Teachers make a difference; they are the most valuable resource in any education system, the most powerful lever of positive change available in any school. But effective teaching requires effective training and ongoing professional development in assessment, two things that the English education system has yet to achieve at scale.

Each year, around 30,000 new teachers enter the profession in England, joining some 450,000 FTE colleagues in approximately 24,000 schools. Every single day, those teachers see the sands of time and opportunity pass unrelentingly for their own students’ learning, and they respond to this positively, urgently, and decisively, doing everything in their power to have a positive impact. But could they be even more effective if they had an even better understanding of assessment? What would they feel confident to stop doing if they had a strong underpinning theory of assessment? Could we help reduce unnecessary workload and increase teachers’ effectiveness?

The Assessment Lead Programme

We wanted to answer these questions, so in 2017, Evidence Based Education launched the Assessment Lead Programme.

We wanted to help an ITT system that broadly does a good job, but which needed to improve its training on assessment, specifically in specialist concepts such as validity, reliability and bias (Carter Review, 2015). We wanted to help teachers at all stages of their careers by responding to a growing disquiet in the profession about effectiveness and expense of common approaches to CPD (Developing Great Teaching,2015). And we wanted to do this in a way that didn’t mean teachers had to be away from their classes, or for schools to be levied huge financial expense in return.

The Assessment Lead Programme has been a huge success, hundreds of schools have begun to develop assessment practices and policies which are fit for purpose and based on the best available evidence. Schools like Falinge Park High School in Rochdale, and Whitehill Junior School in Hitchin. In January 2019, ALP will be complemented by Assessment Essentials, a ten-week, low-cost, online, evidence-based professional learning programme for classroom teachers who want to improve their assessment practice.

In the eBook that follows, our panellists for the #EveryTeacher event speak clearly about what teachers need to know about assessment, and about what they should do more(and less) of. Their voices join those of Prof Dame Alison Peacock, Sir David Carter, Stephen Munday, Prof Rob Coe, and the thousands upon thousands of teachers who simply want to do the best they can to improve students’ outcomes.