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Writer's pictureChris Passey

Assessing for the future: A reflection from Kimichi School

CHRIS PASSEY FCCT, DEPUTY HEAD, KIMICHI SCHOOL, UK


Kimichi School is a small, music-specialist independent school in Birmingham, UK founded by Sally Alexander MBE in 2014.


As published in Impact,13th May 2024


Background

The introduction of a National Curriculum and, therefore, GCSEs was overseen by the Secretary of State for Education (1986–89) at the time, the now-Lord Baker. In an article for the Independent (2019), Lord Baker cited the burden of league tables and the time pressure that necessitates rote learning to cover all of the material as his personal rationale for recommending the abolition of the current assessment system at the end of secondary school education in the UK. Sarah Cottingham (2023) has reinvigorated the philosophy of Ausubel and colleagues (1968) and their work on meaningful learning, where they concluded that rote learning was in direct opposition to a deeper understanding of what was being taught and the ability to demonstrate profound learning. In examinations, employing a meaningful approach – that is to say learning that has its roots in connections to broader and often more abstract concepts and themes – tends to achieve greater success when contrasted with using a superficial strategy such as rote learning (Mayya et al., 2004). Anecdotally, I have found the work of Zoe Helman and Sam Gibbs (2022) on a concept-led English curriculum to be fundamental in a shift of mindset from our students, whereby deeper, more meaningful concepts (such as power and ambition) are fed into the curriculum long before arriving at Shakespeare’s vehicle for them in the shape of Macbeth in Year 10. Compared to a rote system of fact-feeding for the examination, students are demonstrating the impact of this meaningful learning by creating and nurturing deeper links between discrete bodies of knowledge.


At Kimichi, our students often arrive with school-associated trauma, emotion-based school refusal, social anxiety stemming from the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic and other complications, which can often mean that GCSE examinations measure the wrong type of success for our students, who inadvertently suffer from the cramming of key words and concepts necessitated by the pressures of such assessments and the curricula that they create. As a music-specialist school, the ‘way in’ to increased attendance and subsequent academic achievement is to build students’ confidence in the full range of their talents and abilities, alongside the more traditional forms of progress that work so well for other settings and students.


Success is often attributed to grades, percentages and other metrics, for which teachers are held to account. However, that word is so heavily subjective as to often limit its perception by those that would use it to judge college placements and job interviews. The definition of academic success was the subject of research by York et al. (2015), in which they found that such a term was limiting and that future practitioners should consider expanding their definition beyond academic grades to include skills acquisition, personal context and aspiration as suitable additional measures. Miller (2018) suggests that schools should be educating students to contribute to the ever-changing landscape of the world around them and not just to contribute economically, which could be seen in alignment with current and ongoing research by Body et al. (2023), who are beginning to conclude that a strong active civic education also has a positive benefit for students’ future contribution to society and success in employment.


All of this thinking, along with our own experience, has led us to reconsider how the future of assessment may benefit our students and through what method we may achieve this. How do we account for students for whom success is sitting in an examination for two hours, overcoming previous school trauma or simply walking through the door?


COVID-19

The consequences of school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic for assessment and attainment have created a spotlight of focus on the profession. Majeed (2020), for Oxford Policy Management, suggested scripts for teachers to use to ensure that content was at least covered in some way. This seems to go against the accepted learning theories from Ausubel et al. (1968), Anderson (2001) and Rose and Meyer (2002) that may support our anecdotal experience of settings curating examination conditions during the teacher-assessed periods of 2020–21, where schools were directed by the Department for Education (2020) not to hold formal examinations and to take a much more informal approach to assessment to reflect the learning lost. Fahle et al. (2023) found the effect of remote or hybrid learning to be a significant factor in a decline in progress, especially in students from poorer backgrounds. In our own setting, we found that the more relaxed methods of assessment – such as chunked blocks of one hour in English, instead of two and a half hours, and relaxed classroom environments – meant that we found our students with SEMH (social, emotional and mental health) needs or SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) were better able to focus and achieve grades that accurately demonstrated their competency in the subject, as opposed to the snapshot nature of a final, summative examination. To ensure that our grades were fair and unbiased, the team had several internal and external moderations, which included standardisation of work inside departments before an external moderation from a partner school, as well as facilitating local expertise to ensure that the grades were as accurate as they could be for the benefit of our students and their futures.

