It is difficult to start writing about assessment because the subject is enormous. You also need to think about pedagogy, and curriculum, and the purpose of education, not to mention types of assessment such as standardised testing, summative and formative assessment and so on. It’s also all too easy to get caught up in ‘progressive’ versus ‘traditional’ education debates. In assessment terms, this tends to mean a binary of testing knowledge in an exam-based system on the one side, and perhaps no summative assessment at all at the extreme on the other side. From a pedagogical point of view, this might look like direct instruction on one side versus child-led or inquiry learning on the other side.
Moving beyond binaries
These binaries are unhelpful for having meaningful conversations about the teaching and assessment of young people so that all young people can thrive and experience success. The ‘evolution not revolution’ message of the Curriculum and Assessment Review (DfE, 2025c) (CAR) is such a binary. It is an important message for educational settings who want to change or expand their provision but also need to be mindful of staff workload and wellbeing as well as expertise and capacity.
However, if settings plan the small steps for change without a bigger picture sense of what they want to achieve, this could lead to fragmented or even contradictory practice. Therefore, having an overarching plan for significant change based on needs and also breaking that plan down to enact change gradually could ensure meaningful change. For example, it might be that a school has ‘revolutionary’ ideas about assessment (such as dropping a GCSE to offer HPQ project qualifications) but take smaller ‘evolutionary’ steps to get there. These steps are informed by their overall goals about assessment: both revolutionary and evolutionary.
Thinking about the purposes of curriculum and assessment can help to inform some of the big- picture thinking. The CAR conceptual position paper (DfE, 2025a) highlights that the curriculum serves three goals:
“equipping students with knowledge and skills necessary for life and work; fostering responsible citizenship in a democratic society; and promoting holistic development – intellectual, social, cultural, spiritual and moral, emotional, and physical” (p.3).
That is a substantial list and requires the curriculum to do a lot of heavy lifting. To fully realise these ambitions for all young people, it’s important to consider the ways in which both pedagogy and assessment are also components of the holistic education of young people, and to ask if current practice captures everything that we value about young people and enables all young people to thrive and to experience success.
Indications are that it does not. With regard to standardised external testing, at the end of primary school, 29% of pupils did not meet the expected standard in reading, maths and writing (combined) (DfE, 2025b). At the end of secondary school, a substantial percentage of students do not achieve a grade four pass in GCSE English (29%) and maths (28%) (Joint Council for Qualifications, 2025). This is despite the fact that a significant proportion of curriculum time is spent on preparation to sit these tests. The political and media attention given to the headline statistics above highlights part of the problem: the substantial weight put on these types of assessment outcomes means that teaching time, methods, and in-school assessments are all heavily skewed towards them.
Yet even in a world where every single young person passed these tests, would we think that it is sufficient for assessing all the things that are valued about young people’s education? And what might assessing those things look like? Standardised external assessments are measures that can tell politicians how cohorts of students are performing but only within a specific range. A typical SAT or GCSE exam can’t tell us how well students can, for example, collaborate, or verbally communicate, or work creatively or, indeed, what knowledge they have outside of the exam questions.
If school-based assessment is set up as a series of summative assessments where the only goal is to lead to a standardised external exam at the end, then some students are going to spend their educational lives failing tests until the ‘big fail’ at age sixteen (or seventeen or eighteen, in resits). Not only do young people deserve better than this, but such prominence given to such a narrow range of assessments also does not capture the stated aims of the curriculum in England. More attention needs to be given to pedagogies and formative assessments that enable learners to develop a range of skills and attributes, in addition to knowledge, that help them to thrive and succeed. Rethinking Assessment has made the case that, compared to the rest of the world, England is an outlier on account of the limited range of summative and formative assessment modes it encourages, (Lucas, 2021). A record of these developments would enable teachers and students to identify successes.
Over the last few years, time available in the school day has been severely lacking as the content that learners need to know for summative testing has increased. The CAR has recognized this and has called for content of exams – particularly in history and science – to be cut by 10%. At primary level, the recommendation is for grammar teaching and testing to be reduced. In addition to this, teachers and leaders should think carefully about the volume of the content that is taught. This allows more slack (Settle, 2025) in the curriculum, which could be used for teachers to innovate and embed formative assessment.
This is not to say that testing has no place in schools. Of course it does, but used in a different way for different reasons: good evidence from cognitive science (Sweller, 1998) strongly indicates that cognitive strategies such as recall and retrieval have a positive impact on student’s learning. So the value of testing – spelling tests, vocabulary quizzes, and other types of factual recall tests – is that they help students to learn. However, moving beyond binary approaches allows teachers and leaders to consider what students need at different times and to draw from a broader range of pedagogical and assessment approaches.
Addressing misconceptions
Yet the narrative often, as a result of misconceptions, reinforces artificial binaries about what teaching should look like in schools. For example, Kirschner et al (2006) state that direct instruction is the best way to teach so that students can learn and that “minimally guided instructional approaches” (p.75) are not effective. The misconception arises when a range of pedagogical approaches are thought of as being minimally guided. Inquiry-based learning (as an example) requires a vast skill set: the ability to listen to others; to share one’s own opinions and evidence; to turn take; to think critically and creatively; to ask questions. Putting a group of learners in a room and asking them to take part in an inquiry, with no awareness of whether or not those learners: a) have the necessary knowledge to do so and b) have the necessary skills to do so, would indeed be ineffective but this is not what inquiry-based learning promotes.
