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With thanks to Nick Hart, Deputy Head at Penn Wood Primary and Nursery School in Slough, for this fascinating article on scaffolding.

In one episode of the Simpsons, Bart moves school and is immediately put into a remedial class.  He joins a lesson where they are continuing their work from the previous day – the letter ‘a’.  Bart’s observation is: ‘Let me get this straight.  We’re going to catch up to the other kids by going slower than them?’

With thanks to Nick Hart, Deputy Head at Penn Wood Primary and Nursery School in Slough, for this fascinating article on scaffolding.

In one episode of the Simpsons, Bart moves school and is immediately put into a remedial class.  He joins a lesson where they are continuing their work from the previous day – the letter ‘a’.  Bart’s observation is: ‘Let me get this straight.  We’re going to catch up to the other kids by going slower than them?’

In a world without levels, with APP scrapped, and a new assessment landscape suddenly emerging, it's sometimes hard to know where to turn. Schools up and down the country are working on a whole host of different models for in-school assessment, and without the common language of the old world, it sometimes seems hard to know how our own systems relate to the wider world.

We caught up with Deputy Head Michael Tidd at the start of term to ask him what his priorities were for the year ahead and how he intended to tackle them. Here is what he kindly shared with us.

It’s the start of a new school year and with a challenging new curriculum, a level-free approach to assessment and the new national tests around the corner we know there is a lot on the minds of primary school teachers at this time. That’s why we are hosting three conferences this term, designed to help primary schools get ready for the new national tests. 

As the new autumn term approaches, many schools will be interested to hear the latest announcement from the Department for Education which states that primary school children have performed well overall in this year’s key stage 2 national tests, with four out of five children achieving good results in all subjects.

In order to support teachers with preparation for the new National Tests, we asked Deputy Head Michael Tidd to put together a quick reference guide to the changes in the tests and what this means for teachers. 

The DfE recently published information for headteachers, teachers, governors and local authorities about scaled scores and the national standard from 2016. 

With thanks to Michael Tidd for this very thought-provoking guest post

With this year’s National Tests now over, our minds can’t help but turn to the next round of statutory assessments and the challenges they bring. We understand that this is a topic of uncertainty for schools, so we asked Deputy Headteacher Michael Tidd to share his knowledge on what we currently know – and what we don’t – about primary assessment in the new curriculum.