Moderation Delusions
Teachers’ time is too precious to waste. However, in too many schools, that is precisely what’s happening. Instead of having time to discuss important things like the content of the curriculum or to develop their pedagogical knowledge and skills, too many teachers are being expected to focus on pointless exercises, such as ‘moderation of achievement of a level’ in the Broad General Education (3-15) phase of education in Scotland.
Below are two extracts on this topic from The Teaching Delusion and The Teaching Delusion 2: Teaching Strikes Back. By calling this out, it is hoped that school leaders might start to do something about it, so that teachers’ time can be used more wisely.
From The Teaching Delusion
Moderation of assessment evidence
Too many teachers and school leaders spend too many hours on activities which have little or no impact on teaching and learning quality. One such activity can be ‘moderation of assessment evidence’. In Scotland, over the past decade there has been something close to a national obsession with this. I suspect that a similar situation exists in other countries. To briefly summarise: the national 3–15 curriculum has been organised into five ‘levels’ – early, first, second, third and fourth. Schools are expected to collect data relating to how many students have achieved a particular level at a particular stage in their education (for example, by the time they leave primary school). As you might expect, to determine if a student has achieved a level or not, teachers need to assess student learning. However, how teachers and schools do this is completely up to them. What this means is that some schools are assessing student learning through use of question-based tests, some by getting students to create presentations and posters, and some by sampling the day-to-day work that students are producing in lessons. There is no standardisation of the assessment.
Whenever the phrase ‘standardised assessment’ crops up, I know that some teachers and school leaders get a little hot under the collar. To a point, I understand why. Really, standardised assessments are only necessary if the learning of different students in different schools is to be compared, which is what national examinations do. If a comparison isn’t going to be made between schools, then they don’t need to use the same assessment. However, in the example of the Scottish context we are discussing, the learning of different students in different schools is being compared, and therefore assessments do need to be standardised. But they aren’t. Teachers and school leaders are expected to bring to meetings examples of the different assessment evidence that they have collected, to compare with those from different schools who have collected very different assessment evidence. What ends up happening is that teachers have some discussion about what they are looking at in a professional way, but the impact on teaching and learning is limited at best. Apples are being compared with pears. Had the assessments been standardised, such discussions could have been useful professional learning. As it is, the time is being wasted. Certainly, the time being spent on this is vastly disproportionate to any impact it makes on student learning.
From The Teaching Delusion 2: Teaching Strikes Back
The moderation delusion
In some schools, moderation sits on an ‘importance pedestal’ that it has no right to be on. Improvement plans focus on it; twilight professional learning and whole-day training agendas are dominated by it. An inordinate amount of time is being wasted by it.
Schools that are focusing on moderation in this way need to pause, take a step back, and ask themselves a fundamental question: ‘Why are we doing this?’ What difference is moderation going to make to the learning of students in our school? The honest answer is probably: ‘Very little.’
In the world beyond school, we don’t see other professionals engaging in moderation anything close to the extent that many teachers are being expected to. You pass your driving test – no one moderates that judgement. You are diagnosed with conjunctivitis – no one moderates that judgement, either. Why should it be different in teaching? Are assessments in schools that important? Most aren’t. Yes, some will be ‘formal’ in the sense that marks are recorded or reported to parents. However, unless they are being used to make ‘big decisions’, they don’t really count for much. Only a few formal assessments in the latter stages of secondary school count for so much that the judgements of teachers need to be moderated. These are the assessments that determine final grades.
Other than to develop a shared understanding of standards, such as in our PE example, there is little reason to moderate assessment judgements in any other phase of schooling. Once this understanding has been reached, we don’t need to keep moderating. Indeed, if we ditched moderation in most year stages altogether, it is a fairly safe bet that no damage would be done. It’s an equally safe bet that teaching and learning would improve, because teachers would be able to spend their time on activities that would be of more benefit to both them and their students.
The Teaching Delusion: Why Teaching In Our Schools Isn’t Good Enough (And How We Can Make It Better), published by John Catt Educational, is available at:
The Teaching Delusion 2: Teaching Strikes Back, published by John Catt Educational, is available at: