Ask any Head of Year what keeps them up at night during the spring term and you'll hear two words: the data. Not the rich, granular picture of what pupils actually understand — the spreadsheet. The accountability spreadsheet. And somewhere in that gap between what teachers observe daily in classrooms and what gets recorded for Ofsted lives one of the most persistent tensions in UK education: how to balance formative and summative assessment without sacrificing one for the other.
The good news is that balance is achievable. The bad news is that it requires deliberate systems, not just good intentions.
Understanding the Assessment Cycle in the UK National Curriculum
The Department for Education draws a clear three-way distinction in its guidance: day-to-day formative assessment, in-school summative assessment, and statutory summative assessments. Each serves a different master.
Formative assessment, also known as Assessment for Learning (AfL), is the ongoing, diagnostic process that tells a teacher what a pupil understands right now, so that the next lesson can be adjusted accordingly. It feeds the teacher and the learner simultaneously. Dylan Wiliam at University College London has spent decades making the case that formative assessment, when embedded in classroom practice, is among the highest-leverage interventions available to any school.
Summative assessment (Assessment of Learning) measures attainment at a fixed point against a national standard. SATs, GCSEs, A-levels: these exist to tell parents, schools, and the government where pupils stand relative to their peers and national expectations. The audience is accountability, not instruction.
The 2015 removal of National Curriculum levels was supposed to ease the tension. By scrapping the old 2a/3b/4c system, the DfE intended to shift classroom culture toward deeper engagement with the curriculum rather than relentless sub-level tracking. In practice, many schools replaced the old levels with new school-designed tracking systems that function almost identically — the labelling changed, but the pressure to quantify learning at every juncture did not.
AfL asks: "What does this pupil need next?" AoL asks: "Where does this pupil stand?" Both questions matter. The problem arises when AoL data is the only data anyone actually looks at.
Formative Assessment Strategies for Daily Classroom Practice
The research on effective formative practice converges on a few core techniques. The challenge for most teachers is not knowing what to do — it is finding approaches that are sustainable alongside a full timetable, a marking pile, and a data dashboard that wants numbers by Friday.
1. No Hands Up Questioning
Cold-calling every pupil sounds threatening. Done well, it is the opposite.The technique, popularised in the UK through Dylan Wiliam's work and embedded in many ITT programmes, replaces the hands-up culture (which samples only the confident and the eager) with randomised, structured questioning that gives the teacher a genuine read of whole-class understanding.
Use lolly sticks, a random name generator, or structured turn-taking. The key is that every pupil knows they may be asked, so every pupil has to think. Pair it with sufficient wait time — research consistently shows that extending pause time from one second to three dramatically increases the quality of responses.
2. Exit Tickets
An exit ticket is a single question or short task completed in the final three to five minutes of a lesson. It tells the teacher, before they leave the room, whether the learning objective landed.
For Key Stage 2, keep it binary: "Show me one method for finding the area of a rectangle" or "Write the word that links these two clauses." For Key Stage 3 and above, use low-stakes retrieval: a question that requires applying today's learning to a slightly novel context. Stack and sort the tickets before the next lesson. The pile tells you your seating plan for the following day's starter.
3. Live Marking and Verbal Feedback
Written marking is the single largest contributor to unsustainable teacher workload in UK schools.Live marking, circulating while pupils work and annotating books in real-time, cuts the out-of-hours load while making feedback more immediate and, crucially, more actionable.
A verbal feedback stamp ("VF") in the margin signals to SLT and Ofsted inspectors that a conversation happened without requiring paragraphs of written commentary. Several Multi-Academy Trusts have adopted this as policy precisely because it protects teacher time without compromising evidence of feedback.
4. Hinge Questions
A hinge question is a diagnostic multiple-choice question placed at a key decision point in a lesson — the "hinge" at which the teacher decides whether to move forward or loop back. The answer options are designed so that each wrong answer reveals a specific misconception, not just a general gap.
If 70% of pupils select the same wrong answer, you know exactly what to reteach. If the spread is even, the concept needs rebuilding entirely. Wiliam's research team at ETS developed this approach as part of broader AfL frameworks, and it remains one of the most efficient formative tools available at Key Stage 3 and above.
Summative Assessment and the Path to GCSE Success
Summative assessment is not the enemy of good teaching. Used correctly, it is a diagnostic gift — a high-resolution snapshot that formative observation alone cannot always provide.
The problem is when summative data drives the curriculum rather than informing it.
Teachers report that the accountability weight placed on Key Stage 2 SATs results in a disproportionate focus on English and Maths across Year 5 and Year 6 — at the cost of foundation subjects, creative arts, and the broader curriculum. This narrowing is a structural problem, not a failure ofindividual teachers.
