A. Effective assessment systems:

Give reliable information to parents about how their child, and their child’s school, is performing

1. Allow meaningful tracking of pupils towards end of key stage expectations in the new curriculum, including regular feedback to parents.
2. Provide information which is transferable and easily understood and covers both qualitative and quantitative assessment.
3. Differentiate attainment between pupils of different abilities, giving early recognition of pupils who are falling behind and those who are excelling.
4. Are reliable and free from bias.

B. Help drive improvement for pupils and teachers

1. Are closely linked to improving the quality of teaching.
2. Ensure feedback to pupils contributes to improved learning and is focused on specific and tangible objectives.
3. Produce recordable measures which can demonstrate comparison against expected standards and reflect progress over time.

C. Make sure the school is keeping up with external best practice and innovation

1. Are created in consultation with those delivering best practice locally. 
2. Are created in consideration of, and are benchmarked against, international best practice.

Taking each of these in turn:

The baseline tests can provide you with reliable tracking information about how the school and individual children are progressing in the national context. You can provide the schools year group average against the national average and pupil scores in those two contexts. Individual scores from one test are not very reliable and we will provide tests for every 6 months. With two tests a year over the 3 years of key stage 3 you will have 6 data points which can be shared with parents. We will also provide additional tests focused on any particular areas of weakness that emerge. This means you will have additional tests eg to target particular children and to get more evidence. The tests will differentiate attainment and we will provide certificates to recognise achievement and particularly good progress. The test is as far as we can tell free from bias with opportunities to expose any bias through thousands of people looking at it across the country. The only part of A that is then missing is covering qualitative assessment. This means looking at a pupil's result and asking if it is a fair reflection of the competencies they have demonstrated in more general work. To track this you can use the on-line progress tracking system described here [1].

For B, we are using the tests to diagnose weaknesses, misconceptions and suchlike so there is definitely potential to help improve teaching. While teaching to the test has issues, it is also true that if we identify a significant national weakness and put it in the test it will get taught. In digital technologies having regular testing enables new core priorities to be communicated widely as things change. Feeding back identified weaknesses from the tests enables feedback to pupils with specific objectives in mind. Its difficult to see how national expectations can be defined in a new subject before we collect data on what children know and can  do initially and what is shown to be possible with learning over time. 

Finally, having a community of teachers sharing data on pupil attainment might be regarded as good practice (best practice is a bit debateable in any context as it improves it can't be bettered!) and in an internet age of Twitter, Hang Outs, Skype and Teachmeets, local, national and international practice can amount to the same thing. We already have some international schools participating and we plan to extend this further.