Best Practitioner of the Year Award Individual

Kindly sponsored by Acer

Steve Dew, Headteacher, Church Cowley St James Primary School, Oxford
Reason for Nomination

"Steve Dew is a brilliant educator, innovator, and research partner. Crucially he is driven by an un-relenting passion to improve the life chances of children. As a result he is un-phased by the inherent challenge of inertia built into the education system.

Steve's particular interest to this point has been around improving the reliability, validity and fairness of assessment in Primary school assessment, especially in writing. Like many educators, Steve was frustrated by a regime being suffocated by accountability where the joy and creativity of writing was being lost. He recognised the potential of liberating the assessment process by using a relative, rather than absolute, approach.

Adaptive Comparative Judgement (ACJ) provided Steve with a way forward and he quickly realised its potential in his own school. Typical of Steve, however, he very quickly saw the potential to improve outcomes more widely and launched a project across a bunch of other schools in his area

(See this article for more information: https://compare.rm.com/blog/2022/01/how-14-oxfordshire-schools-transformed-formative-assessment-with-rm-compare/).

The project was a huge success and was quickly 'productised' by Steve (assessprogress.com) - all while continuing as a Headteacher of 3 Primary schools. His ongoing, hands-on experience has allowed the ACJ experience to be continually improved and he has worked in close partnership with RM to iterate the offer. In doing so we have been able to understand and realise value much faster than would otherwise be possible. An example of this is the advanced reporting functionality (see compare.rm.com/help-centre/reporting/advance-reporting) that has been almost entirely driven by Steve's efforts over a 12 month period.

Steve continues to innovate with a range of new products and services ( see assessprogress.com/products). The driving force remains unchanged however, remaining laser focused on leveraging e-assessment to make a positive difference to learners.

Together we continue to build, measure and learn.

E-assement needs more Steves!"