Ken Boston

Today is a noteworthy one for those of us who work in the assessment business. We mark the launch of the new Institute of Educational Assessors at the same time as over half a million 11 year olds in England sit down to take their Key Stage 2 tests. The two events are closely connected - over the next few years the new Institute may help bring about real improvements to the way we assess school children.

For many years the idea of having an independent professional body to value assessors properly has been championed by a range of people, including John Dunford, Sir Mike Tomlinson and myself. An institute which offers support and advice to teachers to develop their assessment skills is long overdue, and it will allow England to move down the path taken by many of our international competitors by improving the way we assess young people during their education careers. Recent years have seen a move away from practical and continuous assessment towards more external written examinations. This may be due to a culture of mistrust about teacher judgements, or it may be a practical consideration that written examinations are far less resource intensive than ongoing assessment of performance, particularly in vocational contexts. The Institute will begin to change this by helping to restore teacher's confidence in their own assessment abilities and increasing the professionalism of the entire business.

There are over 50,000 people in England who work as examiners or markers every year. The government has made a considerable investment in recent years to recruit and retain assessors. It needs to be recognised that the majority of these people are teachers and that by assessing the exam and test papers of children from other schools, they can often develop their own classroom teaching skills. The IEA will help this group to develop those skills further, both as assessors and as teachers.

Professional assessors are needed to ensure high quality marking in national curriculum tests and exams. Until now, there has been no way of recognising or setting a benchmark for the skills needed to be a high quality assessor. The IEA will recognise professionalism and give a higher profile to the role and value of marking in the system. It will help to raise trust in the professional judgements of teachers and expose more teachers to the valuable experience of marking, and open up a range of new assessment options in both exams and tests.

In exams, for example, there has been much discussion about coursework in recent months, and this is an area where there is scope for change. We need to move away from the sometimes dull and formulaic assignments set for young people and introduce better quality assessments, often happening in the classroom, where experienced teachers, with highly developed assessment skills, can set creative, challenging tasks to judge those aspects of learning which can not be captured in an exam hall. I would like to see action on this over the next four years with members of the IEA playing a key role in shaping better coursework assessment.

The exams that young people take at the end of schooling in England are quite rightly held in high regard internationally. Over the coming years they will be evolving as new criteria are introduced for A levels and the specialised diplomas come on stream. There is enormous potential to integrate high quality and innovative assessment into the diploma system. Again, the new Institute should be leading a culture change to make this happen.

The National Curriculum tests that we have in this country are amongst the very best assessment vehicles in the world. No other country devotes as much time and expertise to developing measures of pupil progress. We have world class test questions, but we put them to poor quality use. There is far more that could be done in this country to harness assessment as a tool to raise attainment standards.

It is fair to say that the tests have not always received the unanimous support of the teaching profession, but the value of assessment to measuring progress should be clear to all educators. There is no doubt that the tests have real value but we do need to consider how they could evolve over the coming years. Debates about whether or not there should be more internal assessment are often confused by different interpretations of the term. If it means that teachers should set their own tests, and decide on that basis whether a child is a level 4 in KS2 English, then it is a proposition that I would not support.

If internal assessment, however, means that teachers in primary schools and in the early years of secondary education had access to a national bank of standard-referenced tests and examinations which have been trialled and piloted by test developers under QCA regulation, that they administer these tests and examinations within a specific window of time, that they mark the papers using a mark scheme on which they have been trained, and that their marks are thoroughly and independently audited, then there is real sense in it.

There is a belief prevalent amongst some in the education business that internally assessed test results are less accurate than those marked externally, and that there is a low degree of public confidence in the ability of teachers to mark their students work. To some extent I share this concern, not because I doubt the ability of teachers to do the job, but because there has never been any formal recognition of the particular skills needed to be an assessor. This is where the Institute will play a vital role in boosting the assessment skills of teachers, demonstrating that teachers can be expert assessors, and helping to change our assessment system.

The way that we currently test pupils has been frozen in time since the early 1990s. In England the only major change to assessment methodology in recent times was for seven year olds in the key stage one tests. The changes meant that testing continued for all pupils during their second year at school, but the test result was no longer to be the key determinant in the pupil performance measure. A greater emphasis was placed on teacher judgements, supported by data from the tests, in order to decide on the "level" that a child had reached.

It is clear that the new arrangements for 7 year olds offer a wide range of assessment options, and I am confident that are already having a significant impact on the way children are assessed. This does not mean that the precise arrangements for 7 year olds should be replicated for 11 and 14 year olds, but there is a strong case for updating the processes at key stages two and three, to include more internal assessment and new technology. There is no practical reason to continue with the same bureaucratic testing processes that we use today. We need to begin moving towards a system where teachers play a much bigger role in assessing the performance of their pupils against nationally benchmarked assessment instruments. Any move from externally assessed national curriculum tests to a system where teachers assess their pupils work is a significant change and one that would require a policy shift by government. However it is worth reviewing what the original idea was. Margaret Thatcher, as the Prime Minister who introduced the National Curriculum and the connected assessments, wrote that her main intention of introducing a national curriculum was "to concentrate on establishing a basic syllabus for English, Maths and Science with simple tests to show what pupils know."

The consistent view from politicians and the public since the 1980s is that there needs to be standardised, national assessments, backed by legislation. I agree with them. Testing is an important part of a child's education and I'm all for nationwide testing at the end of the key stages, with the results being publicly available. We have a responsibility to those who are assessed to look at how we do things and see where there is scope for innovation. This is true for the national curriculum tests just as it is for exams and the new specialised diplomas. Qualified assessors are needed to drive innovation and if teachers want to change the way that we assess, they should join the Institute of Educational Assessors. Ken Boston