David Jenkins is an experienced international school leader with nearly 30 years in education across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. He has led IB continuum schools through authorisations, evaluations, and periods of growth, and is known for being a visible, people-centred leader who values strong relationships with students, staff, and families. Passionate about holistic education, David believes academic excellence and wellbeing go hand in hand. Outside school, he enjoys sport and travel and leads with a simple principle: take the work seriously, but not yourself.
After nearly thirty years in international education across the UK, Europe, the United States, and Africa, I have worked with multiple curricula, accountability systems, and assessment models. I have been a classroom teacher, examiner, curriculum coordinator, and, for many years now, a Head of School. Few elements of education policy have proven as persistent, or as problematic, as our reliance on standardised testing. Indeed, if there were a standardised test for longevity in education policy, it would score exceptionally high.
From a leadership perspective, the appeal is obvious. Standardised tests offer clean data, comparability, and the comforting sense that something as complex as learning can be neatly captured in a number, preferably one that fits easily into a spreadsheet. They allow schools to be benchmarked, systems to be evaluated, and performance to be summarised in a way that appears clear and decisive. Whether that clarity reflects reality is, of course, another matter.
One of my earliest encounters with this came during my time in Texas in the early 2000s, working within a system shaped heavily by the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS), while also offering three IB programmes. In my first year there it was clear that the pressure associated with these tests was immediate and unmistakable. Schools were judged publicly on their results, and that pressure filtered quickly into classrooms, often with remarkable efficiency.
I recall how, in the months leading up to testing, the curriculum narrowed noticeably. Lessons became increasingly focused on test preparation; drilling question types, practising timing strategies, and rehearsing formats with a level of precision that would have impressed even the most disciplined athletic coach. The richness of the curriculum began to give way to repetition and technique. One could be forgiven for thinking that the ultimate aim of education was to become exceptionally good at answering questions about education.
As a leadership team, we made a deliberate decision to take a different approach. Rather than intensifying test preparation, we chose to remain committed to our International Baccalaureate philosophy of teaching and learning, prioritising inquiry, conceptual understanding, and student wellbeing. We also made a conscious effort to remove as much of the drama from the testing process as possible, presenting it to students as something to be completed rather than feared (a surprisingly radical idea at the time).
What we found was both reassuring and, in some respects, slightly inconvenient for the prevailing narrative: our students performed just as well on the standardised tests.
The difference, however, was in how they got there. Classrooms remained places of discussion, exploration, and deeper thinking. Students were less anxious, more engaged, and, perhaps most tellingly, still willing to ask questions that did not have a single correct answer. They were not being trained to pass a test; they were being educated. The fact that the test results held steady suggested that these two aims are not, in fact, mutually exclusive, despite what some systems might imply.
That experience has stayed with me, not least because it challenged one of the central assumptions underpinning high-stakes testing: that better results require greater focus on the test itself. In our case, the opposite appeared to be true.
I have since seen similar patterns across different contexts.
Early in my leadership career, I remember sitting in a results meeting analysing examination data. One student stood out: high scores across the board, comfortably exceeding expectations. On paper, this was a success story. Yet this same student had struggled throughout the year with independent thinking. In classroom observations and teacher feedback, there was a consistent pattern, strong recall, excellent technique, but a noticeable reluctance when asked to venture beyond what had been rehearsed. Is this the type of learner we wanted to send to university?
At the same time, another student (who happens to also be my son), whose results placed them below the benchmark, had been identified by multiple teachers as one of the most intellectually curious learners in the cohort. This student asked difficult questions, challenged assumptions, and demonstrated genuine depth of understanding. Unfortunately, none of these qualities appeared to be particularly helpful when faced with a tightly timed paper and a selection of well-crafted distractors.
As a school leader, I was left with a fundamental question: which of these students had truly been more successful in their learning?
Standardised assessments reward a specific profile of learner—one who is efficient, well-prepared for the format, and able to perform under timed conditions. These are valuable skills, but they are not synonymous with understanding, nor do they necessarily predict who will thrive when faced with complexity, ambiguity, or problems that have not been conveniently pre-formatted; all important traits in 2026.
Their influence extends far beyond individual students. In schools, they shape behaviour at every level. I have led teams through curriculum reviews where the unspoken question is not “What do students need to learn?” but “What are they likely to be asked?” The distinction is subtle, but significant.
From an international perspective, the issue of equity becomes even more pronounced. While tests may be standardised, student experiences are not. Differences in language, background, and support structures all play a role in shaping outcomes, factors that do not always fit neatly into the margins of an answer sheet.
Perhaps the most concerning aspect, however, is the weight we attach to these results. As a Head of School, I have been involved in decisions related to student progression, university placement, and school evaluation, decisions in which standardised data plays a significant role. Yet I am acutely aware that this data represents only a fraction of what we know about each learner, and, on occasion, not even the most interesting fraction.
In contrast, some of the most meaningful assessment practices I have seen, particularly within IB programmes, are those that value process as well as outcome. Extended essays, coursework, oral assessments, and reflective components provide a far richer picture of a student’s abilities. They are more complex to administer, certainly, but then meaningful things often are.
This is not an argument for abandoning assessment, but for rebalancing it, and perhaps for exercising a degree of caution before placing too much faith in anything that can be summarised quite so neatly.
After three decades in education, my concern is not that standardised testing exists, but that it has come to dominate our definition of success. It offers clarity, but at the cost of depth. It provides comparability, but at the expense of context.
Education is complex, nuanced, and deeply human. Our systems of assessment should reflect that. Until they do, we risk continuing to measure what is easy, while hoping it is also what matters.