Fifteen school data leads convene, bringing together their Heads of Science, English, History, and Maths to create shared end-of-year assessments in these four subjects. What's the impetus behind this collaborative effort? The performance of a subject department is often inferred by comparing the knowledge and skills of their students against a benchmark—usually other students. However, …
Continue reading The quest for standardisation in shared assessments
(This is a rough description of the talk I gave at ResearchED London in September 2023) Come with me twenty years into the future and try to imagine the person teaching your classes or subject at school. Would their job be similar to today's teachers? According to a recent survey by Teacher Tapp, 16% of …
Let me share a secret with you. Chat-GPT, an AI model, generated the title of this blog post. I fed it my blog text and asked it for ten possible titles. Four of them would have been a little misleading. Five were precisely correct, and yet felt clichéd or otherwise slightly unattractive to my human …
Continue reading Training the human arbiters of taste and truth
Sometimes (i.e. rarely) economic theory presents ideas that aren't intuitively obvious. One such idea is that teacher shortages are designed into our schooling system. Understanding this perspective is important if one wants to battle the government about pay. Worker strikes seem odd to most of the general public because they work in more conventional labour …
Another term, another crisis (a desperately sad one this time) and another set of solutions mooted by opposition parties and policy commentators to the perennial school inspection problem. As usual, it’s easy to jump to quick solutions by starting at “the end”. “The end” is the question of what policy triggers should be attached to …
Continue reading Ofsted inspections are (still) unreliable by design
The University of Durham’s initial teaching training provision has not been reaccredited by the Department of Education. I know nothing about the quality of this course or about the quality of their application. And yet, I want to persuade you that this is probably *a bad thing* for education. This is why. Joining the profession …
Continue reading Falling out of university and into teaching
Laura, Alex and I launched Teacher Tapp at researchED in September 2017, as a project we hoped would run for maybe a few months. I don’t think the strange story of its birth is written down anywhere, so I’m taking this birthday celebration as an opportunity to indulge in story-telling. When people ask me what …
Do you write your class assessments to suit your subject’s curriculum and its knowledge architecture? Or do you shape your visions of knowledge architecture to reflect your subject’s assessment tradition? Classroom practice is often described by educationalists as a three-legged stool comprising curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. Three-legged stools are exceptionally stable, provided each of the …
Continue reading Which came first: The knowledge architecture beliefs or the assessment?
In my last post, I explained how KS2 maths SATs can encourage students who struggle with maths to chase marks in periphery topics, rather than improve arithmetic understanding and fluency which is necessary for the study of secondary mathematics. In this post, I’m going to reflect on how we might manipulate accountability to do the …
Eddie (aged 7) and I have been chatting about assessment theory. Eddie: Some children in my class know all the grades you get at secondary school. But I only know one grade and that’s grade B. ME: Well, let me introduce you to the grades A, C, D, E and F [Doesn’t seem fair to …
Continue reading The goal of the curriculum and the shape of the attainment curve
Becky Allen 