John Vorhaus has covered the England case well. I'll add my personal observations.

When I was in England, I visted good programs and good teachers. They did complain about the time 
needed to follow the structured formative assessment. However, the formative assessmnet procedures 
ensured that teachers had an opportunity to assess the learning progress and needs of each student 
and to learn ways to contextualize instruction around the real and immediate demands for literacy 
and numeracy skills in the lives of students. The teachers I visited could and would have employed 
formative assessment without the mandated procedures, but less experienced teacher might benefit 
from the procedures. I thought it might be better to begin with mandaded procedures and then allow 
teachers to drop some or all of the procedures once they had integrated fomrative assessment into 
their practice.
John Comings
National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy
Harvard Graduate School of Education
7 Appian Way
Cambridge MA 02138
(617) 496-0516, voice
(617) 495-4811, fax
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john_comings at harvard.edu
http://ncsall.gse.harvard.edu