Primary Assessment and Accountability

David Laws Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2013 Written Statements

[The Minister for Schools (Mr David Laws)]

I am pleased to announce today the launch of our consultation on primary assessment and accountability.

We believe it is crucial that as many children as possible should leave primary school having reached a level that leaves them ready to progress and achieve their full potential at secondary school. Our reforms to the national curriculum, statutory assessment and school accountability for primary schools are designed to ensure that pupils are well prepared for the next stage of their education and that schools do not allow pupils to fall behind.

We want to see a step change in attainment at the end of primary school. In the past, the achievement bar was set too low and too few pupils cleared this bar. Our ambition is that all pupils, excepting some of those with particular learning needs, should be secondary ready at age 11—that means using a higher measure of what success looks like. We are already raising the threshold for the percentage of pupils to be ready for secondary school to 65%. But we know that schools and teachers have already raised their game way beyond this. For that reason, we will expect a very high proportion of pupils—85%—to reach the new, higher secondary readiness threshold for a school to be above the bar. Since we know that both children and schools can achieve this, it is right that we set this as a minimum standard.

Our new national curriculum is designed to give schools genuine opportunities to take ownership of the curriculum. The new programmes of study, published on 8 July, set out what pupils should be taught by the end of primary education. Teachers will be able to develop a school curriculum that delivers the core content in a way that is challenging and relevant for their pupils.

Statutory assessment in core subjects at the end of key stages is designed primarily to enable robust external accountability. We will continue to prescribe statutory assessment arrangements in English, mathematics and science. National curriculum tests in English and mathematics will continue, and will show whether pupils have met a demanding secondary readiness standard, which will remain the same from year to year. We propose to report pupils’ test results as a scaled score, such as those used in international surveys, to make sure that test outcomes are comparable over time. We will report each pupil’s ranking in the national cohort by decile to show their performance relative to their peers nationally.

It is vital that we set high aspirations for all schools and pupils. Our new targets will prepare children for success. At the moment, pupils are being asked to reach a bar that too often sets them up to fail. So that all children—whatever their circumstances—can arrive in secondary school ready to succeed, we are giving significantly more money to primary school pupils eligible for the pupil premium. This will support this step change in ambition.

We introduced the pupil premium in 2011 to help schools close the attainment gap for disadvantaged pupils. In 2014-15, total funding through the pupil premium will increase by an extra £625 million to a total of £2.5 billion. We will use the extra funding to increase the level of the pupil premium for primary schools to £1,300 per pupil compared with £900 in the current year. This 44% rise in the pupil premium is the largest cash rise so far. This should enable more targeted interventions to support disadvantaged pupils to be “secondary ready” and achieve our ambitious expectations for what pupils should know and be able to do by the end of primary education. We believe in early intervention because the greater the numbers of disadvantaged pupils that leave primary school with basic literacy and numeracy, the greater their chances of achieving good GCSEs.

We also want to treat schools fairly by acknowledging the performance of schools whose pupils achieve well despite a low starting point. We will therefore look at how we can introduce a reliable, robust measure of progress that we can take into consideration when holding schools to account. A school that does not achieve the attainment threshold will not be judged to be below the floor standard if its pupils are making good progress. The progress measure will also help identify coasting schools, whose pupils do not achieve their full potential. Ofsted will focus its inspections more closely on schools below and just above floor standards, and inspect schools with good performance on these measures less frequently.

We will continue to report on the progress pupils make during primary education. In order to measure pupils’ progress, we need to measure how each pupil’s end of key stage 2 test results compare with the results of pupils with similar prior attainment. Currently the baseline against which we measure progress is at the end of key stage 1. We could continue to keep the baseline at this stage. Alternatively, we could introduce a similar teacher-led baseline check early in reception, which would help teachers understand the stage the child has reached and allow the crucial progress made in reception, year 1 and year 2 to be reflected in the accountability system. Our consultation seeks views on which is the best option.

Finally, we recognise that teachers are professionals, and we want to give schools more freedom over the way they measure assessment. We have already announced that we will remove the current system of national curriculum levels and level descriptions, which imposes a single system for ongoing assessment and prescribes the detailed sequence for what pupils should be taught. This will leave schools free to decide how to track pupils’ progress. Ofsted will expect to see evidence of pupils’ progress, but inspections will be informed by the pupil tracking data which schools choose to keep.

The results of national curriculum tests, along with summative teacher assessment, will continue to be published. These provide important information for parents, governors, Ofsted, the wider public, and the secondary school where the pupil will continue their education. The Department will continue to use floor standards to identify schools which are underperforming.

I will place a copy of the consultation on primary assessment and accountability in the Libraries of both Houses.