Centralised Assessment Model and its place in PE departments

You may (or may not!) remember that we posted previously about our brand-new feature of centralised assessment models for PE and Sport courses. Lots of our customers will also be aware that as part of our revision offer for 2025, we included 'Hot Topic’ practice exam papers, which was an exam experience designed to help save teachers time creating their own exam papers, particularly in one of the busiest periods of the year, in the lead-up to exams. If you used these as a customer, or any of our other revision resources, please give us your feedback by completing this short survey. 

Why?

Going back to assessment models… As a teacher, I spend lots of time putting together assessments, changing them at key points throughout the year, trying to ensure that I cover a range of topics, thinking about how to assess knowledge from previous topics, adapting them after each exam cycle… and with limited ‘free’ time (slight understatement), this is quite challenging! As well as the other million and one things required of a teacher, this is certainly a real pain point in terms of time and keeping everything relevant and up to date. Not to mention the marking and feedback elements that are crucial for students in prioritising areas for improvement.

So… what if there was an assessment model for one of your courses (let’s use AQA GCSE PE in this case), which had:

• Nine end-of-unit/core assessments for Paper 1
• Nine end-of-unit/core assessments for Paper 2
• Paper 1 National Mock Exam
• Paper 2 National Mock Exam
• Core assessments that can be completed online or printed
• The option to swap or remove questions from a core assessment
• The capacity to repeat a core assessment
• Included the interleaving of new topics with previous learning
• A brief justification of the topics included and the ‘peak’ skill being assessed

What do you think? Would this fit into your department? Consider, for example, if you teach the Paper 1 and Paper 2 content alongside each other. This assessment model could be used so that core assessments run parallel to each other. Alternatively, if you teach Paper 1 content in Year 10, followed by Paper 2 in Year 11, the core assessment model can be followed in a more linear fashion.

How does this work?

So what does this look like and how can this be implemented in your classroom/department? Take a look at this assessment overview for Paper 1:

If, for instance, you are delivering the whole of Paper 1 in Year 10, you will be able to implement these core assessments at key points throughout the year, as well as using our mock exam (core assessment 10) during your school’s mock exam period. Take a look at CA5 below:

Core assessment 5 includes new topics of:

• Aerobic and anaerobic energy
• EPOC and recovery
• Effects of exercise

and is interleaved with previous topics:

• Bones
• Structure of joints
• Muscles
• Pathway of air and exchange of gases
• Mechanics of breathing
• Cardiac volumes

Core assessment 5 also includes a 6-mark question on aerobic and anaerobic energy, embedding opportunities for students to practise extended writing questions.

So, for you, as a classroom teacher, you can set core assessment 5 (this may be somewhere towards the end of half-term 2 or the start of half-term 3) to assess students’ new knowledge, as well as interleaving this back to some of the earlier topics covered at the start of the year. Obviously, there are multiple rationales we could use to select previous topics (see the image below for an example of the justification section), but we’ve tried to make strategic links back; in this case, for example, introducing the long-term effects of exercise would have clear links back to cardiac volumes.

We’ve also included a justification section as part of our framework for each core assessment:

How can I use this?

• You may wish to give your students more opportunities for exam practice outside of lesson time - Set this as a ‘practice exam’ for homework.
  
  
• Key assessment points across the year? - Use this as an ‘assessed exam’ in one sitting and under timed conditions.
  
  
• Looking for more opportunities (and a wider range of questions) for extended writing? - Our core assessments include extended writing opportunities across topics where relevant, and have been planned for you. For example, core assessment 8 features a 6-mark question from a previous topic, as well as a 9-mark question on a new topic.
  
  
• You may wish to have students working together on exam questions during a lesson - use this as a ‘collaborative exam’ (see James' previous blog on ways to use exams).
  
  
• Notice a particular pattern with your students when they are doing exam questions? For instance, students do really well with identifying and describing for AO1, but tend to lose marks when they are required to ‘explain’ or ‘justify’? - The core assessments are designed to promote development of a range of skills; not only this, but the skills that are DIRECTLY relevant to the topic area.

What is the impact?

Our core assessments have the following objectives:

• To improve the core assessment experiences of all PE students who use it by providing them with exams that are skill-focused and highly relevant to their external exams.
• To provide a reliable, grab-and-go assessment model that teachers can use with their students with very little planning time required. However, the assessments remain entirely editable.
• To provide in-game data to students and teachers about how candidates are performing against other candidates and centres across the country during the course, rather than only after their final exams.

One of our main ambitions with the centralised assessment model framework is that you, the teacher, can spend far less time on the ‘mechanistic’ aspects of the job – for instance, creating exam papers from scratch, finding alternative exam questions for students to practise, which key skills to assess – and reallocate this time towards what really matters: working directly with students. We strongly believe that the core assessments outlined above can help to provide you with a clear context for improvements in exam performance. One of the things we are really proud of is the finer detail within the assessments and how the ‘peak’ skills are included and developed; so that you, the teacher, are able to provide a comprehensive assessment that focuses on a range of skills that the student will need to develop for that particular topic.

What are the benefits?

With this in mind, our aim is to support teachers as much as possible in providing relevant, timely and course-specific exam questions that can be used as part of a wider assessment model. By using this model and the core assessments that have been designed, we hope that you will be able to:

• Reallocate time to using the analysis and feedback tools to support students’ learning
• Promote student retention
• Enable students to recognise links between topics more clearly
• Recognise opportunities to make synoptic links where appropriate (for example, in the nine-mark extended response question)

What next?

• AQA GCSE PE
• OCR GCSE PE
• Edexcel GCSE PE

As a reminder, here’s what you will have access to during 2025/2026:

• a centrally designed and high-quality assessment model for every examined PE and Sport course;
• model exams that specifically target the content areas of each section of a course AND the skills by which these content areas are typically assessed;
• interleaved model exams so that new and previous learning is appropriately assessed together;
• due to that interleaving, content areas are assessed more than once;
• in the range of between seven and nine assessments per course plus a National Mock Exam.

How do I get access to this?

You must be a customer of The EverLearner with ExamSimulator to access these resources. Customers, you can register for an ExamSimulator trial here.

If you are not a customer and would like to find out more, you can register for a free trial here.

Thank you for reading and have a lovely day.

Kim