Teacher or Leadership assessment: which to take

Choose by the question you are working on

Ask for the Teacher assessment if your question is about your own classroom, and the Leadership assessment if it is about how you lead other adults. Your job title matters less than the problem you want to think about this year.

For now, access comes through your school or trust, which may assign Teacher, Leadership or both. So the practical choice is usually which one to request, or which to start with if you have been given both.

If you are not sure what your question is, write one sentence: "This year I want to get better at..." Finish it honestly. If the sentence ends with pupils, start with Teacher. If it ends with colleagues, decisions or a team, start with Leadership.

The Teacher assessment covers five domains of classroom practice

The Teacher Development Assessment has 80 scenarios covering 20 facets across five domains: planning, instruction, assessment, culture and professional practice. In each scenario you choose how you would act in a realistic situation.

It suits questions that sit inside a lesson or a scheme of work. Think of a science teacher in her fourth year whose lessons run smoothly, though she suspects pupils are coasting. Her question is about instruction and assessment, not about leading anyone. These are the kinds of question a teacher might bring to it:

• How well does my planning anticipate where pupils will struggle?
• Do I check understanding during the lesson, or only after it?
• What kind of classroom culture do my routines actually build?
• Which part of my professional practice have I let slide?

The Leadership assessment covers how you lead other adults

The Leadership Development Assessment has 96 scenarios covering 24 behaviours across four domains: observe, reflect, shape and create. The behaviours include listening, judgement, prioritisation, accountability and developing others.

It suits questions about adults, decisions and direction. Picture an assistant head who has just taken on a whole-school priority. Her lessons are fine. She is stuck on a recent meeting where two colleagues disagreed and she let the louder one win. That is a question about listening and judgement.

The Leadership report frames its guidance in executive leadership coaching language, over short-term, medium-term and long-term horizons. That suits someone planning a year of development rather than a quick fix. Questions a leader might bring to it include:

• Do I listen fully before deciding, or decide while I listen?
• How do I choose what to stop when everything feels urgent?
• Do I hold people to account without it turning into blame?
• Am I developing my team, or just handing out tasks?

Leaders who teach still do about half the teaching hours

The Department for Education's Working lives of teachers and leaders survey asked staff about a reference week in 2024. Full-time leaders with teaching responsibilities reported spending 12.4 hours teaching on average. Full-time teachers with teaching responsibilities reported 23.3 hours.

On average, then, leaders who teach reported a little over half the teaching time of a full-time teacher. Those lessons are seen by pupils and by the colleagues a leader is trying to develop. For many middle and senior leaders, classroom practice and leadership are live questions at the same time.

When both are worth taking

Both make sense when you lead other teachers and still teach a real timetable. A head of maths who models lessons for her department is doing both jobs in the same hour. Her standing as a leader rests partly on her teaching, so evidence about each is useful.

If you have both, spread them out rather than taking them back to back. Around an hour is the guidance for each, and a second sitting done while tired gives you less to work with.

Read the two reports side by side. Each describes the evidence from your selected responses, with strengths, reflection questions and development priorities. Look for where they touch. A teacher who sees a strength in checking pupils' understanding might ask whether she checks her colleagues' understanding as carefully. That is a specific thing to take to a coaching conversation.

Assigned by your school, or looking on your own

If your school or trust has assigned an assessment to you, you do not need to buy it. Organisation-provided access does not require an individual purchase. If you are unsure what you have been given, ask whoever sent the invitation.

Individual purchase is separate from organisation access, and individual checkout is not open yet. If you want to take an assessment without your employer, the pricing page at https://assess.otovios.com/assess/pricing shows the current position.

A report bought privately is not visible to an organisation through its assignment. The OTO Assess help pages at https://assess.otovios.com/assess/faq cover getting started.