It is with deep sadness that we write to inform you of the passing of our esteemed colleague and fellow Academy member, Dr. Paul Black, who passed away on March 16, 2026. Below is a tribute and appreciation to Dr. Black from Dr. Hopfenbeck, found in Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 33(2), 113–116.
Professor Paul Black OBE passed away on 16 March 2026, but his legacy will live on. For many of us, he is the reason we believe that change in classrooms is possible at scale and that assessment need not be something done to students, but a process placed in their service, oriented towards their future learning rather than the mere recording of their past performance. Colleagues at King’s College London remember him as a brilliant, generous and quietly inspiring teacher and mentor (Harrison, 2026; King’s College London, 2026), and this will resonate with all who encountered him at conferences, in seminars or through correspondence, and with those of us fortunate enough to have been directly shaped by his thinking.
More than two decades after his official retirement, many readers will remember his presentation at the AEA-Europe conference in Glasgow in 2015, where he spoke to a full room of delegates from Europe. His message was about the importance of preparing students to meet ever higher demands on their knowledge and skills, engaging with characteristic energy on questions of how we might support students to become autonomous learners. Indeed, as his long-time collaborator Professor Dylan Wiliam has noted, Paul Black continued to publish more than 100 articles after leaving his post (Wiliam, 2026). That restless intellectual commitment was entirely characteristic. Paul did not retire from thinking.
In celebration of this journals Assessment in Education’s 25th volume, our Editorial Board and Taylor & Francis invited Professors Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam to present some thoughts on their 1998 article at a one-day conference in Oxford in February 2018. The 1998 review had featured continuously on the list of the journal’s 10 most read articles ever since its publication (Black & Wiliam, 1998; Hopfenbeck, 2018), and more than a quarter of a century later it remains among the most read articles this journal has ever published, with well over 100,000 views at the time of writing. When I introduced Paul Black at that conference, I emphasised for the audience how Paul had made major contributions across curriculum, development and assessment research, leading two of the Nuffield Foundation science curriculum projects (Hopfenbeck, 2018). He served as chair of the International Commission on Physics Education, sat on advisory groups of the US National Research Council and held a visiting professorship at Stanford. In 1988 and 1989, he chaired the government Task Group on Assessment and Testing, whose report laid the groundwork for national assessment policy in England and Wales. His subsequent work on formative assessment with Dylan Wiliam and colleagues at King’s had widespread and lasting impact. In later years, he took part in research at King’s on inquiry-based learning in science, and in research at Berkeley and Stanford on progression in the learning of science concepts. Together with Professor Mark Wilson and Dr Shih-Ying Yao, Paul outlined the relationships between the roles of assessment in pedagogy, the interactions between curriculum assessment, in this case science assessment and pedagogy, and the study of students’ progression in learning. Using the BEAR assessment system as a case, he then illustrated how it could be used in practice, tested among 665 students in 11 schools in the Bay-area in the US. The theme was the atomic-molecular model, leading to detailed consideration of progression in the understanding of melting and evaporation (Black et al., 2011). His engagement with science education where also resulting in specific recommendations for the teaching and assessing of science in UK: Together with Professors Christine Harrison (King’s), Jonathan Osborne (Stanford) and Richard A. Duschl (previous Chair of Science Education at King’s) Paul published an influential report prepared for the Royal Society: Black et al. (2004). Their first recommendation from that report could be lifted as more important than ever: ‘Any framework for assessment must, first and foremost, support a curriculum and pedagogy that meets the needs of all learners’ (Black et al., 2004, p. 6). It was this same clarity of purpose that assessment is always in the service of learning and that shone through his reflections when we gathered in Oxford.