This unique period of time gave us the opportunity to question further the need to place transferable – or soft – skills and behaviours at the foundation of the curriculum offer from schools.


Transferable skills and behaviour assessment: The Compendium

Acknowledging the existence and importance of transferable behaviours, such as resilience, is necessary in schools not only to ensure that students learn skills and behaviours that can be transferred across settings and contexts (Bertrand and Namukasa, 2020) but also to inform successful career progression (Harum, 2023). Nägele and Stalder (2016) stated that transferable skills are essential for entry into the workplace, where they will be utilised for organisational entry, but that these must be supported in both school and employment settings to ensure that their very nature is maintained (Nägele and Neuenschwander, 2014).


In 2018, we had begun to hear from staff, parents and students alike that academic reporting of grades with some personal comments was not providing a complete picture of the success that the students were experiencing. Student A had spent two years in a state of emotion-based school refusal due to SEMH needs, and had arrived at Kimichi as a shadow of their former self, rocking in a chair in the corner of our office. Four years later, Student A had an attendance rate above 90 per cent, had gained four GCSE passes, an AS-level and an A-level. On paper, admittance to another FE/HE (further/higher education) setting would have seemed impossible, as the academic success was hard to prove if the new setting required higher grades for a chosen course or pathway. But the personal success was without comparison: confidence, the ability to look someone in the eye, effective and succinct communication and teamwork were transferable skills and behaviours that Student A had developed but which could not be recognised in any formal way. It could be argued – and it was certainly our experience – that the systems and practices that we use are concerned more with obtaining new skills and behaviours that are espoused through our music specialism; teamwork, communication and a sense of belonging all contribute to confidence (Mertz, 2023), which leads to academic success (Tabe, 2019).


The Compendium was our answer to that: a system of school reporting that allowed teachers to note significant moments of achievement for students for whom academic success was more difficult to attain. Within this document, teachers could submit their usual academic reports but also create a real-time commentary on students’ transferable skills and behaviours that were emerging, and how they were being fostered and encouraged. Should a specific student not obtain the grades required for a certain course, then the Compendium could be called upon to provide detailed insight into the transferable skills desirable by employers, as supported by Nägele and Stalder (2016),‌ and how these might better represent a student’s ability to perform well in their chosen career.


A digital portfolio

The think tank Rethinking Assessment is a conglomerate of non-partisan private and state school leaders who are advocating for the abolition of GCSE examinations in favour of broader assessment systems (2023). The Times Education Commission (2022) recommended the piloting of a ‘digital learner profile’ that records achievements within school, such as assessments and soft skills success, alongside footage of debates, instrument-playing and artwork. The idea is to create a whole and well-rounded representation of the child and their achievements, without limiting it to a grade from a snapshot-in-time examination. In 2022, Rethinking Assessment made available their digital learner profile for use in schools across the country, and we can expect research results from House of Lords select committees and All-Party Parliamentary Groups in the coming years, which will hopefully support our belief in the need for academic success to be recorded alongside growth in behaviours and skills that might have otherwise have been overlooked in a traditional assessment profile.


Barriers to progress

At Kimichi, we continue to develop our own Compendium for each child, ensuring that appropriate and accurate information is held within them. However, colleges and sixth form centres are disinclined to engage with a process of assessment that might affect funding for the placement from a lack of GCSEs or the process of students having to retake these examinations.


If systems like our Compendium or the digital learner profile are to have the positive impact of which we know they are capable, then college and sixth form leaders need to be given the ability to add value to them by requesting such a profile at application, or in lieu of passing with a grade 4 in maths owing to a personal issue at the time of examination for Student A. In turn, these colleges need to have the financial incentives from local authorities and government to imbue into these profiles the same sense of importance that is afforded to the grade criteria for entry on their courses.


If we truly want our world to be filled with vibrant, well-rounded individuals, then we need to start accepting vibrant and well-rounded assessments of them, without confining their futures to a single grade descriptor. Naive? Perhaps, but that’s what we do at Kimichi, as so many others do across the country: we try our best for the students in front of us so that they may one day lead the way. Correctly assessing the whole student, we believe, is an ongoing and deeply important endeavour.


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