| NACE Assessment Audit | NACE |
NACE Assessment Audit©UPDATED JANUARY 2026
A comprehensive tool to support assessment review at whole-school, subject or departmental level, with a focus on high-quality provision for more able learners and challenge for all. How well do your formative and summative assessment systems and practices enable learners, including the more able, to make good progress in learning through the curriculum, without limits on what could be achieved? The NACE Assessment Audit provides a quality framework to support schools’ evaluation of assessment aims, practices, and the extent to which there is consistent whole-school implementation with a resulting positive impact on pupils’ learning and achievement. The NACE Assessment Audit complements the NACE Curriculum Audit and is aligned with the requirements of Ofsted, the new Curriculum for Wales, National Professional Qualifications and the Early Career Framework, providing a comprehensive quality framework for school leaders to review their assessment aims, implementation and the impact on pupils' learning and achievement, with an additional focus on the impact of assessment of more able learners. 
Using the NACE Assessment AuditThe audit document is organised into four parts: intent (aims and principles), implementation (whole school/subject/departmental level), implementation (classroom level) and impact. Each section provides statements against which to audit current policy and practice on a 1-5 scale. In secondary schools, the assessment audit could also be completed by heads of department/subject leaders to gain a subject-level perspective. For each key statement, suggested sources of evidence are provided, along with key questions for more able provision. These can be used to support the formation of evaluation judgements, and findings in each case can be used to form an assessment action plan and inform revision of the school assessment, marking and feedback policies. A Welsh-language edition is also available. 
Costs
Terms of use: the NACE Assessment Audit is issued to purchasing schools for internal use only; external distribution is prohibited. To place an order for the NACE Curriculum Audit with or without accompanying half-day consultancy, complete the form below.
“The NACE Assessment Audit was a really good base and covered a lot of areas of curriculum design too. Myself and other senior leaders have used the prompt questions in meetings with middle leaders to probe the evidence base for the answers provided. It also allowed us to look at the whole school picture and reflect on anything that needing doing at a senior leadership level to support. It provided a benchmark so that once changes were made we could revisit and see what had moved and what still needed working on. Our KS3 assessment framework has been re-written based upon this. Overall, we found this resource really useful and we may use it across the Trust moving forward to allow further comparisons across a large sample.” - Sarah Chesworth, Trust Deputy, Christleton High School |
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