The Curriculum Foundation’s response to the consultation on proposed changes to Attainment Targets and Level Descriptions.

The Curriculum Foundation is an organisation committed to representing the best interests of young people through the potential for their curriculum to improve their lives and the world in which they live. The Foundation believes that the quality of the curriculum is instrumental in helping young people to creating a better world.

In that light, the Curriculum Foundation has welcomed the changes to the Secondary Curriculum and the proposed changes to the Primary Curriculum. We are already working with schools and local authorities across the country to help them to understand and implement these changes. We welcome the way in which the new curricula take account of the demands of the 21st Century, and recognise that people, in both their working and private lives, need to have not only a range of understandings, knowledge and skills, but also need to have the confidence and personal qualities to extend and adapt these to an ever-changing world. Within the new curricula, we particularly welcome the:

    • clear aims in the realms of the personal (Confident individuals), academic ((Successful learners) and social (Responsible citizens)
    • reduced and more flexible content that allows schools to personalise and localise learning to meet the needs of all pupils
    • personal, learning and thinking skills that recognise the need to adapt and extend learning within a changing world, and to apply it in a rapidly altering range of situations

We are therefore somewhat surprised that the proposed amendments to the Attainment Targets and Level Descriptions do not reflect these very positive changes, and do not seem to be sufficient to reflect the new curricula that have been set out for primary and secondary schools. Nor do they reflect the wider ambitions for young peoples’ learning and development that are set out in ‘The Essentials for Learning and Life’, the ‘Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills’ (PLTS), and dimensions of learning.

We see the purpose of an assessment schedule, such as the Attainment Targets and Level Descriptions under discussion, as being to provide a way of ascertaining how well learners are doing in terms of the learning set out in the curriculum. We would therefore expect any schedule to mirror the curriculum it serves, especially in its key points. It would therefore seem unusual to change the curriculum in significant ways, but keep the assessment schedule for the previous curriculum.

If these proposals are implemented, the nation would be missing an opportunity to bring assessment in line with the commendable ambitions of the new curricula. We would have a forward-facing curriculum ready to meet the 21st Century, but an assessment schedule which is a mere echo of a curriculum from the previous century.

There is a saying in education that “What you test is what you get”, and whilst this may not be entirely true, and whilst assessment may be different from testing, there remains a concern that an assessment schedule that is at odds with the curriculum it is supposed to serve will set up tensions that will not contribute to the best education for our young people.

There are several specific concerns:

1. There are particularly significant issues in relation to the new Primary Curriculum because the proposals do not reflect the six new ‘Areas of Learning’ nor the ‘Essentials for Learning and Life’. There are six major areas of concern here:

     • the new primary curriculum sets out programmes for six ‘areas of learning’, but the level descriptions are for the former subjects. This has already created confusion in teachers’ minds about the status of the Areas of Learning, and it will lead to difficulties in using the descriptions in the primary context. For example, elements of the former programmes of study for Design and Technology are now to be found in three of the new Areas of Learning, but the Level Descriptions are still grouped under Design and Technology.

     • the new Areas of Learning have been given unity by their common ‘Key Knowledge’ and ‘Key Skills’, but the revised Level Descriptions make no use of these unifying devices. In fact, the preservation of the Level Descriptions for the old subjects runs the danger of fragmenting the Areas of Learning.

     • the revised level descriptions do not cover some of the ‘new’ elements of the primary curriculum; for example, dance and drama within ‘Understanding the Arts’. There are now four elements within this Area of Learning (Art & design, Music, Dance and Drama) but Level Descriptions for only two of these. There is no reference to drama in the proposed English level descriptions, nor specific reference to dance in the PE level descriptions, although there is reference to the two art forms within the old programmes of study for these subjects. This has already raised questions from schools about the importance of Dance and Drama.

     • the revised level descriptions are set out in terms of the old programmes of study rather than either the new primary or secondary programmes. For example, the Level Descriptions for science are still set out in the four sections of the former primary and secondary programmes, rather than the four (different) new ones of the new programmes. They accord fairly closely with the new secondary programmes, but do not relate well to the new primary programmes where the investigative strand has now been embedded within the other elements.

