Yes

Ali Warren is a full-time drama teacher living in Wiltshire with a long-suffering husband and a cat. She is the secondary officer for National Drama and is involved in the Prince's Trust Children and the Arts in an advisory capacity. She has written a number of short plays for young people

I've spent some of my summer reviewing my Key Stage 3 curriculum and one of the things I've been looking at is assessment. I want to peg the assessment to the things I've learned about the new specifications, so it would tie in, and I wanted to make sure that the schemes of work I'm using have a clear numerical assessment structure so all the people teaching the courses can give clear assessment information when it's required.

There will be people out there who will wonder why I am bothering and it's true that KS3 students don't need to have a numerical grade. Quite a lot of them won't be continuing on to an external qualification at KS4 so the experience for students doing Drama in Years 7 to 9 should be about the experience; the creative and ‘soft’ skills that are at the heart of Drama education.

In the current education climate, grades are needed

The reality, however, is that in the current education climate, grades are needed. The people who lead on education demand it, and therefore our senior managements are demanding it of us. We have a professional responsibility to respond to this whether we agree or not.

The joy of working as a Drama teacher is seeing young people flourish creatively but for those opportunities to continue we, as Drama teachers, have to play the same game as our colleagues in Maths or History or French. If not, we have a hard sell to argue that our subjects belong in a modern curriculum as a subject in its own right – and that's a whole different discussion.

Yes

Keith Burt graduated from the Central school of speech and drama and has a Masters in Drama Education from Middlesex University. He is an experienced and established Head of Drama and former Artistic Director of a professional theatre company.

I understand the impact that stress, pressure and worry have on young people and that it is causing an increase in mental health problems such as depression and anxiety. It is a problem that we urgently need to tackle in an open, honest and sincere way.

However, I am not convinced that one way of tackling this problem is to stop giving students marks or grades.

It is important for students to know the marks they got for a test, the current grade they are on or the grade they are projected to get. There are several valid reasons for this, ranging from communicating progress to parents, to helping young people plan for their future. The most important though, is that it helps put written feedback into context. It gives students a specific goal to works towards rather than just ‘to improve’ or ‘to get to the next grade’ (regardless of what the next grade is).

Progress should not just be about the grade. In their statement about removing marks from student feedback, the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (RWCMD) said that they ‘found that students were concentrating on their mark and where it placed them in their cohort, rather than taking on board the written feedback.’

Students need to be encouraged to compete against just themselves

We need to find a way of stopping students obsessing about the grade and help them to focus on their feedback instead. Students will always compare themselves to others and to some extent that is healthy, as it also provides context. But if we can remove any positive or negative connotations associated with grades that would go a long way to help. For individual students, education should not be a competition against everyone else. Students need to be encouraged to compete against just themselves, to try to match or beat their own targets, rather than competing against the rest of their cohort.

No

Onur Orkut completed his degree in Physics before starting his training in theatre. He graduated from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland twice, with a master's degree in Drama and another in Musical Theatre. He continues to work as a freelance performer and a lecturer. He's a senior fellow of the HEA.

Assessment is problematic in education, especially in vocational higher education in performing arts, and specifically in acting. I believe this problem lies in how we define ‘assessment’. Even the Higher Education Academy used the term interchangeably with ‘measurement’ during its 2017 annual debate: ‘This house believes that the assessment of teaching excellence is a futile exercise as it is inherently immeasurable.’

Grading inherently suggests that 100% is achievable

To challenge this, I think paradoxically. Imagine having to assess your life, say over the last 12 months. You can look at successes, satisfaction level, how busy and tiring your life is, the efficacy of your effort, and so on. You can choose a few of these criteria and/or consider others. Now, try and give it a grade, for example out of 100. Is your life a 68 or is it a 42? Even though you are looking at criteria (criterion-referenced assessment), you are also inadvertently comparing your life to others' (norm-referenced assessment) because grading inherently suggests that 100% is achievable. Now think of the same in acting, or in any other profession. Who is the 100% actor? Or who is the 100% doctor, teacher, taxi driver, architect or musician?

If we use a simpler meaning of the word assessment (Cambridge English Dictionary defines it as ‘the process of considering all the information about a situation or a person and making a judgement’) we can provide a more rounded experience for the learner and give them individual and useful feedback (preferably immediately) on technical aspects and application. Further, we can teach them to self-assess, to make them independent practitioners as they work in the industry.

No

Karen Latto is an Independent Education Adviser and CPD trainer, supporting the work of teachers across England and consults on a wide range of education projects. She is currently studying at Cambridge University for a Masters of Education in Educational Leadership and School Improvement

Target fixation, while commonly associated with fighter pilots and motorcyclists, is a human behaviour that can be applied to the educational context. It is where you become so focused on the goal, that you miss the bigger picture and ultimately crash into the object you are trying so hard to avoid. While students will never physically crash into target grades plastered over their books, planners and report cards, the concept can be applied to the classroom to include missed opportunities and wasted learning time.

I firmly believe that it is the conversations about learning and development that are the lost opportunities here. By removing the focus on grades, numbers or levels, students have a greater focus on feedback and engage with how to improve their work moving forward. When I have given marks back to students, it has often become about ranking and competing and not about individual achievements or feedback on how to improve.

When I have given marks back to students, it has often become about ranking and competing

I believe this pilot by the RWCMD is a great idea. With the increased amount of linear assessment at GCSE and A-level, across the whole curriculum, students' mental health is an issue that is at the forefront of educators' minds. As teachers, we can support our students by adopting this approach. Let's reduce the repeated data drops, the continual mock exams, and the mountain of intervention strategies to ‘achieve the target’. Let's focus on teaching and learning and making sure that our students are engaged with feedback and improving their knowledge, their skills and their self-confidence, which does benefit their learning – and their levels of anxiety and stress about school will reduce too.