Tes and Applied Coaching on assessment

Primary assessment can feel like two different worlds jammed together. One world is the official one — baseline checks, phonics, multiplication tables, Sats. The other is the classroom one — the daily problem of figuring out what a child understands without turning every lesson into a mini exam. What changed this week is that Tes and Applied Coaching each published a useful piece on one side of that split. Read together, they land on the same idea: assessment works better when the big system is understood clearly and the classroom response stays light. ### What did Tes actually lay out? Tes published a plain-English guide to the main assessment points in English primary schooling — from the Reception Baseline Assessment to KS2 Sats — and, crucially, added the national comparison data that tells teachers what “normal” currently looks like. The guide runs through the purpose of each check, when it happens, and how results are used, instead of treating “assessment” as one giant blob. (tes.com) ### Which checks matter most? The sequence starts with the Reception Baseline Assessment in a child’s first six weeks of school. That assessment has been statutory since September 2021, is done one-to-one, and feeds a long-term progress measure that will first be published in 2028. Later come the EYFS Profile, the Year 1 phonics screening check, the multiplication tables check, and KS2 Sats in Year(tes.com)hem all the same way. (tes.com) ### What numbers stood out? Tes highlighted that 68.3% of children reached the expected level of development in the 2024-25 EYFS Profile, up from 67.7% a year earlier. It also noted that 80% met the expected standard in the 2024-25 phonics screening check, with 89% reaching it by the end of Year 2 after resits. Those figures matter because they give schools context for reporting and intervention, but they do not tell a teacher what to do tomorrow morning with one confused child. (tes.com) ### What is Applied Coaching adding? Applied Coaching came at the problem from the classroom end. Its new post argues for “clarity, conferring, and checklists” as the core of actionable assessment — meaning assessment that changes what students and teachers do in real time, not weeks later after a grade is logged. The post starts with a simple story: a student was furious about an assignment, but t(tes.com)nto short steps, the work got done fast. (appliedcoaching.org) ### Why is clarity doing so much work? Because a lot of assessment failure is really communication failure. Applied Coaching’s broader assessment pieces keep returning to the same move — make learning goals, timelines, and success criteria visible before students begin. In its February 2025 posts, the group argues that students do better when the path of assessment is obvious, with clear targets, planned formative checks, and rubrics or exemplars they actually understand. (appliedcoaching.org) ### Where do conferring and checklists fit? They are the low-burden tools. Conferring means short teacher-student conversations while work is happening. Checklists mean students can see what counts without decoding a giant rubric every time. Applied Coaching also stresses narrowing the number of goals being assessed — resist the urge to track 15 standards at once — because overloaded assessment quickly becomes useless for both grading and learning. (appliedcoaching.org) ### So what does this mean for ordinary grading? Basically — separate system accountability from classroom evidence-gathering. Know the statutory checkpoints and national benchmarks, because schools need them. But inside lessons, grade fewer things, choose the tasks that best show the target skill, and collect other evidence through talk, observation, quick quizzes, and simple ch(appliedcoaching.org)different places. (tes.com) ### What’s the bottom line? The useful shift here is not “assess less” in some vague way. It is “assess with less drag.” Big external checks are not going away. But the daily classroom version can be clearer, narrower, and more humane — and that usually produces better evidence, not less.