Actually reading through the Ofqual/DfE consultation rather than what has been said about it by others. It's not making me feel any better.

But, but, but...! This is such an unreasonable question!
Just hold the **** exams, for God's sake!
This passage makes zero sense to me. It's like a Boris announcement on the importance of following guidance. NEA is important, but only if the kids have all done it. It's the only evidence you can use in Art, but it's ok if it's not very good. Oh, and you can just make it up.
Oh, and if all else fails, just make it up using whatever stuff you can find to justify what you want to give.
Ah good, that's fixed the concerns over paper integrity. Nothing could possibly go wrong with these robust measures in place.
I'm sure nobody will do anything dodgy if this happens.
It's ok guys. Who cares that the whole plan doesn't work since they're going to give us some training!
And if it all goes wrong, it's you they'll be appealing to! Enjoy!
To be fair, I don't really blame Ofqual for this complete mess. The parameters they were given were impossible. Nobody could have come up with anything sensible from them. But we'll be the ones who have to pick up the pieces.

More from Education

An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.


It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.

Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).

Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.

Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).

You May Also Like