Now that levels have gone...

I am currently delivering training on the future of testing and assessment for a national provider and get to meet teachers around the country. And, each time, the story is the same: we kind of get it but we are struggling. The truth of the matter is that most of us are currently struggling with the new expectations of assessment.

Since the Task Group on Assessment and Testing report of 1988, we have lived with this idea of a level, "to define one of a sequence of points on a scale to be used in describing the progress of attainment". To those of us who were puzzling out how to implement the first national curriculum, with its nine folders and multiplicity of attainment targets, the idea of a level seemed an alien construct. Years later the arguments still raged over whether levels should be age-related or age-independent, with some suggesting that they were "crude criterion-referencing", to quote Robert Skidelsky from his address to the Centre for Policy Studies conference in 1993.