5. End-of-Unit Assessments as Gap Analysis, Not Grades
When you administer an end-of-unit test, resist the urge to enter the scores into a tracker and move on. Instead, use the data to build a gap map: which questions did most pupils get wrong? What does that wrong answer pattern reveal about the teaching sequence?
A grid with question numbers across the top and pupil names down the side, marked with ticks and crosses, takes ten minutes to complete and tells you more about your next half-term's planning than a column of percentage scores ever will.
6. Mock Papers That Teach, Not Just Test
Mock papers for GCSE and A-level are most valuable when they precede structured feedback, not when they follow a mark scheme handed out in silence. The sequence that works: pupils sit the paper under timed conditions, they mark their own paper using the mark scheme (self-assessment, discussed below), and then the class analyses the three most commonly missed questions together.
This turns a summative event into a formative one. The mock becomes the teaching tool.
7. Use SATs Data Across the Transition
One of the consistent missed opportunities in UK schools is the underuse of Key Stage 2 SATs data at Year 7.Transition data, shared promptly between primary and secondary, allows Year 7 teachers to start the academic year with a picture of prior attainment that informs grouping, scaffolding, and the identification of pupils who need early intervention.
The data only has value if it moves. If KS2 scores sit in a filing cabinet until October half-term, the formative window has already closed.
Bridging the Gap: Using Formative Data to Predict Summative Success
The relationship between formative and summative assessment is not competitive — it is sequential. Consistent formative data, tracked across a term, is the most reliable predictor of summative performance available to a classroom teacher.
— Dylan Wiliam, Embedded Formative Assessment (2011)"If students leave the classroom before teachers have made adjustments to their teaching on the basis of what they have learned about students' achievement, then the assessment wasn't formative."
8. Formative Tracking That Feeds the Summative Picture
Build a simple formative tracker — not a 47-column spreadsheet, but a three-column log: objective, date assessed, outcome (secure/developing/not yet). Update it weekly, using exit tickets, hinge question results, and live marking observations as evidence.
By the time a summative assessment arrives, you already know which pupils will struggle and why. That means you can intervene before the test, not after it. And when the summative data comes back, it confirms what you already knew rather than surprising you.
This is the formative-summative loop that the DfE's 'Assessment without Levels' framework was designed to enable. Whether schools have realised that potential is an open question; evidence suggests many have simply rebuilt the old tracking architecture with new labels. The opportunity, however, is genuine.
Reducing Teacher Workload Through Smarter Assessment
Marking is the most frequently cited source of teacher workload in England. Any assessment strategy that ignores workload will not be implemented — or will be implemented badly, by exhausted teachers who resent it.
Assessment strategies that double a teacher's evening workload will not survive contact with a real school. Design for sustainability from the start, not as an afterthought.
9. Peer and Self-Assessment, Done Properly
Peer and self-assessment are often dismissed as "not real marking" by sceptical SLTs, or implemented as a box-ticking exercise that produces no useful data. When done properly, they are neither.
Effective peer assessment requires pupils to work against clear criteria — not "write two stars and a wish" but "does this paragraph include a topic sentence? Does it use evidence from the text? Does it explain the effect?" Specific, binary criteria allow even Year 5 pupils to give accurate, useful feedback.
Self-assessment develops metacognitive awareness, the ability to evaluate one's own understanding, which John Hattie's synthesis of thousands of education studies places among the highest-impact skills a learner can develop. Teaching pupils to self-assess accurately reduces the volume of teacher feedback required, because pupils begin to identify their own gaps before the teacher has to.
Neither approach replaces teacher judgment. Both reduce the load on it.
What This Means for Your School
Balancing formative and summative assessment is less about choosing between them and more about building systems where each informs the other. Formative data shapes instruction; summative data validates and sharpens it. The loop only works if both types of assessment are used as teaching tools, not accountability performances.
For Heads of Department and SLT, the practical starting point is a workload audit: which assessment practices in your school generate data that actually changes teaching decisions? Which generate data that goes into a spreadsheet and is never consulted again? Cutting the latter frees time for the former.
For classroom teachers, the nine strategies above are not a checklist — pick two or three that fit your subject and year group, embed them until they become routine, then add more. Exit tickets and hinge questions work across all subjects and all key stages. Live marking works anywhere pupils produce written work. No-hands-up questioning works in every classroom from Year 1 to Year 13.
The tension between formative and summative assessment in the UK system is real, and it will not disappear while SATs carry the accountability weight they do. But the classroom, lesson by lesson, is where that tension gets managed. And it can be managed well.
Flip Education supports teachers with active learning tools and lesson planning resources built around evidence-based pedagogy. Explore our methodology guides for practical frameworks you can use tomorrow.
