Last year CfEY teamed up with multi-academy trust Big Education and, with support from the NCFE Assessment Innovation Fund, set out to create the new Primary Extended Project Award (PEPA).
We wanted to design a rigorous, flexible and scalable assessment for ten and eleven-year-olds that any primary school across the UK (or beyond) could use to complement existing practice. Collectively, we recognised three key problems with the assessment system in primary schools that the PEPA set out to address:
- There is an overemphasis on summative assessment directly linked to school performance measures.
- There is a strong focus on literacy and numeracy, which limits pupils’ opportunities to develop wider dispositions, undertake in-depth learning, and identify and pursue individual talents and passions.
- There are limited opportunities for schools to collaborate and offer pupils the chance opportunities to develop based on feedback from outside their classrooms.
