I’ve written three posts so far in this series of posts that lead into this post so you can see my thinking on this:
Five checks to see if you’ve replaced levels with levels
The foundations of assessment: Myths & challenges
A model for whole school life without levels
What do we want to assess in RE?
This comes down to purpose. As the RE community cannot agree I decided to go with what I thought and came up with the following:
However it is not possible to assess all of these. In fact it isn’t desirable to ‘measure’ some of these. How can you measure a child’s spirituality? And why would you want to? Can you or should you reward progression in spirituality?
So I decided to pick out those that I though would be appropriate to include in our model and came up with this:
I don’t we should try to assess or measure those in red. In fact, I think these don’t all just belong in RE; most are SMSC that should be developed across the curriculum.
I initially planned to deal with those that were left but have not included the challenging questions, these should probably also belong across the curriculum. This doesn’t mean I don’t use these in class but I don’t want to include them in this model.
Over time I continued to read blogs and what other schools were doing.
New GCSE and A level requirements
At the same time the GCSEs and A levels were at the beginning of being reformed. This seemed an ideal time to link in. I certainly didn’t want to just use KS4 in KS3 but wanted it to inform and compliment it. We don’t have KS5 in my school but I felt that our KS3 could help to support learning at KS5.
The DfE released the assessment objectives as follows (GCSE and A Level):
I wanted to unpick what these meant. I hate using the words ‘analyse’ and ‘evaluate’. Whilst it is important for students to understand these command words, I believe we should teach them what they mean in terms of breaking them down, not teaching them as command words. There are several skills needed to analyse and evaluate, I wanted to divide these so students can see how they contribute overall to their writing.
I picked out (in red) the knowledge, understanding and skills needed at A level that could transfer down:
I continued to keep in mind what other people had said about new models without levels. In particular I looked at what Michael Tidd had written here:
Whilst not in a Catholic school I was also inspired by the Catholic levels of attainment, in particular for reflection:
Look at level 1 and EP. This really made me think about keeping things as simple as possible but with meaning.
I then began to think about how all of this could be presented to students and could contribute overall to an assessment model.
missdcoxblog 
Love to see where you go with this. In the middle of trying to develop a new way of giving feedback to pupils, but don’t want to over complicate things. Thanks for posting, great food for thought.