Curriculum and assessment reform, together with a new grading system, have put enormous pressure on leaders to ensure that their school or college communities understand the changes. Here ASCL members share their views on what steps they have taken to ensure that everyone is on board.

Action plans

Challenging times

The imposed widespread changes to curriculum, assessment, qualifications and accountability, particularly in the midst of the well-documented funding pressures, represent the highest level of challenge for school leaders since the Education Reform Act 1988. As a school, we began preparing for these changes a couple of years ago, which has meant that we are now in a position of the new curriculum and assessment practices being well understood by parents and students alike. This has been achieved by parent information evenings for every year group at the outset of each academic year and a comprehensive section on our school website. 

A related challenge lies ahead for employers in two ways: first, ensuring that they fully comprehend the new qualifications that they will be presented with from summer 2017 and beyond and, second, the significantly increased level of rigour inherent in the new GCSEs, which will ultimately manifest itself in student outcomes. 

Gareth Burton 

Associate Headteacher, Cheltenham Bournside School and Sixth Form Centre 

Step by step 

In our school, we have taken the decision this year to introduce a new grading system for Years 7–9, alongside the new grading systems in place for GCSE qualifications studied by students in Years 10 and 11. We saw the changes to curricula and assessment systems at GCSE levels as a perfect opportunity to reinvigorate our Key Stage 3 curriculum and assessment systems. We felt that this change was fundamental to the creation of a curriculum in Years 7–9 that effectively supported learners in preparing for the more challenging GCSEs. 

Such a fundamental change in our whole-school assessment structure required a significant amount of planning and preparation if the implementation was to be effective and fully understood by all of the key stakeholder groups. As such, we decided to put the changes at the heart of our strategic planning for 2016/17. In practice, this meant providing time and resources to ensure that the changes were embedded successfully. 

It is vital that the three main stakeholder groups – teachers, parents and students – are placed at the heart of any planning that takes place around the implementation of the new grades and changes to curriculum. We have undertaken a series of steps to ensure the successful implementation of this in our school and these have included involving and discussing plans and their rationale with all staff, encouraging staff to attend relevant training, providing parents and pupils with information, holding special assemblies to explain the changes to pupils and arranging special focus groups for parents and pupils to continually monitor their understanding and react where necessary. 

We will continue with many of these steps until we feel that the assessment and curriculum changes have been fully embedded in our school (or until the government decides to change them again!). 

Anthony Steed 

Assistant Headteacher, Denbigh School, Milton Keynes 

Speak the same language Due to an impending Ofsted inspection back in late 2015, we made changes to our Key Stage 3 assessment procedures very early and adopted the numerical grading system for all subjects back then. This has helped staff, pupils and parents to become familiar with the new systems early on and we are all now speaking the same language.

The challenge has been making meaningful grade descriptors for the new courses and these are being refined all the time. The main thing is that pupils know where they are and what they need to do to improve so the language of these descriptors and the feedback given is crucial. The next challenge is to ensure that pupils (including SEND pupils) are prepared from the moment that they arrive in school in Year 7 for the increased content and skills needed now to achieve a good pass or make good progress at GCSE level.

Emma Hillman

Deputy Head, Frederick Bremer School, East London 

Pragmatic approach 

The changes to the assessment system have presented some unique challenges and opportunities. We have adopted a very pragmatic approach, taking time to visit other schools and have had a long consultation process with staff, students, governors and parents. As a result, our new assessment policy has recently been launched with the input and buy-in from a huge majority of stakeholders. Alongside this, there have been regular meetings of an Assessment Strategy Group (to drive the initiative) and Assessment Working Group (to moderate). This is now being followed up by further consultations to establish how well understood the changes are and adapt accordingly. 

The challenges and next steps are now to make our arrangements robust and scaffold the learning and intervention – an enormous task given the changing landscape and shifting targets and initiatives from the government.

Avani Higgins 

Deputy Headteacher, Little Ilford School, East London

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