The rationale for the removal of levels
** Despite a wider set of original purposes, the pressure generated by the use of levels in the accountability system led to a curriculum driven by Attainment Targets, levels and sub-levels, rather than the programmes of study. Levels came to dominate all forms of assessment. Not only were they used for both statutory national curriculum tests and statutory reporting of teacher assessment, but they also came to be used too frequently for in-school assessment between key stages in order to monitor whether pupils were on track to achieve expected levels at the end of key stages.
Despite a wider set of original purposes, the pressure generated by the use of levels in the accountability system led to a curriculum driven by Attainment Targets, levels and sub-levels, rather than the programmes of study. Levels came to dominate all forms of assessment. Not only were they used for both statutory national curriculum tests and statutory reporting of teacher assessment, but they also came to be used too frequently for in-school assessment between key stages in order to monitor whether pupils were on track to achieve expected levels at the end of key stages.
The Commission believes that this has had a profoundly negative impact on teaching and learning. Alongside the Government’s changes to ways of reporting national curriculum test outcomes and statutory teacher assessment, the freedom for schools to develop their own approaches to in-school assessment means that the three forms of assessment – formative assessment, in-school summative assessment and nationally standardised summative assessment5 – can be appropriately tied to their different purposes. Overall this will better serve the needs of pupils and promote a higher quality of teaching, learning and assessment.
The problems with levels
Accuracy and consistency of assessment
Although levels were intended to be used to assess pupils against the whole programme of study, the results of almost any assessment were translated into a level or sublevel and used as a measure of overall attainment. This either required aggregating a wide variety of data into a single number, which did not represent pupil performance accurately, or meant that levels were being assigned to individual pieces of work, regardless of how much of the programme of study they covered.
Too often levels became viewed as thresholds and teaching became focused on getting pupils across the next threshold instead of ensuring they were secure in the knowledge and understanding defined in the programmes of study. In reality, the difference between pupils on either side of a boundary might have been very slight, while the difference between pupils within the same level might have been very different.
Progress became synonymous with moving on to the next level, but progress can involve developing deeper or wider understanding, not just moving on to work of greater difficulty. Sometimes progress is simply about consolidation.
Levels also used a ‘best fit’ model, which meant that a pupil could have serious gaps in their knowledge and understanding, but still be placed within the level. There were additional challenges in using the best fit model to appropriately assess pupils with uneven profiles of abilities, such as children with autism.
Although levels were intended to define common standards of attainment, the level descriptors were open to interpretation. Different teachers could make different judgements. Teachers receiving new pupils frequently disagreed with the levels those pupils had been given by previous teachers. Consequently, the information secondary schools received from primary schools was sometimes felt to be unreliable or unhelpful.
Too often levels have dominated lesson planning. Teachers planned lessons which would allow pupils to learn or demonstrate the requirements for specific levels. This encouraged teachers to design and use only classroom assessments that would report a level outcome. As a result, formative classroom assessment was not always being used as an integral part of effective teaching. Instead of using classroom assessments to identify strengths and gaps in pupils’ knowledge and understanding of the programmes of study, some teachers were simply tracking pupils’ progress towards target levels. The drive for progress across levels also led teachers to focus their attention disproportionately on pupils just below level boundaries.
In addition, levels were often the main focus of conversations with pupils and their parents or carers6. Pupils compared themselves to others and often labelled themselves according to the level they were at. This encouraged pupils to adopt a mind-set of fixed ability, which was particularly damaging where pupils saw themselves at a lower level. The disconnect between levels and the content of the national curriculum also meant that telling a parent his or her child was level 4b, did not provide meaningful information about what that child knew and understood or needed to know to progress. Levels were used to measure both end of phase achievement and lesson-by-lesson formative progress, but they had not been designed to fulfil the latter purpose, with the result that formative assessment was often distorted.