Occasionally (ok quite a lot of the time!) I see resources and think “ooh that’s a great idea” and last week I was shown OCRs “check in” tests .. which are just brilliant. Check them out in the “Teaching and Learning” section at the bottom of this page

Basically it’s a way of assessing the required knowledge prior to teaching a topic – so far there are about 13 different topics on the maths pages of their site. Each “check in” is made up of 10 questions with Q1-5 covering procedural calculations (AO1), questions 6-8 assessing the ability to reason and communicate mathematically (AO2) and questions 9-10 relate to problem solving tasks (AO3). NOTE: There is a health warning that they should not be considered as exemplars of GCSE assessment style questions.

I hope they are made available as a zip file with them all in once they’re all available … and I also wish I had the time to produce something like this!

Many moons ago I went off on one (I know! Imagine that!) about how , in the ideal world the decision about which exam board to use would be centred around the support given to teachers and not the difficulty of the exam papers. Maybe, just maybe we are moving closer to that point.