Monitoring and planning for improvement in Plockton Primary School, Highland

Project summary

This project was the result of a fresh look at assessment in light of the national AifL initiative. There were several reasons behind this, including changes in local authority policy regarding reporting and also the development of ‘programmes of study’ in primary schools. There was also a desire to examine options that could assist in raising standards.

The initial aims of the project were related to classroom assessment and highlighted issues such as feedback and learning intentions. However, the school quickly moved beyond the area of formative assessment and began to look at how a wider understanding of AifL principles could lead to an ability to plan for improvement by using assessment information to inform the process.

Case study extract

Young children’s learning takes hold of opportunities; it does not presuppose them. The national initiatives of Assessment is for Learning, Determined to Succeed, and Creativity in the Curriculum were asking us to revisit child-centered education. We were not about to pin it down, constrain it, fix it, or stultify it. Yet we needed to tighten up on programmes of study: coverage is a requirement; assessment evidence is needed across the board.

We found a lot of assessment evidence was being produced in the school, which was addressing the needs of the target-setting agenda and the national assessments in reading, writing and maths. But we agreed we were not producing a lot of verifiable 5-14 level assessment data for all other areas. School forward plans were covering all the right areas and the school was resourcing areas and providing policy guidelines to guide teachers in their planning, and to have a whole school approach. Yet still we felt that our planning for each of the core subject areas was not making ‘skill’ and ‘informed attitude’ development explicit; and it was not generating assessment evidence, certainly not in a verifiable form. So we went right back to 5-14 and here we observed another funny thing. We could be quite honest and admit that we were not, in fact, opening our 5-14 guidelines very often.  We were following schemes – maths schemes, and punctuation schemes. We were following topic cycles, but not in fact referring to the 5-14 strands. 

We are asking that teachers use [the existing 5-14 programmes of study as published by Learning and Teaching Scotland] as a tool for their forward planning, not as followable courses. We now want them centre stage in the planning process, and are asking teachers to start with the attainment targets – what you want the children to do, know, appreciate, and understand. Again, we have assessment centre stage. This is where the project and AifL came in for us – how it links to programmes of study in this format, for how will you know whether the pupils are ‘able to’? So that is what we have adopted here – the assessment as the central planning focus, but in this school’s planning it is verifiable at the individual pupil level. 

The teachers’ planning will now focus around particular content areas – environmental studies say, or music, or whatever. But now units of study may be cross-curricular. Now the topics must be selected to ensure progression and must meet those strands most appropriate for this teaching group. But it does not matter what the actual topic is! What matters are the strands that topic is going to address. In this way strands will be selected, similar ones will not be overly revisited and breadth and balance will be maintained. In fact, often by selecting a cluster of strands which have not yet received sufficient focus that year, the topic itself then emerges. That is what we mean by replacing 5-14 right back at the heart of our forward planning system. This is what we are now trying to do here as a result of this project. But how will we know what are the most appropriate strands for a particular class or teaching group next term? The answer is by looking at last term’s assessment evidence. 

In essence it is the strands that are planned and around which assessment is planned But now the assessment may be formative. A teacher may assess a given strand by observation, or by looking at a portfolio, or by a pupil on task in an investigation, a presentation, a discussion and so on.

Evaluation

Are we an AifL school? Well to be honest these are early stages. We want to run with this cyclical learning and assessment framework for some time now. We are going to try to make our assessment more sophisticated and look at the questioning within our planning and lesson delivery. On that we probably have a way to go and will seek to trial many more of the individual components of AifL.  

Next steps

We feel this project has given us a triangulation (or is that octangulation?) between the curriculum, planning for it, delivering it, focusing on better learning, assessing while learning, learning while assessing, recording and reporting. It is linking that system with the assessment at centre stage built into the learning and teaching process that has enabled us to get to grips with curriculum clutter and it is helping us find our way into personal learning planning.

Contact details

If you would like further information on this case study, please contact the local authority assessment co-ordinator. You can find contact details for each authority area on our local authority co-ordinators' contacts page.