I'll go up to bat for levels, as part of an equal national education system. It's not the levelling of work that's keeping me awake until 2am, it's the planning and ridiculously specific marking scheme which isn't related to levels.
In Primary, levels are pretty important for tracking the often chaotic and uneven progress young children make. In particular the sub levels of progress, which have also been scrapped. Each school making their own up means that children transferring from one to another is going to be entertainingly bureaucratic in terms of assessing the incoming child.
It also, and this is from my current experience, can mean that what was previously a National Standard Level 1 is mysteriously now a Level 2 in the schools own form of assessment.
Which is madness, because when the statutory tests come along, all of those Level 2 kids will grade solid 1's because the expectation of the statutory tests will be linked to an assessment criteria which isn't matched to the schools.
It's useful for teachers, who are pretty mobile, to know that L1 = this, as a guide for understanding. God help moving to a new school and having to pick up an entirely different range of assessment.
It's a neat little trick though. Break the pay spine for the country, break the system up with Academies and Free Schools and then dissolve the national standards of expectation except in DfE statutory tests at a time when the new curriculum is about to seriously fuck with teacher capability to implement. It means that they can cover their arses at the DfE if all of these reforms fuck the system over and exam grades go haywire, by blaming schools for poor assessment.
You may have partied
SLK, but the cure could well be worse than the apparent illness.
