I was privileged to be invited to share some thoughts at Teachers Talk Radio Connect 2026 in Manchester yesterday. When I considered what to present on, I chose to talk about assessment, reflecting on some thoughts from my time out of the classroom at AQA. I called my session 'The Importance of Success in Assessments'.
In May 2025, Impact Ed released 'Mind the Engagement Gap: A National Study of Pupil Engagement in England's Schools'. I'm sure that you've seen the graph as part of whole school CPD this year, but if you've forgotten or you haven't, here is that graph:
I think it's easy to draw a conclusion from the graph - students like being at primary school, and hate secondary school. But there are significant questions around why this might be the case. I don't have answers, but I do have some thoughts.
I think that we massively underestimate the transition between a primary setting and a secondary setting, and don't do nearly enough to support students. A former colleague's son started in Year 7 in September, and in late September/early October, I asked how he was getting on. 'He's lost', he said, 'doesn't know his teachers' names, who he sits next to in lessons, what his timetable is. The change is huge.'
This young man is high-attaining, but his dad was worried about him settling in to his new environment, and now I'm worried for my own child's transition in two years, too.
I think it's understandable. Going from a primary school of 300 students to a secondary school of 1000 must be overwhelming. Day-to-day, they spent the last six years of their education in the same room with the same teacher, developing a strong bond. I've experienced the other side of this when asking Year 7 students what 19 - 11 + 8 is. 16, obviously, but the response when you explain that the answer is actually not 0 is quite similar to 'No. It's not. My primary teacher said so, and I love them!' It's quite the bond that carries over.
Engagement levels are high between Years 3 and 6. They remain relatively stable with slight dips across Key Stage 2, but in Year 7 there is a significant drop. The aforementioned reasons of a lack of relationship with trusted adults, not knowing their classmates, having to juggle equipment expectations with a timetable, and a different approach to conduct and behaviour. There's so much to remember without even considering new content within the curriculum, and there are so many LARGE people around - I speak from experience as a vertically challenged man, some of those Year 11s are huge.
This issue hit home for me in November. I tried to be prepared by informing one of my Year 7 classes of the date of their next assessment - 'Write this in your planners' - but I wasn't prepared for one response...
'OH! WE'RE DOING ANOTHER TEST?! BECAUSE THAT'S ALL WE DO IN HIGH SCHOOL!'
I went home, spoke to my 8-year-old, who was two-to-three months into Year 4, and asked when her last test at school was. Year 3. My year 7 classes had done five tests - a Sparx baseline, CATs testing, GL assessments and two unit tests - in maths alone, none of which this young person had been successful in. My Year 10 class had done three unit assessments already, too. My own year 4 daughter? Not aware that she'd done an assessment in this academic year.
Let's focus on the phrase above - 'none of which this young person had been successful in' - and move on to Year 9, as I don't teach Year 8. I teach a Year 9 class of low-attaining learners - set 8 of 8. They're incredibly successful in lessons, but I face the same battle every day. They reach the top of the stairs, turn right, and put their guard up. 'Eurgh. Maths!' goes through their heads, and it takes 5-10 minutes to get them out of their slump and to start showing them what they can do again. But then the assessment comes, and we're back to square one. Is the dip in Years 8 and 9 down to repeated failure?
Year 10, when pressure ramps up as GCSEs loom in Year 11, doesn't appear to have a larger drop off, but could their engagement actually get much lower?! And as Year 11 looms, engagement increases a little, but not significantly. Is this down to the light at the end of the tunnel? No more school uniform soon? No more state-mandated PE? The idea of a fresh start? Maybe a bit of maturity and responsibility? Again, I'm not armed with the answers. Only some thoughts, and those are mostly around assessment.
So, what's the point of assessment? What are we aiming to do?
In Year 11, we have terminal assessments and mocks, which are used to give accurate predictions for those high-stakes assessments. In Year 10, we have the same mocks, used to give predictions to leadership teams and colleges. But in Years 7 to 9, what is the purpose? From my experience, any assessments in Years 7 to 9 are mainly about ranking students to identify whether we should move anyone between groups. It's felt aimless for a while, and I think that the withdrawal of KS3 SATs was detrimental to disadvantaged students who perhaps require external validation of their efforts, struggling for intrinsic motivation.
Ultimately, the point of assessment should always be success. I know this is sometimes a challenge, but it should always be the aim. We need to kick-start the success-motivation cycle, manufacturing success for students, motivating them to seek out more successes through hard work, which feeds into more motivation down the line.
Here's where I shared some actionable suggestions:
I teach a Year 11 set 5 of 8. In their Year 10 mocks, they achieved grades of 1s and 2s, with a maximum mark of around 30%. Giving them past papers from September is a waste of a useful resource, and a weekly reminder that they can't do over half of the questions they're being asked to do. That's not a recipe for success. Delay giving Year 11 past papers until they need familiarity with full papers. They can get exam practice from topic-based practice quizzes, which can be found on many websites, or created yourself using Exampro, Exam Wizard or Exam Builder.
For their Year 10 mocks, remove content that they haven't yet encountered. There is no wonder my Year 11s struggled on full papers - they're nowhere near completing the content from the Foundation GCSE specification. The purpose of Year 10 mocks is mostly around familiarity with the processes of exams - revising for each exam, entering in silence, completing a GCSE paper in the sports hall in complete silence, becoming more accustomed to exam conditions, and waiting patiently for all papers to be collected before leaving in silence. Do they need to do each paper for 90 minutes?
Those Year 10s know what they know, and whether they sit a full series of GCSE papers or something amended, they won't know any more at the end of those exams. The average Grade 2 learner scored 24 marks out of 100 on Paper 2 of OCR Foundation GCSE Maths exam in Summer 2025. If we remove the hardest 50 marks (according to performance data), that score comes down to 20, and this means that those learners only scored 4 marks in the last hour (approximately) of that exam.
When this is a terminal assessment, this is unavoidable, but suppose that we gave Year 10 learners the experience of sitting an exam, for half the time, with half the questions. The same learners scored 40% (20 out of 50) instead of 24% (24 out of 100), and I think that this can only be a good thing for motivation and feeling successful. It's also possible to use the assessment data provided by the exam boards to provide accurate grades on those half papers, so our data wouldn't suffer either.
In Years 7 to 9, we can do the same thing. Engineer assessments so that students are more successful. Stop building assessments that consist of 25 marks of the 'main content' from a unit and 25 marks which would be considered 'challenging content', and accepting 50% as the expected standard. Instead, build assessments which are made up of 20 marks of 'pre-requisite knowledge' (that we expect students to score all of the marks on), 20 marks of 'main content' and 10 marks of 'challenge content'. Higher attainers are still being challenged, but score close to 100% instead of 70%, and the expected standard is now closer to 75%-80% rather than 50%, feeding into motivation and later successes.
We tend to manufacture success for students in lessons - carefully selecting tasks that they'll be successful with - but not so much with assessments. This is a noble thing to do - give students success every day, and the assessment is just a one-off. But students don't see it that way - their perceived importance of an assessment is greater than that of the importance of each lesson. Just consider the behaviour of your worst class when you give them an assessment - a significant improvement on their day-to-day, working in silence. This lesson matters because they want to do well in assessments.
We should be carefully selecting their assessments to allow them to feel success too, because (and I think this is a quote from a Craig Barton podcast) "it's really hard to have a growth mindset when you keep doing shit in tests".
Ultimately, we should be engineering opportunities for students to feel successful in assessments. When students feel more successful, they have a greater sense of enjoyment and belonging and are more likely to be engaged in their education.
