Data-driven, teacher-led: how teaching and learning guidance can empower primary teachers to unlock potential

Think back to the moment you woke up this morning. Before you even got out of bed, you likely encountered some data—maybe your sleep app stats, smartwatch summaries, an energy usage update from your home hub, or some weather forecasts.

Data is everywhere, and it stands to reason: we live in a technological world.

But as research has shown, the use of technology does not guarantee data competence and nowhere is this truer than in the workplace with studies suggesting that few people consider themselves to be data literate. Indeed, a 2024 Forbes report suggests that organisations around the world are nearing data saturation point, with the sheer amount of data compromising their ability to process it and use it in the way it was intended – to support decision-making.

In our schools we can be flooded by data too: attendance, behaviour, assessment, progress, safeguarding, the list goes on. There’s no denying that some of it is useful but the time and expertise needed to properly process and use it can be in short supply. We need to be choosy.

That is why we are working hard to cut through the data overwhelm and support our primary school teachers to develop the knowledge and confidence to make data-driven decisions in their classrooms by connecting our Cambridge Primary Insight Plus baseline assessment data with teaching and learning guidance that can be quickly incorporated into your lesson plans.

Baseline assessment might seem like just another data burden for busy teachers. But accessing the right data at the right time about our learners can give us a crucial head start in supporting them to achieve the best they can, providing clear and reliable insight into academic strengths and areas for improvement.

Our teaching and learning guidance has been written by real teachers, experts in their field, and not by AI programmes. The pedagogical strategies, classroom resources and wider reading that we recommend is all tried and tested by real teachers with real children, to support the quality dataset that we provide.

Whether you’re supporting:

• a child excelling in numeracy but struggling in literacy;
• A child requiring 1:2:1 support with a member of staff;
• A non-specialist teacher or an early-career teacher in your school who would benefit from pedagogical support,

We've got you covered.

Our Primary teaching and learning guidance is available for the four learning areas that are key contributors to the future educational success of your primary aged children:

• Mathematics
• Arithmetic
• Reading
• Spelling

It is accessed through the summary of scores group report you receive when a class or year group complete our Cambridge Primary Insight Plus assessment. Like our assessment, our teaching and learning materials are curriculum agnostic so can be woven into your existing schemes of work and lesson plans with ease.

To help you tailor your teaching, we’ve differentiated our guidance into four standardised score ranges:

• performance below typical range (scores <85);
• performance at lower end of typical range (scores 85-99);
• performance at higher end of typical range (scores 100-115);
• performance above typical range (scores >115).

Supporting our pedagogical advice are:

• classroom activities designed to be implemented the very next day
• classroom resources like worksheets or visuals to project from your whiteboards;

• links to third party content, like the incredible online mathematics resources from our colleagues at NRICH, based at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Mathematics

Combining our high-quality data with reliable, adoptable teaching and learning strategies enables you to work smarter and more efficiently to support the children in your classroom.

Together, we can make a measurable difference.

If you’d like to find out more about Cambridge Primary Insight and the teaching and learning guidance, sign up for one of our free webinars on 16 September.