How many of your year 8 students have secured what they were taught in year 7? Most schools couldn’t answer that with confidence. Teachers pick up a lot in lessons, but there’s rarely a reliable way to check what’s secure across a whole year group at KS3.
Securing the Fundamentals gives schools that check. It’s a new PiXL package for KS3 that shows exactly where the gaps are in English, maths and science, while there’s still time to close them. It launches today and is free to every PiXL member school.
How it works
Securing the Fundamentals runs on PiXL’s DTTR approach: Diagnose, Therapy, Testing, Revisit. Teachers choose questions based on where they suspect the gaps are, and students sit the assessment. The results show precisely what’s secure and what needs more work.
Where there’s a gap, therapy resources are built in to address it. Schools then retest and return to the content later in the year. The cycle repeats right through years 7, 8 and 9, so each round builds on what the last one found.
Testing recall and application
Examiner reports at GCSE and A level keep flagging the same issue. Students often know something and then struggle to apply it when a question asks them to. Securing the Fundamentals tests for this directly, with questions at both recall and application level.
Questions are also matched to curriculum stage rather than year group. Schools sequence KS3 content in different ways, so teachers can choose questions that fit what their students have been taught, whatever their year group.
Precise questions over broad criteria
Most schools already assess KS3 in some way. Some have built their own rubrics or use a standardised package from another provider. Many use GCSE-style mark schemes at KS3, even though those were designed for terminal exams.
Broad criteria have a known weakness. Different teachers interpret them differently, so two students producing similar work can receive different judgements depending on who’s marking. Daisy Christodoulou’s research on assessment makes the case for defining what a student can do through specific, carefully constructed questions. A student either answers a question correctly or they don’t, which gives teachers a reliable, comparable answer they can act on.
Securing the Fundamentals is built on that model, with every question designed to show what a student understands.
What’s included
The package launches with over 1,500 questions and more than 2,000 therapy, testing and revisit slides.
English focuses on writing and the interpretation of text and poetry, skills KS3 curricula often assume students are building but rarely check. The maths questions target the core skills that later topics depend on. Science covers maths in science and working scientifically skills alongside substantive content.
What teachers see
The dashboard shows results by student, class, subject and school, so a head of department can tell whether a gap belongs to a single student or runs across a whole year group. Schools can also benchmark their results against other schools using the package, which adds useful context beyond their own walls.
Foundations that last to KS5
The knowledge this package tests matters well beyond GCSE. It’s what later learning is built on, right through to KS5. A gap left in year 7 tends to resurface at each new stage, often in the students who go on to study the subject further.
Getting started
Securing the Fundamentals is free to every PiXL member school from today, and you don’t need a whole-school rollout to begin. A single department running a first cycle with one year group is enough to see how it works.
Choose the year group and subject where you’d most like an answer, run your first cycle and see what your students show you. Members can access it here.
