About

Our Director, Steve Dew, set up AssessProgress in 2016 after becoming disillusioned with biased assessment practices, particularly teacher assessment at the end of KS2. He wanted more scope to use classroom writing to moderate anonymously and benchmark against other schools in a more reliable, valid and fair way. In addition, he aimed to find a way of supporting teacher judgements and developing teachers' understanding of the quality of writing beyond their school.  

He came across a Comparative Judgement provider in early 2017 but wanted something more flexible and with more scope that met his aims for teachers and pupils.

 His search led him to a small comparative judgement assessment company using a system to assess Hair and Beauty students' portfolios. He worked with them to develop their system for assessment and moderation of Primary school writing and sold that first incarnation to Primary schools in 2017 as 'Compare'. 

That led to that company selling their engine to RM Plc (the tech company); Steve helped them develop the product further through 2021/22 and gave the name to what is now RMCompare.

From that first trial with 14 schools in 2017 - the rest, as they say, is history.

AssessProgress are now set up to deliver a National Programme for Primary and Secondary schools. 

 We are looking forward to rolling out our Primary and A-level products throughout 2022/23.

We've been using Adaptive Comparative Judgement (ACJ) in schools to predominantly assess writing since early 2017. 

In 2017 500 children took part in writing sessions in Year 6 in partnership with Moderation of Primary Writing.

In 2018-19: 14 schools, 2,000 children participated in local authority writing assessment and moderation.

Post-Covid: In 2021/22, over 4,000 pupils regularly participate in our National Moderation of Primary Writing, National Year Six Portfolio of Writing Assessment and Mastering MetaCognition programmes.

Since 2017 we've spoken about the power of Comparative Judgement in formative/summative assessment and for moderation across the U.K, Sweden and Madrid. 

Our director is still a Head Teacher at a two-form entry, inner-city primary school in Oxford. He's been a Head since 2013; prior to that, he'd taught in two Nurseries, seven primaries and a secondary school since 2003. As a Head Teacher, he's acutely aware of the pressures of time and budget on schools daily, the push and pull of the system, how your context can be a tremendous positive or huge challenge and the myriad of primary writing assessment options open to you. 

AssessProgress is a service solution; we are therefore uniquely placed to support your use of Comparative Judgement to assess and moderate subjects to develop teachers' knowledge and understanding of assessment, both formative and summative. 

Are you still interested? We look forward to hearing from you soon.

We are continually building the power within the product, backed by some of educations' best programmers, report designers and computer experts. 

 We continue to build capacity in what will be the best Comparative Judgement engine in the world.