How priorities are chosen

There are always a hundred things you could practise. Almost none of them are the thing you should practise next.

A priority is our answer to “what now?”: the small set of tasks that, based on everything we know about where you stand, will move your mark the most. Not the easiest tasks, not the hardest, not the most overdue. The most valuable, in order.

Underneath, they’re built on the same demonstrated-mark model described in how we estimate your marks, the living picture of what you can do right now, topic by topic. Priorities are where that picture stops being a report and starts being a plan.

Before we can tell you what to do next, we need to know where you stand: everywhere, not just in one topic.

Day one begins with a diagnostic: a careful handful of questions spread across the whole course. It’s deliberately light: this isn’t an exam, and there’s no pass or fail. It’s a first reading taken everywhere at once, so the map has something honest to say about every topic, not just the ones you happened to touch first.

Those question marks are the point. A map that pretended to know you everywhere after one sitting would be lying to you, and every decision built on it would wobble. Where the picture is thin, we say so, and then we go and fill it in.

The same map can say three very different things about three different topics. So it deals three very different kinds of work.

Where the map sees a topic falling behind, it deals consolidate work: easier questions, not harder ones, set just underneath the wobble and repeated until the base holds. Going harder on a shaky foundation only teaches you to wobble faster.

Where the map sees strength, it deals push work: the harder questions, set while you’re hot, so strength turns into marks instead of plateau. And wherever the map has no signal yet, it deals establish work: a few careful questions whose only purpose is to learn about you. Establish runs quietly alongside everything else, filling in the corners of the map we’ve never seen you in.

None of this happens once. It happens every time you answer a question.

Every attempt you make feeds back into your map: the map sharpens, and the next set of priorities is dealt from the sharper picture. The loop never stops turning. Read the map, deal the next moves, practise, sharpen.

The directions matter. Establish and the diagnostic feed knowledge into the map. Consolidate is dealt from the map wherever it finds weakness. And consolidate is the on-ramp to push: easier questions, mastered, earn you the harder ones. You climb by holding each rung, not by leaping.

Finish what’s in front of you; the next set is dealt.

Priorities arrive in small sets rather than an endless scroll: a handful of tasks worth doing now, usually a blend of the three kinds. Work through them, and as each one completes, the lens looks again at your updated picture and deals the next set from whatever is now most valuable.

Two promises follow. First, work you’ve started is never yanked away: anything in progress stays pinned until you finish it. Second, your list always reflects the current you: every attempt you make updates the map, and the next set is dealt from the new map, not the old one.

The same lens, pointed at the whole room.

Teachers see the same picture gathered up across the class: each student’s diagnostic map, the mix of establish, consolidate and push, and where a lesson would lift the most people at once. When you set work through Leibniz, it lands inside the same picture: your students’ attempts on it update their maps, and their lists, exactly like their own practice does.

The effect you should notice in the classroom is simple: students arrive having practised the right things, and you can see precisely which things those were.