Reclaiming ‘Match’ from the Critics of Primary Education

Quality assessment: two traditions (a review article)

“…The really important question in all this, however, is one which cannot yet be decided: it is whether or not one can shift from one paradigm to the other over a period of time without giving up one's values. The unspoken agenda of HMI in recent decades has been to move away from seeking to help schools and colleges to improve in order to make use increasingly of methods based on systematic investigational techniques, to take on the wholly critical and sceptical gaze of the disengaged objectifying observer and to use technologies of match in support of a curricular vision (see Withers and Eke, 1995). There seems to be something of the same aspiration, to graft the control form on the other, expressed by those who seem to believe that the use of assessors who are themselves drawn from teaching institutions (so called "peer assessment") and assessment against the institutions' own mission statements can temper quality assessment and turn it into "quality enhancement".…”