BlogDale

It is interesting that today the QCA has recommended that ministers scrap the plans for the KS3 on-screen test in ICT. I heard the news first thing this morning from Garry, one of our senior managers, and quickly verified the news at the BBC’s site. I dashed off a blog post straight away, but a day of cover lessons and various PC crashes has prevented publishing properly until now.

“The minutes of the QCA board meeting in November say its members agreed “that it was not necessary to burden schools with an additional statutory test, considering that ICT was something that should be embedded into other subjects”.

Hear, hear. Although we have some distance to go yet before ICT gets fully embedded into other subjects, I think that the on-screen test was testing for testing’s sake in so many ways. I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that part of the Year 9 curriculum was hijacked simply to prepare for the Test with its unfamiliar interface and mode of working.

What the Test failed to take account of (and never really stood a chance of doing so) was that the world of ICT has moved on - while the core knowledge in other subjects remains similar to that five years ago (although my Science colleagues tell me that their curriculum is changing hugely), technology is developing at such a rate that those that were pinnacle skills five years ago in ICT are now the basic requirements. The basic mechanical skills that were once novel and important could now to be viewed as commonplace, and what is more important is what the technology is used for - the communications, the C part of ICT. The means of building social networks, of using the different ways of publishing on the web to link with others is way beyond the expectations of the on-screen test so that using valuable ICT time to “teach to the test” is frankly, barmy.
The downside is that the recent promotion of ICT to new heights of recognition (”we have our own test, y’know”) in schools might be damaged without a nationally-recognised testing regime. Will it mean a return to the days when just anybody with a pulse could be timetabled to teach ICT, where subject specialists are not valued and the Head of ICT had to train new staff to deliver and assess the curriculum every year? I hope not. The days of endless word-processing exercises are over; ICT is so much more about communication and less about technology these days and we need innovative and knowledgeable subject specialists more than ever in ICT.

I can’t see the Test dying out though. £23m worth of development isn’t just going to disappear. It might be useful in summatively assessing functional ICT skills in much the same way as GOAL or Electric Paper  do to give baseline data and measuring progress against that, and it would be great if this was given as a free resource.

This test has given so many schools unnecessary headaches, both in fulfilling the technical requirements and in the management of the tests. I know, I’m going through the pain right now. (Historical note: three years ago, the school I was at (where I am again now) was told that we didn’t pass the technical spec, even though we were an RM school with a brand new server and suite of PCs! Clearly there was some other box we couldn’t tick; we never did find out what). The test administration involves so many people and so much juggling of the available hardware that it hardly feels worth the effort simply to apply an arbitrary assessment that, I feel, has a long way to go to develop rigour.

As a tool for informing assessment, the test has had some value but it’s not the only game in town - there are other online assessment tools in use already that are much more flexible and yield (in my opinion) more rich and meaningful data that inform teaching. The greatest value of the test is that it is standardised nationally - yet isn’t that what the National Curriculum does anyway? It always rankled with me that the Attainment Targets are the same for all and teachers are still expected to make their judgement based on progress throughout the key stage, yet along comes the Test and all of a sudden we are expected to believe that the result of a summative test trumps a teacher assessment, having supposedly more credence based on two fifty-minute sessions than an experienced teacher’s assessment of a pupil they have seen working for years. ICT departments with access to nationally standardised materials and who go through the correct internal moderation and standardisation training will surely produce more rigorous assessments of ability in the subject. If not, what is the point in asking teachers to make an official assessment?