Services
We design, write, and teach assessment that works. Whether you need help designing tools, training your team, or rethinking your approach entirely, we’ll help you define what you want to improve, measure it accurately, and use those insights to move forward.
Designing assessment systems from scratch
Designing developmental rubrics and learning progressions
Creating assessment frameworks and reporting structures
Developing curriculum-aligned assessment tasks
Building evaluation and evidence-collection processes
Delivering training in developmental assessment design
Refining and validating existing systems
Reviewing and improving existing rubrics and criteria
Conducting psychometric analysis of assessment tools and progressions
Increasing consistency and reliability in teacher judgement
Simplifying overloaded or unclear assessment systems
Delivering training in moderation, validation, and assessment quality
What we do
Most systems can tell you how someone went on a task, a test, or a KPI. That’s not the same thing as explaining what’s actually developing, or what to do next.
We do the hard, slightly nerdy work of turning “we want people to get better at X” into clear descriptions of quality across a progression.
That progression becomes a practical tool: it makes assessment more consistent, feedback more usable, and planning less like guessing.
If your rubric feels vague, your reporting feels defensive, or your team keeps arguing about what “good” even means, you’re usually missing the same thing: a shared map of growth.
Bespoke education study tours
Bespoke study tours for principals and school leaders, shaped around what you actually want to explore. We help define the focus, organise the visits, and create a program that gives you useful insight rather than a parade of examples.
Advisory and retainer work
Sometimes you don’t need a one-off artefact. You need someone to sit alongside the work as it evolves, especially if you’re building a product, scaling an approach, or aligning multiple stakeholders.
Developmental rubric and progression design
A good developmental rubric is not a scoring sheet with nicer adjectives. It’s a map. We build rubrics that describe how quality changes over time, using observable evidence from real work.
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Your Title Goes Here
Your content goes here. Edit or remove this text inline or in the module Content settings. You can also style every aspect of this content in the module Design settings and even apply custom CSS to this text in the module Advanced settings.
Your Title Goes Here
Your content goes here. Edit or remove this text inline or in the module Content settings. You can also style every aspect of this content in the module Design settings and even apply custom CSS to this text in the module Advanced settings.
Learning games
We design learning games and simulations as a structured way to make capability visible in action. They help surface evidence, reveal decision-making, and strengthen shared understanding.
Learning games
We design learning games and simulations as a structured way to make capability visible in action. They help surface evidence, reveal decision-making, and strengthen shared understanding.
Learning games
We design learning games and simulations as a structured way to make capability visible in action. They help surface evidence, reveal decision-making, and strengthen shared understanding.
Let’s start something
If you’re trying to define growth more clearly, build a progression that holds up, or stop your assessment language drifting into vague territory, a discovery call is the fastest way to work out whether this is a fit.
His guidance drew on deep expertise, allowing us to quickly and effectively create a high-quality assessment tool.
Ben Taylor
The English Lab
Together, we transformed the original Seven Steps rubrics for narrative, persuasive and informative writing - making them far more robust and explicit.
Sarah Bakker
Seven Steps
Ben delivered an outstanding professional learning session on developing rubrics, expertly engaging staff with practical strategies and getting everyone on board.
Sally Morath
Deputy Principal Oak Park Primary
Pattern Re:Cognition
Occasional notes on assessment, learning design, and patterns worth paying attention to.