NAHT adopted a policy to work with the Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors (CIEA) at their Policy Conference in October 2021, ‘to encourage every school to have a Lead Assessor and ensure members and the appropriate staff in their school can access the training provided by CIEA‘. NAHT is also lobbying government to fund the initiative.
In collaboration, CIEA and NAHT have created a Lead Assessor Support Programme, leading to the Lead assessor Award with special rates for NAHT members.
Why should every school be interested?
Taking part in this important NAHT/CIEA initiative provides a range of benefits to schools and learners including:
- Better outcomes for pupils and schools through improved teaching and learning
- Ensuring the school’s curriculum and the assessment processes align in order to measure the extent to which the intended outcomes are achieved
- Improving self-evaluation and preparation for scrutiny
- The development a highly skilled workforce with expertise in educational assessment
- Reducing teacher workload by ensuring that efficient, valid and reliable processes are used to measure and record pupils’ attainment
- Building professional trust and integrity through accredited professional qualifications.
The Lead Assessor Support Programme and the Award can lead on to other CIEA qualifications including Chartered Educational Assessor.
What is the Lead Assessor Award?
The Lead Assessor Award is a flexible online, modular course with expert tutorial support designed by a prestigious, charitable body to enable those achieving the Award to ensure the development of high-quality educational assessment practice in their school or MAT by:
- improving the validity and reliability of school-based assessment
- enhancing teaching and learning, delivering tangible benefits for all pupils
- providing insight into ways in which learning progression is achieved using the curriculum and assessment in combination
- raising the status of teachers through gaining accredited professional qualifications.
The Lead Assessor Award consists of six online modules including approaches to assessment, validity & reliability, standardisation & moderation, using data and leading the assessment process. All modules are tailored to the context of either primary or secondary phases of education and the submission of a final assignment.
Further information
- Contact administratorciea@herts.ac.uk for further information about the Lead Assessor Support programme and Award
- Find out more by accessing a paper by Dr Mick Walker, President of the CIEA explaining the background to this initiative and more on its benefits
- Listen to the recent NAHT podcast ‘Leading on assessment’ which can be found here
Written by: CIEA
Published on: 21 October 2022