By Gary Eason Education editor, BBC News Website

The move could mean an end to universal national testing

The idea is that, each December and June, children whose teachers felt they had reached the next national curriculum level should sit an external test to assess their progress.

First announced last January, the idea has now become more concrete with children in 411 schools in 10 local authorities in England having taken pilot versions of the tests last week.

The participants are those who volunteered out of 477 schools invited by the National Assessment Agency to take part.

It means about 40,000 children have been involved, spread across Years 3 to 9 (ages seven to 14).

They sat what the agency calls "single level tests" in English reading, English writing and mathematics.

Children's Secretary Ed Balls has said he will not be abolishing national tests completely because parents "want to know not only about their child but how their school is doing".

So with the new tests, league tables will remain.

"But it is time for a change," he said.

"Our Children's Plan will pave the way for a change away from the rigidity of the national testing we have at the moment - which says that every child does the same test at the same age - towards testing which is more in line with the needs of the child."

Different ages

This involves children taking the tests "when they're ready, at the level which makes sense for them".

One of the tricky issues is the way the new tests are not age-specific.

With the standard national curriculum tests or "Sats" at the end of primary school, for instance, all the children have 10 or 11 years' experience of life.

They are expected to attain Level 4 but the tests also have to cover a range of possible attainment - though they are capped at Level 5, normally expected of 14-year-olds.

The new tests are level-specific: they are assessing performance at a particular standard.

But a child might be entered for, say, a Level 4 test a year or more earlier. Academically they might be capable of the standard but they do not have the same maturity.

So pitching the tests at this wider age group was one of the challenges for their designers.

'About right'

David Smith, head teacher at one of the pilot schools, said: "The pilot programme is quite an important process in getting that judgement right, especially in the suitability of a reading or writing test.

"We found, the feedback from my staff was that they had got that pretty well judged."

In particular, the Level 3 tests taken by older but slower learners did not make them feel they were being patronised.

"Our view was that they had got it about right."

The tests were taken by some 200 of the 440 pupils in his school, Longlevens Junior in Gloucestershire, across Years 3 to 6.

"They were selected on the basis of where we felt they were in their teacher assessments at the end of last summer term."

Mr Smith said children would be entered for the tests only when their teachers were "absolutely sure" they were working at the appropriate level.

"Philosophically it's the right thing to do, to test children's progress in this way - and we are testing progress rather than just focusing on key stage attainment."

He also thought that it would "raise the bar further" for more able pupils.

"What this testing regime does is enable schools to be a lot more focused on tracking individual pupils and groups of pupils."

'Taught to the test'

The system now being tried in England is more like that which has operated in Scotland's schools since 1992.

The lesson from there is that the existence of official targets for children's attainment is likely to have a perverse influence.

The idea in Scotland was that teachers would choose tests from a catalogue of test units when they judged pupils had achieved a Level and were ready to move on to the next.

The tests would be used to confirm teachers' professional judgements rather than as a means of determining a Level on their own.

But a report from the Scottish Executive said an unintended consequence of setting targets for attainment was that "teachers sometimes felt compelled to disregard the guidance on 'testing when ready' and adopt approaches to testing that are not helpful to pupils' learning and classroom teaching".

"Teachers have indicated that sometimes they test too frequently, 'practising' for the test, and giving less attention than they themselves feel desirable to aspects of learning that are difficult to assess using written tests.

"They have 'taught to the test', thus narrowing the range of activities covered in English or mathematics."

'Danger'

The report added: "Evidence from some teachers is that they feel forced to test all pupils at the same time, using tests as a device to 'sort' pupils, rather than using the 'testing when ready' approach.

"In such cases, it is likely that some pupils will not be ready to be tested and are therefore likely to fail, which is demotivating for pupils."

The head of the National Assessment Agency in England, David Gee, said "there is that danger" - that teachers would enter children too often or too soon.

But there were some safeguards, he said in a BBC News interview.

"I think we would watch with great interest the number of times the school has entered a child for a test."

The English pilots are being marked at a central location in Coventry by more than 400 examiners who were trained over the weekend to recognise the standards expected for each level.

Mr Gee agreed the pass rate might be expected to be high, if schools were correctly selecting children who were ready to take the tests - but he would not be drawn on what it might be.

He also acknowledged that the new tests might be just another assessment burden for children who are already sometimes described as the most tested in the world.

But schools already use a battery of optional internal and external tests in addition to the statutory ones, and he argued that the single level tests may replace some of those.

Last week was the first of four "test windows". The next is in June, with two more in the following school year.

What happens after that is a political decision.