Richard, in a word - yes! The school based assessment can be used in a number of ways including as means of assessing learning not measurable by the external exam systems as we touched on in a previous question. And there is the possibility that students may transfer between countries or systems and the national exams may not be recognised in their new institution or they may transfer prior to taking these exams. Apart from that the teacher led assessment helps teachers to improve their own skillls and leads them to recognise any development they need, it leads to expertise being developed in areas of learning and ultimately this will feed into the high stakes national system: after all where do your external examiners come from? I mark external exams for other schools and colleges and I hope that this made me better in delivering the subjects I taught as I knew what was required for these subjects. I also hope that my feedback as an examiner is used to inform the question setters and indeed have done this in the past too.

On a more practical note. If you have an appropriate assessment system in a school then it will make report writing more useful and easier (maybe), hopefully will inform the students, parents and staff better because, as I assume, you will have some kind of moderation in place to ensure standardisation across departments or even across similar schools. And it should not be too difficult to, after running the internal assessments, to be able to predict outcomes in the high stakes exams more accurately for your students based on their achievement in internal assessments.

In terms of formative assessment, it's essential. Most high-stakes external assessment is taken at the end of a period of study and the results are used to assign grades or levels. It is difficult to use them to feed back into the system at the level of the individual. Throughout the learning period, internal assessments can be used to identify strengths and weaknesses and to guide students and teachers in future action.

Thanks Juliet...yes SBA and internal assessments are geared towards formative assessment or assessment FOR learning. It is both useful for students and teachers.