The Diagnostic Assessment (DA), which is administered to Grade 3 pupils in Mauritius at the start of the school year, is a classic example of using assessment to support learning. Pupils are assessed on key aspects of numeracy, enabling the early identification of learning difficulties. In this note, we briefly report on the philosophy and background of the DA project, the thinking behind the design of the assessment instrument, and present some findings from the 2018 assessment, all with the idea of demonstrating the potential of the DA in identifying learning difficulties. Such rich information can be very useful to the teacher to design tailor-made instructional interventions.

The poor performance of German students in PISA 2000 was a wake-up call for Germany, with the students’ scores in reading, mathematics and science being considerably lower than the OECD average. The immediate reaction to the disappointing results, dubbed the German “PISA shock”, stimulated a heated public debate and a strong policy response, with the German government enacting reform measures that led to significant improvement in the country’s educational performance. One of the core elements of the reform was the passage from the German Bildung, which is an education philosophy based on the development of the individual rather than on specific functional abilities, to a notion where educational standards and assessment of students’ achievements are central. Another crucial intervention was to define standards for teacher education, which led to a critical reflection on the quality of teacher training. In this article, we propose to review those measures, while touching upon others, of the German educational reform following the publication of the PISA results.

We offer a critical appraisal of the Primary School Achievement Certificate (PSAC) assessment in the context of the Nine-Year Continuous Basic Education, which is the latest education policy reform implemented in Mauritius. The PSAC is an essential element of the new assessment framework for basic education since it is meant to evaluate and certify students’ achievement at the end of the primary cycle. Performance is used to stream students going into lower-secondary education according to their learning needs. Hence, the PSAC assessment has replaced the once much contested Certificate of Primary Education (CPE) examination. Using Bronfenbrenner’s model of child development, we look at the issues related to CPE examinations, and how these motivated the need for the PSAC. We then examine the various aspects of the PSAC and elaborate on how the main features of the assessment could be improved to ensure reliable, fair and valid evaluation of students.

The recent Nine-Year Continuous Basic Education (NYCBE) reform has brought about a dramatic change in the provision of alternative lower-secondary education in the Republic of Mauritius. Whereas the previous prevocational education (PVE) programme allowed educators to make use of an aims-based curriculum to respond to the learning profile of children marginalised within the primary education system by formatively catering for their holistic development in an inclusive and integrated manner and preparing them for vocational pathways, the new extended programme (EP) proposes to engage those same learners with a knowledge-based curriculum that focuses heavily on subject learning and high-stakes examinations. Our aim in this article is to examine, through the lens of social justice, the aims, objectives and expectations of the two alternative education programmes, and elaborate, by looking at aspects of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, on how the EP ends up being a fundamentally flawed and poorly implemented programme that undermines the development and potential for human flourishing of the learners concerned. Implications for educators involved in the programme will also be touched upon.