WAT Cohort Ranking

This emphasis is a common theme in the OECD’s evaluation of school systems internationally which drew the conclusion that ‘the point of evaluation and assessment is to improve classroom practice and student learning. With this in mind, all types of evaluation and assessment should have educational value and should have practical benefits for those who participate in them, especially students and teachers’ (OECD, 2013, p. 2).

A common assessment follows logically from a shared curriculum and allows comparison between schools to determine where areas of best practice are to be found so they can be shared and their positive effects multiplied. Other School Trusts have described the benefits of a Trust wide assessment system including Ark Schools (Davies, 2020, p. 75) which also recognises that formative and summative assessments serve different purposes and which is why formative assessments are not graded in any way.

While formative assessment needs meaning for students and teachers to move themselves forward in their learning, where summative assessments are concerned, ‘shared meanings are much more important’ (Wiliam and Black, 1996, p. 544). This means the information generated by our summative assessments has to be able to be interpreted not only by teachers and students but also parents and school leaders. At Key Stages 4 and 5, GCSE and A Level grades along with their vocational equivalents are a natural way of reporting the results of Key Assessment Tasks that already have shared meaning; over time we come to know the meaning of what standard is represented by each grade irrespective of the subject or stage in the educational journey. At Key Stage 3, this used to be achieved by National Curriculum Levels before their abolition; ‘they had become disconnected from their original purpose; (Myatt, 2018, p. 57) and the Department for Education rightly identified that they ‘distorted the purpose of in-school assessment’ (DfE, 2015, p. 5) and ‘had a profoundly negative impact on teaching’ (ibid.).

At Windsor Academy Trust, scaled scores create shared meaning instead, but without the negative impact on teaching and learning. Raw marks do not create shared meaning because ‘the raw marks needed to achieve a certain standard fluctuate depending on the particular assessment and the version of the assessment being taken’ (Christodoulou, 2016, p. 193) whereas using scaled scores ‘is the method used for transforming raw marks, which are not comparable, into a scale that is comparable’ (Koretz, 2008, cited in Christodoulou, 2016, p. 193). How scaled scores are used to improve students’ learning and for school improvement activities is discussed later.

This system exploits the benefits of consistency and scale employed by other successful School Trusts, such as Ark Schools (Davies, 2020, p. 80) and is an example of where our Trust ‘operates as a single organisation’ which is ‘one of the five things that mark out great multi-academy trusts’ (Carter, 2020, p. 35).