Assessment
The primary education assessment system has been overhauled since the introduction of the new National curriculum. In May 2015, Year 2 and Year 6 children sat the last SATs tests under the previous assessment system of Levels. The Government have now given each school the freedom to design their own assessment system.
What are we doing about assessment?
The new National Curriculum, brought in at the start of September 2014, is written so that children have to cover some objectives over the course of two years and some objectives over a single year.
The ethos of the new curriculum is about embedding a depth and mastery of the learning objectives. Therefore assessing children’s depth of knowledge and ability to apply this knowledge into other contexts is now every school’s priority. Assessment of these objectives is now no longer determined by a central system of levels determined by the Government.
As a school, we regularly assess our children’s depth of understanding and use this to inform our planning. We track the children formally each term and use this assessment data to track children’s progress.
In order to support our assessments of children’s depths of understanding, we use the Chris Quigley Depths of Learning Assessment package which tracks children’s level of understanding in the following ways:
- Beginning Level of Understanding,
- Advanced Level of Understanding
- Deep Level of Understanding.
Children are still legally required to be assessed formally at the end of Foundation Stage, at the end of Year 1 in the Phonics Test, the end of Key Stage 1 SATs tests and the end of Key Stage 2 SATs tests. These will remain in place however the scoring system will change next year.
