ABSTRACT
Although the importance of assessing academic progress in schools, as an essential part of ‘raising standards’, was emphasised in the Education Reform Act (DES 1988) and is high on the present Government’s agenda as the millennium approaches, the case for the statutory assessment of pupils ‘having special educational needs’ was made much earlier in the Education Act 1981 (DES 1981). Nevertheless, in the late 1980s Goacher et al. (1988) found that schools still perceived assessment procedures as time-consuming and difficult to implement.
