You told us Flexi Assessments needed to be easier to build, easier to find, and easier to manage across a whole school. We listened. Essential Assessment has just rolled out a redesigned Flexi Assessments experience, shaped directly by feedback from teachers and leaders across the country.
If you have not built a Flexi Assessment before, here is the short version: Flexi lets you create a fully custom assessment for your class. You choose the strand, the year level or stage, and the exact curriculum content, instead of relying only on a pre-built assessment. It is the tool for when you need to check exactly what you taught this week, not a broad slice of the curriculum.
What’s new for Flexi Assessments
The redesigned experience centres on three things teachers asked for again and again: a faster build process, a clearer library, and less duplicated effort across a school.
- A guided three-step build. Set up your assessment, add your content, then review and save. Each step is clearly marked, and you can preview any question exactly as your students will see it before you commit.
- A searchable School Flexi Library. Every Flexi built at your school lives in one place, filterable by year level, strand, topic, and status, so you are not recreating something a colleague already built last term.
- Rollover Flexi. Move last year’s assessments straight into the current academic year instead of rebuilding them from scratch.
- Clearer status tracking. See at a glance whether a Flexi is not yet added to your class, added and ready, or already in use.
This is the shift worth knowing about: and your whole team is working from one shared, searchable library instead of everyone building their own version from scratch. We know your week is full, this redesign is about putting your energy into the teaching only you can do, while keeping the curriculum alignment and rigour EA is built on.
Why this matters, whether you are in the classroom or leading the school
For teachers, Flexi is about responsive teaching. Use it before a unit starts, as a quick pre-assessment to surface prior knowledge and gaps before you plan a single lesson. After explicit teaching on a concept, a short Flexi check tells you whether it landed before you move on. Mid-unit, it gives you a read on progress without stopping instruction. For a student who is stuck on a specific skill, like fraction equivalence, Flexi lets you assess just that skill instead of retesting an entire strand, and gives you clean entry and exit evidence if that student is on an MTSS pathway. Flexi also works well for low-stakes retrieval practice, like a weekly fluency check or a last-term review, keeping previously taught concepts fresh without extra planning. Because you control the content and the length, you can build shorter, focused assessments for younger learners or students who need reduced cognitive load, so assessment stays manageable rather than overwhelming. You can also revisit the same Flexi later to show growth across a sequence of teaching, without it needing to feel like a formal test.
For school leaders, Flexi supports something harder to build: whole-school consistency without losing teacher flexibility. A shared Flexi Library means your team is not duplicating effort, and a shared naming convention keeps assessments easy to find and compare across classes. Teaching teams and PLCs can build common assessments together, supporting moderation and giving you comparable cohort data instead of 20 different versions of the same check. That matters most in composite classes and schools with diverse cohorts, where consistent evidence and flexible delivery both need to hold true at once.
That is the balance: teachers keep control over what gets assessed and when, and leaders get the consistent, comparable data they need across the school.
One more option: reporting or non-reporting
Alongside the redesign, you can now also choose upfront whether a Flexi Assessment is Reporting or Non-Reporting when you build it.
Reporting assessments count towards your student, class, and school reports and contribute to overall levels and strand averages. Use these for the assessment points that matter formally, like an end-of-unit check. Non-Reporting assessments are for checking understanding in the moment. They still show up in the Markbook and on the student profile, clearly labelled, but they will not affect any report or average.
You can change this setting any time before a student starts the assessment, so there is no pressure to get it right on the first try. If you build a Reporting assessment without enough content coverage, you’ll get a prompt to switch it to Non-Reporting instead. When it is time to report, you can also download evidence at the strand level or right down to the individual indicator, so your reporting decisions stay grounded in specific evidence.
This option is rolling out to NSW schools first, aligned to the NSW K-10 Syllabus. Schools working from the Australian Curriculum or Victorian Curriculum already have the full redesigned Flexi build experience described above, with reporting and non-reporting options following as part of the wider rollout.
Getting started
From your class, open Manage Class Assessments and select the Flexi tab. From there, Manage from Flexi Library lets you browse what already exists at your school or create a new one. If you are setting up Flexi Assessments for the first time this term, it is worth agreeing a naming convention with your team first, something short that includes the subject, topic, and year level or stage, so everyone can find what they need later.
If you have questions about how reporting and non-reporting behave for your school, or when your region gets full access to these new options, reach out to your Essential Assessment Customer Success contact.
