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Latest Blog Posts
- What curriculum do young people need? July 23, 2020
- School reopening? top scientists say not yet May 25, 2020
- Sending England back to work and back to school? May 11, 2020
- Too early to reopen schools : look at Europe April 30, 2020
- Ofsted : unreliable, destructive, beyond repair December 5, 2019
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Tag Archives: streaming and setting
The mismeasurement of learning
Our new pamphlet The Mismeasurement of Learning focuses on primary assessment. It describes an assessment system which gives poor feedback on children’s learning and is damaging their well-being. The situation was brought to a point of crisis this year because of … Continue reading
Links to posts on primary testing
We thought it would be useful to publish a list of our posts on primary tests over the past year. Primary testing (general issues) Moving beyond ‘fixed ability thinking’ Bullying by numbers – its roots in neoliberalism An impossible curriculum: … Continue reading
Deciding ‘ability’ and ‘potential’, or learning without limits
Alison Peacock is becoming very widely known, and rightly so, for her advocacy of learning without limits, and her challenge to core assumptions of the English education system with its constant sorting and ranking, ability tables and setting. The world … Continue reading
A great victory – let’s make it the first of many
We have just learnt that the government has abandoned baseline testing for 4 year olds. This was to have served as the starting line for “holding primary schools to account”. The plan was a mess from the start, and showed … Continue reading
They are children not robots: baseline research
Earlier blog posts on baseline assessment have focused heavily on the damage done by false predictions of children’s potential. This post looks at another consequence – how testing is changing children, education and teachers. * * * In a book … Continue reading
Moving beyond ‘fixed ability thinking’
by Sara Bragg, University of Brighton ‘Fixed ability thinking’ takes various forms, involving ability labelling, setting and streaming. It is a residual form of the discredited belief that intelligence is fixed and genetically transmitted. It persists as the ‘common sense’ … Continue reading
Posted in Curriculum, Social Justice, Uncategorized
Tagged ability, IQ, streaming and setting
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Abolishing grammar schools is not enough
by Patrick Yarker Education secretary Nicky Morgan has agreed that Weald of Kent Grammar School, a single-sex academy in Tonbridge, can open a new building in Sevenoaks. This is officially an ‘annexe’ even though it is 10 miles away. The … Continue reading
Baseline testing: science or fantasy?
There’s nothing hidden in your head The Sorting Hat can’t see, So try me on and I will tell you Where you ought to be. The new Baseline Assessments are a new model of Sorting Hat imposed by the government on … Continue reading
Posted in Accountability, Curriculum, GERM
Tagged accountability pressures, baseline tests, disadvantage, early education, streaming and setting, testing
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Achieving socially just education
by Diane Reay, University of Cambridge This briefing note outlines how both the testing regime and the segregation of children into different sets or streams increase failure and disadvantage rather than raising standards and ‘closing the gap’. It then deals … Continue reading
Posted in Social Justice
Tagged accountability pressures, disadvantage, poverty, streaming and setting, testing
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Reclaiming Schools 