Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment she has made of the extent of changes in the workload of teachers arising from the new Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 testing regime.

The removal of unnecessary workload is a priority for this Department and is considered carefully when introducing any significant change for schools. Our primary assessment reforms have been designed to put arrangements for the majority of classroom assessment back into the hands of the school and to reduce the tracking burdens that national curriculum levels previously encouraged. We believe schools are best placed to decide how to assess pupils in line with their curriculum and that over time this should lead to a reduction in workload for teachers.

Following the introduction of the new national curriculum and the removal of levels, we have developed new forms of statutory assessment at the end of Key Stages 1 and 2. The duty to report assessment at these points remains unchanged from previous years. We do recognise, however, that in this first year of the new forms of assessment teachers will be adapting their approach. Significant reforms like take time to embed and the best way to prepare pupils remains to focus on teaching the core knowledge set by new national curriculum, which schools have been doing since September 2014.

Throughout the introduction of our important reforms to primary assessment, we have worked closely with teachers and head teachers and continue to listen to the concerns of the profession as the details of the new arrangements are finalised. We are working constructively with the teaching profession and their representatives to find solutions to some of the remaining issues.