Best Practice

Assessment: Giving pupils the power

Headteacher Rachel Wells explains how her staff team have developed and implemented a new approach to assessment, encouraging pupils to play an active role in analysing their own progress, achievement and next steps for learning

West Heslerton CE Primary School, a small school in North Yorkshire, is typical in many ways of the many small rural schools countrywide. A complete redesign of our approach has resulted in a very different type of education for all learners.

At West Heslerton, 50 children are taught in two mixed age classes. I am the full-time headteacher, both classes have a full-time teacher and teaching assistant. The teaching assistants swap classes at lunchtime and many activities are whole-school, so that staff know and work with children of all ages.

Together, as staff and governors, we wanted to thread British values, and as a church school Christian values, throughout the learning experiences of each individual to ensure that all pupils were fully equipped for life in modern Britain. We wanted to put the hard-to-define spiritual, moral, social and cultural education (SMSC) at the heart of our learning. We also wanted to consider learning in its widest sense.

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