Teach Secondary 14.4

Belief , we can also take into consideration the impact of leadership, governance and safeguarding on rates of school improvement and overall outcomes. Unfettered by colour card judgement descriptors, inspectors and schools wouldn’t have to tie themselves in knots. Instead, inspectors would use their own expertise and experience to evaluate the quality of the school they’re visiting, identifying any barriers to progress and issuing practical recommendations for the next steps the school ought to take. A truly inclusive model might look at ipsative assessment, which would measure progress from each individual learner’s own starting point. Some might argue that this would lower standards, since it’s not a comparative outcome – and yet, there’s world-renowned curriculum, with no accredited outcome, that has students ready for the next phase of their education at the age of 16, having acquired knowledge across a suite of interdisciplinary subjects. The International Baccalaureate (IB) ensures that children and young people acquire reasoning, problem solving and critical thinking skills, and can then apply these to enquiry-based project work and learning assignments. These are skills widely recognised as being necessary for further training, employment and increasingly for simply living , in a global world where AI technologies are fast becoming commonplace. The IB sees teachers making effective use of formative assessment – with the aid of AI, in some cases – to provide feedback and adapt students’ future learning. The concept of the ‘zone of proximal development’ additionally encourages better understanding of how learners can secure progress over time. Schools using the ManageBac learning platform can additionally allow learners and parents to view the progress being made in real time, with teachers able to consult charts and other visual tools to monitor students’ development and award them a best-fit grade. Under such a system, there are no summative percentages or weightings; teachers’ professional judgement is key. Atwo-tier system Meanwhile, the absence of any reference to AI tools in Ofsted’s EIF seems like a glaring omission, and at odds with the government’s commitment earlier this year to making more extensive use of AI within education. Even before that, the government announced in 2024 its plans for a £3 million ‘content store’ designed to train AI models on English teaching standards, guidelines and lesson plans, so that it might eventually mark and tailor work to students’ individual needs in line with the curriculum of the day. We may therefore yet see the large-scale adoption of genuinely inclusive, adaptive teaching – though it’s worth noting that general purpose generative AIs tools that have trained on data from across the wider internet – such as ChatGPT – can still struggle to generate context- relevant content, and are prone to making factual errors (popularly termed ‘hallucinations’). Without any general consensus on the long-term future of curriculum design from the DfE and Ofsted, however, just how relevant can we expect these tools to be in the long term? The government’s own research on parent and pupil attitudes towards AI in education found that “ Parents want teachers to use generative AI so they have more time helping individual children in lessons ”. Further research by the online safety campaign group Internet Matters conducted in 2024 found that over half of children regularly use AI tools to help with, or even complete their school work, with two thirds of parents having not been informed about how their child’s school plans to use generative AI tools for teaching purposes. Without set policies, relevant safeguards and appropriate training for teachers and children in place, howwill parents, schools and even Ofsted itself be able to tell when work submitted by children is their own or AI generated? Is the Ofsted ‘report card’ an adequate tool for capturing these nuances in learning and teaching? Once in use, will inspectors even knowwhat questions to ask of teachers?Will schools and trusts able to afford AI resources for their staff and students ‘achieve’ better outcomes, and thus more positive Ofsted judgements than those that can’t? Such scenarios risk creating a two-tier education system overseen by flawed Ofsted inspections completely out of kilter with prevailing curriculum, assessment and AI trends. Unless the DfE and Ofsted develop a joined-up approach to creating an inclusive education system– one in which SEND children are at the very centre of inspection – then the process of judging inclusion and achievement for all pupil groups could become little more than a mere tick box exercise reliant on pupil data. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Meena Wood is a former principal and HMI, and author of Secondary Curriculum Transformed – Enabling All to Achieve (Routledge, £24.99) “If there’s no change in what students learnand howthey’reassessed,a thirdwill continue to fail” 49 teachwire.net/secondary S E N D