With Years 7 to 12 all involved in ‘examinations’ this week, it is useful to consider how this assessment is used for the children’s learning. One of the first principles is that all of our students in Years 7 to 9 will be sitting whole of year examinations for most of their Year 12 subjects, in their final year of schooling. There are somewhere between forty and fifty thousand Year 12 students in Queensland, so this externally set exam will be a massive undertaking, bigger than the current Qld Core Skills Test that the Year 12s will be sitting in late August this year. It is disruptive to the usual curriculum learning to have students out of usual classroom subject experiences, so we try to minimise exam times, particularly for the younger children. Examinations are designed to isolate children so that their skills and knowledge are tested in solo and without assistance. This of course can be daunting and stressful, so the experience has to be practised prior to Year 12. We try not to stress the younger ones. We emphasise that this is another learning opportunity, and one that they will become increasingly familiar with as they move through schooling and possibly onto university.