ABSTRACT
This chapter considers two key questions– the design of assessment and, at a deeper level, the ideological functions of assessment. It explores testing as one of the most significant policy steers in education, where a developing global hierarchy puts UK schools in competition with other education regimes across the world. It is widely acknowledged that standardised testing demonstrates significant economic and cultural bias, and that students can experience this bias several times over. Students were to a large extent controlled by tests in terms of how they spent their time and how they viewed education. Two significant educational theories for a critical analysis of assessment are 'cultural reproduction' and the 'hidden curriculum'. Learners in an educational system come to understand themselves and their relationship with knowledge according to particular assessment discourses above all else. The problems and tensions arising from attempts to use assessment to compare diverse educational systems and the people teaching and learning within them.
