Interview

26 make the grade . Summer 2010

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The key message Dame Yasmin wants to convey, to staff and pupils alike, is that assessment is a continual process and an integral part of every lesson. It's not an overnight process

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Profile

dame yasmin bevan,

headteacher and

executive principal of

denbigh high school

Photographs: Jim varney

Classroom connections

Dame Yasmin Bevan explains how she draws on the CIEA, her participation in the Expert Group in Assessment and the staff and pupils themselves, to make assessment a powerful learning tool

Interview Lucie Carrington

If there is one thing schools need to get right, it is assessment, because it is assessment that drives learning, argues Dame Yasmin Bevan, headteacher and executive principal at Denbigh High School in Luton. "You can get short-term outcomes from tinkering with the curriculum and choosing different courses but, in the longer term, effective assessment is what makes teaching powerful, and ultimately leads to good learning," she says.

Calm and measured in her approach, Dame Yasmin inspires confidence. However, despite being a member of the Expert Group on Assessment 18 months ago, she would never describe herself as an assessment expert. "As a headteacher, it's hard to be an expert in anything - it is such a vast job. But as a teacher, I've always been convinced that what happens in the classroom is the most important aspect of education and therefore needs to be assessed and understood properly," she says.

Her fellow members of the Expert Group - who included Sir Jim Rose, responsible for last year's Government review of the primary curriculum, and Professor Tim Brighouse - were probably in a similar place to Dame Yasmin. "When we heard what the real experts had to say, the depth of their knowledge and research, we felt pretty awed by it all," Dame Yasmin says. She's gradually using what she learned on the Expert Group, as well as its recommendations, to inform assessment at Denbigh High.

"Being part of the group was a fantastic opportunity for me, as a practitioner, to really analyse assessment," Dame Yasmin says. For example, it gave her a better insight into the use of Assessing Pupils' Progress (APP). Dame Yasmin admits she had never really engaged with APP and, in keeping with the CIEA, prefers not to ally herself to any particular brand of assessment. "We heard from people who thought APP worked really effectively and those who felt it was simply too bureaucratic. My own view was that it could be very atomistic. But I can now see that used carefully and intelligently, with teachers employing their own judgement, APP can be a useful tool."

The Expert Group was set up in response to the government's decision to scrap statutory national tests for 14-year-olds and it made a set of recommendations for improving the quality of assessment across key stages and school phases. Despite the problems with national curriculum tests in 2008, the group did not condemn that style of summative testing at 11 and 14. It called for testing to be one part of a broader pupil and school assessment process that inspired trust among teachers, pupils and parents.

Faith in the system

Trust is a key issue for Dame Yasmin. "Teachers and parents must have faith in the system if they are going to buy into it," she says. While Key Stage 3 national curriculum tests were falling out of favour when the Expert Group came together, they were a valuable tool when introduced in 1993, when there was not the same rigour in the system.

"There is no doubt that Key Stage 3 tests did ratchet up standards, certainly at this school. It was good for students to know they were going to be assessed and there were high stakes attached to these assessments," Dame Yasmin says. "However, gradually they became an end in themselves - especially in the way in which they were reported. So it was time to move on."

During her tenure as headteacher at Denbigh High, Dame Yasmin has done a great deal to ratchet up performance herself. When she joined the school in 1991 Denbigh was Luton's sink school. It was undersubscribed; only 14 per cent of pupils were achieving five or more higher grade GCSEs; and only 50 per cent of the teaching was deemed satisfactory.

Over 15 years, Dame Yasmin transformed the school and, in 2007, it received an outstanding Ofsted report. Last year (2009) 89 per cent of pupils gained five or more higher GCSEs. This was a massive leap from the previous year when 74 per cent achieved those results - although the number of pupils with maths and English dropped slightly from 47 per cent to 44 per cent.

Dame Yasmin moved to Luton following several years as a deputy head in Harrow. Before that she had been a maths teacher in Bristol and West London having gone into teaching in the late 1970s. As head of Denbigh she has won awards for her leadership and been an adviser to government. And in September 2008 she was asked to become executive principal of a soft federation between Denbigh High School and another outstanding Luton school, Challney High School for Boys.

