Curriculum and Assessment

Assessment, Feedback & Response

There are six key principles underpinning the way we assess pupils:

Acquire

Apply

Approach

Attend

Attain

Aspire

Acquire:  Assessment of the specified milestone subject knowledge and what a pupil can remember.

Apply: Assessment of the pupil’s ability to apply their knowledge in different ways, using skills that have been identified as pertinent to the subject.

Approach: Assessment of how well a pupil engages in the classroom, their readiness to learn both inside and outside their classroom.  Their behaviour for learning with a focus on how effectively they undertake key learning approaches in class. 

Attend: Measure of a pupil’s attendance to school, lessons and their level of punctuality.

Attain: Outcomes of summative assessments, tests, public and pre-public examinations.

Aspire: A pupil’s target grade and a measure of their progress towards these.

Response To Assessment

Any assessment that takes place at The Kingsway School should result in responsive teaching for the class, cohorts of students or individuals. Assessment should be used to diagnose any possible gaps in knowledge, misconceptions or the need to consolidate skills further. Once these are diagnosed, the relevant aspects of the curriculum should be adapted and ‘therapy’ should be delivered to address any issues. Further assessment will be needed following this to ensure that any therapy delivered has been successful.  Therapy or intervention should follow the ‘Wave Model’ outlined here:

Formative & Summative Assessment

Teachers should use a combination of formative and summative assessment techniques to evaluate what learning has taken place.  Formative assessment should take place EVERY LESSON using a full range of ‘assessment for learning’ techniques. These can be implemented as pre-planned activities at important points in the learning or via habitual checking such as circulating the class, live marking or strategic questioning.  Summative assessments must take place regularly and the timings of these should be defined by subject leaders. These summative judgements are important as they allow for teachers to identify which students need additional support with their learning.  

Formative Assessment should be assessed against curriculum planning documentation and should inform the ACQUIRE and APPLY judgements that teachers make of pupil learning. 

Summative assessments should inform the ATTAIN aspect of the judgement of pupil learning but may also incorporate ACQUIRE and APPLY style questions. 

Milestone Assessments

Subject leaders are responsible for ensuring that more formal ‘milestone assessments’ are planned regularly into schemes of learning at key points when teachers wish to assess what essential and higher-level knowledge students have learnt over time.  The frequency of these will depend on the subject area and how much learning time takes place per term.  These milestones must be designed so that teachers can identify what students have and have not yet learned and include elements that require pupils to retrieve knowledge from their long-term memory.   

Adaptations to Milestone Assessments:
No pupils should be given assessments that they cannot access.  Teachers should use their formative assessment information to support students to be successful in their milestone assessments. If a teacher’s formative assessment indicates that a student may need help to be able to access an assessment, this support should be provided.  The amount of support needed or given should be considered if the milestone assessment results in or forms part of a later summative judgement. 

Marking

All milestone assessments must be marked using the school’s FAR marking technique, which should make it clear to students what the next steps or ‘actions’ should be in their learning.  To help with the visibility of FAR marking, teachers mark in green pen and most students respond in red pen.  The steps to FAR are outlined here: 

Making Summative Judgements & Reporting Home

Making Summative Judgments:  Judgements across all SIX assessment principles will be reported home to parents twice a year.  Heads of department are responsible for planning key moments where a teacher should make a summative judgement in relation to either a milestone assessment or holistically for a child in their subject area.  Before making any summative judgments for ACQUIRE, APPLY or ATTAIN at Key Stage 3, subject leaders and subject specialists must define their ‘age related expectations’ for knowledge and skills clearly and using progression grids with starting points aligned to Education Learning Trust ‘feeder schools’. When teachers are making summative judgements, pupils’ learning will be assessed to be at one of FIVE stages in comparison to age related expectations: 

1.       Below

2.       Working Towards

3.       Expected

4.       Greater Depth

5.       Mastery

At Key Stage 4, summative judgements will take the form of a GCSE or Vocational grade. These judgements should be awarded in-line with the national standard from the most recent set of GCSE results, Exemplar work and/or be calculated using national grade boundaries for the qualifications students are sitting.

To support teachers with making accurate summative judgements, subject leaders should provide support to those that deliver their subject by providing: interrogation of model answers, opportunities for standardisation and moderation and a chance to mark work in collaboration with others.   This should happen at both Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4.