It will consider whether written exams are fit for purpose beyond 2025, and ask the question 'If we started afresh, what would assessment look like?'
Graham Stuart, Chair of the Education Select Committee, has welcomed the initiative, entitled 'The future of assessment: 2025 and beyond' as "extremely timely and welcome" as Government is already conducting wide-ranging reforms of curriculum and assessment.
Andrew Hall, Chief Executive of
AQA, said:
"In 2025, I would like to see an assessment system that has trust at the heart of it and makes the student the focus of everything we do."
"The initiative will consider what the assessment system achieve and how to ensure that students are equipped with the skills they need.
"We thought it would be a great opportunity for teachers, educationalists and politicians to debate how school assessment should evolve to meet changing educational and economic needs," said Mr Hall.
Brian Lightman, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said it is "absolutely essential that we have a step-change about the way we think about assessment in this country".
At an event in Parliament, Charlotte Leslie said:
"I’m so please to see the hashtag and the website is talking about assessment 2025. Its very seldom in politics that we think beyond the next press release, the next year or the next general election.
"Some of the work that I’ve done and AQA have been very supportive is in another thing that is for 2025 which is the idea of a professional body for teaching, a royal college for teaching if you like. I think we have a lot to learn when we have a lot to learn looking at how other professions be it the military, the police, medicine, conduct themselves and how they organise assessment and accountability."
She asked for people to get involved in the initiative and make their views known:
"No one single person has the answers, but we do have a collection of people who do have the answers, who do have the expertise, who do have the array of insights and angles and perceptions to enable us to get to the right answer.
"Please engage, please get your ideas heard."
Shadow Schools Minister, Kevin Brennan MP also attending the launch of Assessment 2025 said: "It’s great that AQA are doing this. We need some long term thinking in education and there's no question that for all sorts of reasons assessment is an important issue and we need to go beyond the debate about whether people are just need to be doing written examinations and not doing controlled assessments into a much more broad and balanced debate about how we are going to assess young people in the future so its great to have this opportunity to talk about things in the longer term."
"In the long term I think AQA are quite right; we need to look at thing like can technology help us to improve assessment? Can we personalise assessments to such an extent that you really give people an opportunity to show what they can do."
For more information on Assessment 2025 and to make your views known visit the site
here