     • the revised descriptions do not always fit with the new programmes. For example, there are elements of science in the level descriptions that are not in the new programmes: Level 2 of science 2 says, “pupils use their knowledge related to organisms, their behaviour and the environment to describe plants and animals, the places they are found and the basic conditions they need in order to survive” which is part of the present KS1 programme. However, it is no longer a requirement of the proposed new programmes.

     • in other places, there is a mis-match between the ‘Curriculum Progression’ sections of the programmes and the levels of the Level Descriptions. For example, in ‘English, languages and communication’ the proposed E11 (in the ‘Early’ section) requirement is to “Make connections between different parts of texts and the meaning as a whole”. As this is a present KS2 requirement, it is reflected in the Level 4 description which would seem an unlikely level of attainment for children at the early stage.

2. The amended level descriptions do not offer a way of setting out progression in the ‘Essential Learning’ or ‘Key Skills’ within the primary Areas of Learning, nor the ‘Key Concepts’ and ‘Key Skills’ of the secondary subjects, yet these are supposed to be ‘key’ to the programmes. The opportunity to signal the centrality of these aspects to each of the Areas and subjects has therefore been missed, and a message seems to be being sent that they are not as ‘essential’ and ‘key’ as their title suggests.

3. It is also a major missed opportunity that the amended level descriptions do not give an opportunity to assess progress within the ‘Essentials of Learning and Life’ that lie at the heart of the primary curriculum. For example, it would have been helpful if those aspects of literacy and numeracy that were picked out as ‘essential’ could have been clearly visible in the Level Descriptions, thus offering a clear path of progression. This could have been done within English and Maths even if new Area of Learning targets had not been written.

4. The Curriculum Foundation welcomes the four clear common threads that run through the key skills for each of the areas of learning (although there are more than four key skills in some areas). However, an opportunity has been missed to use these common threads as a basis for progression. This is particularly a pity when these four threads (investigation, analysis, evaluation and communication) can be discerned in all of the present Level Descriptions, and it would have been a relatively easy matter to consolidate these into new generic descriptions for each area. These would have:
      • provided a common approach to progression across the areas of learning
      • made the job of promoting progression more straightforward for teachers
      • focused progression on the key skills, whilst making the clear the unique application of these skills in each area of learning

5. As the amended Attainment Targets and Level Descriptions do not relate to the ‘Essentials for Learning and Life’ of the new primary curriculum or to the ‘Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills’ of the secondary curriculum, the opportunity is missed to develop a more useful learner profile that takes account of learners’ progress in these key areas and which would be welcomed by employers.

6. The Level Description have been only slightly amended, and therefore they do not reflect or value the higher order progression of making links and connections between learning across subjects, yet this is a key aspect of understanding within a 21st Century context. This is particularly the case in the new primary curriculum where there is not way of recognising understandings across even one Area of Learning.

Whilst the proposed amendments help in some minor ways to bring the Attainment Targets and Level Descriptions in line with some of the subjects of the secondary curriculum, they miss many of the key facets of the new secondary and primary curricula, and taking the proposals as whole, it seems that they take 'the route of least resistance' rather than a providing vision for effective assessment for the future. The proposals are still rooted in the former programmes of study, and therefore do not sufficiently address the new programmes or the 21st century skills and competencies that these programmes embody.

What is now needed is a set of proposals that take the best in assessment practice from around the world (and much of that best practice is already here in the UK), that build on our growing understanding of learning, and which reflect the wide ambitions of a curriculum for the 21st Century. These proposals may take a little time to develop, and could not be achieved through minor amendments to the present proposals. The Curriculum Foundation would be pleased to work with the DCSF and the QCDA to develop these proposals and to produce an assessment format that would:

     • reflect more fully the wide ambitions of the new programmes of learning and study
     • provide more help to teachers in assessing key skills and concepts
     • address higher order understandings across subjects
     • be more straightforward and easier to use
     • present a more rounded profile of learners’ progress

We would recommend that such a process should start as soon as possible, and we would be very pleased to participate.

Dr Brian Male
CEO The Curriculum Foundation