Why you should be using standardised assessments at your school or MAT

Tim Ward - 28 March, 2019

Assessment

Category : Blog

Why you should be using standardised assessments at your school or MAT

A number of factors are making schools and MATs look again at the data they gather and use around pupil attainment and progress. These include, but are not limited to:

• Reducing teacher workload
• The proposed new, less data reliant, Ofsted Framework
• The challenge of standardising teacher assessments
• Balancing the autonomy that schools require to meet the needs of their unique context vs. the MAT’s need for reliable performance data

The traditional model in schools has, for some time, been a combination of formative assessment and summative teacher assessment.

Tracking formative assessment takes many forms, from simple notes against lesson plans to more formal ‘rubrics’ where banks of statements are ‘ticked off’. Whatever level of recording is used by schools, this is the main vehicle for improvement in student achievement as it’s ongoing and informs future provision.

Since the removal of ‘levels’, there’s been a huge amount of time spent by schools coming up with alternative summative assessment models. A lot of these ended up looking very much like the levels they were supposed to replace!

Whatever the summative model, the greatest challenges of a teacher-determined summative judgement have remained the same; ensuring consistency and validity of these judgements, and managing the workload caused by creating, moderating and collating judgements (let alone analysing the outcomes!)

There is also clear pressure from Ofsted to stop using flight paths to judge whether pupils’ progress is as desired. Only this weekend, Sean Harford (HMI and Ofsted’s National Director for Education) made it clear that this approach to target setting is, in his opinion, potentially demotivating. Flight paths are intrinsically linked to the use of summative teacher assessment scales – each implies the other is a valid approach.

In summary; schools and MATs face a real challenge. It’s essential for leaders to know the success, or otherwise, of their provision. This is particularly difficult for MATs as they scale and begin to cover a wider geographical area (and manage ever higher pupil and school numbers). Without attainment data then desktop surveys of the success, or otherwise, of schools and teachers is not possible.

What is needed is a method of providing the data required whilst reducing teacher workload, ensuring consistency of judgement and, depending on your approach, moving away from flight-paths.

This is where commercial standardised testing comes in. It solves many of the problems associated with summative teacher judgement:

• It’s time efficient – teachers don’t need to keep excessive records or sit through long moderation meetings. Results are available for review more quickly than if moderation is necessary – giving more time for planning better provision.
• Consistency is determined through the mark scheme for the test and developed and refined by the results from a very large sample of the pupil population nationally (much larger than most schools and all but the biggest MATs can provide).
• Tests designed to give a ‘point in time’ measurement reduce the reliance on the flight path model through a focus on outcomes relative to the academic year.

The final piece of the jigsaw in getting standardised testing to work in your school or MAT is making sure you have analytics that are informative and easily aggregated.

Some MIS systems should be able to do this for you. For example, Arbor’s integration with RS Assessments’ PiRA and PUMA testing aggregates all of your test outcome data into the school and MAT MIS, with no extra data downloads and uploads, for easy and insightful analytics. Teachers can use the strand level analysis provided by RS Assessments to more accurately plan future curriculum content to meet the needs of the pupils. Senior leaders at schools and MATs can also use Arbor MIS to take action on their results – for example, by setting up intervention groups, or by building custom reports combining data from their PiRA and PUMA test results and Arbor MIS. If you don’t have access to this kind of analysis, many standardised test providers will offer their own dashboards or reporting services.

Fig 1.: Using Arbor’s integration with PiRA & PUMA tests in Arbor MIS

By adopting standardised assessments in place of teacher determined summative judgements, the time saved can be put back into planning and delivering great learning experiences for pupils whilst ensuring school and MAT leaders can still evaluate the outcomes achieved.

Get in touch to book a free demo to find out how Arbor MIS and RS Assessments from Hodder Education could transform your school or MAT, call us on 0208 050 1028  or email us at tellmemore@arbor-education.com.

For current customers: contact your Arbor Customer Success Manager or Account Manager to get this integration set up!