Denbigh High has attracted its fair share of controversy. In 2002 the school was at the centre of a media furore - and a major court case - when it refused to let a Muslim student come to school in the full-length jilbab. The school held firmly to its uniform policy and the case went all the way to the Lords which in 2006 ruled in Denbigh's favour insisting that it had "taken immense pains to devise a uniform policy which respected Muslim beliefs."

It's this sort of consistency, and the ability to hold the line, that Dame Yasmin believes is key to any school's success and is equally important in the school's current bid to turn round assessment procedures following her participation in the Expert Group. But when the government initially cancelled Key Stage 3 curriculum tests, it wasn't immediately obvious which way to go. As with many schools, Denbigh's initial response was to do the tests anyway and mark them internally.

"We simply didn't feel we had sufficiently robust alternatives in place, Dame Yasmin says. "We had got into the habit of doing things as we had for long time and being over reliant on external assessment. We hadn't really trusted our own judgement."

Slowly that is changing. The school has a three-year strategy to embed Assessment for Learning (AfL). It's not about dumping exams or adopting a particular style of classroom assessment, insists Dame Yasmin. Rather it is developing a variety of assessment methods - involving teacher assessment, self-assessment, peer assessment. The key message Dame Yasmin wants to convey, to staff and pupils alike, is that assessment is a continual process and an integral part of every lesson. It's not an overnight process.

"The primary sector has a better grip on AfL than we do in secondary schools, largely because they spend longer with individual learners and know the pupils better," says Dame Yasmin. "In secondary schools, because we are juggling so many things, we don't always set aside the time it takes for effective assessment, moderation and standardisation. But we need to - it needs to become bread-and-butter stuff for us."

For this reason, getting assessment right has become a focus for staff development too, using the CIEA and Denbigh's own Chartered Educational Assessor (see box above). As important, is the involvement of pupils. AfL doesn't work if pupils don't take an active role in the system.

A culture shift

Dame Yasmin is particularly proud of Denbigh's pupil involvement. When she took over the school it simply wasn't cool to learn, gradually this attitude has been replaced by a culture of success. "Our assessment strategy is working because the children here are interested and engaged. They want to contribute, so they just go for it," she says.

Dame Yasmin is confident that if she went into any classroom every child would be able to tell her what level they were working towards, describe where they were and what they needed to do to move on. "We are seeing this happen now in a way that it wasn't three years ago. And I would expect quite specific responses, not bland ones."

But a pupil's involvement in assessment isn't limited to understanding his or her own performance. Denbigh has also introduced a strong element of peer assessment into the system. Different departments take different approaches to peer assessment (see box left) but according to Dame Yasmin it is there in around half of all lessons. "I would expect to see some form of peer assessment going on in most classes with students giving each other feedback. And in another three years I expect to see it happening more consistently," she says.

Dame Yasmin admits these aren't new ideas. "We knew about the advantages of peer assessment before, we just weren't always insistent that it happened in lessons. Being in the Expert Group has encouraged me think about it in a more structured way."

The Group's remit was to look at Key Stage 3 assessment, but it is impossible to see one Key Stage in isolation from another, and much of the work that Denbigh is doing applies equally to Key Stage 4. Indeed, Dame Yasmin attributes the hike in GCSE results last year to a teachers' improved understanding "of the need to standardise before they moderate [students'] work".

However, as with Key Stage 3 SATs a few years ago, the stress of league tables is taking its toll on people's trust in GCSE courses and results. Many schools feel under pressure to offer courses that lead to four or five GCSEs rather than a single award at the end. However, while these are great for the school profile, students can find themselves unable to use them to move on to A-levels.

Dame Yasmin robustly defends this approach. "Not every young person will get [five good GCSEs including English and maths] but everyone should be capable of getting a good range of qualifications. That is do-able and we need to maximise outcomes for young people who don't want to do A-levels. They still need to feel they have achieved, so we should not consider narrowing the curriculum."

As Dame Yasmin points out, there has always been variability in the system, whether it is between courses or exam boards, and schools have rightly wanted to get the best for their pupils. "As a maths teacher years ago, I would look for courses that best suited my students. It's always been like that."

Just as Key Stage 4 was implicated in the Expert Group's recommendations, so too was Key Stage 2. The group recommended that national tests remain for English and maths but not for science, which has happened. They also made particular recommendations for transition from primary to secondary school, including developing bridging projects that pupils could begin in their final year at primary school and complete at their new secondary school.

However, Dame Yasmin is less optimistic about schools' ability to crack this nut, even with the Expert Group recommendations.

