ABSTRACT
Although the National Curriculum of England and Wales has undergone several revisions since its inception in 1988, the main features of its assessment have remained largely unchanged. Namely:
• all pupils are assessed at the ages of 7, 11, 14 and 16 (the end of each of the four ‘key stages’ of education);
• the assessments are to be criterion-referenced; • the results are based on both teachers’ judgments and the results of external
tests; • the assessments of pupils [apart from those at 16] are reported on a scale of
age-independent levels (Secretary of State for Education and Science, 1988).
During the development of National Curriculum assessment in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, a variety of innovative scoring models for the external tests were piloted. Many of these were inconsistent with ‘good practice’ in aggregation (Cresswell, 1994) and so, from 1994 on, the level achieved on the test is to be determined entirely by unweighted summation of marks and the teachers’ judgments and the test levels are to be reported separately.
