The social implications of national assessment

This paper considers the implications of national assessment in the United Kingdom. The increased emphasis on competition and on differentiation of children, the consequences for pedagogy, the likelihood of raising standards of performance, and the difficulties of addressing bias in open-ended models of assessment are all discussed. Emphasizing the position of national assessment within the ERA, the paper concludes that the effect will be to control what is taught, to raise standards of performance on the assessment, and to emphasize inequalities in educational attainment, reflecting social inequalities.Some of the material in this article appears in Gipps, 1990.