If we genuinely care about children, the last thing schools should be doing at the moment is subjecting them to formal testing.
During normal circumstances, diagnostic testing of children is a very powerful tool to enable gap analysis and ensure that teaching is effectively targeted on the skills and concepts that children need to make progress. Most schools are very good at conducting tests in a positive environment which minimises anxiety and stress. However, subjecting children to a ‘test’ situation in these first weeks following lockdown is morally indefensible and will simply add to the damage already done to children’s confidence and wellbeing.
Even the most well-adjusted, seemingly confident children whose home environment has been supportive and nurturing will feel anxiety about the current situation, and sadly that scenario is not the case for vast numbers of the school population. Whatever their levels of ability or awareness of how much of the curriculum they have missed, the last thing any child needs at the moment is to be sitting taking a test. Especially since such tests are worthless unless they are conducted under ‘test conditions’ to ensure they are a true reflection of a child’s ability and, even in normal circumstances, this can be very stressful for many children.
What children need right now is to be helped to settle happily back into school; to feel confident about being in the classroom, to re-establish relationships with their teachers, to learn how to socialise and work together again in small and large groups, and to be involved in pleasurable and creative activities designed to promote their wellbeing and help them feel safe and secure.
Formal testing does not fulfil any of these needs, nor does the language of; ‘catch-up.’ ‘recovery,’ ‘gaps,’ or similar terminology. We must totally guard against fuelling the notion that this generation of children is somehow lacking, and we need to ensure that they do not hear such language or are in any way made to feel inadequate when they are already likely to feel anxious and uncertain about their ability. Even after only six weeks out of the classroom, many teachers will relate to the feelings of facing a new class of children every September and wondering if they are still up to this – imagine how children must be feeling right now. There is no suggestion here that children should not be having formal lessons; indeed, taking part in lessons in their typical format is part of that return to feeling safe and secure back in school.
Equally, there is no suggestion that from Day 1 teachers should not be assessing exactly where their pupils are and beginning to establish and address gaps in their learning but through formative assessment, not formal testing.
Teachers are very skilled at formatively assessing pupils and have a wealth of strategies which they use on a day in and day out basis to improve outcomes for their pupils – and this should be how we proceed in the short term - NOT via formal testing. Many of the formative assessment strategies teachers use will be familiar to their pupils and be part of their day-to-day experience, forming part of that secure return to ‘normality.’
In the absence of formal testing, it is essential that these formative assessments should be recorded in order to inform teaching and learning. Many schools already have such procedures to record formative assessments and provide a record of children’s achievements: and these often, in themselves, provide a gap analysis. Some schools have developed their own recording sheets, and some use the ‘off the shelf’ products supplied by a number of educational publishers.
JLEducational Consultancy offers a range of such materials for Writing and Maths, allowing teachers to record achievements for each year group against national curriculum objectives with accompanying guidance and support for teachers as to what achievement looks like at WTS/EXS/GDS. These are available for immediate download on my website: https://www.jleducationalconsultancy.co.uk
However, regardless of which products schools use to support teacher assessment, this is the only way moral way forward until, at the very earliest, the end of the summer term. Hopefully, by then children will have adjusted back into the routine and demands of school and be more able to cope with more formal testing processes, should schools wish.