So we have spent quite a long time over the last nine months considering how we might develop a system of progression and assessment suitable for a post levels world. We have made many revisions along the way, however I think we now have something which we are reasonably happy with. To give a brief outline we:

1. Established a common "gold standard" for history in school
2. Used research based models of progression to identify how students could make conceptual progress towards this gold standard - picking out key misconceptions to overcome through teaching and feedback
3. Developed outline enquiries which would be based around developing students' conceptual understanding as well as their substantive knowledge
4. Tied these to enquiry-specific assessments with task-specific mark-schemes. Each mark scheme outlines the broad areas in which a student might demonstrate understanding of a particular task.

So we have begun planning our next steps for the new Key Stage 3 curriculum. For the most part, the last few weeks have been spent hammering out what exactly we want to cover in Year 7-9 and fleshing out how Year 7 might be assessed in particular. 

I have had a number of interesting discussions about assessment with people on the back of the last blog, and have continued to refine ideas about how we assess in history. For some more thoughts on this issue from a much more reputable source, you might like to read Michael Fordham's excellent blog posts on 
http://clioetcetera.wordpress.com/ .

The document attached here just gives a brief outline of the assessment scheme we are putting in place and a little more detail on the units and assessment were are planning on introducing in the first wave. Some more adventurous units may come later. Importantly, we are basing each unit around a number of key enquiry questions and planning the assessments from the outset. I should note that the BWEA idea may later change to something akin to Michael's Pass, Merit, Distinction model.

I have also attached another sample unit for the Reformation which I would love to hear feedback on!

Mr F

For a brief moment, I genuinely thought that I might get through this week without reading anything too upsetting about education in the news. A few days ago, Mr Gove seemed to switch his attention to private schools, attacking them as 'islands of privilege'. Whilst yesterday the Secretary of State for Education was forced to back down on his plans to reform school teachers pay and conditions. The STRB enacted a full sweep of humiliating defeats against Mr Gove's plans to change everything from the school day to forced extra-curricular activities. 

Of course, this couldn't last too long. This morning I awoke to news which nearly had me choking on my cornflakes. The exams regulator Ofqual has apparently decided that the fact so many schools are sending exam scripts for re-marking is because we are all busy manipulating our A*-C pass rate. To quote the review paper specifically, Ofqual stated that “A high volume of enquiries about results are, we believe, motivated by a speculative attempt to improve results...”