Interview

Interview

Sir Tim Brighouse has influenced education policy-making for decades but is still wary of the limelight. He says his knighthood in the 2009 New Year Honours was "a bit embarrassing" and says deep down, he knows he has feet of clay.

Self-understanding is a quality he values highly, which perhaps explains why, having developed a passion for golf at school, he gave it up completely while at university. "I looked at my golf clubs and decided I was not going to be brilliant at golf." Forty years later, he started playing again after being told he needed an alternative addiction to his work to help lower his blood pressure.

But any need to wind down was far from his thoughts when, in 2008, he declined an invitation to lead the Expert Group on Assessment that he took part in. He felt he was too closely associated with progressive thinking and, as a result, there was a danger that the group's recommendations would have been dismissed.

Expert group

The group was set up in the wake of the Key Stage 3 tests confusion to explore the purposes of assessment and what improvements should be made to the current system. Its findings, published in May, were accepted in full by Ed Balls, secretary of state for children, schools, and families. Recommendations include that all schools should have a lead assessor, changing assessment at Key Stage 2 and, eventually, giving all schools access to a Chartered Assessor to encourage more precision in assessment.

In one sense, Brighouse feels he was right not to lead the five-strong group, which included both a primary and a secondary school head teacher. "In another, I deeply regret it. Had I been chair, I could have dug my heels in. In an ideal world, I would have gone for a much greater emphasis on institutions' capacity to assess correctly and individual teachers' ability to assess correctly. I would have gone for stronger national sampling to keep track of standards over time than the expert group came up with."

Assessment thinking

Assessment has always interested him and he pays tribute to several influential thinkers on the subject including Professor Dylan Wiliam from the Institute of Education in London for furthering understanding of Assessment for Learning. "Mary James in Cambridge also has huge influence on teachers in this territory. If you go back a generation to the 1980s, Patricia Broadfoot had a big influence on how teachers observe pupils."

Despite the efforts of such experts, he believes the coverage given to assessment during initial teacher training is still inadequate, and he suspects that the conflict between AfL and other assessment purposes is not explored sufficiently as a result.

He argues that over the past 10 years, the emphasis has become increasingly skewed in favour of using external assessment for accountability purposes. As a result, he says, data provided by National Curriculum Tests and GCSEs now dominates the working hypotheses for Ofsted when it undertakes school inspections.

He would like to see Ofsted awarding licences based on a comparison of external examinations with the school's estimate of what individual pupils can do. "I think the visiting Ofsted inspector should use data and their own observations to say whether a school needs to be put under another school or have their licence confirmed and carry on with what they were doing. Then you have opened up the possibility of validating a lot more than external exams; you could cover the sorts of things that matter to employers because the school would be able to assess them."

He believes that institutions are quite capable of assessing qualities such as teamwork, critical thinking and the ability to solve inter-disciplinary problems. When chief education officer in Oxfordshire, he pioneered the idea of a certificate of educational achievement. This covered areas such as citizenship in order to give a more rounded picture of what an individual was capable of than that provided by the then General Certificate of Education.

"Trust in this country for teachers as reliable assessors is lower than in other countries and always has been. There's always been a gold standard system that relies on external exams." He argues that, under the current system, learners lose out if they have fast and accurate memory recall.

"To be quick on your feet and quick in argument is tremendously important but I don't know an exam system that tests that. One of the most important things in my career is to be able to think aloud in public, work with other people and understand myself. I don't know of any external exams that come close to assessing any of those qualities."

Exam validity

To his knowledge, no action has been taken about the expert group's report yet but this does not worry him, pointing out that the people needed to implement its recommendations are busy.

However, he does feel there is an urgent need for change, partly because of the general mistrust about the validity of external examinations. "I am sceptical about their reliability because of research undertaken over many years coupled with my personal experience. Even in the 1930s and '40s, people were pointing out the lack of reliability."

His own experience of assessment highlights how people can come up with seriously different points of view about how work should be graded. On one occasion, while an external examiner for PhDs at Keele University, he asked a Nobel Prize winning professor for advice about the best approach to take in this role. The professor said he himself had had a problem with a candidate, because the supervisor involved in this case was not up to scratch. In the end, the course of action taken was to make a decision based more on the candidate's personality than the work submitted. For Brighouse, this underlines how unpredictable the whole process of assessment can be.

"Trying to professionalise assessment is a good thing because it increases the likelihood of diminishing error," he concludes. "But don't rely on what is necessarily a very restricted method of examination."