Among the highlights of that Oxford conference was listening to Paul reflect on how the review was made possible, and on what those citation numbers actually meant in practice. He was characteristically wry: ‘You look at one of the indices like Google Scholar, you’ll find over 8,100 citations. That’s almost enough’ (Black, 2018). He was equally clear-eyed about what they signified: ‘As one American friend of mine said to me a few years after the publication, “Everyone’s read your article”. No, “Everyone’s quoting your article, but many of them haven’t read it”’ (Black, 2018). A telling detail: the article contained a subsection headed explicitly ‘No meta-analysis’, yet, as Paul noted with dry precision, ‘many of the people who refer to it say “in Black and Wiliam’s 1998 meta-analysis” and I know they haven’t read it’ (Black, 2018). That combination of wit, honesty and precision was Paul at his best. To understand one of the reasons why that review carried such weight, it helps to understand how the review came to exist at all: At Oxford, Paul also offered something rare in academic life: an honest and unhurried account of how the review actually came to be. It was Professor Mary James who had first raised the idea with him, on behalf of the British Educational Research Association Assessment Group, later the Assessment Reform Group. They had identified the need for a systematic review of the research on assessment and learning and had secured a grant from the Nuffield Foundation to support it. Paul had recently retired. ‘It was what I intended to do anyway. And here was something promising to give it a ride, and even there was some money involved. So I said yes, under one condition: that Dylan would be my joint author’ (Black, 2018). Together, Black and Wiliam started the process of reviewing the field at a time when it involved sitting in the library and turning the pages of print journals, unlike our current electronic searches. Their final article was published in March 1998, a text of 67 pages with 250 references and a survey of 76 journals. Paul spoke warmly about the role of this journal’s founding Lead Editor, Professor Patricia Broadfoot, whose decision to commission responses from leading scholars without consulting Black and Wiliam in advance was, as Paul put it, ‘a splendid example of proactive and constructive editorial initiative, not just reporting what people have done, but by putting it together in this sort of way, advancing the subject as a whole’ (Black, 2018). His tribute to Broadfoot’s contribution was characteristic: generous and entirely focused on the advancement of the field rather than on himself.
The intellectual trajectory that produced the 1998 review had begun some years earlier. A 1996 paper with Dylan Wiliam had mapped the conceptual distinction between formative and summative functions of assessment (Wiliam & Black, 1996), laying the groundwork for what was to follow. After the review’s publication, Paul was not content to establish a theoretical framework and leave others to apply it. The King’s-Medway-Oxfordshire Formative Assessment Project (KMOFAP) translated the review’s principles into sustained classroom practice, resulting in Assessment for Learning: Putting It into Practice (Black et al., 2003). He understood that the real test of any idea about learning is whether it survives contact with real teachers and real students, and he devoted years of his post-retirement career to ensuring that it did. His 2018 article with Wiliam in this journal, ‘Classroom Assessment and Pedagogy’, showed that even two decades on, he continued to extend and revise the theoretical foundations of formative assessment, responding to Perrenoud’s (1998) original call for any such theory to be embedded within a broader account of pedagogy (Black & Wiliam, 2018). That article appeared when Paul was 87 years old. He submitted it with the same care and rigour as everything else he wrote. Paul Black’s influence extended well beyond Britain. Norway offers a striking example of how his work shaped national education policy directly. His review with Wiliam provided the foundational evidence base for Norway’s national assessment reform, the (The Knowledge Promotion), and was explicitly drawn upon in the evaluation of Bedre vurderingspraksis (Better Assessment Practices) (Throndsen et al., 2009), commissioned by the Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training. Among the Nordic countries, Norway has been described as the most directly influenced by Black and Wiliam’s work (Tveit, 2014), as seen in assessment studies of classrooms in secondary schools (Gamlem & Smith, 2013). It was this connection that first brought me to Paul Black’s office. I had been asked by the Minister of Education at the time to evaluate the implementation of the assessment reform, a reform that had been explicitly shaped by his research and that of his colleagues at King’s (Hopfenbeck et al., 2013). I have never forgotten how generously Paul Black gave of his time and knowledge to a younger scholar, with none of the impatience or self-importance that seniority might have excused. That generosity of spirit, I came to understand, was not occasional. It was simply how Paul Black was.
The loss of Paul Black is profound, but his intellectual legacy is secure and enduring. The questions he devoted his life to, how do we know what students understand, how does feedback change learning, what should assessment be for, are more pressing today than ever, in an era of rapid technological change and renewed debate about the purposes of schooling. His insistence that assessment must serve learning, not merely measure it, remains both a challenge and a compass for our field. In his own words from Oxford in 2018, reflecting on the journey from that library in 1996 to a body of work cited thousands of times across the world: ‘It turned out that involving Dylan was one of my best decisions’ (Black, 2018). That modesty, offered with a smile, tells you everything about Paul Black.