John Dunford: Testing can no longer be a secret garden

The problems over the marking of this year's national tests for 11 and 14-year-olds have brought to public attention the innermost workings of external assessment. They illustrate that testing and examinations can no longer be a secret garden, occupied only by educational experts using arcane terminology.

The general public must have been shocked to find that the ETS five-year contract for marking Key Stage 3 tests consumed £156m of their taxes. And they may well have wondered about the cost of the rest of the testing and examinations system. They may also have questioned whether test marking is the exact science that they believed it to be.

How, they will now be asking more sharply, is the line drawn between one level and the next? And these doubts, once sown in the public mind, will lead to new questions being asked about the grading of GCSEs, A-levels and the new diplomas.

It is surely time to acknowledge the cost and imperfections of external tests and examinations and develop a system of chartered assessors – experienced teachers, externally accredited to carry out in-course assessment to external standards. The Association of School and College Leaders proposed this scheme five years ago. It is now an idea whose time has come.

We should put more faith in the professional judgement of teachers. Chartered assessors are the best way to do this. A successful examinations system must have five elements. Examination grades must be a true reflection of the achievement of the student. That can best be guaranteed by accumulating marks over a long period and not as a result of a single test taken in the hay fever season.

Second, the examination grade should reflect knowledge across the whole syllabus. A wide range of questions and activities is therefore better than a short test. Moreover, grades must be consistent, so that the same level of achievement produces the same grade each year.

Reliability matters too. We must be able to rely on grades being accurate. Finally, and of critical importance to any system that includes teacher assessment, is the issue of credibility. Employers, universities and the general public must be able to accept the grades as credible. In the hands of well trained, nationally accredited, senior professionals, a system of chartered assessors scores more highly than external examinations on all five counts.

To achieve reliability and credibility, however, changes need to be made in the ways that test and examination results are used. The progress of the national education system should be monitored not by the summation of every individual test score, but by a sample of students at age seven, 11 and 14 being given the same test each year. This would not have consequences for the individual pupil or school, so there would be no teaching to the test and the results would therefore be highly reliable.

Schools would still be held to account for individual student results at 11, 16 and 18. There are two ways of doing this and both could be used. First, the work of chartered assessors would be monitored and inaccurate grading would result in the loss of chartered status. Second, half of the grade could come from in-course assessment by chartered assessors and half from traditional external test. Inconsistencies between the two halves would be subject to investigation.

As the public came to recognise the reliability and credibility of the chartered assessor system, the external test component could be reduced, and eventually dropped.

Sir Mike Tomlinson recommended the use of chartered assessors in his 2004 report. But it was such a severe blow to the status and professionalism of teachers that the government rejected the recommendation. Nonetheless, a Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors has been formed by the National Assessment Agency and has begun to develop an accreditation scheme for chartered assessors. The new diploma system will rely on chartered assessors to deliver reliable grades for students on all diploma courses.

None of this should cause any problem to universities, which have always used externally moderated internal assessment for degrees. The Prime Minister has talked of a new professionalism in the public services. The introduction of a system of chartered assessors would be a huge step towards a new professionalism for teachers.

The £700m or so that is spent annually by secondary schools and colleges could be halved and, best of all, the external assessment and grading system could come out of its secret garden.

The writer is the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders

education@independent.co.uk