Assessing without levels - but still with grades

The UK's Department for Education recently removed the need for secondary schools (11-18) to use National Curriculum Levels to determine student progress in years 7-11 or Key Stage 3 as it's known. I'm not clear what the thinking behind this was but it's true that Levels in most schools were relatively meaningless and had become a stick to beat underperforming teachers with and a vastly misinterpreted scale from subject to subject and school to school. So the idea of removing these national requirements and replacing them with the individual school's own scale makes some kind of sense. Many countries around the world get by without having any kind of target grade system or levelling. They take each piece of work from a student as it stands and rate it against other students and expected levels of attainment for that stage of learning. As head of department for a growing languages faculty at my school, I was given the task of defining what each step in the school's own scale from 0-8 would look like to students. Not an easy job, given that MFL has four main areas of assessment in its four key skills (listening, writing, reading and speaking). What I ended up doing was tying the scale (with up to three sub-levels) to a range of GCSE examination criteria and - more importantly, I believe - the Common European Framework Reference for Languages. In many ways, all I've done is redefine the national curriculum levels but the important thing is, I think I've done it for the needs and aspirations of my own school using language that makes sense to me and my department. If you'd like to see what I came up with, please DM me via Twitter.