Education Minister Elizabeth Truss speaks to Reform about new freedoms for teachers over materials, assessment and professional development.
Introduction
It’s a pleasure to be back at Reform.
I want to start with a story. I was visiting a primary school in East Anglia a few months back. I was talking to the teachers. It was late on a Friday evening, about 6pm.
And as most people were heading off for a night in front of the TV - or for a night in the pub - they were in their classrooms.
They were working away on something called ‘assessing pupils’ progress’, or APP.
It’s basically a massive sheet which records whether a child is achieving in a subject against a set of things called ‘assessment focuses’.
It was introduced under the old National Strategies in 1998, and came with a 40-page guidance document. Many schools felt forced to adopt this enormous, cumbersome process.
But here’s the funny thing: this government got rid of it.
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/ ... g-teaching