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Planning to secure judgements

Planning to introduce and support the APP approach in your school will be central to its success.

Here we outline the initial considerations for you and your school senior leadership team (SLT), the planning decisions required to identify the staff to be involved, their continuing professional development (CPD) and training needs and the activities to secure your teachers' assessment judgements through planned in-school standardisation and moderation activity.

The APP pilots have shown that critical to teachers' success is the active involvement of a senior member of their school staff. A checklist of questions for the school senior leader to review the progress of APP after each assessment round is provided in the booklet Guidance for planning and supporting in-school standardisation and moderation  (PDF 0.16 Mb)

Initial considerations for the SLT

The SLT should consider the school context and how the assessment policies and practices of your school fit the APP approach. This will help the SLT decide with which subjects, year groups and teachers your school is going to start using APP.

School assessment policy review

School assessment practice review

  • When and how assessments are undertaken
  • The balance between teacher assessment and summative testing
  • Progress reviews
  • Effective in-school standardisation and moderation activity to ensure:
    • the consistency of teacher judgements within school (between teaching and year groups)
    • the robustness and reliability of judgements against national standards
  • The cost/benefit of implementing the APP model
  • Involvement of teaching assistants (TAs) and other adults
  • Enhancing what is passed on to the next teacher
  • Current teacher assessment practice
  • Medium- and short-term planning
  • Reviewing progress with pupils, parents/carers, colleagues
  • Grouping pupils
  • Use of planning, preparation and assessment (PPA) time
  • How you gather, record, and use evidence and information from assessments
  • Use of end of unit, term and year tests
  • A cross-curricular approach to assessing literacy and mathematics