"We know that transition between schools is a big issue and that getting it right is critical but it is also a big ask of secondary schools given that we take children from so many different primaries," she says. "We have tried to instigate transition projects with our key primary school partners but some pupils, who don't attend these schools, are inevitably left out." Her key point is that there always have been problems around the move from primary to secondary school and there never was a golden age of transition.

Dame Yasmin may not claim to be an assessment expert, but she does have a clear view of what good pupil assessment is. "It's knowing where each child sitting in front of you is; knowing what engages that child and adjusting your teaching to get maximum engagement and so learning from each child. For me that's what good assessment is about and it's what makes teaching
come alive." n

make the grade . Summer 2010 27

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28 make the grade . Summer 2010

Peer assessment at Denbigh High School

Around 50 per cent of all lessons at Denbigh High now involve some form of peer assessment. How they do it depends very much on what individual departments feel best suit them and there
is no single peer
assessment method.

For example, Dame Yasmin describes a geography class she recently sat in on, where two girls were assessing each other's written work. "One had assessed her friend's work as a level five. I asked her why and she turned straight to another sheet with six level-five criteria, each of which had been ticked," says Dame Yasmin. She holds this up as a good example of peer assessment but knows there are many others operating throughout the school.

Following the report of Expert Group on Assessment, subject leaders at Denbigh High School have been trialling a variety of approaches to peer assessment. For example:

Modern Foreign Languages

Denbigh operates a sticker system with different coloured stickers to indicate if a piece of work has been teacher assessed, self-assessed or peer assessed. It enables teachers to ensure they are using different assessment methods regularly.

PE

Vaulting

Pupils are filmed during their vault and the results instantly relayed to a computer screen in the gym. Pupils are encouraged to watch the film of their vault immediately afterwards so they can see what they got right and what they got wrong.

Trampolining

A member of the PE staff explains an aspect of trampolining to a small group of pupils. They then take it in turns to try out a particular manoeuvre while their peers provide feedback.

English literature

Pupils are encouraged to assess their peers' written work and give them a grade. They have examples of work that fit the requirements of a particular performance level to help them.

Maths

In a plenary session, a teacher will ask a pupil a question. When the pupil has answered, the teacher will ask another pupil for their view on the first pupil's answer.

Dame Yasmin counts peer

assessment as a big part

of denbigh's success

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Effective assessment is what makes teaching powerful, and ultimately leads to good learning

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Jim varney

Getting assessment right

Appropriate assessment has become the focus of staff development. Both Denbigh High and Challney Boys, to which it is federated, are members of the CIEA and staff at both schools have been through CIEA assessment training.

However, Denbigh has taken its commitment to developing sound assessment practices even further, by encouraging staff to qualify as Chartered Educational Assessors (CEAs). The idea is that between them they will oversee the school's classroom assessment and exam strategies.

One member of staff has already gained chartership. She is working closely with staff to improve internal moderation, ensuring that her teaching colleagues allocate enough time to assessment. According to Dame Yasmin, having a member of staff operating across the school in this way is vital when it comes to sharing knowledge and experience. "It gives us a good overview of what effective assessment practice looks like in the school," she says.

The school is keen to share its expertise beyond its own gates. As a result, CEAs are closely involved in developing the 14-19 Diploma courses in Luton. Campus Luton, which brings together all the secondary schools in the town plus the further education college, is the main vehicle for delivering Diplomas. Dame Yasmin says: "We only have five at the moment, but delivered across the town this still involves substantial numbers of young people. And we have to get the assessment right."

Profile

make the grade . Summer 2010 29

Qualifications:

Degree in Government,
London School of Economics

Maths degree, Open University

MA Institute of Education

Honorary Doctorate of Education, Bedford University

Employment includes:

1977-1978 Greenford High School, Ealing, maths teacher

1979-86 Pen Park Girls' School, Bristol, maths teacher

1987-91 Canons High School, Harrow, deputy headteacher

1991-2007 Denbigh High School, Luton, headteacher

2007-2008 Secondment:
Secondary schools adviser to
the education secretary

2008-present Denbigh High School and Challney High School for
Boys, Luton, headteacher and executive principal

Other achievements:

2005 - Headteacher of the Year for the East of England

2007 - named Dame Yasmin Bevan for services to education

2008 - a member of the Expert Group on Assessment