This is the first of a series of pieces about tracking pupils with Special Needs and Disabilities (SEND), looking at broadening understanding of what information we might want to keep track of for those students with SEND. We consider stepped assessment and Point In Time assessment from a SEND perspective, particularly for those who might be working at a level below their peers.
Tracking both learning and wider education
Students come to school to learn. Learning can be defined as an alteration in long-term memory. If nothing has altered in long-term memory, nothing has been learned. (Ofsted, Sept 2023, 235) This is often summarised as students needing to know more and do more as a result of what they are taught.We need to track that this is happening. This is where assessment and data are often focused.
Students also come to school to be educated. This is a broader definition including personal development, citizenship, cultural capital and preparation for adulthood. This can be particularly important to track for SEND students, who may find learning more difficult than their peers.
Learning is an internal process – to assess it we need to make that internal process visible, so schools tend to use two main proxies to show this: performance and products.
And this can be the first place where schools might consider their practice for SEND students – have they made the proxies (performances and products) accessible for these students?
Tracking and reporting learning
In terms of summative teacher assessment to record student attainment, there are two main approaches to making judgements and tracking progress.
Firstly, stepped assessment where pupils ascend the framework. This approach uses the curriculum as the progression model. It tracks a pupil’s grasp of each year group’s curriculum often using terminology such as Y1 emerging, developing, secure; Y2 emerging, developing, secure etc. It can be visualised as something like this:
Secondly, and more recently, there is Point in Time assessment where students traverse the primary curriculum. This uses age related expectations as the progression model and assesses students in terms of their mastery of what is expected of a student in that school year. It generally uses terminology such as below, just below, on-track and greater depth, or working towards, working at, working above etc.
It can be visualised as something like this:
For most students, the point in time assessment model works well – they are working at or above age related expectations, no matter where they are in the school year. But there can be concerns that SEND students will stay in the ‘below’ category throughout their time in school. It is worth noting that some schools choose to use more inclusive terminology to describe this assessment – such as ‘developing’ or perhaps applying the EYFS ‘emerging’. It can even be appropriate in some settings to record this as students working on an adapted curriculum.
Where schools want to be able to track SEND students using a stepped model, they can use a parallel SEND assessment with steps just for those students where it is appropriate to track the stage within the curriculum that they are currently working.
However, there are a range of options for tracking the learning and wider education of SEND students, such as using curriculum objectives, assessment within provisions, and targets on learning plans which we will explore in the next post in this series.
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