ABSTRACT

The drive to raise standards has been at the top of successive government agendas. Since the introduction of the National Curriculum (NC), a school’s success in this regard has been judged in terms of the increases in SATs levels and GCSE and A-level grades. More recently the notion of ‘value added’ has been introduced to give some recognition to the fact that pupils start a given stage of their schooling at different achievement levels. This has been accompanied by the use of baseline assessment to establish such starting points, and benchmarking, as an indication of how well the school is doing in comparison to schools with ‘similar’ intakes. Along with this practice has come the idea that target setting in itself can act as a catalyst for improving performance despite the lack of research evidence to support this view.