ECM: What is the purpose of assessment?

KB: There are dozens of potential purposes for assessment. It might be for selection in a school or setting by ability, or it might be to find out what a pupil knows and what they need to do to improve. An assessment optimised for one purpose isn’t going to work for another: for an entrance assessment you are looking to rank pupils, and for learning you are more focused on feedback.

ECM: If we focus on entrance assessments (where we’re looking for potential), are General Ability Tests, portfolios, interviews, or extended response questions more effective?

HM: Anybody who cares about social mobility should worry about portfolios. Children who have more resources around them (particularly human resources) are going to be able to assemble richer and deeper portfolios; they are going to be able to prepare better for interviews, or be ready to do role plays with more aplomb. If you look at the American university application system, and the treadmill that pupils are on from a very young age – do you have to have founded a charity by the age of nine? – it can degenerate into trophy-hunting.

There will be pupils from disadvantaged and advantaged backgrounds doing old-fashioned examinations, but when they walk in there with just a pen, you are going to see what that child can do. I haven’t yet seen any evidence that an examination process is less fair than the alternatives.

ECM: Winchester is introducing a Writing Assessment that’s just the pupil and the pen. It is designed to balance the General Ability Test, the reference, and the interview. We are looking to ensure pupils have an opportunity to demonstrate original thinking, an independent voice, and fluency of expression. How can pupils prepare for this kind of assessment?

DC: A lot of the analysis we have done across many different types of writing shows the importance of sentence structure. That’s often forgotten about. A lot of teaching focuses on the purpose of the writing (persuasive, descriptive, narrative), but the thing that sits underneath all of that is good sentence structure.

For example, knowing where to put a full stop is not as easy as it sounds. We’ve done some interesting analysis of handwritten scripts, where we can see pupils going back and trying to correct their work. Pupils have been told: ‘You need to add more full stops.’ We can see them making the correction by crossing out the lower case and adding the upper case, but they’re just putting full stops in at random. They don’t understand what a subject or a verb is, but that helps you know where to put a full stop. Pupils taught about subjects and verbs demonstrate an improved understanding of sentence structure, which improves their writing as well.

There’s value to teaching morphology, prefixes, suffixes, and sentence structure. But to develop your writing significantly, you need a broad vocabulary. You have to be seeing words in different contexts – many of them – and you need to be getting that through reading.

HM: It troubles me that parents read good books with children while they are young and then, when they are young adults, parents just let children read poor literature like dumbed-down young-adult fiction. If parents really want to prepare their children for entrance assessments, then the best thing they can do is to ensure they’re reading good fiction. Classic children’s literature is almost certainly going to be of more benefit in terms of language development (fluency, cadence, vocabulary, and style) than the ‘young adult’ category. There are honourable exceptions, of course.