Understanding Beyond the Numbers: Rethinking Assessment in Primary Maths
You’ve probably heard something like this before:
Oh, he’s brilliant at maths — picks things up instantly, knew his times tables way back in Year 2, and usually gets full marks except for the odd slip. He’ll get more than 86% so he’s greater depth, for sure.
Or perhaps this one:
Oh, she takes ages to start. Really has to understand every single thing first. Sometimes, it’s just… get on with it! You know? She did do quite well in her reasoning paper but she needs to learn her times tables because her TTRS score is not great. Still, I think she’ll get over half so we can put her down as ARE, right?
At parent evenings and progress meetings, conversations like these are common. We reel off levels, marks, and scaled scores — quick, familiar shorthand that helps us manage busy teacher lives. Levelling has a practical role: it gives an at‑a‑glance sense of pitch, a quick way to group pupils or shape planning. But here’s the danger: numbers are easy to repeat, and in repeating them we risk mistaking them for the whole story.
So often the conversation about assessment in maths drifts towards scores. Percentages. Levels. Scaled marks. These feel concrete — easy to record, easy to compare. But if we pause for a moment, we might ask: what do they truly reveal about how children think mathematically? A pupil who races to the answer may still hold fragile concepts. Another, slower and more deliberate, may be building a deep and connected understanding. Both might carry the same label — GDS, ARE, below — even though their journeys through mathematics look entirely different.
What happens if we stop treating assessment as a way of labelling and begin to treat it as a lens? Instead of asking, “What mark did this child achieve?”, we might ask, “What did this task reveal about their understanding?” That single change reshapes the purpose of assessment. It becomes less about outcome, more about process. Less about ranking, more about insight.
And insight doesn’t come only from big, formal tests. It often appears in the small rhythms of the classroom: the quick exchange at the board, the low‑stakes check that uncovers a misconception, the task that shows whether today’s learning connects to last month’s. These moments provide richer, more immediate feedback than waiting for a set of end‑of‑term results. Larger assessments still hold value — they allow us to step back, to notice patterns across domains, to see where reasoning falters or where a lack of fluency blocks progression. But they should sit alongside, not above, the evidence we gather through daily teaching.
Ultimately, the challenge is to reimagine assessment not as the measure of achievement, but as a conversation about understanding. If we move from asking, “How many did they get right?” to “What does this suggest about how they’re thinking?”, assessment becomes a tool to guide learning rather than a final judgment. Pupils begin to see assessments as part of the ongoing story of their growth, rather than a verdict upon it.
Of course, none of this denies the real pressures teachers face. Workload is relentless, and quick judgements and levelling systems remain practical tools, especially when reports and planning demand something neat. The point isn’t to abandon them, but to resist letting them become the only lens. Numbers have their use, but they should never drown out the child behind them.
Assessment should never end with the score. The real work begins in the looking closer, the listening carefully, and the valuing of the messy, meaningful journey of learning mathematics.
Thanks for reading,
The Square Club Team
