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Merlin John

The sheer futility of marking – wasting time on a paper process in which the teachers' efforts are nowhere near commensurate with the value the learners get from the feedback – was one of the major bugbears for Gwyn ap Harri when he started out as a teacher. A computer science graduate, he taught ICT at Hatfield Visual Arts College, near Doncaster.

"I was teaching to an exam," he says. "I wasn't seeing the kids learning anything. I wanted to be part of the solution and not part of the problem. What I was doing in my professional life was not what I believed in. I think you can only do that for so long."

The seminal moment for Gwyn, who had just been inspired by reading 'Inside The Black Box', came when his own insightful head sent him for a staff development day to Cramlington Community High School (soon to become Cramlington Learning Village), just north of Newcastle, in Northumberland. "What Mark Simpson and Mark Lovatt were doing blew me away. I thought, 'This is what it's supposed to be like'. Cramlington always say that they are on a journey and they are not there yet, but they are way ahead of a lot of other places."

Gwyn returned to Cramlington for a day every other term to develop his ideas for software to support assessment for learning in line with the philosophy of the school, which had already been working for many years with 'learning to learn' expert Alistair Smith, using his L2 course marketed by his company, Alite. Gwyn's first creation was software, called screenflash, for students to record and share their curriculum work. Within a year of continuing to bounce around his ideas with his collaborators at Cramlington he had created his original assessment program, smartAFL.

"My ideas complemented what Cramlington was doing," says Gwyn. "We were travelling along the same route." After about a year of coming home from a day's teaching and then doing work for his company, smartassess, Gwyn left teaching and his young company quickly took off. smartAfL attracted immediate attention for its pedagogical approach and ease of use. Using a simple, attractive interface it enabled learners to record and present their work in a wide variety of formats to a system in which they could clearly see what was expected of them and how they could progress.

As learners completed work the system recorded their contributions and progress with straightforward visual devices like pie charts and traffic lights. They could now engage fully with their learning and understand exactly what was required in order to reach their goals. Of course it also allowed teachers to see at a glance where students were with their learning and give feedback in a far more meaningful way. Gwyn was now well on the way to solving the marking problem that had initially motivated him.

As Web 2.0 tools emerged, Gwyn was quick to build them into his software. Features like blogging and wikis quickly emerged, and the result was a suite of software tools called realsmart which was launched in September 2007.

What Gwyn and his company had achieved was to build software that is structured in the same way as learning processes. As he says, "It's all based on the pedagogy. Teachers can be learners and organisations can be learners too. It's all about sharing the information and collaborating and feeding back in – that is assessment for learning."

And that's why smartassess' work is being so promptly adopted. The company now provides the software through which the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust conducts six of its own programmes, such as Raising Achievement, Transforming Learning. And it will be developing the software that will be used to train teachers to teach the new diplomas.

The software is already making inroads into schools in a big way. It is being used in 12 pilot schools in Kent and in all the schools in Guernsey. Schools in Northumberland will be using it too, within a bespoke VLE created by the University of Durham.

"We were a company that had a flagship product," says Gwyn ap Harri. "That was smartAfL. Now it's realsmart but now we are a development company as well. We have a product that we market and sell but now we also develop for other organisations like the SSAT."

Gwyn warmly credits the continuing role of Cramlington. "Every time I go there I am completely inspired by them, and not just as a professional,” he says. It's not just that I would love to teach there, I would love to be a kid in a lesson there."

Of course he's absolutely right. A day's visit to Cramlington, a secondary school with 1,550 pupils and more than 100 teachers, to sit in on a presentation of the school's work to ICT expert Alan Day, from Kent County Council, and a colleague from Kent's ICT partner, Northgate, was a revelation. Presentations by Assistant Head Mark Simpson, Deputy Head Mark Lovatt, Alistair Smith and Gwyn ap Harri, were tours de force of world class learning and teaching and the ways in which ICT can enable and extend it.

Cramlington has had its own intranet for nine years and the teaching intranet contains all the lessons and modules of all the teachers. And all those lessons are stamped with the school's philosophy of learning, providing a consistency of approach that is extremely rare, if not unique. Now the school will start using its new VLE, its third in five years, with realsmart "overarching", says Mark Lovatt.

Whatever teachers are unable to create there is an expert team of web developers and technicians on hand to bring their dreams to reality, he says. The management information system is used for pupil data and reports can be accessed externally by parents and pupils. Student voice is integral. For example, in humanities students are invited to blog on how their courses are going. "Student voice contributes to a community of inquiry," says Mark.

Learning is at the heart of every presentation, and attention to detail in Alistair Smith's L2 software even drills down to the vocabulary co-created by learners and teachers to engage students. In fact the presentations are so collaborative that they bear elements of a conversation among a team of developers which is, essentially, what this group also represents.

Cramlington is a living embodiment of the sort of 'vision of education' required for schools at the start of England's Building Schools for the Future programme. The theory is that if you get your vision of education right, with buy-in from all parts of the community, then the buildings and the ICT will be relatively straightforward. When Northumberland re-organised its schools, ending middle schools, the secondaries were faced with taking on two new year groups.

At Cramlington, where the buildings are very much 'old school', they are creating a new building for these pupils. And a successful bid for funding to the Faraday project for science developments has resulted in the schools getting a biosphere. On our visit £100,000 was being spent on plants. Developments like this are very much the product of a highly developed vision of education, and it doesn't take much to imagine the effect this will have on new students.

It's also easy to see how it can inspire teachers like Gwyn ap Harri (he starts his presentation with "I’m a teacher, a parent and a software developer, in that order"). He jokes, with an element of wistfulness, "My plan is to earn enough money to buy Cramlington and move it down to Doncaster for my kids."

Sitting in on the Cramlington presentations it's clear that these developments, the result of a 10-year journey, are part of a trend that is starting to emerge for more meaningful forms of assessment. And ICT is a crucial element.

"ICT allows us to get over our human limitations. On a simple level, if I am talking to you on the phone, we can only do that because of ICT. It's the sharing that is the most powerful thing that ICT can do.

"The classroom is no longer an isolated black box with an alienated teacher inside, where no one else knows what's going on. The teacher can actually see what's going on with the use of ICT. When you use ICT the walls come down and the children can come home from school and show their parents that night what they were doing in their lessons that day. This changes the whole way we learn, and the pedagogy of teachers in their classroom.

"There seems to be a movement of people who have connected and are getting together with their ideas. It really feels like you're on the crest of a wave. It's a really exciting place to be."

Merlin John is a freelance editor and writer who also runs his own website at www.merlinjohnonline.net .

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