To ignore the research on pedagogical approaches such as oracy, inquiry-based learning or experiential learning (e.g. Ranken et al., 2024) on the basis that they are not direct instruction is to lose the wealth of skills and knowledge that these approaches can teach young people: skills and knowledge that are important to develop attributes that will help them to succeed in education, in the workplace and as flourishing human beings in society (OECD, 2025).
But students do need instructional guidance on these approaches and for that to happen, teachers need expertise about how to teach these skills and what progression looks like for students. Another misconception is that the types of knowledge and skills mentioned above don’t require evidence, or that progression can’t be evidenced, or even can’t be taught.
Oracy, for example, is a skill that can be systematically developed. As an oracy specialist, a frequently observed misconception is that some learners just don’t like speaking and therefore shouldn’t be made to do it. Yet, we don’t have this belief about other strands of literacy: we build in steps to teach children to read and write; we model and scaffold; we provide opportunities for practice. The same can be done for speaking and listening skills, rather than perceiving them as fixed and unchanging learner dispositions of being ‘shy’ or ‘chatty’. One reason that this is so important is that classroom questioning and discussion plays a key role in formative assessment of the full range of curriculum subjects, as teachers find out what their learners know and can do and plan the next steps accordingly (Schildkamp et al., 2020).
The importance of assessment literacy
Assessment literacy, knowing when, why and how to carry out different types of assessment (Pastore, 2023), is vital for teachers and leaders. In addition to the time needed to carry out assessment, including formatively, teachers need expertise. To be able to assess whether or not learners are making progress, teachers need to know what progress looks like. A framework for different knowledge and skills is important, including those such as oracy and critical thinking. This allows teachers to know what learners are working towards and the steps to achieve it.
A taxonomy, or common language (Johnson and Majewska, 2024), that is used to describe skills, steps, progress and outcomes enables leaders and teachers to collaborate professionally and allows teachers to share aims and outcomes with learners so that they understand what they are working towards. Key strategies such as these are a bedrock to evidencing progression in and supporting teaching of an expanded range of pedagogies.
The Next Generation Assessment project
The Next Generation Assessment project aims to systematically examine the evidence for expanding assessment, developing pedagogies and evidencing progression in areas such as oracy and inquiry-based learning. Building on the ground-breaking work undertaken by the Rethinking Assessment coalition, we will then provide guidance about how to use this evidence in different educational settings, considering implementation best practice, to enable leaders and teachers to make informed decisions. Funded by the Comino Foundation, the project is led by Dr Laura Kerslake at the Chartered College of Teaching and Professor Bill Lucas from the University of Winchester.
In addition to working on rapid evidence research reviews and case study research, we’ll also be holding a series of assessment-focused webinars and creating podcasts for teachers and leaders about how to implement these approaches. In February 2026 we’ll be holding the Next Generation Assessment Conference: From Principle to Practice. If you can’t make it to the conference, our webinar on 12th March will share some of the key ideas and how you might put them into practice in different settings.
References
Department for Education. (2025a). Curriculum and assessment review: conceptual position paper. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/curriculum-and-assessment-review-interim-report
Department for Education. (2025b). Key Stage 2 Attainment. https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/key-stage-2-attainment/2024-25
Department for Education. (2025c). Curriculum and assessment review: final report. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/curriculum-and-assessment-review-final-report
Johnson, M., Majewska, D. (2024). What is non-formal learning (and how do we know it when we see it)? A pilot study report. Discovering Education 3, 148 https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-024-00255-y
Joint Council for Qualifications. (2025). GCSE and Level 1, 2 results – Summer 2025. https://www.jcq.org.uk/examination-results/gcse-and-level-12-results-summer-2025/
Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 75–86. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep4102_1
Lucas, B. (2021). Rethinking educational assessment: the case for change. Melbourne: Centre for Strategic Education.
OECD (2025), Education for human flourishing: A conceptual framework, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/73d7cb96-en.
Pastore, S. (2023). Teacher assessment literacy: a systematic review. Frontiers in Education 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2023.1217167
Ranken, E., Wyse, D., Manyukhina, Y., & Bradbury, A. (2024). The effect of experiential learning on academic achievement of children aged 4–14: A rapid evidence assessment. The Curriculum Journal. https://doi.org/10.1002/curj.304
Schildkamp, K., van der Kleij, F.M., Heitink, M.C., Kippers, W.B. & Veldkamp B.P. (2020). Formative assessment: A systematic review of critical teacher prerequisites for classroom practice. International Journal of Educational Research 103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2020.101602.
Settle, C. (2025). Purposeful assessment. In Chartered College of Teaching. (Eds.), From Principle to Practice. Evidence-informed Leadership. (pp. 45-52). Hachette.
Sweller J (1998) Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science 12: 257–285. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1202_4
