in maths. That, based on five INSET days per year over five years, equals 25 days devoted to the 3 Rs and chasing an often contradictory Ofsted-based notion of what ‘outstanding’ teaching might be.

These aims were not so much the noble pursuit of learning and human happiness as pragmatic, primarily designed to prevent external sources coming to beat us over the head with a very large stick with sharp nails sticking out of the business end. Ditto the national training programmes I have run: how to be a great administrator (National Professional Qualification for Senior Leadership), how to be a great junior administrator (NPQ Middle Leadership) and so on. All have been less to do with children and learning than with keeping central government from giving us a kicking and / or turning our schools into a forced academy. Same thing, really. Hoop jumping aided by carrot and stick techniques where the stick is as above and the carrot turns out to be, well, just a variation on the stick. Assessments are nothing to do with learning and everything to do with the bean counters at the DfE Death Star.

David Almond, celebrated author of Skellig, used to be a teacher till he got fed up with the conveyor belt techniques of contemporary schooling. He quit when it became clear there was no longer any time in the production line of UK schooling to simply stare out of the window for a bit, watch the clouds, get your thoughts in order and think. Thinking time allows us to assimilate learning, turn it over like a shiny pebble and admire it and consider how it might enhance one’s experience of life. Sure, you can’t do that interminably: tables and spellings do have to be learned, books have to be read and maybe even enjoyed, writing has to be writ. But taking time out simply to contemplate and reflect and assimilate humanises learning sets it in context, and helps us distinguish between what is fundamentally important and what is simply urgent or the result of the latest crackpot diktat from some here today gone tomorrow education minister.

As a result of such musings whilst regarding some fine cumulo nimbus drifting past the mullioned windows of the north-facing and freezing cold cell I laughingly call my office, I decided to give my teaching staff a ‘staring out the window’ training day. Not literally, of course, but a break from the grind of cranking up SATs results for every disadvantaged sub-group in the school. I organised an art training day, led by a local lecturer at our local gallery. We drew, we painted, we made faces out of bent wire and modelled in plaster-of-Paris and plasticine and tin foil. We rediscovered skills we had forgotten we had and acquired some new ones to pass on to the children. We remembered the primary curriculum was meant to be broad and balanced, not bored and biased, and took time for some metaphorical staring out the window. We had been engaged in learning in its best sense rather than engaged in instruction of how to placate the grumpy bureaucrats at the DfE and their interminable ‘school improvements’.

The new ‘life without levels’ assessments are a case in point. Who on earth devised a curriculum without a sensible means of assessing it? A politician, of course. We’ve had a new curriculum imposed on us since September without any guidance on actually assessing pupil progress through it. Now we are being told that children will need 155 individual judgements made on them at the end of key stage 2 to determine whether they are working towards, at, or exceeding age-related expectations. Moreover, these 155 tick boxes will determine accountability outcomes. Schools failing to meet the new floor standards are likely to be academised, which sounds like an unpleasant medical procedure and might as well be. Teacher pay is predicated on such assessments, for pity’s sake! I have a single simple assessment question: has a child made adequate progress or not? Oh, and here’s another: is the DfE barmy, is it merely working towards being barmy or has it exceeded barminess? Take a few minutes to stare out the window and get your thoughts in order then send your answers, please, to Nicky Morgan.

About the author

Kevin Harcombe is a Teaching Award winner and headteacher at Redlands Primary School, Fareham.