Five years of the Assessment Innovation Fund: From Digital to Authentic Assessment Part 1

I’m writing this just before heading off on a family camping trip to Yorkshire, which means the house is currently a chaotic blend of optimism, overpacking, and the quiet hope that every weather forecast is wildly inaccurate.

It’s also reminded me of something that feels surprisingly relevant to innovation – you can spend hours planning the perfect camping trip, but once you’re out in the Dales the plan quickly gives way to reality. The weather changes, something gets forgotten, and you must adapt. Innovation is no different. Plans are essential, but the ideas that succeed are the ones that learn, adjust, and respond when the real world has other ideas.

When NCFE and Ufi VocTech Trust launched the Assessment Innovation Fund (AIF) in 2021, we expected to see new ideas. What I’m not sure we expected was that, five years later, the applications themselves would become such a useful map of how the sector’s thinking on assessment has changed over time.

Across seven funding windows, our application register tells a story. Early ideas often focussed on making assessment more digital and flexible. Later applications increasingly explored authenticity, AI (of course), inclusion, confidence, and trust. In education, five years is not very long. But the pace of change has been striking.

The fund has already invested £1 million in 14 projects, directly engaging more than 3,500 learners and 200 educators across over 60 institutions and two continents. But the application data tells a slightly different, and equally useful, story: across the funding windows there are more than 200 application entries, rising from 19 in the first window to 63 in the latest.

That growth says something about appetite for innovation. But the more interesting story is what those applications were trying to solve.

Digitising existing assessments

In the early windows, many applications focussed on digitising existing assessment practice.

Could learners capture evidence through video? Could online marking reduce workload? Could comparative judgement help assess complex work more fairly?

The motivation was practical. People wanted assessment to be easier to manage, more flexible, and less dependent on fixed tests or traditional written submissions. The University of Newcastle’s (Australia) project, for example, explored replacing marks with digital badges in initial teacher education. For some learners, badges encouraged deeper engagement with feedback, assessment criteria, and teaching standards. For others, they created uncertainty and anxiety, especially when learners were unclear about how they were performing or what they needed to do next.

The project showed that badges can have value, but only when they are carefully designed, properly explained, and supported by high-quality feedback.

So perhaps the first learning from the fund is that feedback only creates value when learners can understand it, use it, and see the route to improvement.

Does it work in real conditions?

Over time, the focus of applications began to shift. The question became less “can we digitise assessment?” and more, “does this help us assess what really matters?”

This is where the trend gets interesting. The growth in immersive approaches suggests the sector was not simply looking for new technology – it was looking for new ways to represent real-world practice. Across the register, around 50 application entries referenced virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, or similar approaches.

The underlying theme was clear in that applicants were looking for ways to make assessment feel closer to the world of work. Calderdale College’s work in health and social care captured this well. The project explored VR and simulation centre environments for T Level Health learners, including scenarios linked to Care Certificate standards. Learners valued the realism of the experience, particularly the simulation centre, which helped them feel closer to a professional environment.

However, the project also demonstrated an important lesson that technology alone does not create better assessment. The VR element showed promise, but success depended on onboarding, tutor confidence, technical readiness, curriculum integration, and clear links to learning outcomes.

That’s the difference between innovation as a shiny object, and innovation as real assessment improvement. A headset does not make an assessment authentic. A realistic scenario, clear purpose, strong facilitation, and a learner who understands why it matters might.

In camping terms, it is the difference between buying impressive kit and knowing whether it works when the rain arrives at 2am.

By Dean Blewitt, Senior Innovation and Investments Manager at NCFE