ASSESSMENT WORTH DOING
While agreeing with Steffen Sommer that assessment can lead wider educational change, Simon Lightman suggests that assessment worth doing requires a cultural change in schools.
Culture, self, and agency
In his recent interview with ITM about Assessment 3.0, Dr Steffen Sommer argues that if we want to change education, we must first change the way we assess. Curriculum content, he insists, is not the main target. The urgent task is to move away from narrow, exam-driven systems that over-reward memory recall, and to focus instead on the transferable skills that young people need to thrive in a fast-changing world.
Sommer’s message is both urgent and pragmatic. He believes reform must happen within three years, but also knows the establishment is cautious. His call to “make haste slowly” captures this tension: act quickly, but with enough care that reforms take hold. His argument is simple: do not scrap subject disciplines, but change how students are assessed within them. And if you want change at scale, start with the exam boards. What they choose to assess will drive the behaviour of teachers and students alike.
The vision is compelling. Qualities such as collaboration, adaptability, creativity, leadership, and critical thinking must be placed under the same scrutiny as knowledge recall. The methodologies already exist: portfolios, oral assessments, teacher observation, peer and self-assessment. Sommer is also clear-eyed about AI: its outputs may be hard to authenticate, but we can still assess the quality of the inputs, the questions students ask, and the judgement they show in how they use it.
The strengths of pragmatism
There is wisdom in this pragmatism. Too often, debates about educational change become abstract or overloaded with complexity. Sommer cuts through: assessment drives behaviour. If exam boards adjust their rubrics, schools will follow. The success of the Extended Project Qualification shows that alternatives can gain credibility with universities and employers. Sommer’s preference for coalition-building, and to work with those who share his perspective, points to a movement already underway.
As someone working on whole-school sustainability initiatives, I find this focus on leverage points refreshing. In schools, culture rarely shifts because of lofty rhetoric. It shifts because structures, incentives, and recognition change.
But is it enough?
Sommer is right to locate the lever in assessment, but the question then becomes: will pulling this lever alone be enough to transform the culture of learning?
My experience suggests that changing assessment without changing culture risks producing only surface-level reform. In sustainability education, I have seen how easily frameworks and policies become symbolic gestures when the deeper ethos of a school remains untouched. Solar panels and recycling bins may signal progress, but without cultural alignment they rarely change the lived experience of learning.
The same applies to assessment. Portfolios and competency frameworks will make little difference if they are simply bolted onto exam-driven traditions. Without cultural depth, they risk being absorbed into the same performative logic that prizes grades over growth. The challenge is not just to add new measures, but to reconsider what kind of learners our systems are designed to produce.
What kind of self?
This brings us to the heart of the matter. Sommer is right to highlight competencies such as adaptability and creativity. But we also need to ask a deeper question: what kind of self are we nurturing through assessment?
In my own research I have written about the “egoic self,” the self formed around competition, defensiveness, and control. This is the self that thrives in exam halls but struggles with empathy, ecological responsibility, or collaboration. If Assessment 3.0 is to succeed, it cannot stop at measuring competencies. It must help cultivate a more relational self: one that sees learning as interdependence, not just individual achievement.
Teachers see this every day. We witness transformation when students lead environmental projects, wrestle with philosophical uncertainty, or encounter the wonder of the natural world. These moments of becoming resist easy quantification, yet they shape who students are. Assessment that ignores them risks missing the heart of education. Which is why the next step is clear: students cannot only be subjects of assessment, they must be partners in shaping it.
Youth as co-authors
Sommer highlights the importance of student-centred approaches such as self-assessment and portfolios. This is vital, but it must go further. Students should not only participate in assessment systems; they should help design them.
In my work with youth leadership initiatives such as the City of London Youth Natural Environment Board, I have seen how quickly students rise to the challenge when they are given genuine responsibility. The same principle applies to assessment. When students are treated as co-authors rather than simply subjects of it, assessment becomes part of their identity as change-makers rather than just another hoop to jump through.
Of course, for this to be credible, schools need leadership that is willing to trust students and model the values of partnership and humility. That leads us to another crucial dimension: leadership itself.
Leadership beyond strategy
Reform will not be sustained by good ideas alone. Sommer rightly identifies exam boards as crucial, but the day-to-day reality in schools is that leaders must interpret, mediate, and embody change. My research on whole-school approaches to sustainability found that the most effective leaders were not simply strategists. They were witnesses, able to hold uncertainty, act with humility, and create spaces for dialogue and plurality.
Assessment reform needs this kind of leadership. Without it, portfolios and rubrics risk being applied mechanically, stripped of their transformative potential. With it, they can become part of a deeper cultural journey in which assessment is not just a measure of past performance, but an invitation to become otherwise.
Toward assessment worth doing
Sommer is right to call time on the dominance of high-stakes exams. He is right to insist on simplicity, pragmatism, and urgency. But if “education worth having” requires “assessment worth doing,” then the task is not only technical but cultural.
We need assessment systems that reflect not just what students know, or even what they can do, but who they are becoming. We need to see assessment not only as an institutional lever but as a relational practice, co-authored with students, and grounded in the values that shape school life.
In Assessment 3.0, Sommer points us in the right direction. To get there, however, we must remember that change is not just about rubrics and portfolios. It is about culture, self, and agency. Without these, reform risks becoming another initiative. With them, it could become a genuine transformation, one that prepares young people not just for exams, but for the fragile, complex, and interconnected world they already inhabit.
Simon Lightman is the Founder of the City of London Youth Natural Environment Board and Co-Chair of SEEd (Sustainability and Environmental Education). He is an educator, writer, and researcher whose work explores how education can respond to the moral, ecological, and philosophical challenges of the twenty-first century. His writing and practice focus on transformative sustainability education, systems thinking, and the philosophy of education. Simon received the Educators’ Trust Environmental Educator Award in 2025 for innovation in embedding sustainability across leadership and curriculum.
FEATURE IMAGE: by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu on Unsplash
Support Images: Thank you to Simon and the City of London Youth Natural Environment Board, SEEd & Solar for Schools for their kind permission
