The Flemish government has reached agreement on the introduction of region-wide central assessments to be introduced in phases in Primary School Grades Four and Six, and Years Two and Six of Secondary School, starting in 2024.
These centralised exams should help “keep an eye on the quality of education,” in Flanders, according to Flemish Education Minister Ben Weyts, who has been working for some time now on plans to introduce a system of centralised tests in the region.
Flanders has been doing less than well in international surveys for some time now, and an increasing number of students do not meet the minimum objectives.
“Today we are highly dependent on foreign research, but we wish to keep our finger on the pulse,” Weyts explained, arguing that centralised tests are an ideal instrument for monitoring education quality. The new system should also allow schools to “compare themselves with comparable schools” and give pupils and parents a view of the progress of individual pupils.
In concrete terms, the idea is to start in 2023 with a kind of test, a calibration covering thousands of students, followed in 2024, by the introduction of the centralised tests in the fourth grade and the second year of secondary school.
In subsequent years, the tests will be administered to sixth graders and students in the sixth year of secondary school.
To counter the phenomenon of ‘teaching to the test,’ the aim will be to set tests requiring students to apply insight and reasoning skills, something for which they cannot be prepared by having them spend hours filling in test-practice booklets or drilling them in exercises.
Each school will be given access to the test results so that they can compare themselves with similar schools. Class councils can use these results as an additional element in student assessments, although they should not be used as the sole evaluation.
The results will not be made available to the public, nor will schools be allowed to publish their results themselves, as a way, for example, of advertising their performance. And no rankings will be allowed.
