Hello, welcome back. Did you have a good summer? I know, always flies by, doesn’t it? Did you get away at all? No, just a few days out here and there for us, too.

Right, that’s the usual start of term pleasantries out of the way. That’ll be pretty much the nature of several thousand conversations over the coming days - with apologies to those of you in Leicestershire and Scotland who have had those conversations and have already reached the point of feeling like you were never away!

After that, what does the new year bring? Well, if I’m honest, I almost didn’t bother writing a new article. After all, I’m not sure we’re any further on than this time a year ago. In September 2016, we were all hanging on to find out those all-important progress scores, to check whether we’d reached the magic zero, or fallen through the dreaded floor. Here we are again and none of us know any more this year than we did the last. One of the first tasks of the academic year will be for school leaders to pore over the data and see how this year’s numbers have ended up.

Last year we also had to wait to hear what would replace the wretched interim assessment framework.

The saving grace of that awful concoction had been that it was only interim: strictly for use in the 2015-16 academic year, we were advised. Only to be told out that a stay of execution was to be offered and we’d all be aiming to jump through the same hoops again come springtime.

Nearly seven years of changes

Three years into the new curriculum and many more since we were told that assessment arrangements were to be updated…we’re still waiting. For the third year in a row, teachers of children in Years 2 and 6 wait to hear exactly how they will be expected to judge their pupils’ work. We seem still to lurch from one attempt to the next, all the while wondering whether anybody at the Department for Education (DfE) is actually steering the assessment bus.

We do, at least, have a rough idea of what the curriculum should look like by now. Two years of tests under our belts has given us a clue about what is actually going to be measured and whether or not that aligns with the national curriculum at all. Finally, we have cohorts who have all been taught the new national curriculum since at least the start of the key stage. That should mean we continue to see results on the rise - much to the government’s delight.

To give the department its due, when results were published in July, Mr Gibb was quick to praise “the hard work of teachers and pupils across England.” Of course, he also took the time to take credit for the improvements that nobody can really demonstrate, but at least he waited until the second sentence of his statement for that.

This year’s Year 6 cohort started their primary education months after Mr Gove and his colleagues took control of the department. They’ve worked through nearly seven years of changes and yet we’re still no closer to having a finalised framework for assessing their learning.

So as you step back into your classrooms wondering what the latest assessment wheeze will be, or wondering just how we’ll be judged next summer on our work over the coming year, take some solace from knowing that it’s not only you who feels a little in the dark in this brave new world. I think they’re working with the lights off at the DfE, too.

Michael Tidd is headteacher at Medmerry Primary School in West Sussex. He tweets @MichaelT1979