Does a focus on national testing and assessment reduce the scope of creativity in the curriculum?
11. The crucial issue here is the status given to the results of testing and assessment and the extent to which they become the primary focus of teaching and learning. There is a clear tension between the need to ensure that schools are properly accountable on the one hand and the need to allow room for curriculum innovation and inspired teaching on the other. 12. There is no reason why a suitably structured and restricted range of national testing and assessment should swamp the curriculum and constrain creativity. Clarity about the purpose of national testing and assessment is crucial to its design. If the intention was only to measure the performance of schools, then there would be no need to assess every pupil across the entire curriculum at each Key Stage – a sampling approach within each school would be adequate. In the same way, if the intention was only to monitor the system as a whole then sampling of schools themselves would be possible within a system which would still provi
