Why Future-Ready Assessment Needs School Leadership

Much has been written about a future-ready assessment culture. Beutel and Ruberg published an extensive academic review in 2025, the Bertelsmann Stiftung issued a call for courageous decisions that same year, and creative pilot projects are emerging at many schools.

Even so, broad change remains limited. That gap is the reason for this article.

In Germany, ministries and state institutes set assessment frameworks at the federal-state level, while schools shape practice within those boundaries.

An honest diagnosis

Conversations with teachers about new assessment formats often reveal a familiar mixture of interest and caution. Everyone recognizes the topic's importance, but it collides with daily routines, perceived risks, and concern about being challenged by parents or school supervisory authorities.

The question is therefore not whether teachers want change. The question is who creates the conditions for it.

Three barriers repeatedly emerge:

1. Schools lack protected spaces for experimentation where a trial is allowed to fail.
2. Staff make too little use of the legal room available because it is not widely understood.
3. Assessment culture is treated as a teaching detail for individual teachers rather than consistently as an issue of school development.

As long as these three issues remain unaddressed, every reform remains fragile.

Assessment culture is not a teaching detail. It expresses a school's strategy, and shaping strategy is a leadership responsibility.

Who carries responsibility?

Ministries set frameworks, but they do not create school practice. State institutes provide materials, but they do not create school culture. Teachers can innovate, but need institutional support. Technology provides tools, but not educational direction.

Who, then, takes responsibility for turning new ideas about assessment into lived school culture?

My argument is that school leadership does. That responsibility has three dimensions.

Enable

School leaders establish the conditions in which experimentation can happen. That means understanding and explaining the available legal room, creating protected pilot phases in selected grades or subject areas, and deliberately allocating resources such as workload relief.

Without this first step, new formats depend on the courage of individual teachers. Courage alone cannot sustain a school culture.

Coordinate

Assessment culture needs to be embedded systematically in school development. That means establishing a cycle in which review, priority setting, pilots, and evaluation build on one another.

A steering group with a clear mandate matters more here than any tool because it makes change independent of individual people. Without this step, committed individual work never becomes school-wide practice.

Develop

School leaders shape the view of people that lies behind performance assessment. Do we see assessments as instruments of selection, or as tools for learning progress and agency?

That perspective is reflected not only in mission statements, but in how leaders and staff discuss achievement, which achievements they make visible, and how they communicate them to parents and students.

Ultimately, the question is what assessments are intended to achieve and which role they play in a learning process.

Three levels, one shared path

Change in assessment culture rarely arrives as one sweeping transformation. It emerges through coordinated steps. From my observations, three levels can be distinguished.

Level 1: Analysis and vision

Individual teachers are committed, but the school has no shared strategy. The goal at this stage is not a comprehensive concept, but trust and initial experience.

A review of current assessment practice, a manageable pilot in one subject or grade, and a short professional-development session are enough to begin moving.

Level 2: Development and strategy

A steering group exists and initial pilots are underway, but the work is not yet sustained. This is where strong school leadership has the greatest leverage.

Fixed periods in the school-year calendar, a shared frame of reference such as the thirteen factors of change, and a deliberately cultivated culture of trust are central building blocks.

Level 3: Depth and sustainability

Assessment culture is embedded in the school program, new formats have been tested and documented, and staff share a common language. At this level, the focus shifts to expansion.

AI-assisted diagnostic approaches are integrated, participatory assessment formats are expanded, and knowledge is shared with other schools.

What AI and VUCA change

Assessment culture does not stand alone. It intersects with two debates that are reshaping school work: generative AI and a world described through VUCA and BANI.

In his AI competency model, Joscha Falck identifies four areas of development: understanding, applying, reflecting, and co-creating. Applied to assessment culture, that means school leaders need not only a position on AI use in assessments, but also language for discussing the subject with staff and parents.

When schools test new assessment formats, they need to think them through consistently. Otherwise, the work stops at the decisive moment and has no effect. A further principle applies here, as it should in any change process:

The question of why should always come before the questions of what and how.

These considerations show that assessment culture today is about more than whether traditional written exams remain sufficient or how to keep students in conventional formats despite AI. It is part of school development for a world with AI, changed learning pathways, and new questions about belonging.

Culture beats format

A new assessment format is not yet a future-ready assessment culture. An AI feedback tool is not yet a concept. Anyone who thinks only in tools or formats will fail because tools have no effect without culture.

The most important levers are elsewhere. School leaders who visibly take responsibility for questions of assessment encourage colleagues to follow. A culture of psychological safety makes room for difficult questions. Transparency with parents prevents change from turning into mistrust. A willingness to evaluate pilot phases honestly closes a cycle that would otherwise remain unfinished.

All of this is demanding and requires persistence. It is also what separates schools that try new formats from schools that genuinely transform their assessment culture.