The introduction of the new standards provides a good opportunity to look at how we have been assessing candidates, to reflect on our past practice and to decide how we want to move our practice forward as assessors.
Gone are the days, I hope, of a unit-by-unit approach, and welcome are the days of holistic assessment.
According to the Assessment Strategy for Children's Care, Learning and Development 2005, 'Work with children and families does not lend itself to a series of fragmented activities. When planning for assessment it is essential that assessors and candidates identify opportunities to integrate a number of activities for assessment on any particular occasion.'
These opportunities to assess the candidate's competence should be based mainly in the candidate's own workplace and be built around naturally occurring work activities that the candidate is involved in during their usual day-to- day working life.
What these opportunities should not be based on is artificially created scenarios that the candidate is not involved in unless an assessor is present!
In this way we are working from the candidate's practical experience of his or her job role towards the new requirements. As a result of this approach they should feel confident and motivated, rather than concerned about entering unknown territory.
Knowledge and understanding
Holistic assessment is an efficient and cost-effective way to gather evidence that reflects the candidate's usual job role. After all, interactive work with children and families requires that candidates are involved in positive relationships, health and safety issues, children's development and reflective practice as soon as they step through the workplace door. So why concentrate our assessment on only one of those aspects at any one time?
If holistic assessment is not practised, we are wasting valuable opportunities for our candidates to demonstrate their competency in the workplace. We are creating artificial barriers to achievement and we are not recognising or celebrating our candidates' individual skills, knowledge and understanding.
It is important not to assess knowledge and understanding separately. The new standards are very clear; it is expected that knowledge and understanding will be demonstrated by performance and reinforced by reflection, work products, questioning and/or professional discussion.
The Assessment Strategy document states, 'Assessment of knowledge and understanding should wherever possible be carried out during performance to ensure that theory and practice are linked.'
This means that we need to move away from 'classroom-based' tasks to real work-based evidence. As assessors we should be gaining evidence from what the candidate does in the workplace and from what he or she produces in the workplace.
So what evidence should our candidates be putting in their portfolios? How do we move to quality rather than quantity of evidence? We shall be addressing these topics in the next column.
