The Globalised Challenge

"As well as teaching the traditional knowledge and skills, including literacy and numeracy, it is more important than ever that our education system equips young people with a broader set of personal, learning and thinking skills, including confidence and the ability to think analytically and creatively; to learn and research in depth; to be active citizens; and to work on their own, with others, and in teams." So says Ed Balls in his contribution to 'The Globalised Challenge, SSAT conference Nov. 2009'. This is to be lauded. However, it is a statement that needs to be addressed by how we go about assessment. Our education system will not be able to fully equip our young people with a broad set of personal learning and thinking skills until the assessment of these skills is fully developed and realised in all our schools.

In order to enable young people to attain self mastery in a wide range of 'skills' we need to assess PLTS fairly and with relevance to a young person's life. Students need to leave school with the ability to do, to take part, to find out, to use knowledge, as well as, can I scream this one out please, KNOWING STUFF! Schools need to assess skills in a joined up way because without this knowledge institutions can only make guesses as to what skills are being developed and to what level. These guesses often miss out what is really happening in a significant number of students' day to day experiences.

We need to include young people, in PLTS assessment as well as their peers, their teachers and/or other adults. This assessment needs to take place across a wide variety of domains, subjects, and opportunities, reflecting the rich variety of a student's experience and the transferability of their skills. The assessment needs to be simple. Assessment must not get in the way of the important process of 'doing'. There is often the danger that the assessment of skills becomes a bureaucratic nightmare of form filling, collecting evidence, and having passports stamped in a way that would even frighten Kafka. The assessment needs to be able to reflect a student's individual progress and be reported on in a way that is useful, both to the student, their parents and other interested parties. Finally, an assessment needs to be informative to an institution in a way that enables the institution to audit how groups of students, as well as individuals, are performing at any particular moment. 

The information that we can get from a joined up audit of our skills assessments enables teachers and schools to adapt the curriculum to particular needs at any given time. It is this information, based on observed progress, which will have, potentially, the biggest impact on how students' are able to improve and achieve mastery as learners, enabling them to meet the 'globalised challenge'.