An achievable goal

One of the main recommendations of the expert group is that all schools should have a lead assessor, and that, by 2020, they should have access to an accredited Chartered Assessor. Brighouse denies this target is over-ambitious, saying the necessary requirements for becoming a lead assessor could be incorporated into the National Professional Qualification for Headship. "In primary schools, I would expect it to be held by the head or deputy head and in secondary schools by one of the leadership team."

He believes a potential danger for the Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors (CIEA) could be to make the requirements for Chartered Educational Assessor status so rigorous that people end up thinking it is beyond their capability. "There's nothing to suggest this is happening at the moment but people add things because they are going for the gold standard."

Another recommendation of the expert group is that a system of national accreditation for schools is developed so that they can share expertise with other schools once awarded a mark of excellence in assessment. The idea is that Balls' department would work with organisations such as the CIEA to establish how this would be done. With time, some teacher assessment could be used for accountability purposes if sufficiently robust systems were developed.

Brighouse believes stronger emphasis should have been placed on teacher assessment, giving teachers a licence to assess both in their subject and, if seeking chartered status, across a range of subjects. "Institutions would need somebody who really understands the subtleties of all forms of assessment," he explains. "Because the present system assumes you cannot trust a teacher's assessment - hence the reliance on external assessment - we need something that makes it clear you need to trust teachers. And the only way to do that is a 'licence to assess' for teachers and a 'licence to assess' for a school."

Sampling

He is particularly disappointed that he failed to win the argument in favour of sampling, something he advocated when chief education officer at Birmingham because its pupils seemed to be doing better in National Curriculum Tests than elsewhere in the country. He felt then that sampling would have provided a reliable way of checking whether claims that tests had been dumbed down had any substance.

"I think we have missed the opportunity to establish, beyond dispute, a methodology of keeping track of standards over time. That could easily be done. I would do it area by area as well as throughout the nation."

He suggests that a sample of nine, 11 and 13 year-old pupils could be tested in reading, writing and mathematics to give a reliable indication about performance. "Then you will keep track of what people perpetually argue about - whether standards have gone up or down."

In addition, he says sampling would be an effective way of ensuring that primary schools remained accountable without depending on National Curriculum Tests in Year 6. "If you accept the premise of bringing really strong trust into teacher's assessment then you will remove some of the pressure of taking an unknown test. That did not win the day within the group, which decided that you could reduce the impact of the Key Stage 2 test by making them happen later in the term and by making sure that the information that went over to the secondary school was the teacher's assessment."

Unsurprisingly, he welcomes a decision by Balls, announced in November, to publish this year's (2010) test results alongside teacher assessments, following a threat to boycott the tests by both teachers and headteachers.

Transition period

In theory, the group was not invited to make any comments about Key Stage 2 assessment. "If we had stuck to the brief, it would have been narrow and we were pretty good at stretching it," comments Brighouse.

He is pleased that the idea of a primary graduation certificate is going to be introduced to measure a range of academic and non-academic criteria rather than just the English and mathematics attainment used in league tables.

But he is concerned at the suggestion by the Conservatives that the tests should be moved from year six to seven. "The primary voice says 'what a wonderful thing' but I don't think they realise the implications of that." He argues that secondary schools would have a vested interest in the results playing down the capabilities of the learner who would probably under-achieve anyway by being tested after the long summer break from school.

Exam costs

Brighouse believes the Conservatives will be less sympathetic to the idea of using teachers as assessors. This view is partly based on the policies of the last Conservative government, but also on what the party is saying about education now. He suggests that, in order to counter opposition to increased teacher assessment, the CIEA should highlight the cost of using external examinations while upholding the model of inter-institutional assessment practiced in higher education.

He claims that the examination system for 16-year-olds creates profits of around £90m-a-year for three organisations. "That deserves scrutiny. Are they charging too much? If school budgets are going to be under scrutiny, isn't this something that should be looked at?"

The future

After a career in education stretching back to the early 1960s, Brighouse is used to seeing the ideas and initiatives he fervently believes in being ignored. He questions whether the expert group's recommendations will have a long-term impact on learners and their parents. This is partly because he believes assessment deserves a much fuller independent study, and also, with a general election imminent, he suspects the recommendations could be overtaken by events.

But he does sense a new opportunity to recognise the broader capabilities of pupils, although in a different format to the certificate of educational achievement he pioneered in Oxfordshire. Although this was adopted elsewhere in the country, he says it eventually ended up lacking sufficient currency following government interference.

For Brighouse, the development of the CIEA, with its emphasis on professionalising the assessment process, is symptomatic of a changing climate in which more emphasis is placed on teachers' judgement and less on external examinations.

"The way things are moving now, it might get it back into a better balance. It might mean that assessment could be much more comprehensive because, at the moment, it is restricted by exams that can be externally assessed. There are things, it seems to me, that the existing exam system can't do."