The recent publication of headlines from Rethinking Assessment: ‘Leading Experts Call for A Digital Learner Profile to transform “narrow” education system’, gave me a strange sense of Deja Vue.
Over the last decade I have been involved in various attempts to improve the education system to make it more relevant and engaging. And we keep coming back to the same place: our current approach to assessment is not incentivising the broad curriculum that the economy requires.
In 2014, David Cameron appointed Lord Young as his ‘enterprise advisor’. Lord Young established several advisory groups, one of which looked at enterprise in schools. It has passed into folklore that Margaret Thatcher once said that “all ministers bring me their problems. David [Young] brings me his solutions.” But despite this reputation, even he was unable to make any real difference beyond setting up a network of enterprise advisors.
