Professional teacher judgements on students’ overall progress are supplemented by mini assessments across all year groups. Mini assessments are low stakes, highly diagnostic pieces of work that inform teaching and learning as well as providing evidence towards the overall progress judgements of a student.

Mini assessments take place in hub subjects at a time that fits the needs of the schemes of learning as well as the needs of the teacher in assessing student progress. Mini assessments draw on pertinent and current research which has highlighted the importance of interleaving and retrieval as a means to revise prior knowledge. As such, staff in The King’s make a conscious effort to include a ‘lagged’ element to their mini assessments, drawing on knowledge students have acquired perhaps ‘last week, last month, or even last year’.

There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to our mini assessment process; staff use their professional judgement when determining ‘when’’ and ‘how’ to issue the assessments based on their knowledge and understanding of the students who sit in front of them. As such, we do not have an assessment schedule nor do we have ‘assessment weeks’.

Mini-assessments are an approach to teaching and learning that creates feedback which is then used to improve students’ performance. In John Hattie’s seminal work on educational effectiveness, Visible Learning for Teachers (2011), Hattie ranked feedback strategies 10th out of 150 factors that bring about significant improvements in learner outcomes. This was particularly true if the strategies involved feedback about the learner’s own work.