“The Fear Is Palpable” – Life After Levels And Where Teachers Go From Here
Ditching levels was the right thing to do, says Andrew Day – but poor execution has caused panic among teachers uncertain of what the future will bring…
- by Joe Carter
We talk to Andrew Day – executive director of the Northumberland Church of England Academy and member of the Future Leaders Trust – about how teachers should proceed in a post-levels world…
What’s been your experience of life after levels so far? Complicated. It really is a complex issue for schools across the country. Everywhere I go, people are deeply concerned about it. Nobody has any great clarity on how to implement new systems of assessment, and life without levels is essentially life with different levels.
Do you think we were wrong to get rid of levels? No, I don’t. I think levels were an obstacle to progress and proper education. The problem has been the way in which they’ve been removed. There are teachers going through the system who’ve never worked without levels – they need to be weaned off.
Letting everyone work out their own systems for assessment is a complexity too far. How are we going to be judged? How can we tell if one school’s approach is more effective than the next?
Will people end up just ticking off objectives from the National Curriculum? If you look at many of the commercial products out there, that’s what they’ve done. They’re not significantly different to the old system of levels. To a certain extent, we’re guilty of exactly the same thing. We’ve moved towards a system of assertive mentoring, so children’s understanding is either emerging, developing, secure or they’ve mastered the subject – at which point they’re ready for the next stage.
In effect, though, we’re still tinkering with levels. We’ve decided to work with the University of Durham to set up a system that meets our needs as an all-through school with seven primary campuses. If we can effect change in the way we want, we could probably get back to the notion of educating our children, rather than teaching to a test.
One of the criticisms of levels was that it left gaps in children’s learning. Does your mastery approach solve that problem? Yes, I think it does. But you can’t hold children back because there’s a single aspect they haven’t mastered. We believe it’s about filling the gaps as quickly as possible.
Are teachers feeling the strain in other ways, too? You’re teaching towards an exam in May and the exemplification materials didn’t come out until early February. The government says this doesn’t matter because if children are taught well, they’ll know what they need to do when it comes to the exams. But that’s disingenuous – it’s not quite how education works. Every child has to know how to approach exam questions. If you don’t give teachers the wherewithal to help children with this, they’re going to panic.
When I speak at a Capita conference, the fear caused by this uncertainty is palpable. It’s an unacceptable place to be for teachers who are trying to teach children and get the very best results out of them.
Will teachers be teaching to the end of key stage requirements then? It’s still going to be a problem. As long as you have end of key stage tests that are high stakes – and that impact on what Ofsted says about your school – teachers are going to respond to their fears by pushing towards getting the tests right. That means you’re going to spend a lot of time in Y6 and Y2 teaching to a test, which defeats the object of education.
Faced with these problems, what can you do? The key message we try to get out to staff is that we want them to educate children. We want them to teach every single child to the highest possible level, so that every child is excited and challenged by what he or she learns.
It’s a bit of dark future for us – we’re seeing through a crystal darkly. We may not know exactly where we’re going to end up, but we are trying to excite children through their learning, and hopefully by doing that they’ll end up with the best results anyway.
The Future Leaders network is made up of over 800 school leaders across the country and offers a leadership development programme for aspiring headteachers of challenging schools who believe that all children deserve a great education; for more information, visit future-leaders.org.uk or follow @FutureLeadersCT
