Blog

Introducing our brand-new edition of GAPS: our termly grammar, punctuation and spelling tests re-standardised on over 7,000 pupils in 2023/2024. Find out what's new and sneak a peek at some sample pages.

Aoife Bruen, Product Manager for MARK, outlines an exciting update, new for Summer Term 2023. Our new feature will allow Multi Academy Trusts and School Groups to extract assessment data from across all of their member schools at the click of a button in MARK.

Many learners with maths difficulties or dyscalculia have maths anxiety and they also tend to have a fixed mindset about their ability and/or potential in maths. These children may have had years of experiencing failure in maths, having to follow a fast-paced curriculum and often being taught in a procedural way where the emphasis is on fact recall and speed. They have learnt to believe that they are no good at maths and never will be. But it doesn’t have to be that way!

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve published the first wellbeing research report as part of our Nuffield Foundation project The longer-term impact of COVID-19 on pupil attainment and wellbeing.

In 2021, Hachette UK and the National Literacy Trust partnered to create the Changing the Story reading programme. This exciting new initiative supports disadvantaged children in 25 primary schools with reading. 22,000 Reading Planet and Hachette Children's Group books were donated to the schools. We can now reveal the findings. 

The third and final research report in our series providing the latest updates in pupil attainment from the summer term 2022.

Read the analysis on children’s attainment in maths, conducted by Dr Kristina Milanovic and Katie Blainey on data from over 120,000 pupils sitting standardised termly maths tests between May and August 2022.

The Catch Up Numeracy intervention was developed in 2007 and 2008 and, during this research, Basic Number Screening Test (BNST) was the standardised test of choice in assessing and evaluating the learning impact of Catch Up Numeracy. Since then, Catch Up has continued to use BNST in its own research projects.

For over 20 years Catch Up has been recommending that schools use SSRCT.  Over that time 'the Salford Test' has been updated several times so that it takes account of curriculum, teaching and learning changes but the various versions of the test have continued to be easy to administer with the pupil data being reliable, valid and easy to access. 

The second in our series providing the latest updates in pupil attainment from the summer term 2022.

Read the analysis on children’s attainment in reading, conducted by Dr Kristina Milanovic and Katie Blainey on data from over 130,000 pupils sitting standardised termly reading tests between May and August 2022.

The first in our series providing the latest updates in pupil attainment from the summer term 2022.

Read the analysis on children’s attainment in Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling (GPS), conducted by Dr Kristina Milanovic and Dr Timo Hannay on data from over 100,000 pupils sitting standardised termly GPS tests between May and August 2022.