What is formative assessment? A practical guide for primary teachers

Formative assessment is one of those phrases that has been in education long enough to mean almost everything and almost nothing at the same time. In some schools it has become synonymous with a particular set of systems — marking codes, coloured pens, response time. In others it is used so broadly that it covers everything except a terminal exam.

It is worth going back to what it actually means.

The simple version

Formative assessment is assessment that informs teaching. It tells you, while you are still teaching a topic, what your pupils understand and what they don't — so you can adjust what you do next.

This is different from summative assessment, which measures what pupils have learned at the end of a unit, term, or year. Both have a place. Formative assessment is the one that changes what you teach tomorrow.

What it looks like in practice

Formative assessment does not have to be a system. It can be:

A question you ask during a lesson — targeted at a specific misconception, asked of a specific child, telling you whether the class is ready to move on or needs more time.

An exit ticket — a brief task at the end of a lesson that gives you a picture of the whole class's understanding before you plan the next lesson.

Live marking — reading pupils' work as they write and responding in the moment, rather than taking it home and marking it three days later.

A show of hands or whiteboard response — rough, quick, imperfect, but immediate.

Observation and listening — walking around the room during a task, listening to how pupils talk about what they're doing, noticing where the misconceptions are.

None of these require a system. They require attention and intention.

The marking question

Formative assessment became associated in many schools with an extensive written marking policy — response marking, pink and green pens, coded feedback. The research support for the workload these systems generated was, at best, mixed. Ofsted's own guidance has explicitly stated that it does not require any particular style of marking.

The most effective formative feedback is usually immediate, verbal, specific, and actionable. Written feedback has a place, but it does not need to be the primary mechanism.

Using assessment to actually change what you teach

The most important question about formative assessment is: do you actually use it? Many teachers are collecting information through exit tickets or observation and not consistently adjusting what they teach in response. This is not a criticism — it takes habit and practice. But the information is only valuable if it changes something.

Use what you find to shape the next lesson's opening. A five-minute re-teach of a misconception at the start of the following day, prompted by yesterday's exit tickets, is more efficient than discovering the gap three weeks later in a test.