The Purpose of Assessment

The Windsor Academy Trust (WAT) Threshold Curriculum is in place in Key Stage 3 and our Examinations Curriculum is in place in Key Stages 4 and 5. Our assessment framework allows leaders and teachers to measure the impact of the curriculum and teaching and determine the progress that students are making towards mastery of the Threshold Concepts.

‘A school’s assessment system has many jobs to do. It must provide useful information for students, parents, teachers and leaders about the progress being made by students’ (Wiliam, 2014, p. 6). This is a simple aim that can be difficult to achieve but we know how important assessment is to diagnose and improve learning.

Formative assessment is that which provides feedback to students and helps them to learn (Newstead, 2004, p. 97) while the aim of summative assessment is to ‘achieve a summary mark which captures a student’s performance relative to that of other students’ (Newstead, 2004, p.97).

It is important to consider the purpose of WAT’s summative assessments, called Key Assessment Tasks, because this can impact how accurate they are in diagnosing where students are in their learning and can also have an impact on the curriculum, teaching and learning and strategies to accelerate progress more widely. Evaluating teaching is an important aspect of summative assessments as it helps us identify strengths.

1. Formative assessment is not graded and is part of our approach to teaching and learning; this is assessment that takes place in lessons as part of our teaching cycle. It can take many forms, such as Key

Learning Tasks, multiple choice quizzes, short-answer quizzes or the use of miniwhiteboards. They are often used in

Smart Starts which frequently take the form of low-stakes retrieval quizzes. Marks from these are not collected or analysed centrally; they inform what the teacher does next.

2. It is important to evaluate the impact of our teaching as doing so allows us to improve it (such as through developing the curriculum, teachers or leaders) and so we have a scaled score system in Key Stage 3 and a grading system in Key Stages 4 and 5 using summative assessments (called Key Assessment Tasks), that are undertaken in week 10 of each of three curriculum cycles annually. These allow school and Trust leaders to gauge the progress students are making.

The purpose of our Key Assessment Tasks is to diagnose the extent to which students have achieved understanding of the Threshold Concepts or examination content in each subject. This supports teachers, school subject leaders and Trust Subject Directors/Leaders to take actions that move students forward in their learning and ensure our curriculum is refined and improved over time.