I enjoyed Tom Finn-Kelcey’s article (“10 things I wish I’d known”, 6 September) but I am surprised he thinks that using Assessment for Learning strategies “universally” is indicative of lazy teaching. As a newly qualified teacher, I don’t want to fall into the trap of believing I know everything; AfL makes good sense to me because it echoes so many of my own instincts with regard to children’s learning. To strive to gain, and maintain, awareness of where children are and what - or whether - they understand, by using a variety of strategies, and then to feed this knowledge into future planning, is surely not “laziness”?

The whole point of AfL is not to cherry-pick but to embed effective assessment across one’s practice. Perhaps Mr Finn-Kelcey has mistaken the government’s railroading of AfL into a neat’n‘discrete nine-point table for the real deal, but it is more than that and I hope that as a subject leader his understanding of AfL is better than he has made it sound.

Helen Salthouse, Banstead, Surrey.