12/12/2025
💚🌱
Assessment fatigue
Children can be assessed so frequently that the assessments themselves begin to crumble in value. Tests, quizzes, trackers, baselines, progress checks, mocks, standardised scores… one after another after another. And we say it’s to help them. To guide teaching. To inform learning.
But I’m not sure that’s true anymore.
Not always.
There’s a saying I love:
“Weighing a pig doesn’t fatten the pig.”
You can measure it every day if you like, but unless you’re feeding it — nourishing it, supporting it, giving it what it needs to grow — the weighing alone does nothing. And that’s where we are with assessment for so many children.
Because if we’re constantly assessing, we’re not teaching.
And if we’re not teaching, children aren’t learning (the curriculum of a schooled education) -they’re simply being measured.
The original purpose of assessment was simple:
To find out what a child knows.
What they can do.
Where their misconceptions sit.
What support they need next.
It was assessment for learning -formative, responsive, directly feeding into planning. It shaped teaching. It guided intervention. It helped teachers see their pupils clearly.
Now, too often, assessment has become something else.
A data collection exercise.
A number-generation machine.
Evidence for someone else -leaders, governors, inspectors- rather than information for the child and the teacher standing in front of them.
We track movements in points. We colour-code children into attainment bands like green, amber, red. And children — living, curious, inconsistent, growing children — become graphs of themselves.
No wonder they’re exhausted.
No wonder teachers are too.
Assessment fatigue is real. When children are tested relentlessly, the meaning blurs. Tests lose power. Motivation drops. Anxiety rises. The results no longer reflect ability -they reflect overwhelm. And eventually, the thing designed to support learning starts to harm it.
A child constantly assessed is not a child constantly improving.
Sometimes they are simply a child constantly measured.
I’m not anti-assessment. Far from it.
Used well, assessment is powerful. It guides teaching beautifully. It shines a light on gaps and strengths. It helps us celebrate growth we might otherwise miss.
But assessment should serve learning -not replace it.
If we want children to thrive, we need to return to intention:
• What is this assessment for?
• How will it shape what we do next?
• Does it benefit the pupil, or just the spreadsheet?
When we ask those questions honestly, our assessment culture could look very different.
Gentler. More meaningful. More human.
Because children are not data points.
And weighing them, without feeding them, helps no one grow.
Emma
The Autistic SENCo
♾️
Photo: Googly eyes really do make everything fun.
