A phrase much heard among impressive heads of history that I have worked with is ”kicking rubbish data upstairs to SLT”. This is not unprofessionalism; it is the desperate necessity of those determined to preserve academic integrity and to help students properly. It is a sign of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party that is school assessment in England that scholarly heads of department should be forced to manage two parallel worlds – the real world of quietly working out what will actually help students to improve, and the phoney world where it is assumed that repeated summative assessments, quite unfit for formative use, should take over the language of the classroom, distort teaching and trigger the whole bureaucracy of “intervention”.
Michael Strain 13 February 2017 Perhaps the only authentially educational discussion of assessment I have read for years!