Book excerpt: The Essential Guides for Early Career Teachers provide accessible, carefully researched, quick-reads for early career teachers, covering the key topics they will encounter during their training year and first two years of teaching. This title on Assessment provides a range of practical but critically engaged strategies and approaches to assessment. It offers a brief history of the core ideas and educational philosophy underpinning these, looks at links to planning and reflection, examines the concept of progress over time as a mirror for quality teaching and learning, and explores the idea of pupil self-assessment. Most importantly it recognises that assessment can and should be at the heart of enabling and accelerating the progress of all learners. Clear, accessible and practical. An unmissable guide to classroom assessment. Professor Dame Alison Peacock