“What comes next: A fairer approach to primary assessment” is a paper by the Institute for Public Policy Research, a progressive think tank.
Here’s the IPPR’s own summary of its report:
We set out four recommendations for immediate implementation from the 2027/28 academic year.
Recommendation 1: The Department for Education should establish an independent ‘statutory accessibility and bias audit’ for all key stage 2 assessments.
Recommendation 2: The Department for Education should remove the Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar (SPaG) test.
Recommendation 3: The Department for Education should change how results are published and reported by:
– ending the publication of school-level key stage 2 results, which would also end the publication of school-level league tables
– using rolling averages (for instance, three- or five-year averages) of attainment data from the department and from Ofsted for internal monitoring and inspection.
Recommendation 4: The Department for Education should introduce a competency framework for pupil results in place of scaled scores.
However, reform must go further to build a truly equitable system that properly supports disadvantaged pupils. Therefore, we also set out a further recommendation to act as the foundation of a longer-term, more significant reform to primary school assessment.
Recommendation 5: The Department for Education should introduce a random sampling approach to assessment across years 3–6.
Emphasis added.
. . . which also, incidentally, creates the always-preferred bureaucratic ‘explanation’, viz, “since the assessment metric was restructured to be more-accurate and -inclusive of disadvantaged populations, it is not possible to extract meaningful comparisons between current results and prior-year results”, IOW, you won’t be able to discern how badly things are going. It’s a pretty-poor bureaucrat who can’t “improve” the reporting method in this way every few years. See also Appleby, Sir Humphrey.
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