Keystage history bulletin – Assessment special – March 2025

Welcome to this special edition of the newsletter devoted to the thorny issue of assessment

OFSTED’s most recent survey of primary history delivered a damning verdict on the state of assessment in primary schools.

Assessment in history was not fully developed in most of the primary schools visited. Commonly, teachers made broad judgements about pupils’ progress, but did not identify or address specific gaps and misconceptions in their knowledge.

• Assessment in history should allow teachers to make valid and meaningful judgements about the range and security of pupils’ knowledge.
• It should enable them to identify gaps and misconceptions for groups or individual pupils so that these can be addressed quickly.
• Assessment should focus on whether pupils are secure in their knowledge of the most important content and concepts, which can support future learning.
• Judgements and feedback can be distorted by a reliance on generic or overly broad skills descriptors.

>> Good practice, according to OFSTED 2024

What types of assessment should I be using?

What types of assessment should I be using?

The assessment wheel above shows the rough proportion of evidence you should be collecting using each method.

Unseen common assessment tasks 

As you can see below, we have worked really hard to ensure that there is a common assessment task for each major topic. The distinctive features of each task are:

• An accessible format, often using visual stimuli.
• A laser-like focus on specific concepts e.g.cause or change
• Clear expectations of standards expected from pupils’ answers as shown in our ground-breaking markschemes
• Opportunity to share the markscheme with pupils to show them how they can improve
• Not too much emphasis on literacy

See KS1 assessment task here and KS2 assessment tasks here

Short diagnostic tasks

These will often be in the form of quick-to-complete on-the-spot tasks to give you immediate confirmation of who has grasped a specific idea and who has not.

An example might be sequencing images of castles as in our new KS1 unit or a sorting task such as ‘which of these statements refers to Mary Seacole and which to Florence Nightingale.

Low stakes quizzes

Building historical knowledge is important. We are rolling out short quizzes for each unit that focus on the most important things pupils need to retain. They are not just any old question!

In the upper part of each key stage these quizzes often require pupils to show  broader knowledge by comparing periods across the key stage. See an example for KS2 – Ancient Egypt

Longer written ‘open book’ answers

Whilst pupils’ answers to unseen common assessment tasks carried out on their own are by their very nature inevitably quite short, these offer scope for pupils to show that they can write at length.

As pupils move through the school it will be increasingly important to provide opportunities for pupils to organise their ideas and structure coherent answers. An example might be in KS2 when putting forward both sides of an argument as to whether the Benin Bronzes should be returned  or should the Parthenon be rebuilt?

Enquiry based tasks

Whether set by the teacher or interest-led there must be scope for pupils’ own research so that they show an ability to carry out lines of enquiry. This is extremely difficult to do on shorter tasks so we advocate at least one longer enquiry-led task-let’s call it the 7^th key question!

New and updated assessment tasks

KS1

• Mary Anning – assessment task
• Caxton and Bell – assessment task
• Grace Darling – assessment task
• Great Fire – assessment task
• Amy Johnson – assessment task – Can you explain why Amy Johnson was so important?
• Moon landing – assessment task
• Florence Nightingale – assessment task
• Mary Seacole – Assessment task – Assessing pupils’ understanding of the work of Mary Seacole
• Seaside – assessment task
• Scott of the Antarctic – assessment task Y2
• Sinking of the Titanic – assessment task – looking at consequences and change
• Toys; old and new – assessment task
• Wright brothers – assessment task

KS2

• Ancient Greece – assessment task – Life for women in Ancient Greece
• Anglo-Saxons – assessment task – What were the main changes that took place in Anglo-Saxon England?
• Crime and punishment – assessment task
• Early Islamic Civilisation – assessment task – Why was life in 10th century Baghdad was so significant.
• Mayan civilisation – assessment task – What can we tell about Mayan society 1,000 years ago?
• Roman Britain – assessment task – Roman legacy
• Roman Britain – assessment task – Why did the Romans invade?
• Stone Age to Iron Age – assessment task
• Stone Age to Iron Age – assessment task – changes from Stone Age to Iron Age
• Tudor Britain – assessment task – What can we learn about the way Elizabeth ruled the country from portraits
• Victorian Britain – assessment task – How do we know this picture shows Victorian Britain?
• Vikings – assessment task – Depictions of the Vikings
• WW2 – Assessment task – How do we know that this picture shows England at the beginning of the Second World War?

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