ABSTRACT
It has become a truism to say that schools should always be progressing, and that school leaders should be relentlessly urging their staff and students to aim higher, achieve more, get better. Regardless of how progress is measured, the expectation is that certain outcomes, including examination results, have to show year-on-year improvement. For Tom Sherrington, any numerical measure has to be 'contextualised and triangulated with other modes of evaluation', which attempt to capture 'subtle educational ideas' that teachers use every day, and which, hopefully, inspire young people to love learning. For Carrie Huang Jai-Li, standardised tests can 'identify learning problems' which will help improve teaching and in turn improve learning. The education landscape of the future is likely to become more diverse, not less. Evaluation of school performance will need to be sufficiently flexible in approach to cope with that diversity without compromising the coherence of the findings.
